Any one who has traveled much about the country of recent years must have
been impressed by the growing uneasiness of mind among thoughtful men.
Whether in the smoking car, or the hotel corridor, or the college hall,
everywhere, if you meet them off their guard and stripped of the optimism
which we wear as a public convention, you will hear them saying in a kind
of sad amazement, "What is to be the end of it all?" They are alarmed at
the unsettlement of property and the difficulties that harass the man of
moderate means in making provision for the future; they are uneasy over
the breaking up of the old laws of decorum, if not of decency, and over
the unrestrained pursuit of excitement at any cost; they feel vaguely that
in the decay of religion the bases of society have been somehow weakened.
Now, much of this sort of talk is as old as history, and has no special
significance. We are prone to forget that civilization has always been a
_tour de force_, so to speak, a little hard-won area of order and
self-subordination amidst a vast wilderness of anarchy and barbarism that
are with difficulty held in check and are continually threatening to
overrun their bounds. But that is equally no reason for over-confidence.
Civilization is like a ship traversing an untamed sea. It is a more
complex machine in our day, with command of greater forces, and might seem
correspondingly safer than in the era of sails. But fresh catastrophes
have shown that the ancient perils of navigation still confront the
largest vessel, when the crew loses its discipline or the officers neglect
their duty; and the analogy is not without its warning.
Only a year after the sinking of the _Titanic_ I was crossing the ocean,
and it befell by chance that on the anniversary of that disaster we passed
not very far from the spot where the proud ship lay buried beneath the
waves. The evening was calm, and on the lee deck a dance had been hastily
organized to take advantage of the benign weather. Almost alone I stood
for hours at the railing on the windward side, looking out over the
rippling water where the moon had laid upon it a broad street of gold.
Nothing could have been more peaceful; it was as if Nature were smiling
upon earth in sympathy with the strains of music and the sound of laughter
that reached me at intervals from the revelling on the other deck. Yet I
could not put out of my heart an apprehension of some luring treachery in
this scene of beauty--and certainly the world can offer nothing more
wonderfully beautiful than the moon shining from the far East over a
smooth expanse of water. Was it not in such a calm as this that the
unsuspecting vessel, with its gay freight of human lives, had shuddered,
and gone down, forever? I seemed to behold a symbol; and there came into
my mind the words we used to repeat at school, but are, I do not know just
why, a little ashamed of to-day:
Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all its hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!...
Something like this, perhaps, is the feeling of many men--men by no means
given to morbid gusts of panic--amid a society that laughs overmuch in its
amusement and exults in the very lust of change. Nor is their anxiety
quite the same as that which has always disturbed the reflecting
spectator. At other times the apprehension has been lest the combined
forces of order might not be strong enough to withstand the
ever-threatening inroads of those who envy barbarously and desire
recklessly; whereas today the doubt is whether the natural champions of
order themselves shall be found loyal to their trust, for they seem no
longer to remember clearly the word of command that should unite them in
leadership. Until they can rediscover some common ground of strength and
purpose in the first principles of education and law and property and
religion, we are in danger of falling a prey to the disorganizing and
vulgarizing domination of ambitions which should be the servants and not
the masters of society.
Certainly, in the sphere of education there is a growing belief that some
radical reform is needed; and this dissatisfaction is in itself wholesome.
Boys come into college with no reading and with minds unused to the very
practice of study; and they leave college, too often, in the same state of
nature. There are even those, inside and outside of academic halls, who
protest that our higher institutions of learning simply fail to educate at
all. That is slander; but in sober earnest, you will find few experienced
college professors, apart from those engaged in teaching purely
utilitarian or practical subjects, who are not convinced that the general
relaxation is greater now than it was twenty years ago. It is of
considerable significance that the two student essays which took the
prizes offered by the Harvard _Advocate_ in 1913 were both on this theme.
The first of them posed the question: "How can the leadership of the
intellectual rather than the athletic student be fostered?" and was
virtually a sermon on a text of President Lowell's: "No one in close touch
with American education has failed to notice the lack among the mass of
undergraduates of keen interest in their studies, and the small regard for
scholarly attainment."
Now, the _Advocate_ prizeman has his specific remedy, and President Lowell
has his, and other men propose other systems and restrictions; but the
evil is too deep-seated to be reached by any superficial scheme of honors
or to be charmed away by insinuating appeals. The other day Mr. William F.
