The Rational Study of the Classics

DEAN SWIFT, in his description of the battle between the ancient and the modern books in the king’s library, has very wisely refrained from telling the outcome of the encounter. No violent polemic is in progress to-day as in the time of Swift, but the conflict itself between ancients and moderns has not got much beyond the point where he left it at the end of the Battle of the Books ; it is not yet fought to a finish. The advantage, indeed, would seem of late to be rather on the side of the moderns. By its unconscious drift not less than by its conscious choice of direction, the world at present appears to be moving away from the classics. Even from England, that ancient stronghold of the humanities, we hear complaints that Latin and Greek are losing ground. The modern mind, as the number of subjects that solicit its attention increases, tends, by an instinct of self-preservation, to reject everything that has even the appearance of being non-essential.

If, then, as may be inferred from the foregoing, the teacher of the classics is at present put more or less upon the defensive, the question arises how far the position he thus occupies is an inevitable one, and how far it springs from a failure on his part to conform his methods to existing needs. During the past twenty years, the methods of classical teaching in this country have undergone a modification corresponding to the rapid evolution that has taken place within that time in our whole college and university system. Of the curious period of transition through which the higher education of this country is now passing it would be quite unsafe as yet to predict the outcome. There is one phenomenon, however, connected with the new development, that cannot escape the most casual observer ; the rise, namely, in all of our great centres of learning, of graduate schools organized with a view to the training of specialists on the German plan, and superimposed on undergraduate systems belonging to an entirely different tradition. The establishment of the first of these graduate schools, that of the Johns Hopkins University, and the impulse there given to work of the type leading to the German doctor’s degree, may be regarded as an event of capital importance in the history of American education. President Gilman contemplated with something akin to enthusiasm the introduction of the German scientific spirit, of wissenschaftliche Methode, the instinct for research and original work, into the intellectual life of the American student. The results have more than justified his expectations. In all that relates to accurate grasp of the subject in hand, to power of strenuous application and mastery of detail, the standard of American scholarship has risen immensely during the last few years, and will continue to rise. Our universities are turning out a race of patient and laborious investigators, who, for scholarship of the accumulative type, may claim to have rivaled the Germans on their own ground, as Horace said the Romans had come to rival the Greeks:

There are, however, even among those who recognize the benefits of the German scientific spirit, some who feel at the same time that it is not without certain dangers and drawbacks, especially when exhibited in the field of ancient or modern literature. A reaction is beginning to manifest itself of late, in some quarters, against a too crude application of German methods to American educational needs. There are persons at present who do not believe that a man is fitted to fill a chair of French literature in an American college simply because he has made a critical study of the text of a dozen mediaeval beast fables and written a thesis on the Picard dialect, and who deny that a man is necessarily qualified to interpret the humanities to American undergraduates because he has composed a dissertation on the use of the present participle in Ammianus Marcellinus. It is held by others, who put the matter on broader grounds, that German science, in some departments at least, is beginning to show signs of a decadence similar to the decadence that overtook Greek science in the schools of Alexandria. Matthew Arnold declares the great Anglo-Saxon failing during the present century to have been an excessive faith in machinery and material appliances. May we not with equal truth say that the great German failing during the same period has been an excessive faith in intellectual machinery and intellectual appliances ? What else but intellectual machinery is that immense mass of partial results which has grown out of the tendency of modern science to an ever minuter subdivision and analysis ? The heaping up of volumes of special research and of investigations of infinitesimal detail has kept pace in Germany with the multiplication of mechanical contrivances in the Anglo-Saxon world. One sometimes asks one’s self, in moments of despondency, whether the main achievement of the nineteenth century will not have been to accumulate a mass of machinery that will break the twentieth century’s back. The Harvard College library already contains, for the special study of Dante alone, over eighteen hundred volumes; about three fourths of which, it may be remarked in passing, are nearly or quite worthless, and only tend to the confusion of good counsel. Merely to master the special apparatus for the study of Dante and his times, the student, if he conforms to the standard set for the modern specialist, will run the risk of losing his intellectual symmetry and sense of proportion, precisely the qualities of which he will stand most in need for the higher interpretation of Dante.

