Codfish and Fox Terriers

by James Francis Cooke

Here is an idea--a comparison--that is worth more than money to the student, the music lover, the teacher, who can make use of it by practical application. The first and greatest essential in learning anything is attention. Without concentrated attention all learning halts and stumbles. Once attention is assured, the path to knowledge is blazed, and progress becomes possible.

How can we cultivate attention? How can we make ourselves more continuously attentive? Some psychologists have insisted that it is literally impossible to concentrate the mind upon any one thing for more than a very short time. They tell us that we may be acutely attentive for a few seconds, but then the truant mind will wander off on thought excursions in all manner of directions. We are then supposed to bring it back by repeated efforts. We poor mortals are not allowed by our psychological wardens to be continuously alert for more than a few seconds.

Did you ever watch a fox terrier sitting at a rat hole? Did you ever try to coax that fox terrier to do something else while he was on that particular job? Did you ever note his tenseness, the gleam in his eyes, the steady, unmoving posture, with every atom of his slick little body intent upon one thing and one thing only ? On the other hand, did you ever watch a codfish swimming around in a tank apparently inhaling his nourishment from the invisible animal life in the water? Or did you ever watch a mollusk anchored in one place waiting for the food to float into his vicinity?

Attention, after all, is controllable by the will power. You can be attentive if you want to be, and you can be as attentive as you are willing to make yourself. It may be a good thing to ask yourself in your study periods if you are like the codfish or like the fox terrier? It is purely a mental state. One hour of "fox terrier" attention--with any kind of study, particularly music, which demands keenness and alertness more than almost anything else--is worth a year of "codfish" attention.

Indeed, the very attention condition of the mind shows in the countenance. The passive state in which some virtuosi appear on the platform, is by no means that in which they originally studied their works. Your editor in his own teaching days always found it profitable to look at the pupil's face. If the pupil had the expression of a codfish, not much could be expected; but if the expression was that of the fox terrier, all eagerness, all alertness, then there was attention. And attention is the greatest factor in learning.