A CLASSICAL EDUCATION
Though I made such a hash of classical studies and was apparently so
impermeable to Latin and Greek literature, I am not one of those people
who are prepared to damn the Greek and Latin classics, either with faint
praise or with a strenuous invective. I am not prepared to say with
Cobden that a single copy of _The Times_ is worth the whole of
Thucydides, or to ask, as did the late Mr. Carnegie, what use Homer was
either in regard to wisdom or human progress. I believe that in all the
things of the soul and the mind the stimulus of the Greek spirit is of
the utmost value. The Romans, no doubt, excelled the Greeks on the
practical side of law--though not in the pure jurisprudential spirit.
Again, the Hebrews did incomparable service to mankind in their handling
of such vital matters as the family, the place of women and children in
the State, and the position of the slave. On the moral issues, in fact,
the Jewish prophet is far the safer teacher:
As men divinely taught, and better teaching
The solid rules of Civil Government
In their majestic, unaffected style
Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome.
In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt,
What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so,
What ruins Kingdoms, and lays Cities flat.
In what concerns the intellectual rather than the moral side of life the
Greek is, of course, supreme. It is hardly too much to say that
intellectual progress has only pursued a steady and consistent course
when men's minds have been in touch with the Greek. The sense of beauty
in all the arts, intellectual and figurative, was the prerogative of the
Hellenic communities, or, rather, of Athens, for only in Athens was
perfection in the arts achieved. The Greek was the best, as he was the
first, director and teacher. It is true that the artists of Florence,
Umbria, Lombardy, and Venice equalled the Greeks in some of the arts and
excelled them absolutely in the new art of painting. In Greece,
painting, though it had a beauty of its own, was hardly more than
exquisitely-coloured sculpture in the lowest conceivable relief. In
painting the Italians were guided by a wholly different series of visual
conceptions. Their understanding and use of atmosphere and mass was
something of which the Greeks had formed no conception. Apart, however,
from painting, the Greeks were the first to light and feed the sacred
flame of Beauty.
There is a charming story of the way in which Renan emphasised this
fact. Some thirty-five years ago--I well remember the period--it was the
fashion, just as, in a sense, it is the fashion now, to say that the
Egyptians were the real masters of sculpture, wall-painting, and metal
work, that the Greeks learnt from them, and in the fine arts originated
nothing. At that time it happened that the Keeper of the Egyptian
antiquities at the Louvre was running this theory for all it was worth.
One day he showed Renan and a party of distinguished visitors a special
exhibition illustrating his contention. Notable examples of Egyptian art
were produced, as proving how perfectly and finally the Egyptians
treated the human figure in the round, in bas-relief, in the bronze
statue, in the wooden statue, and even in earthenware. And to all the
treasures displayed was added the chorus of the Professor: "_And so,
you see, the Greeks invented nothing._" Renan assented. "Nothing.
Nothing," he echoed, but added as an afterthought: "_Seulement le
Beau._"
I have sometimes thought that these words, "_Seulement le Beau_,"
might do as the commemorative epitaph of the Greek race. But of course
the Greek was a great deal more than the exponent of the beautiful. I
only tell this story to make it quite clear how deep is my reverence and
admiration for the Greeks, and how strongly I feel that their
philosophers and their poets are lively oracles from which the human
spirit may still draw perennial draughts of inspiration.
But if this is so, it will be asked, "How comes it that, with these
views, you proclaim yourself an opponent to compulsory Greek and
compulsory Latin in schools and universities?" My answer is, it is just
because I am such an intense believer in the quickening power of the
Greek mind and in the immense advantages secured by getting into touch
with the Greek spirit that I desire the abolition of compulsory Greek.
No civilised man should ever be out of touch with it at first hand. But
this means, translated into action, no compulsory Greek grammar, no
compulsory drudgery in acquiring the things which do not really belong
to the Greeks but to the vapid pedants of vanished ages. I passionately
desire that as many people as possible should enjoy Hellenic culture. I
want to clear away the smoky mist of grammatical ineptitude which keeps
men from the great books and great minds of antiquity and prevents the
soul of the Greek and the soul of the Englishman--natural allies, for
some strange reason--from flowing together.
