[Footnote 13: By permission of the author, John Finley.]
In a book on "Roman Farm Management" containing translations of Cato and
Varro by a "Virginia Farmer" (who happens also to be an American railroad
president), there is quoted in the original Latin a proverb whose practice
not only gave basis for the proud phrase "_Romanus sum_" but also helped to
make the Romans "a people of enduring achievement." It is "_Romanus sedendo
vincit_." For, as this new-world farmer adds by way of translation and
emphasis, "The Romans achieved their results by _thoroughness_ and
_patience_." "It was thus," he continues, "they defeated Hannibal, and it
was thus that they built their farmhouses and fences, cultivated their
fields, their vineyards and their olive yards, and bred and fed their
livestock. They seemed to have realized that there are no shortcuts in the
processes of nature and that the law of compensations is invariable." "The
foundation of their agriculture," he asserts, "was the _fallow_"; and
concludes, commenting upon this, that while "one can find instruction in
their practice even to-day, one can benefit even more from their
agricultural philosophy, for the characteristic of the American farmer is
that he is in too much of a hurry."
This is only by way of preface to saying that the need in our educational
philosophy, or, at any rate, in our educational practice, as in
agriculture, is the need of the _fallow_.
It will be known to philologists, even to those who have no agricultural
knowledge, that the "fallow field" is not an idle field, though that is the
popular notion. "Fallow" as a noun meant originally a "harrow," and as a
verb, "to plough," "to harrow." "A fallow field is a field ploughed and
tilled," but left unsown for a time as to the main crop of its
productivity; or, in better modern practice, I believe, sown to a crop
valuable not for what it will bring in the market (for it may be utterly
unsalable), but for what it will give to the soil in enriching it for its
higher and longer productivity.
I employ this agricultural metaphor not in ignorance; for I have, out on
these very prairies, read between corn-husking and the spring ploughing
Virgil's _Georgics_ and _Bucolics_, for which Varro's treatises furnished
the foundations. And I have also, on these same prairies, carried Horace's
_Odes_, in the spring, to the field with me, strapping the book to the
plough to read while the horses rested at the furrow's end.
Nor do I employ this metaphor demeaningly. Nothing has so glorified for me
my youthful days on these prairies as the associations which the classics,
including the Bible, gave to them on the farm; and also in the shop, I may
add, for it was in the shop, as well as on the farm, that I had their
companionship. When learning the printer's trade, while a college student,
I set up in small pica my translation of the daily allotment of the
_Prometheus Bound_ of Aeschylus, and that dark and dingy old shop became
the world of the Titan who "manward sent Art's mighty means and perfect
rudiment," the place where the divine in man "defied the invincible gesture
of necessity." And nothing can so glorify the classics as to bring them
into the field and into the shop and let them become woven into the tasks
that might else seem monotonous or menial.
In a recent editorial in the _New York Times_ it was said that the men and
the times of Aristophanes were much more modern than the administration of
Rutherford B. Hayes. But this was simply because Aristophanes immortally
portrayed the undying things in human nature, whereas the issues associated
with this particular administration were evanescent. The immortal is, of
course, always modern, and the classic is the immortal, the timeless
distillation of human experience.
But I wander from my thesis which is that the classics are needed as the
_fallow_ to give lasting and increasing fertility to the natural mind out
upon democracy's great levels, into which so much has been washed down and
laid down from the Olympic mountains and eternal hills of the classical
world.
In the war days we naturally ignored the _fallow_. We cultivated with
Hooverian haste. It was necessary to put our soil in peril of exhaustion
even as we put our men in peril of death. Forty million added acres were
commandeered, six billions of bushels of the leading cereals were added to
the annual product of earlier seasons. The land could be let to think only
of immediate defense. Crops only could be grown which would help promptly
to win the war. Vetch and clover and all else that permanently enriched
must be given up for war gardening or war farming. The motto was not
_Americanus sedendo vincit_ but _Americanus accelerando vincit_.
But on this day of my writing (the day of the signing of the peace) I am
thinking that in agriculture and in education as well, we must again turn
our thoughts to the virtues of thoroughness and patience--the virtues of
the fallow, that is, to ploughing and harrowing and tilling, _not_ for the
immediate crop, but for the enrichment of the soil and of the mind,
according as our thought is of agriculture or education.
