XIIIKEEP THE CLASSICS BUT TEACH THEM
This is not the time to drop Latin or Greek openly or under the subterfuge of optional electives. Colleges everywhere are crowded. Buildings are too small for the students; classes are too large for the professors. Now is the time to impose stricter conditions rather than to open wider the doors to colleges, and now is the proper time to restore the classical languages, and especially Greek, if not to favor, because knowledge maketh a bloody entrance, and its weapons are resented, at least to respectable toleration, by teaching them in the right way. Do not empty the baby with the bath, but do draw off the stagnant waters and let the bright showers sparkle and sing and refresh. Don’t throw out Greek, but do teach Greek as literature, as the art of self-expression, as a practical and permanent possession of the student through appreciation and through composition in his own language.
Greek authors used to be put in the students’ hands with a Latin paraphrase. In Jesuit schools the explanation of the author included a translationwhich might be dictated to the class. This was done because in Latin, and especially in Greek, which was not the language to be used in life, the proper and real work began after the interpretation was known. That proper work was artistic appreciation and artistic reproduction in one’s own language, formerly Latin and now various languages. Rather than cast out Greek, furnish the students with Loeb or Jebb or Murray or Lang, shorten grammatical drill, and then center attention on the appreciation and the reproduction of the finest literary art of all ages, exacting compositions written and spoken in the student’s own language. This is not a revolutionary proposal, the system now prevalent is revolutionary; but it is a proposal to relegate to the university the specialism and scientific handling of literature, and an earnest plea to retain or restore to the classics, especially Greek, their age-old method, proper to the general training of academy and of college and profitable to every student if the art of speaking and writing is of lifelong utility.
The teaching of literature has a handicap which is not found in the teaching of other arts. A painter must know some practical facts about preparing and applying paints, but he need not know the whole chemistry of pigments or the physics of colors. The sculptor must choose the right kind of marble, but he does not take a course in geology. In all arts except literature the contact with theartist’s work is almost immediate. But in literature a language must be mastered, and in mastering that language a thousand sciences have obtruded themselves between the student and the masterpiece. Gustav Foch of Leipsic published some years ago a catalog of dissertations printed in Germany during the latter part of the nineteenth century. The catalog, which was by no means complete, containing only the items he was prepared to furnish, listed 27,000 titles. This formidable number concerned itself entirely with the Greek and Roman writers and embodied special studies on the history, the evolution, the text, the erudition of classical literature. Practically nothing of this immense flood of special dissertations touched on the art of literature.
Now, if all this tremendous erudition were left to the university, where it properly belongs, not much harm would be done; but unhappily the study of literature as a science has almost completely excluded its study as an art. The small school of Dissen, Rehdantz and Blass, who represented in Germany the artistic appreciation of Greek literature, was submerged by the immensely greater number of scientific investigators. The classical poets, with the exception of Homer, fared better than the prose authors; but all literature, instead of being a help to the art of composition, was subordinated to establishing a theory or to exemplifying a generalization.
France resisted almost entirely this scientific obsessionof literature. England held out long. In both of these nations composition in the classical languages was a fixed feature of the schools. Victorian literature is steeped in the classics, especially of Greece; the golden age of England’s eloquence, the age of Chatham, Fox and Burke, preceded the scientific era of classicism and was the product of artistic appreciation and of composition.
What of America? The earlier schools followed French and English traditions and taught the classics with literary appreciation and with fruitful results for the literature of America. Then later America sent its professors to Germany; specialism and the departmental system separated literature entirely from the classics; composition ceased except as a means of learning grammar, thus establishing a complete reversal of the original practice, where grammar was a means to composition.
It would be untrue to say that all the erudition, discovered and systematized by numerous sciences and centering upon the classics, was useless or unprofitable. Even the immense library which the Wolfian theory of Homeric origins brought into existence has not been entirely in vain. Germany of the nineteenth century was the Alexandria of the modern world, and as Alexandrian criticism was the forerunner of the best in Latin literature, perhaps the immense activity of scientific investigators may have an artistic outcome. A selection of what is good and true, and a clear, concise presentation ofwell-established facts, such as Père Laurand gives in his excellent series,Manuels des Etudes Grecques et Latines(Picard, Paris), will help the study of the classics. Erudition should take now its proper place of subordination. The classics should resume the functions which history, evolution, origins and other scientific approaches have taken away; the classics should once more be studied primarily as works of art. The medium and materials do not dominate other arts; they should not dominate literature. Self-expression is the goal of all art; it should be the goal of literature.