McCombs, chairman of the National Committee which engineered a college
president into the White House, gave this advice to our academic youth:
"The college man must forget--or never let it creep into his head--that
he's a highbrow. If it does creep in, he's out of politics." To which one
might reply in Mr. McCombs's own dialect, that unless a man can make
himself a force in politics (or at least in the larger life of the State)
precisely by virtue of being a "highbrow," he had better spend his four
golden years otherwhere than in college. There it is: the destiny of
education is intimately bound up with the question of social leadership,
and unless the college, as it used to be in the days when the religious
hierarchy it created was a real power, can be made once more a breeding
place for a natural aristocracy, it will inevitably degenerate into a
school for mechanical apprentices or into a pleasure resort for the
_jeunesse dorée_ (_sc._ the "gold coasters"). We must get back to a common
understanding of the office of education in the construction of society,
and must discriminate among the subjects that may enter into the
curriculum, by their relative value towards this end.
A manifest condition is that education should embrace the means of
discipline, for without discipline the mind will remain inefficient, just
as surely as the muscles of the body, without exercise, will be left
flaccid. That should seem to be a self-evident truth. Now it may be
possible to derive a certain amount of discipline out of any study, but it
is a fact, nevertheless, which cannot be gainsaid, that some studies lend
themselves to this use more readily and effectively than others. You may,
for instance, if by extraordinary luck you get the perfect teacher, make
English literature disciplinary by the hard manipulation of ideas; but in
practice it almost inevitably happens that a course in English literature
either degenerates into the dull memorizing of dates and names or, rising
into the O Altitudo, evaporates in romantic gush over beautiful passages.
This does not mean, of course, that no benefit may be obtained from such a
study, but it does preclude English literature generally from being made
the backbone, so to speak, of a sound curriculum. The same may be said of
French and German. The difficulties of these tongues in themselves, and
the effort required of us to enter into their spirit, imply some degree of
intellectual gymnastics, but scarcely enough for our purpose. Of the
sciences it behooves one to speak circumspectly, and undoubtedly
mathematics and physics, at least, demand such close attention and such
firm reasoning as to render them an essential part of any disciplinary
education. But there are good grounds for being sceptical of the effect of
the non-mathematical sciences on the immature mind. Any one who has spent
a considerable portion of his undergraduate time in a chemical laboratory,
for example, as the present writer has done, and has the means of
comparing the results of such elementary and pottering experimentation
with the mental grip required in the humanistic courses, must feel that
the real training obtained therein was almost negligible. If I may draw
further from my own observation I must say frankly that, after dealing for
a number of years with manuscripts prepared for publication by college
professors of the various faculties, I have been forced to the conclusion
that science, in itself, is likely to leave the mind in a state of
relative imbecility. It is not that the writing of men who got their early
drill too exclusively, or even predominantly, in the sciences lacks the
graces of rhetoric--that would be comparatively a small matter--but such
men in the majority of cases, even when treating subjects within their own
field, show a singular inability to think clearly and consecutively, so
soon as they are freed from the restraint of merely describing the process
of an experiment. On the contrary, the manuscript of a classical scholar,
despite the present dry-rot of philology, almost invariably gives signs of
a habit of orderly and well-governed cerebration.
Here, whatever else may be lacking, is discipline. The sheer difficulty of
Latin and Greek, the highly organized structure of these languages, the
need of scrupulous search to find the nearest equivalents for words that
differ widely in their scope of meaning from their derivatives in any
modern vocabulary, the effort of lifting one's self out of the familiar
rut of ideas into so foreign a world, all these things act as a tonic
exercise to the brain. And it is a demonstrable fact that students of the
classics do actually surpass their unclassical rivals in any field where a
fair test can be made. At Princeton, for instance, Professor West has
shown this superiority by tables of achievements and grades, which he
published in the _Educational Review_ for March, 1913; and a number of
letters from various parts of the country, printed in the _Nation_, tell
the same story in striking fashion. Thus, a letter from Wesleyan
(September 7, 1911) gives statistics to prove that the classical students
in that university outstrip the others in obtaining all sorts of honors,
commonly even honors in the sciences. Another letter (May 8, 1913) shows
that in the first semester in English at the University of Nebraska the
percentage of delinquents among those who entered with four years of Latin
was below 7; among those who had three years of Latin and one or two of a
modern language the percentage rose to 15; two years of Latin and two
years of a modern language, 30 per cent.; one year or less of Latin and
from two to four years of a modern language, 35 per cent. And in the
_Nation_ of April 23, 1914, Prof. Arthur Gordon Webster, the eminent
physicist of Clark University, after speaking of the late B.O. Peirce's
early drill and life-long interest in Greek and Latin, adds these
significant words: "Many of us still believe that such a training makes
the best possible foundation for a scientist." There is reason to think
that this opinion is daily gaining ground among those who are zealous that
the prestige of science should be maintained by men of the best calibre.