It is appropriate that I should testify. Owing to having been forced to
try to learn the Greek Grammar instead of reading the books written by
the Greeks in a language which I could understand, I very nearly made an
intellectual shipwreck. Indeed, it was only by a series of lucky
accidents that I escaped complete ignorance of the Greek spirit, though
retaining a certain knowledge of the grammar.
It was only after I had miserably squirmed my way through Mods., as a
man may squirm through some hole in a prison wall, that I had the
slightest idea of what was meant by the Greek spirit.
I closed my grammar, with all the miserable and complicated stuff about
_tnpto_ and its aorists, the enclitic and the double-damned
Digamma, to open my Jowett's Plato, my Dakyns' Xenophon, and, later,
Gilbert Murray's Dramatists and Mackail's Anthology. It is true that in
the squirming process I have described I had to read a portion of the
_Anabasis_ and of the _Odyssey_ and _Memorabilia_, as well as
books of Caesar, Livy, Horace, and Virgil.
In the case of these books I acquired nothing but a distaste so deep
that it has only just worn off. Only after an interval of forty years
could I bear to read these kill-joys in translation. No doubt some of
the fault was mine. Possibly I was born with an inability to learn
languages. But if that is so it is a misfortune, not a crime for which
one should be put on the rack!
By the time I realised fully the glory of Greek letters, I was a very
busy man, and bitter indeed was the thought that the well-meaning
persons who maintain our university system had actually been keeping me
all those years from the divine wells of grace and beauty. But for them,
how many more years of enjoyment might I have drawn from the Socratic
_Dialogues_, from the _Apology_, and from the _Republic_! Think
of it! It was not till four years ago that I read Thucydides and had my
soul shaken by the supreme wickedness, the intellectual devilry of
the Melian controversy. How I thrilled at the awful picture of the supreme
tragedy at Syracuse! How I saw! How I perished with the Greek warriors
standing to arms on the shore, and watching in their swaying agony
the Athenian ships sink one by one, without being able to lift a hand,
or cast a long or short spear to help them! Yet the watchers knew that
the awful spectacle on which they gazed meant death, or a slavery worse
than death, for every one of them!
Almost worse to me than the denial of Plato, the dramatists Thucydides
and Homer, was the refusal to allow me to walk or hunt with Xenophon,
and to saunter through his kitchen or his grounds. And all because I
could not show the requisite grammatical ticket. Could anything be more
fascinating than the tale of Xenophon's prim yet most lovable young
wife, or the glorious picture of the boy and girl lovers with which
Xenophon closes his _Symposium_?
My sense of a deprivation unnecessary and yet deliberate was as great in
regard to Latin literature. It was only in 1919, owing to what I had
almost called a fortunate illness, that I took to reading Cicero's
Letters and came under an enchantment greater than that cast even by
Walpole, Madame de Sévigné, or Madame du Deffand.
For forty years I was kept in ignorance of a book which painted the
great world of Rome with a touch more intimate than even that of St.
Simon. Cicero in his Letters makes the most dramatic moment in Roman
history, the end of the Oligarchic Republic, live before one. Even
Macaulay's account of the Revolution of 1688 seems tame when called in
comparison.
I know that by the time some Greek or Latin scholar has got as far as
this he will ask with a smile,
Why is this self-dubbed ignoramus making all this pother about being
deprived of the classics? Surely he cannot have failed to realise that
it is impossible to understand and appreciate the classics properly
without having learnt Latin and Greek? But you cannot learn Latin and
Greek without learning the grammar. He not only on his own showing has
no grievance, but is giving support to those who desire that the
classics should remain the centrepiece of our educational system.
For all such objections I have one, and I think a final, argument. When
people ask me how I propose to enjoy Plato without knowing Greek, I ask
them to tell me, in return, how they manage to enjoy reading one of the
greatest poets in the world, Isaiah, without knowing Hebrew. How have
they found consolation in the Psalms; how have they absorbed the worldly
wisdom of Proverbs and Ecclesiastes; how have they read the lyric
choruses of the Song of Solomon; how have they followed the majestic
drama of the Book of Job? _They read them in translations_. That is
the way in which they have filled their minds with the noble deeds and
thoughts of the Hebrew history and Hebrew literature. That is the
answer, the true answer, and the only answer.
