results has the least conception of the difficulty of securing that "certain amount" of proficiency. Two years of fierce and constant drill will often fail to teach a bright boy to avoid sentence errors. Five years of almost daily writing is sometimes insufficient to fix the habit of changing y to i and adding es. I know a boy of unusual literary talent who after three years of training in forming possessives, when the form Dickens's was on the board, when the teacher had specially called attention to it before a test, proceeded to write Dicken's the proper form being all the while before him in six-inch letters. He was not the only one. Another boy, who was near the top of the class in scholarship, could not put the apostrophe where it belonged. Any teacher could fill a volume with that sort of thing. No critic has a real apprehension of such difficulties.

A teacher, then, in order to get passable results must concentrate. Scatter his energies, and you doom him to failure. If he takes time for niceties of idiom and tries to teach the spelling of two thousand used-once-in-a-while words, his instruction will be dissipated, the world and the university will get poorer service, and the pupil will have a less useful education. For example: not much can be done with the spelling of words in ant and ent, able and ible, because no rule can be formulated; all that is possible is to select a few of the most common and make sure of them. Essencial and parliment must not distract emphasis from the inexcusable rotteness or writting.

I am making no plea for a lower standard. Quite the contrary. This is a plea for reducing the "practically unteachable" requirement, for following exactly the Madison theory, for increased rigor in all matters that systematic teaching can enforce.

Can it be just to declare that stoped is a degree less serious than I was too offended? Which of the following sentences deserves more condemnation?

(1) There house is larger than ours.

(2) The first appearance of Shylock is when he meets

Antonio.

Apparently the Madison authors have conveyed some wrong impressions. Would any other university have done better? Probably not. Wisconsin has done a great service by putting her opinions on record-that is the important matter. Amid a babel of vague voices, thru a jungle of unanalyzed sentiment, across a wild waste of fluctuating ideas call it what you like she has spoken definitely, has cut a path, has shown a light. All teachers everywhere ought to call her blessed. The university that "has been so long and so invidiously held up as a model" is a model still.

Well, then, what is secondary English? Nobody knows. But opinions are now being codified all over the land, and will be tabulated before long. The chaotic mass is crystallizing.

A good illustration of the present tendency in school rhetoric may be had from a comparison of the editions of a popular textbook for 1902 and 1911. In the latter edition the space devoted to improprieties has been reduced one-third; that devoted to grammatical errors has been increased one-third; the chapter on punctuation has been doubled in length.

What, then, will English be? We may hazard a forecast in three parts:

(1) Literature will be non-essential. Probably more than ever will be read in the schools, and most colleges will require evidence of some kind that books have been read; but the requirement will be, like Latin or history, varying and optional.

(2) Ability to write a decent theme, on a topic not based on reading, will be the simple definition of "English.'

(3) "Decent" will mean: practically free from common, typical, fundamental errors in spelling, punctuation, syntax, and arrangement of material.

WATERTOWN, CONN.

C. H. WARD

VI

THE BROKEN FELLOWSHIP1

On the 15th of October the new aula of the FriedrichWilhelms-Universität in Berlin was thronged with an assembly, academic and civic, who had come to hear a man in the purple gown and golden chains of office pronounce an oration. It was the new Rector Magnificus of the University, Dr. Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff. His inaugural speech had, of course, to be in the first instance concerned with that world of scholarship and letters which his office subserved, but he was also speaking at the moment when just half a millennium had been completed since the house of Hohenzollern rose to be rulers in Germany and he was speaking in the midst of the greatest war of all times, in which his eldest son had fallen exactly a year before. His speech ranged over the history of his people from the days when the old German tribes were shifting their borders between Celts and Slavs to the present hour with its tremendous burden.

Few Englishmen, maybe, know the name of WilamowitzMöllendorff, except those whose special walk in life has been in classical studies. But for them the name is a centre of many memories, going back, perhaps, to schooldays. Some may themselves in former years have been among those who heard his lectures in Berlin. Others may have heard him in Oxford, when he visited our own eldest seat of classical learning a few years ago. And for all of these the name will stand for a strongly marked personality, which has laid hold of them at different times thru his printed writings. If their heart has really been in the search after a knowledge of the ancient classical world, of its life and feeling and mind as they may be discerned thru the literature and the monu1 From the Literary Supplement of the London Times, November 4,

1915.

ments which it has left behind, then they will have towards this man that mixt feeling of admiration and gratitude which a scholar feels for one whose vivid genius and masterful sense of reality have lit up with sudden illumination tracts which his own feebler vision might never have penetrated.

Wilamowitz sometimes provoked contradiction, but he was never dull. He was one of those scholars in Germany who were emphatically not what we are sometimes told in these days all German scholars are mere laborious and pedestrian accumulators of facts and data. It is one of the things which can not but give English scholars a sense of shame that Englishmen claiming to be scholars should play to the gallery at a moment like the present by statements which, if they are scholars, they must know to be untrue, and which, if they make them in good faith, must throw grave doubt upon their scholarship. It is the natural logic of the multitude that because we Englishmen feel it our duty at this moment to combat the German State to our last breath therefore Germany has never done any thing of value for scholarship or letters. But that is just the kind of logic to which scholars should give no countenance. We surely need not be any weaker in our resolution to hold out till we have righted a great wrong and removed a great danger to our nation because we recognize the world's debt in science and letters to the researchers and writers of Germany. It is, of course, the least creditable utterances on either side which attract notice on the other. We have seen a painted refutation of Professor Sayce's absurdities by the venerated Old Testament scholar, Professor König of Bonn, but we have not seen any allusion in the German Press to really candid attempts to estimate the contribution of Germany to scholarship, such as that of Professor Gilbert Murray, or of Professor Percy Gardner, or of Professor Moulton. This is so in the field of letters generally. In Germany only extreme utterances on this side get known— either those indiscriminately violent or those of eccentric pacifists associated with the Labour Leader or the Union of Democratic Control. Very little notice is taken of utter

ances far more representative and central. What is known in Germany of the England for which Mr. W. H. Dawson or Mr. Clutton-Brock speaks?

The assertion that German scholarship is mere industry. in accumulation, like many other false assertions, gets its plausibility from something which is true. In a great deal of German scholarship the industry in accumulation is accompanied by a very small measure of fine perception; the touch is often heavy and wanting in humor. But every national type of mind has its special limitations and defects, more pronounced in the second and third rate men, and tending to disappear in the men who stand up above the common level. Long before England and Germany had been flung upon each other in world-shattering convulsion, in the quieter days which lie behind, Matthew Arnold, in the preface to an early edition of Literature and dogma, discust the relative strength and defect of the French and German minds. He judged that the German mind had less of fine perception and the French mind, on the other hand, more of caprice. Whether that be true or not, it is certain that every type has the defects of its qualities. An honest Englishman would acknowledge that with reference to the English as frankly as Dr. Wilamowitz-Möllendorff does in his inaugural speech with reference to the German. He is speaking of the old days of glad cooperation between the scholars of different nations.

"It was only a matter of joy to us when scientific learning was cultivated by others with the same sense of historical truth as our own. We knew and we know that every people has its peculiar endowment, that in consequence it sees many things more easily and more truly than we do."

But to single out the defects to which any type of mind is liable and offer that as the whole account of it is a misrepresentation which even the exigencies of war hardly justify. It must be allowed too that there is a special reason why German scholarship should appear as the dull industry of mediocrities, and a reason not unhonorable to Germany. Thru the elaboration and organization of its scientific