The disagreement in this matter would no doubt be less, were it not for an
ambiguity in the meaning of the word "efficient" itself. There is a kind
of efficiency in managing men, and there also is an intellectual
efficiency, properly speaking, which is quite a different faculty. The
former is more likely to be found in the successful engineer or business
man than in the scholar of secluded habits, and because often such men of
affairs received no discipline at college in the classics, the argument
runs that utilitarian studies are as disciplinary as the humanistic. But
efficiency of this kind is not an academic product at all, and is commonly
developed, and should be developed, in the school of the world. It comes
from dealing with men in matters of large physical moment, and may exist
with a mind utterly undisciplined in the stricter sense of the word. We
have had more than one illustrious example in recent years of men capable
of dominating their fellows, let us say in financial transactions, who
yet, in the grasp of first principles and in the analysis of consequences,
have shown themselves to be as inefficient as children.
Probably, however, few men who have had experience in education will deny
the value of discipline to the classics, even though they hold that other
studies, less costly from the utilitarian point of view, are equally
educative in this respect. But it is further of prime importance, even if
such an equality, or approach to equality, were granted, that we should
select one group of studies, and unite in making it the core of the
curriculum for the great mass of undergraduates. It is true in education
as in other matters that strength comes from union, and weakness from
division, and if educated men are to work together for a common end, they
must have a common range of ideas, with a certain solidarity in their way
of looking at things. As matters actually are, the educated man feels
terribly his isolation under the scattering of intellectual pursuits, yet
too often lacks the courage to deny the strange popular fallacy that there
is virtue in sheer variety, and that somehow well-being is to be struck
out from the clashing of miscellaneous interests rather than from
concentration. In one of his annual reports some years ago President
Eliot, of Harvard, observed from the figures of registration that the
majority of students still at that time believed the best form of
education for them was in the old humanistic courses, and _therefore_, he
argued, the other courses should be fostered. There was never perhaps a
more extraordinary syllogism since the _argal_ of Shakespeare's
gravedigger. I quote from memory, and may slightly misrepresent the actual
statement of the influential "educationalist," but the spirit of his
words, as indeed of his practice, is surely as I give it. And the working
of this spirit is one of the main causes of the curious fact that scarcely
any other class of men in social intercourse feel themselves, in their
deeper concerns, more severed one from another than those very college
professors who ought to be united in the battle for educational
leadership. This estrangement is sometimes carried to an extreme almost
ludicrous. I remember once, in a small but advanced college, the
consternation that was awakened when an instructor in philosophy went to a
colleague--both of them now associates in a large university--for
information in a question of biology. "What business has he with such
matters," said the irate biologist; "let him stick to his last, and teach
philosophy--if he can!" That was a polite jest, you will say. Perhaps; but
not entirely. Philosophy is indeed taught in one lecture hall, and biology
in another, but of conscious effort to make of education an harmonious
driving force there is next to nothing. And as the teachers, so are the
taught.
Such criticism does not imply that advanced work in any of the branches of
human knowledge should be curtailed; but it does demand that, as a
background to the professional pursuits, there should be a common
intellectual training through which all students should pass, acquiring
thus a single body of ideas and images in which they could always meet as
brother initiates.
We shall, then, make a long step forward when we determine that in the
college, as distinguished from the university, it is better to have the
great mass of men, whatever may be the waste in a few unmalleable minds,
go through the discipline of a single group of studies--with, of course, a
considerable freedom of choice in the outlying field. And it will probably
appear in experience that the only practicable group to select is the
classics, with the accompaniment of philosophy and the mathematical
sciences. Latin and Greek are, at least, as disciplinary as any other
subjects; and if it can be further shown that they possess a specific
power of correction for the more disintegrating tendencies of the age, it
ought to be clear that their value as instruments of education outweighs
the service of certain other studies which may seem to be more immediately
utilitarian.