Nowhere, perhaps, is this disposition to forget the end of knowledge in the pursuit of its means and appliances more apparent at present than in the study of the classics. There is no intention, in saying this, to underrate the immense services that nineteenth-century scholars, especially those of Germany, have rendered the cause of classical learning. In their philological research and minute criticism of texts they are only following a method which, though first formulated and systematically applied by Bentley, goes back in its main features to the great scholars of the Renaissance. Is there not, however, a fallacy in assuming that material so strictly limited in amount as that remaining to us from classical antiquity is forever to be primarily the subject of scientific investigation ? The feudal institutions which saved France from anarchy during the Middle Ages had come, in the eighteenth century, to be the worst of anachronisms; and in like manner, the type of scholarship which, at the beginning of the Renaissance, was needed to rescue and restore the texts of the classical writers will, if persisted in after that work has been thoroughly done, come to be a no less flagrant anachronism. The method which in the sixteenth century produced a Stephanus or a Casaubon will only give us to-day the spectacle of the “ German doctor desperate with the task of saying something where everything has been said, and eager to apply his new theory of fog as an illuminating medium.” As the field of ancient literature is more and more completely covered, the vision of the special investigator must become more and more microscopic. The present generation of classical philologists, indeed, reminds one of a certain sect of Japanese Buddhists which believes that salvation is to be attained by arriving at a knowledge of the infinitely small. Positions, it is said, have recently been given in American colleges to men who have shown their assimilation of the classical spirit by writing theses on the ancient horse-bridle and on the Roman door-knob.

Doubtless the time has not yet come for what may he called the age of research in the ancient languages to be finally brought to a close. Of Greek literature especially we may say, in the words of La Fontaine, “ That is a field which cannot be so harvested that there will not be something left for the latest comer to glean.” But while there may still be subjects of research in the classics that will reward the advanced student, it is doubtful whether there are many such whose study the beginner may profitably undertake as a part of his preparation in his specialty. It may be questioned whether, in doing the work necessary under existing conditions to obtain the doctor’s degree in the classics, a man has chosen the best means of getting at the spirit or even the letter of ancient literature, or of qualifying himself to become an exponent of that literature to others. It is claimed by the advocates of research that the training the student gets in his investigation, even though he fail to arrive at any important result, is in itself valuable and formative to a high degree. He is at least initiated into that wissenschaftliche Methode on which, as we have seen, President Gilman lays such particular stress. We must recognize a large measure of truth in the claims thus put forward by the advocates of research. It is by his power to gather himself together, to work within limits, as Goethe has told us in a well-known phrase, that the master is first revealed. In so far, then, as the German scientific method forces us to gather ourselves together and to work within limits, thereby increasing our power of concentration, our ability to lay firm hold upon the specific fact, we cannot esteem it too highly. There can be no more salutary discipline for a person who is afflicted with what may be termed a loose literary habit of mind than to be put through a course of exact research. The lack of the power to work within limits, to lay firm hold upon the specific fact, is a fault of the gravest character, even when it appears in a mind like that of Emerson.

The question arises, however, whether an unduly high price has not been paid for accuracy and scientific method when these qualities have been obtained at the sacrifice of breadth. Would it not be possible to devise a series of examinations, somewhat similar in character, perhaps, to those now held for honors at Oxford and Cambridge, examinations which would touch upon ancient life and literature at the largest possible number of points, and which might serve to reveal, as the writing of a doctor’s thesis does not, the range as well as the exactness of a student’s knowledge? Certainly, some test is needed which shall go to show the general culture of a candidate as well as his special proficiency, his familiarity with ideas as well as with words, and his mastery of the spirit as well as of the mechanism of the ancient languages.

It is precisely in the failure to distinguish between the spirit and the mechanism of language, in the unwillingness to recognize literature as having claims apart from philology, that the danger of the present tendency chiefly consists. The opinion seems to be gaining ground that the study of literature by itself is unprofitable, hard to dissociate from dilettanteism, and not likely to lead to much except a lavish outlay of elegant epithets of admiration. A professor of Greek in one of the Eastern colleges is reported to have said that the literary teaching of the classics would reduce it-self in practice to ringing the changes on the adjective “beautiful”! It is rigorous scientific method that needs to be painfully acquired. If a man has a certain right native instinct, his appreciation of the literature will take care of itself ; and if this native instinct is lacking, it is something that no pressure from without will avail to produce. It is, then, wissenschaftliche Methode with its talismanic virtues that our every effort should be directed to impart, whereas the taste for literature is to be reckoned in with Dogberry’s list of the things that come by nature. It is in virtue of some such sentiment as this that the study of philology seems at present to be driving the study of literature more and more from our Eastern universities. Do not the holders of this view, we may ask, emphasize unduly the influence their method will have upon individuals, and at the same time fail to consider the effect it may have in the formation of a tendency ? In the long run, the gradual working of any given ideal upon the large body of average men, who simply take on the color of their environment, will produce a well-nigh irresistible movement in the direction of that ideal. If the minutiae rather than the larger aspects of the classics are insisted upon, the taste for small things will spread like a contagion among the rank and file of classical scholars, and we shall soon be threatened with an epidemic of pedantry. A particular type of scholar is as much in need of a congenial atmosphere in which to flourish as a plant is in need of a congenial soil and climate in which to flower and bring forth fruit. We cannot readily imagine a Professor Jowett appearing under existing conditions at the University of Berlin. Besides, the danger is to be taken into account that if present methods are pushed much further, the young men with the right native instinct for literature are likely to be driven out of the classics entirely. Young men of this type may not all care to be educated as though they were to be “ editor’s, and not lovers of polite literature ; ” they may not feel the fascination of spending months in a classical seminary, learning how to torment the text and the meaning of a few odes of Horace,

