III THE TEACHING OF ENGLISH AND THE STUDY OF THE CLASSICS1 On the present occasion I am expected, as a teacher of English, to address an audience chiefly made up of teachers of Greek and Latin on the "cultural value" of the classics. It is a large topic, which we must in some way restrict. There will be a suitable restriction if we discuss the value of an early training in Greek and Latin as it appears to a teacher of English after an experience of a dozen years with pupils in the modern subject; this done, it will not be improper to indulge in a few general reflections. To begin with, let us have specially in mind the needs and the opportunities of first-rate students when they leave the preparatory school, and are not immediately to engage in active life. They are about to enter the academic course of a college or university, where they will be called upon to write numerous essays in the mother tongue, and to read not a few of the standard modern authors. What qualities, and what training, should we expect them to bring to these and such-like tasks? To write a fair essay demands a certain grade of general cultivation; and to sympathize with one of the great English poets with Spenser or Milton, for example, or, let us say, with Coleridge—means that one must have something in common, in the way of training, with a man who wrote well, partly because of his genius, but partly also because he was well-taught. This immediately raises the question, how have the masters of the English tongue been educated-how have they learned to write? Before suggesting an answer to this question, it may not be out of place to marvel at teachers of English, and of 1 This paper was read before the Classical Association of the Atlantic: States at its Eighth Annual Meeting, April 18, 1914. other modern literatures, at our administrative officers in the higher education, and above all at our professors of pedagogy, for their general lack of interest in certain inquiries which no teacher, and no leader in the art of teaching, should ever neglect. Their interests commonly are of another sort. They have traced the history of various movements in education, and they can tell you, it may be, what Plato and Comenius, or Herbart and Rousseau, have said or thought about the discipline of youth; they can even explain the relation of experimental psychology to what we used to call "mental arithmetic;" but they have given little heed to the way in which great teachers actually have taught, or men of acknowledged attainments have acquired their power. We need not pursue this line of thought beyond remarking that the authors in whose works our collegians must read, and about whom they must write, have, almost to a man, had a classical training, and have not secured their command over the English tongue without an acquaintance with Greek and Latin. The record of the studies of Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, and of Chatham, Burke, and Newman, represents the great experiment in English education—an experiment lasting thru centuries, a successful one, and one whose results no teacher or theorist on teaching can safely disregard. So much in general; it may be wise to add a concrete illustration. Let us attend to the weekly routine of the upper class in Christ's Hospital, the school where Samuel Taylor Coleridge was prepared for Cambridge, and was inflamed with a love of English; where, in fact, he laid the foundations of a literary training. Here is approximately what he and the best of his fellow-pupils, the "Senior Grecians," were doing at a charity school at London in the year 1790: Monday morning: Homer or Tragic Chorus by heart; Greek Tragedy. Monday afternoon: Hebrew Psalter; Horace or Juvenal. Written exercise for Monday: English and Latin Theme, in alternate weeks. Tuesday morning: Xenophon at sight; Homer. Tuesday afternoon: Mathematical Scholium. Exercise for Tuesday: Huntingford's Greek Exercises. Wednesday morning: Cicero's Orations at sight; Livy or Cicero. Wednesday afternoon: English Speaking; Tacitus. Exercise for Wednesday: Greek Translation. Thursday morning: Virgil by heart; Demosthenes. Thursday afternoon: Mathematical Scholium. Exercise for Thursday: Greek Verses, and Translation from English into Latin. Friday morning: Horace or Juvenal by heart; Greek Tragedy or Aristophanes. Friday afternoon: Hebrew; Latin Speaking. Exercise for Friday: Latin Translation. Saturday morning: Seale's Metres; Repetition. Exercise for Saturday: Latin and English Verses alternately, with an abstract. "As the time of continuance on the Grecian's form is always three, and generally four years," says the historian of the school, "a very considerable acquaintance with the higher classics, as well as a readiness in the composition of English, Greek, and Latin, verse and prose, is easily attainable within this period, and forms a substantial groundwork for the more extensive researches of academical study." "At school," says Coleridge himself, "I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, tho at the same time a very severe master [the Rev. James Boyer]. He early moulded my taste to the preference of Demosthenes to Cicero, of Homer and Theocritus to Virgil, and again of Virgil to Ovid. He habituated me to compare Lucretius, (in such extracts as I then read) Terence, and above all the chaster poems of Catullus, not only with the Roman poets of the, so-called, silver and brazen ages, but with even those of the Augustan era; and on grounds of