For it will be pretty generally agreed that efficiency of the individual
scholar and unity of the scholarly class are, properly, only the means to
obtain the real end of education, which is social efficiency. The only
way, in fact, to make the discipline demanded by a severe curriculum and
the sacrifice of particular tastes required for unity seem worth the cost,
is to persuade men that the resulting form of education both meets a
present and serious need of society and promises to serve those
individuals who desire to obtain society's fairer honors. As for the
specific need of society at the present day, it is not my purpose to open
this matter now, for the good reason that the editor of THE UNPOPULAR
REVIEW has already permitted me to argue it at length in my article on
_Natural Aristocracy_. Mr. McCombs, speaking for the "practical" man,
declares that there is no place in politics for the intellectual
aristocrat. A good many of us believe that unless the very reverse of this
is true, unless the educated man can somehow, by virtue of his education,
make of himself a governor of the people in the larger sense, and even to
some extent in the narrow political sense, unless the college can produce
a hierarchy of character and intelligence which shall in due measure
perform the office of the discredited oligarchy of birth, we had better
make haste to divert our enormous collegiate endowments into more useful
channels.
And here I am glad to find confirmation of my belief in the stalwart old
_Boke Named the Governour_, published by Sir Thomas Elyot in 1531, the
first treatise on education in the English tongue, and still, after all
these years, one of the wisest. It is no waste of time to take account of
the theory held by the humanists when study at Oxford and Cambridge was
shaping itself for its long service in giving to the oligarchic government
of Great Britain whatever elements it possessed of true aristocracy.
Elyot's book is equally a treatise on the education of a gentleman, and on
the ordinance of government; for, as he says elsewhere, he wrote "to
instruct men in such virtues as shall be expedient for them which shall
have authority in a weal public." I quote from various parts of his work
with some abridgment, retaining the quaint spelling of the original, and I
beg the reader not to skip, however long the citation may appear:
Beholde also the ordre that god hath put generally in al his
creatures, begynning at the moste inferiour or base, and
assendynge upwarde; so that in euery thyng is ordre, and without
ordre may be nothing stable or permanent; and it may nat be called
ordre, excepte it do contayne in it degrees, high and base,
accordynge to the merite or estimation of the thyng that is
ordred. And therfore hit appereth that god gyueth nat to euery man
like gyftes of grace, or of nature, but to some more, some lesse,
as it liketh his diuine maiestie. For as moche as understandyng is
the most excellent gyfte that man can receiue in his creation, it
is therfore congruent, and accordynge that as one excelleth an
other in that influence, as therby beinge next to the similitude
of his maker, so shulde the astate of his persone be auanced in
degree or place where understandynge may profite. Suche oughte to
be set in a more highe place than the residue where they may se
and also be sene; that by the beames of theyr excellent witte,
shewed throughe the glasse of auctorite, other of inferiour
understandynge may be directed to the way of vertue and commodious
liuynge....
Thus I conclude that nobilitie is nat after the vulgare opinion of
men, but is only the prayse and surname of vertue; whiche the
lenger it continueth in a name or lignage, the more is nobilitie
extolled and meruailed at....
If thou be a gouernour, or haste ouer other soueraygntie, knowe
thy selfe. Knowe that the name of a soueraigne or ruler without
actuall gouernaunce is but a shadowe, that gouernaunce standeth
nat by wordes onely, but principally by acte and example; that by
example of gouernours men do rise or falle in vertue or vice. Ye
shall knowe all way your selfe, if for affection or motion ye do
speke or do nothing unworthy the immortalitie and moste precious
nature of your soule....
In semblable maner the inferiour persone or subiecte aught to
consider, that all be it he in the substaunce of soule and body be
equall with his superior, yet for als moche as the powars and
qualities of the soule and body, with the disposition of reason,
be nat in euery man equall, therfore god ordayned a diuersitie or
pre-eminence in degrees to be amonge men for the necessary
derection and preseruation of them in conformitie of lyuinge....
Where all thynge is commune, there lacketh ordre; and where ordre
lacketh, there all thynge is odiouse and uncomly.
