II

So much preliminary to the business before us, to meet changed

conditions as practical men, with the reinforcement born of hope or with

the strong resolution of despair.

For what does this Association stand? What are these classical interests

that you represent? Take a familiar simile. By a very simple trick, you

remember, did Empedocles give Menippus in the moon-halt--the first stage

of his memorable trip--such long and clear vision that he saw the tribes

of men like a nest of ants, a seething mass going to and fro at their

different tasks. Of the function of the classical members in this

myrmecic community there can be no question. Neither warriors, nor

slaves, nor neuters, you live in a well-protected social environment,

heretofore free from enemies, and have been well taken care of. I hate

to speak of you as larvæ, but as such you perform a duty of the greatest

import in this trophidium stage of your existence. Let me explain. From

earliest days much attention has been paid by naturalists to the

incredible affection "--incredible [Greek: storgê]," Swammerdam calls

it--which ants display in feeding, licking, and attending the larvæ.

Disturb a nest, and the chief care is to take them to a place of safety.

This attention is what our symphilic community--to use a biological

term--bestows on you. So intensely altruistic, apparently, is this

behaviour, that for the very word "[Greek: storgê]," which expresses the

tenderest of all feelings, there is a difficulty in finding an

equivalent; indeed, Gilbert White used it almost as an English word. The

truth is really very different.

It has been shown that the nursing function--or instinct--is really

trophallactic. In the case of the ant the nurse places the larva on its

back, and the broad ventral surface serves as a trough for the food,

often predigested. The skill and devotion with which this is done are

among the wonders in the life of the insect to which moralists have

never tired of urging a visit. But listen to the sequel! The larva is

provided with a pair of rich honey-bags in the shape of salivary glands,

big exudatoria from which is discharged an ambrosia greedily lapped up

by the nurse, who with this considers herself well paid for her care. In

the same manner, when the assiduous V.A.D. wasp distributes food to the

larvæ, the heads of which eagerly protrude from their cells, she must be

paid by a draught of nectar from their exudatoria, while if it is not

forthcoming the wasp seizes the head of the larva in her mandibles and

jams it back into its cell and compels it to pay up. The lazy males will

play the same game and even steal the much-sought liquid without any

compensatory gift of nourishment.[7]

[7] Professor Wheeler in _Proceedings of Amer. Phil. Soc._, vol.

LVII, no. 4, 1918.

What does the community at large, so careful of your comforts, expect

from you? Surely the honey-dew and the milk of paradise secreted from

your classical exudatoria, which we lap up greedily in recensions,

monographs, commentaries, histories, translations, and brochures. Among

academic larvæ you have for centuries absorbed the almost undivided

interest of the nest, and not without reason, for the very life of the

workers depends on the hormones you secrete. Though small in number,

your group has an enormous kinetic value, like our endocrine organs. For

man's body, too, is a humming hive of working cells, each with its

specific function, all under central control of the brain and heart, and

all dependent on materials called hormones (secreted by small, even

insignificant-looking structures) which lubricate the wheels of life.

For example, remove the thyroid gland just below the Adam's apple, and

you deprive man of the lubricants which enable his thought-engines to

work--it is as if you cut off the oil-supply of a motor--and gradually

the stored acquisitions of his mind cease to be available, and within a

year he sinks into dementia. The normal processes of the skin cease,

the hair falls, the features bloat, and the paragon of animals is

transformed into a shapeless caricature of humanity. These essential

lubricators, of which a number are now known, are called hormones--you

will recognize from its derivation how appropriate is the term.

Now, the men of your guild secrete materials which do for society at

large what the thyroid gland does for the individual. The Humanities are

the hormones. Our friend Mr. P. S. Allen read before this Association a

most suggestive paper on the historical evolution of the word

"Humanism." I like to think of the pleasant-flavoured word as embracing

all the knowledge of the ancient classical world--what man knew of

nature as well as what he knew of himself. Let us see what this

university means by the _Literæ Humaniores_. The "Greats" papers for the

past decade make interesting study. With singular uniformity there is

diversity enough to bear high tribute to the ingenuity of the examiners.

But, comparing the subjects in 1918 with those in the first printed

papers of the school in 1831, one is surprised to find them the

same--practically no change in the eighty-seven years! Compare them,

again, with the subjects given in John Napleton's "Considerations" in

1773--no change! and with the help of Rashdall we may trace the story of

the studies in arts, only to find that as far back as 1267, with

different names sometimes, they have been through all the centuries

essentially the same--Greek and Latin authors, logic, rhetoric, grammar,

and the philosophies, natural, moral, and metaphysical--practically the

seven liberal arts for which, as you may see by the names over the

doors, Bodley's building provided accommodation. Why this invariableness

in an ever-turning world? One of the marvels, so commonplace that it has

ceased to be marvellous, is the deep rooting of our civilization in the

soil of Greece and Rome--much of our dogmatic religion, practically all

the philosophies, the models of our literature, the ideals of our

democratic freedom, the fine and the technical arts, the fundamentals of

science, and the basis of our law. The Humanities bring the student into

contact with the master minds who gave us these things--with the dead

who never die, with those immortal lives "not of now nor of yesterday,

but which always were."