plain sense and universal logic to see and assert the superiority of the former in the truth and nativeness both of their thoughts and diction. At the same time that we were studying the Greek tragic poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons; and they were the lessons, too, which required most time and trouble to 'bring up' so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him that poetry, even that of the loftiest and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes,. had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science, and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent upon more, and more fugitive causes. In the truly great poets, he would say, there is a reason assignable, not only for every word, but for the position of every word." This, then, is the way in which the great experiment, if one may so describe it, worked out in a particular instance. Such instances might be multiplied; and the inference as to the nature of a liberal education, which means an education in good taste, could not be disregarded. But the experiment of a classical training still continues, nor can we disregard the results as they appear, or are wanting, in the successive generations of young men and women who throng to our higher institutions of learning in search of what is termed culture. What can we discover from a scrutiny of our students? First, those relatively few young persons of our day who possess an adequate grounding in Greek and Latin have this in common with the English poets: they know something about grammar-not English grammar specifically, nor Greek, nor Latin, but grammar in general. They recognize subject, copula, and predicate whenever they meet them; they have an understanding for order and relation in the parts of a sentence. They are accustomed to see the elements of language as elements, and are not incapable of arranging them. They know the difference between a temporal and a causal connective; they can distinguish between post hoc and propter hoc-a highly important distinction in life. The reason they can do so is that, whereas it is possible to express oneself either loosely or distinctly in English, according to one's previous education, both Greek and Latin compel the schoolboy to make a sharp distinction between one thought and another. This is precisely what those who have mist a severe linguistic training are never prone to do. An observant teacher should know whereof he speaks. He should know why he is glad to welcome students of Latin and Greek to his classes in English. There may be exceptions; if so, these are negligible. In the long run, they who have done well with Greek or Latin in the preparatory school can write passable English as freshmen, and they who have had neither are ungrammatical and otherwise slovenly in usage. Next, the youth with a classical training has a superior knowledge, not only of connectives that are by themselves non-significant, but also of the significant elements in the English vocabulary. In particular, as compared with the youth who lacks that training, he recognizes and can use what we call "learned words;" that is, the word which an educated man employs, and an uneducated man does not. Year after year one may toil with uneducated sophomores over the sixth stanza of Coleridge's Dejection, an Ode, that stanza in which the author has epitomized his tragic life. And why this recurrent toil? Because the poet has made use of terms like resource, research, and abstruse— And haply by abstruse research to steal which fifteen out of twenty in a class will mispronounce, and which they do not comprehend, being unfamiliar with the Latin element in modern French and English. The ugly combination "résearch work" (and who is responsible for this pronunciation?) does not, one may guess, occur in any English poet. Our fifteen sophomores will dimly gather what the combination signifies, because in work they see their ancient foe; they will look wise or otherwise when told that research is a "learned" word; they will smile when they hear that its fellow is one of those that competent students of Latin and English call "popular." Again, the fit tho few among those who engage in the study of English have more orderly minds for the larger details, as well as the smaller, in written composition. They excel their untutored comrades in joining sentence to sentence when they build up a paragraph, and in linking paragraph to paragraph to form an essay. And why is this? Because the fit tho few have had their mental operations regulated by a progress thru some portions of Greek and Latin literature; and because the Greek and Latin authors that have come down to us differ from the rank and file of modern authors in possessing a more excellent sequence of thought. We ought forthwith to guard against any misapprehension that the ancient classics are to be deemed in all ways superior to modern literature. On the contrary, it is evident that in developing a boy of our generation into a clear-headed gentleman, if the ancients will help more in making him clear-headed (and yet to some extent gentle as well), the modern writers, or some of them, can perform the greater service in creating within him a clean and tender heart. The fact remains, however, that in Sophocles the train of thought is more cogent than in Shakespeare, as the internal order of a speech in the Odyssey is more lucid than in Paradise Lost. Further, the boy with the classical training, since he is |