Such is the goal which the grave Sir Thomas pointed out to the noble youth
of his land at the beginning of England's greatness, and such, within the
bounds of human frailty, has been the ideal even until now which the two
universities have held before them. Naturally the method of training
prescribed in the sixteenth century for the attainment of this goal is
antiquated in some of its details, but it is no exaggeration,
nevertheless, to speak of the _Boke Named the Governour_ as the very Magna
Charta of our education. The scheme of the humanist might be described in
a word as a disciplining of the higher faculty of the imagination to the
end that the student may behold, as it were in one sublime vision, the
whole scale of being in its range from the lowest to the highest under the
divine decree of order and subordination, without losing sight of the
immutable veracity at the heart of all variation, which "is only the
praise and surname of virtue." This was no new vision, nor has it ever
been quite forgotten. It was the whole meaning of religion to Hooker, from
whom it passed into all that is best and least ephemeral in the Anglican
Church. It was the basis, more modestly expressed, of Blackstone's
conception of the British Constitution and of liberty under law. It was
the kernel of Burke's theory of statecraft. It is the inspiration of the
sublimer science, which accepts the hypothesis of evolution as taught by
Darwin and Spencer, yet bows in reverence before the unnamed and
incommensurable force lodged as a mystical purpose within the unfolding
universe. It was the wisdom of that child of Stratford who, building
better than he knew, gave to our literature its deepest and most
persistent note. If anywhere Shakespeare seems to speak from his heart and
to utter his own philosophy, it is in the person of Ulysses in that
strange satire of life as "still wars and lechery" which forms the theme
of _Troilus and Cressida_. Twice in the course of the play Ulysses
moralizes on the causes of human evil. Once it is in an outburst against
the devastations of disorder:
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop of all this solid globe:
Strength should be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son should strike his father dead:
Force should be right; or rather, right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides,
Should lose their names, and so should justice too.
Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite.
And, in the same spirit, the second tirade of Ulysses is charged with
mockery at the vanity of the present and at man's usurpation of time as
the destroyer instead of the preserver of continuity:
For time is like a fashionable host
That slightly shakes his parting guest by the hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd, as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer: welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. O, let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating time.
To have made this vision of the higher imagination a true part of our
self-knowledge, in such fashion that the soul is purged of envy for what
is distinguished, and we feel ourselves fellows with the preserving,
rather than the destroying, forces of time, is to be raised into the
nobility of the intellect. To hold this knowledge in a mind trained to
fine efficiency and confirmed by faithful comradeship, is to take one's
place with the rightful governors of the people. Nor is there any narrow
or invidious exclusiveness in such an aristocracy, which differs in its
free hospitality from an oligarchy of artificial prescription. The more
its membership is enlarged, the greater is its power, and the more secure
are the privileges of each individual. Yet, if not exclusive, an academic
aristocracy must by its very nature be exceedingly jealous of any
levelling process which would shape education to the needs of the
intellectual proletariat, and so diminish its own ranks. It cannot admit
that, if education is once levelled downwards, the whole body of men will
of themselves gradually raise the level to the higher range; for its creed
declares that elevation must come from leadership rather than from
self-motion of the mass. It will therefore be opposed to any scheme of
studies which relaxes discipline or destroys intellectual solidarity. It
will look with suspicion on any system which turns out half-educated men
with the same diplomas as the fully educated, thinking that such methods
of slurring over differences are likely to do more harm by discouraging
the ambition to attain what is distinguished than good by spreading wide a
thin veneer of culture. In particular it will distrust the present huge
overgrowth of courses in government and sociology, which send men into the
world skilled in the machinery of statecraft and with minds sharpened to
the immediate demands of special groups, but with no genuine training of
the imagination and no understanding of the longer problems of humanity,
with no hold on the past, "amidst so vast a fluctuation of passions and
opinions, to concentre their thoughts, to ballast their conduct, to
preserve them from being blown about by every wind of fashionable
doctrine." It will set itself against any regular subjection of the
"fierce spirit of liberty," which is the breath of distinction and the
very charter of aristocracy, to the sullen spirit of equality, which
proceeds from envy in the baser sort of democracy. It will regard the
character of education and the disposition of the curriculum as a question
of supreme importance; for its motto is always, _abeunt studia in mores_.