As true to-day as in the fifth century B.C. the name of Hellas stands no

longer for the name of a race, but as the name of knowledge; or, as more

tersely put by Maine, "Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves

[intellectually, he means] in this world that is not Greek in origin."

Man's anabasis from the old priest-ridden civilizations of the East

began when "the light of reason lighted up all things," with which

saying Anaxagoras expressed our modern outlook on life.

The Humanities have been a subject of criticism in two directions. Their

overwhelming prominence, it is claimed, prevents the development of

learning in other and more useful directions; and the method of teaching

is said to be antiquated and out of touch with the present needs. They

control the academic life of Oxford. An analysis of the Register for

1919 shows that of the 257 men comprising the Heads and Fellows of the

twenty-three colleges (including St. Edmund's Hall), only fifty-one are

scientific, including the mathematicians.

It is not very polite, perhaps, to suggest that as transmitters and

interpreters they should not bulk quite so large in a modern university.

'Twas all very well

"... in days when wits were fresh and clear

And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames--"

in those happy days when it was felt that all knowledge had been

garnered by those divine men of old time, that there was nothing left

but to enjoy the good things harvested by such universal providers as

Isidore, Rabanus Maurus, and Vincent of Beauvais, and those stronger

dishes served by such artists as Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas

Aquinas--delicious blends of such skill that only the palate of an

Apicius could separate Greek, Patristic, and Arabian savours.

It is not the dominance, but the unequal dominance that is a cause of

just complaint. As to methods of teaching--by their fruits ye shall know

them. The product of "Greats" needs no description in this place. Many

deny the art to find the mind's construction in the face, but surely not

the possibility of diagnosing at a glance a "first in Greats"! Only in

him is seen that altogether superior expression, that self-consciousness

of having reached life's goal, of having, in that pickled sentence of

Dean Gaisford's Christmas sermon, done something "that not only elevates

above the common herd, but leads not unfrequently to positions of

considerable emolument." "Many are the wand-bearers, few are the

mystics," and a system should not be judged by the exceptions. As a

discipline of the mind for the few, the system should not be touched,

and we should be ready to sacrifice a holocaust of undergraduates every

year to produce in each generation a scholar of the type of, say, Ingram

Bywater. 'Tis Nature's method--does it not cost some thousands of eggs

and fry to produce one salmon?

But the average man, not of scholar timber, may bring one railing

accusation against his school and college. Apart from mental discipline,

the value of the ancient languages is to give a key to their

literatures. Yet we make boys and young men spend ten or more years on

the study of Greek and Latin, at the end of which time the beauties of

the languages are still hidden because of the pernicious method in which

they are taught. It passes my understanding how the more excellent way

of Montaigne, of Milton, and of Locke should have been neglected until

recently. Make the language an instrument to play with and to play with

thoroughly, and recognize that except for the few in "Mods." and

"Greats" it is superfluous to know how the instrument is constructed, or

to dissect the neuro-muscular mechanism by which it is played. It is

satisfactory to read that the Greek Curriculum Committee thinks "it is

possible in a comparatively short time to acquire a really valuable

knowledge of Greek, and to learn to read with accuracy and fair fluency

some of the most important works in Greek literature." I am sure of it,

if the teacher will go to school to Montaigne and feed fat against that

old scoundrel Protagoras a well-earned grudge for inventing

grammar--_pace_ Mr. Livingstone, every chapter in whose two books appeal

to me, except those on grammar, against which I have a medullary

prejudice. I speak, of course, as a fool among the wise, and I am not

pleading for the "Greats" men, but for the average man, whom to infect

with the spirit of the Humanities is the greatest single gift in

education. To you of the elect this is pure _camouflage_--the amateur

talking to the experts; but there is another side upon which I feel

something may be said by one whose best friends have been the old

Humanists, and whose breviary is Plutarch, or rather Plutarch gallicized

by Montaigne. Paraphrasing Mark Twain's comment upon Christian Science,

the so-called Humanists have not enough Science, and Science sadly lacks

the Humanities. This unhappy divorce, which should never have taken

place, has been officially recognized in the two reports edited by Sir

Frederic Kenyon,[8] which have stirred the pool, and cannot but be

helpful. To have got constructive, anabolic action from representatives

of interests so diverse is most encouraging. While all agree that

neither in the public schools nor in the older universities are the

conditions at present in keeping with the urgent scientific needs of the

nation, the specific is not to be sought in endowments alone, but in the

leaven which may work a much-needed change in both branches of

knowledge.

[8] _Education, Scientific and Humane_ (1917), and _Education,

Secondary and University_ (1919).