Especially was Dr. Arnold an orthodox Oxonian in his belief of the
indispensable usefulness of Classical Learning, not only as an important
branch of knowledge, but as the substantial basis of education itself,
the importance of which he thus forcibly illustrates: “The study of
Greek and Latin, considered as mere languages, is of importance mainly
as it enables us to understand and employ well that language in which we
commonly think and speak and write. It does this because Greek and Latin
are specimens of language at once highly perfect and incapable of being
understood without long and minute attention: the study of them,
therefore, naturally involves that of the general principles of grammar;
while their peculiar excellences illustrate the points which render
language clear and forcible and beautiful. But our _application_ of this
general knowledge must naturally be to our own language: to show us what
are its peculiarities, what its beauties, what its defects; to teach us,
by the patterns or the analogies offered by other languages, how the
effect we admire in them may be produced with a somewhat different
instrument. Every lesson in Greek or Latin may and ought to be made a
lesson in English; the translation of every sentence in Demosthenes or
Tacitus is properly an extemporaneous English composition; a problem,
how to express with equal brevity, clearness, and force, in our own
language, the thought which the original author has so admirably
expressed in his.”
In other words, Dr. Arnold was the first English commentator who gave
life to the study of the Classics, by bringing the facts and manners
which they disclose to the test of real life.
Mr. Buckle, siding with the anti-classicists, remarks that, “With the
single exception of Porson, not one of the great English scholars has
shown an appreciation of the beauties of his native language; and many
of them, such as Parr (in all his works) and Bentley (in his mad edition
of Milton) have done every thing in their power to corrupt it. And there
can be little doubt that the principal reason why well-educated women
write and converse in a purer style than well-educated men, is because
they have not formed their taste according to those ancient classical
standards, which, admirable as they are in themselves, should never be
introduced into a state of society unfitted for them. To this may be
added, that Cobbett, the most racy and idiomatic of all our writers, and
Erskine, by far the greatest of our forensic orators, knew little or
nothing of any ancient language; and the same observation applies to
Shakspeare.”[72]
Our author has been just to Porson, to whom chiefly English scholarship
owes its accuracy and its certainty; and this as a branch of
education—as a substratum on which to rest other branches of knowledge
often infinitely more useful in themselves—really takes as high a rank
as any of those studies which can contribute to form the character of a
well-educated English gentleman.
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Footnote 72:
_History of Civilisation in England._
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