Now this aristocratic principle has, so to speak, its everlasting
embodiment in Greek literature, from whence it was taken over into Latin
and transmitted, with much mingling of foreign and even contradictory
ideas, to the modern world. From Homer to the last runnings of the
Hellenic spirit you will find it taught by every kind of precept and
enforced by every kind of example; nor was Shakespeare writing at hazard,
but under the instinctive guidance of genius, when he put his aristocratic
creed into the mouth of the hero who to the end remained for the Greeks
the personification of their peculiar wisdom. In no other poetry of the
world is the law of distinction, as springing from a man's perception of
his place in the great hierarchy of privilege and obligation, from the
lowest human being up to the Olympian gods, so copiously and magnificently
set forth as in Pindar's _Odes of Victory_. And Æschylus was the first
dramatist to see with clear vision the primacy of the intellect in the law
of orderly development, seemingly at variance with the divine immutable
will of Fate, yet finally in mysterious accord with it. When the
philosophers of the later period came to the creation of systematic
ethics, they had only the task of formulating what was already latent in
the poets and historians of their land; and it was the recollection of the
fulness of such instruction in the _Nicomachean Ethics_ and the Platonic
Dialogues, with their echo in the _Officia_ of Cicero, as if in them were
stored up all the treasures of antiquity, that raised our Sir Thomas into
wondering admiration:
Lorde god, what incomparable swetnesse of wordes and mater shall
he finde in the saide warkes of Plato and Cicero; wherin is ioyned
grauitie with dilectation, excellent wysedome with diuine
eloquence, absolute vertue with pleasure incredible, and euery
place is so infarced [crowded] with profitable counsaile, ioyned
with honestie, that those thre bokes be almoste sufficient to make
a perfecte and excellent gouernour.
There is no need to dwell on this aspect of the classics. He who cares to
follow their full working in this direction, as did our English humanist,
may find it exhibited in Plato's political and ethical scheme of
self-development, or in Aristotle's ideal of the Golden Mean which
combines magnanimity with moderation, and elevation with self-knowledge.
If a single word were used to describe the character and state of life
upheld by Plato and Aristotle, as spokesmen of their people, it would be
_eleutheria_, _liberty_: the freedom to cultivate the higher part of a
man's nature--his intellectual prerogative, his desire of truth, his
refinements of taste--and to hold the baser part of himself in subjection;
the freedom, also, for its own perfection, and indeed for its very
existence, to impose an outer conformity to, or at least respect for, the
laws of this inner government on others who are of themselves ungoverned.
Such liberty is the ground of true distinction; it implies the opposite of
an equalitarianism which reserves its honors and rewards for those who
attain a bastard kind of distinction by the cunning of leadership, without
departing from common standards--the demagogues who rise by flattery. But
it is, on the other hand, by no means dependent on the artificial
distinctions of privilege, and is peculiarly adapted to an age whose
appointed task must be to create a natural aristocracy as a _via media_
between an equalitarian democracy and a prescriptive oligarchy or
plutocracy. It is a notable fact that, as the real hostility to the
classics in the present day arises from an instinctive suspicion of them
as standing in the way of a downward-levelling mediocrity, so, at other
times, they have fallen under displeasure for their veto on a contrary
excess. Thus, in his savage attack on the Commonwealth, to which he gave
the significant title _Behemoth_, Hobbes lists the reading of classical
history among the chief causes of the rebellion. "There were," he says,
"an exceeding great number of men of the better sort, that had been so
educated as that in their youth, having read the books written by famous
men of the ancient Grecian and Roman commonwealths concerning their polity
and great actions, in which books the popular government was extolled by
that glorious name of liberty, and monarchy disgraced by the name of
tyranny, they became thereby in love with their forms of government; and
out of these men were chosen the greatest part of the House of Commons; or
if they were not the greatest part, yet by advantage of their eloquence
were always able to sway the rest." To this charge Hobbes returns again
and again, even declaring that "the universities have been to this nation
as the Wooden Horse was to the Trojans." And the uncompromising monarchist
of the _Leviathan_, himself a classicist of no mean attainments, as may be
known by his translation of Thucydides, was not deceived in his
accusation. The tyrannicides of Athens and Rome, the Aristogeitons and
Brutuses and others, were the heroes by whose example the leaders of the
French Revolution (rightly, so far as they did not fall into the opposite,
equalitarian extreme) were continually justifying their acts:
There Brutus starts and stares by midnight taper,
Who all the day enacts--a woollen-draper.
And again, in the years of the Risorgimento, more than one of the
champions of Italian liberty went to death with those great names on their
lips.