Have the teachers of the classics lost faith? Is artistic appreciation an idle thing or is it a thing of beauty, a joy forever? The experimental sciences are always changing in facts and theories. The chemistry of a century ago is absurd; the chemistry of twenty-five years ago is antiquated; the chemistry of today will be old tomorrow. As Remsen long ago saw and insisted on, what is valuable in the teaching of chemistry are the processes, not the theories, which will likely change tomorrow. Chemistry, as a science, is a bit of classified information always modified by research. Art and artistic appreciation is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Give a man appreciation of literature; let him taste the beauty of Homer and of Sophocles and of Demosthenes, and you have given him, not a catalog of facts which must always be rectified, not a theory which must change with the facts, but aprecious treasure in the mind which will always remain. In teaching chemistry the processes are more important than the temporary information; in the teaching of literature the processes are at least equally valuable, and besides last through life in abiding taste and in perfected self-expression.
Formerly reproduction was the aim of the teacher of the classics. “Reproduction is the soul of the explanation or prelection,” is the way early Jesuit pedagogy put it, and every student of philosophy knows what the soul or formal cause contributes to the effect. How many in explaining classical literature today guide themselves throughout by the principle that their students are to reproduce artistically the masterpiece which they explain? No doubt professors insist upon the formation of clear ideas and further demand explicit judgments in the way of propositions. Most too require that the links of reasoning be sharply and definitely stated. Interpretation, in a word, is well done. The intellectual element of the masterpiece is handled satisfactorily. But what of the artistic form? Does the literature take shape in the student’s imagination? Is the picture realized in the teacher’s imagination and then by suggestion, through the sparkling eye and sympathetic voice and interpreting gesture, by vivid, though not histrionic, dramatization, is the author’s message staged in the student’s imagination? Scientific analysis, especially where a text becomes a tag to some learnedgeneralization, often prevents imaginative realization and thus precludes artistic appreciation of literature.
The teaching of the classics has been and is now justified by the general training they impart, but it is chiefly when taught as literature that they impart that general training. If the classics are subordinated to the university lecturer’s specialty, then the classics are imparting little general training and have hardly more right in the classroom, except for indirect results which may accrue from contact with art, than have special courses in conchology or entomology. Let the teacher look upon the classics as art to be reproduced after being appreciated, and a general training will be the outcome. Composition should be made the aim of literature.
Idioms of languages, and their vocabulary and their structure differ, but thought and imagination may be the same. Set all the languages of the world before a moving-picture, and each language will tell the common story on the screen to its children in its own way of speaking. So the student of any language may learn from Homer how to select details and group them into artistic wholes, how to carry on the narrative through significant and choice events, how to dwell on the important and touch lightly on the insignificant, how to relieve a story and intensify a part of it by appropriate comparisons. As the student learns how to tell a story, so too may he master the art of describing a scene,of creating a character, of making a speech. He will be taught the way to focus an idea and give it discriminating expression by the right word, the way to embody good or evil in concrete and picturesque words and the way to be proficient in all the elements and processes of composition. The Greek Homer made the Latin Æneid, the Greek Theocritus made the Latin Eclogue and, if Stedman is right, also the Tennysonian Idyll. The literary art of Greek and Latin has given and will give artistic form to the student’s vernacular.
The classics will give a general training if they are made to do so. Literature will not impart a general training automatically. Art is a habit arising from a repetition of acts. The art of thinking is mastered by thinking, and the art of imagining by imagining, and that thinking and imagining will be done well if done under the guidance of masters. Has the literary art of Greece, which created Latin literature and directly and indirectly shaped the literature of all civilization, done its full work? Who can believe it? Every generation since Homer has been influenced by the art of Homer in translation and imitation, and no generations more so than those of Cowper and Morris and Lang in England and of Bryant and Palmer in America. The time may come when literary taste and literary art will be as well studied and demonstrated in modern languages as in those of Latin and Greek; the time may come when modern classics may be as well adaptedfor education as the classics of Greek and Rome which have been in the classroom for century upon century, but that time does not appear to be tomorrow or the day after. If the art of self-expression is the best test of education, if the art of self-expression is the most practical thing in life and the most permanent treasure that can be gained in school, then Greek literature, the finest masterpiece of self-expression, should remain, and Greek literature should be taught, as for centuries it was taught, with interpretation and translation furnished to the student, leaving the time of training to be devoted not to special sciences proper to the university, but to the general training in appreciation and expression, proper to academy and college.