A good, practical, commonsense proof of what I am saying is to be found
in the fact that the ordinary man and also the man of brains who has
gone through the good old fortifying classical curriculum, to quote
Matthew Arnold once more, and who _theoretically_ can read the
great Greek and Latin authors in their own languages, and without
translations, hardly reads them at all. Those who know that it is a
translation or nothing will be found to be far closer and more constant
readers of Plato and Thucydides. Certainly that is my case. To this day
I find myself reading the Greek and Latin authors in translation when
many of my friends, who took Honours Mods, and Honours Greats, would no
more think of opening books which they are supposed to have read than
they would attempt to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. The man with a
classical education will still worry himself over an accidental false
quantity or a wrongly-placed Greek accent, but it is extraordinary how
seldom, unless he is a schoolmaster, you hear of him enjoying the
classics or applying knowledge drawn from the classics to modern
literature or to modern politics.
A further proof of this view, which I admit sounds strange, may be
registered. The only man I have known who habitually read Greek in the
original was Lord Cromer, and he had not had a classical education. He
left a private day-school in London to go straight to Chatham, where he
was prepared for entry into the artillery. And at Chatham they did not
teach Greek. Therefore when, as a gunner subaltern, he went to the
Ionian Islands on the staff of Sir Henry Storks, he was without any
knowledge of Greek. He wanted, however, as he told me, to know modern
Greek, as the language of the islands. Also, like the natural Englishman
he was, to be able to talk with the Albanian hunters with whom he went
shooting in the hills of the mainland. But when he had mastered enough
modern Greek to read the newspaper and so forth, he began to wonder
whether he could not use his knowledge to find out what Homer was like.
He very soon found out that he could read him as one reads Chaucer. From
this point he went on till he made himself--I will not say a Greek
scholar, but something much better--a person able to read Greek and
enjoy it in the original. Throughout the period of my friendship with
him, which lasted for nearly a quarter of a century, he was constantly
reading and translating from Greek authors and talking about them in an
intimate and stimulating way.
Once more, it is because I want people to study and to love classical
literature and to imbibe the Greek spirit that I desire that the
ordinary man should not be forced to grind away at Greek grammar when he
might be getting in touch with great minds and great books. I am not
blind, of course, to the gymnastic defence of the classics, though I do
not share it. All I say is, do not let us make a knowledge of the Greek
and Latin languages a _sine qua non_ in our educational system, on
the ground that such knowledge brings the ordinary man into touch with
the Greek spirit. It does nothing of the kind.
But though Greek and Latin literature had thus been temporarily closed
to me, I still, Heaven be praised, could enjoy the glories of my own
language. When I began to read for the History School, I not only felt
like a man who had recovered from a bad bout of influenza, but I began
to realise that academic study was not necessarily divorced from the
joys of literature, but that, instead, it might lead me to new and
delightful pastures. Even early Constitutional History, though
apparently so arid, opened to me an enchanting field of study. The study
of the Anglo-Saxon period brought special delights. It introduced me to
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and to Bede, both of them books which deserve
far greater fame than they have yet received. Again, I can quite
honestly say that the early part of Stubbs's Excerpts from the Laws,
Charters, and Chronicles proved to be for me almost as pleasant as a
volume of poetry. To my astonishment _Magna Charta_ and the
_Dialogus de Scaccario_ were thoroughly good reading. The answer to
"_Quod est murdrum_" was a thrilling revelation of what the Norman
Conquest was and was not. I understood; and what is more delightful than
that? There were even good courses, I found, in such apparently
univiting a feast as "The Constitutions of Clarendon." I shall not
easily forget my pleasure in discovering that the quotation "_Nollumus
leges Angliaemutari_" on which Noodle relied in his immortal oration,
is to be found in the record of the Barons' great "Palaver."