So runs the law of order and right subordination. But if the classics
offer the best service to education by inculcating an aristocracy of
intellectual distinction, they are equally effective in enforcing the
similar lesson of time. It is a true saying of our ancient humanist that
"the longer it continueth in a name or lineage, the more is nobility
extolled and marvelled at." It is true because in this way our imagination
is working with the great conservative law of growth. Whatever may be in
theory our democratic distaste for the insignia of birth, we cannot get
away from the fact that there is a certain honor of inheritance, and that
we instinctively pay homage to one who represents a noble name. There is
nothing really illogical in this: for, as an English statesman has put it,
"the past is one of the elements of our power." He is the wise democrat
who, with no opposition to such a decree of Nature, endeavors to control
its operation by expecting noble service where the memory of nobility
abides. When last year Oxford bestowed its highest honor on an American,
distinguished not only for his own public acts but for the great tradition
embodied in his name, the Orator of the University did not omit this
legitimate appeal to the imagination, singularly appropriate in its
academic Latin:
... Statim succurrit animo antiqua illa Romae condicio, cum non
tam propter singulos cives quam propter singulas gentes nomen
Romanum floreret. Cum enim civis alicujus et avum et proavum
principes civitatis esse creatos, cum patrem legationis munus apud
aulam Britannicam summa cum laude esse exsecutum cognovimus; cum
denique ipsum per totum bellum stipendia equo meritum, summa
pericula "Pulcra pro Libertate" ausum,... Romanae alicujus
gentis--Brutorum vel Deciorum--annales evolvere videmur, qui
testimonium adhibent "fortes creari fortibus," et majorum exemplis
et imaginibus nepotes ad virtutem accendi.
Is there any man so dull of soul as not to be stirred by that enumeration
of civic services zealously inherited; or is there any one so envious of
the past as not to believe that such memories should be honored in the
present as an incentive to noble emulation?
Well, we cannot all of us count Presidents and Ambassadors among our
ancestors, but we can, if we will, in the genealogy of the inner life
enroll ourselves among the adopted sons of a family in comparison with
which the Bruti and Decii of old and the Adamses of to-day are veritable
_new men_. We can see what defence against the meaner depredations of the
world may be drawn from the pride of birth, when, as it sometimes happens,
the obligation of a great past is kept as a contract with the present;
shall we forget to measure the enlargement and elevation of mind which
ought to come to a man who has made himself the heir of the ancient Lords
of Wisdom? "To one small people," as Sir Henry Maine has said, in words
often quoted, "it was given to create the principle of Progress. That
people was the Greek. Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in
this world which is not Greek in its origin." That is a hard saying, but
scarcely exaggerated. Examine the records of our art and our science, our
philosophy and the enduring element of our faith, our statecraft and our
notion of liberty, and you will find that they all go back for their
inspiration to that one small people, and strike their roots into the soil
of Greece. What we have added, it is well to know; but he is the
aristocrat of the mind who can display a diploma from the schools of the
Academy and the Lyceum, and from the Theatre of Dionysus. What tradition
of ancestral achievement in the Senate or on the field of battle shall
broaden a man's outlook and elevate his will equally with the
consciousness that his way of thinking and feeling has come down to him by
so long and honorable a descent, or shall so confirm him in his better
judgment against the ephemeral and vulgarizing solicitations of the hour?
Other men are creatures of the visible moment; he is a citizen of the past
and of the future. And such a charter of citizenship it is the first duty
of the college to provide.
I have limited myself in these pages to a discussion of what may be called
the public side of education, considering the classics in their power to
mould character and foster sound leadership in a society much given to
drifting. Of the inexhaustible joy and consolation they afford to the
individual, only he can have full knowledge who has made the writers of
Greece and Rome his friends and counsellors through many vicissitudes of
life. It is related of Sainte-Beuve, who, according to Renan, read
everything and remembered everything, that one could observe a peculiar
serenity on his face whenever he came down from his study after reading a
book of Homer. The cost of learning the language of Homer is not small;
but so are all fair things difficult, as the Greek proverb runs, and the
reward in this case is precious beyond estimation.
Nor need we forget another proverb from Greece, with its spirit of
"accommodation"--that the half is sometimes greater than the whole. Even a
moderate acquaintance with the language, helped out by good translations
(especially in such form as the Loeb Classics are now offering, with the
original and the English on opposite pages), will go a surprising length
towards keeping a man, amid the exactions of a professional or otherwise
busy life, in possession of the heritage to which our age has grown so
perilously indifferent.