Cato, when asked what the first principle of good agriculture was, answered
"To plough well." When asked what the second was, replied "To plough
again." And when asked what the third was, said "To apply fertilizer." And
a later Latin writer speaks of the farmer who does not plough thoroughly as
one who becomes a mere "clodhopper." You will notice that it is not sowing,
nor hoeing after the sowing, but ploughing that is the basic operation.
It is the sowing, however, that is popularly put first in our agricultural
and educational theory. "A sower went forth to sow." A teacher went forth
to teach, that is, to scatter information, facts:--arithmetical,
historical, geographical, linguistic facts. But the emphasis of the
greatest agricultural parable in our literature was after all not on the
sowing but on the soil, on that upon which or into which the seed fell,--or
as it might be better expressed, upon the _fallow_. It was only the fallow
ground, the ground that had been properly cleared of stones, thorns, and
other shallowing or choking encumbrances, that gave point to the parable.
It was the same seed that fell upon the stony, thorny, and fallow ground
alike.
There is a time to sow, to sow the seed for the special crop you want; but
it is after you have ploughed the field. There is a time to specialize, to
give the information which the life is to produce in kind; but it is when
you have thoroughly prepared the mind by its ploughing disciplines.
I have lately seen the type of agriculture practised out in the fields that
were the Scriptural cradle of the race. There the ploughing is but the
scratching of the surface. Indeed, the sowing is on the top of the ground
and the so-called ploughing or scratching in with a crooked stick comes
after. Contrast this with the deep ploughing of the West, and we have one
explanation at least of the greater productivity of the West. And there is
the educational analogue here as well. In those homelands of the race, the
seed of the mind is sown on the surface and is scratched in by oral and
choral repetitions. The mind that receives it is not ploughed, is not
trained to think. It merely receives and with shallow root, if it be not
scorched, gives back its meager crop.
There must be ploughing before the sowing, and deep ploughing if things
with root are to find abundant life and fruit. And the classics to my
thought furnish the best ploughs for the mind,--at any rate for minds that
have depth of soil. For shallow minds, "where there is not much depth of
earth," where, because there cannot be much root, that which springs up
withers away, it were perhaps not worth while to risk this precious
implement. And then, too, there are geniuses whose fertility needs not the
same stirring disciplines. There are also other ploughs, but as a ploughman
I have found none better for English use than the plough which has the
classical name, the plough which reaches the sub-soil, which supplements
the furrowing ploughs in bringing to the culture of our youthful minds that
which lies deep in the experience of the race.
There are many kinds of fallow as I have already intimated. The more modern
is not the "bare fallow" which lets the land so ploughed and harrowed lie
unsown even for a season, but the fallow, of varied name, where the land is
sown to crops whose purpose is to gather the free nitrogen back into the
ground for its enrichment. So is our fallowing by the classics not only to
prepare the ground, clear it of weeds, aerate it, break up the clods, but
also to enrich it by bringing back into the mind of the youth of to-day
that which has escaped into the air of the ages past through the great
human minds that have lived and loved upon this earth and laid themselves
down into its dust to die.
In New York City, a young man, born out upon the prairies, was lying, as it
was thought, near to death, in a hospital. He turned to the nurse and asked
what month it was. She answered that it was early May. He thought of the
prairies, glorified to him by Horace's _Odes_. He heard the frogs in the
swales amid the virgin prairie flowers as Aristophanes had heard them in
the ponds of Greece. He saw the springing oats in a neighboring field that
should furnish the pipes for the winds of Pan. He saw, as the dying poet
Ibycus, the cranes go honking overhead. And he said, "I can't die now. It's
ploughing time."
* * * * *
It is "ploughing time" for the world again, and ploughing time not only
because we turn from instruments of war to those of peace, symbolized since
the days of Isaiah by the "ploughshares" beaten from swords, but because we
must turn to the cultivation with _thoroughness_ and _patience_ not only of
our acres but of the minds that are alike to have world horizons in this
new season of the earth.
Amos prophesied that in the day of restoration "the ploughman would
overtake the reaper." War's grim reaper is quitting the field to-day. The
ploughman has overtaken him. May he remember the law of the "_fallow_" and
not be in too great a hurry.