There is, to be sure, a very real danger in some subjects, especially in English literature, that the instruction may take too bellelettristic a turn. The term “ culture course ” has come to mean, among the undergraduates of one of our Eastern colleges, a course in which the students are not required to do any work. It is one of the main advantages of Latin and Greek over modern languages that the mere mastering of an ancient author’s meaning will give to a course enough bone and sinew of solid intellectual effort to justify the teacher in adding thereto the flesh and blood of a large literary interpretation. In a civilization so hard and positive in temper as our own, it is not the instinct for philology, but rather the instinct for literature and for the things of the imagination, which is likely to remain latent if left to itself. A certain dry, lexicographical habit of mind is said by Europeans to be the distinctive mark of American scholarship. Instead of fostering this habit of mind in the classics by an undue insistence on philology, it should rather be our endeavor to counteract it by giving abundant stimulus and encouragement to their study as literature. In the classics more than in other subjects, the fact should never be forgotten that the aim proposed is the assimilation, and not the accumulation, of knowledge. In the classics, if anywhere, there is need to insist on a scholarship that will lay hold on some faculty higher than the memory. In the classics, if nowhere else, mere erudition should be held of comparatively little account except in so far as it has been converted into culture ; and culture itself should not be regarded as complete until it has so penetrated its possessor as to become a part of his character. Montaigne has said somewhere in his essays that he loved to forge his mind rather than to furnish it. The metaphor of Montaigne’s phrase is somewhat mixed, but the idea it embodies is one that men born into a late age of scholarship cannot ponder too carefully. As the body of learning transmitted from the past increases in volume, it becomes constantly more difficult for one to maintain that exact relation between the receipt and the assimilation of knowledge which has been declared by the greatest of the Hindoo sages to be the root of all wisdom. “ Without knowledge,” says Buddha, “there is no reflection, without reflection there is no knowledge ; he who has both knowledge and reflection is close upon Nirvâna.” The risk we run nowadays is that of having our minds buried beneath a dead-weight of information which we have no inner energy, no power of reflection, to appropriate to our own uses and convert into vital nutriment. We need to be on our guard against allowing the mere collector of information to gain an undue advantage over the man who would maintain some balance between his knowledge and reflection. We are, for instance, putting a premium on pedantry, if we set up as the sole test of proficiency in the classics the degree of familiarity shown with that immense machinery of minute learning that has grown up about them. This is to exalt that mere passive intellectual feeding which is the bane of modern scholarship. It is to encourage the man who is willing to abandon all attempt at native and spontaneous thought, and become a mere register and repertory of other men’s ideas in some small department of knowledge. One of the college comic papers recently published a cathode ray photograph of a very modern type of university professor, with the result, alas, of revealing inside the professor’s head only a set of wheels. The man who is willing to reduce his mind to a purely mechanical function may often thereby gain a mastery of facts that will enable him to intimidate the man who would make a larger use of his knowledge ; for there are among scholars, as Holmes says there are in society, “ fellows ” who have a number of “ illconditioned facts which they lead after them into decent company, ready to let them slip, like so many bulldogs, at every ingenious suggestion or convenient generalization or pleasant fancy.” There has always existed between the man of the literal fact and the man of the general law, between the man of the cold understanding and the man of thought and imagination, an instinctive aversion. We can trace the feud that has divided the two classes of minds throughout history. They were arrayed against each other in fierce debate for centuries during the Middle Ages, under the name of Realists and Nominalists. The author of one of the oldest of the Hindoo sacred books pronounces an anathema on two classes of people, the grammarian and the man who is over-fond of a good dinner, and debars them both from the hope of final salvation. A similar animus is betrayed in an ancient Sanskrit epigram which Mr. Paul E. More, of Bryn Mawr College, renders as follows : —

The remark has frequently been made that quarrels would not last long if the fault were on one side only. We may apply this truth to the debate in question, which, considered in its essence, springs from the opposition between the lovers of synthesis and the lovers of analysis. Now, Emerson has profoundly said, in his essay on Plato, that the main merit of the Greeks was to have found and occupied the right middle ground between synthesis and analysis; and in like manner, the true scholar will find and occupy the Aristotelian mean between the pure grammarian and the pure humanist.

The purely humanistic ideal of the classics, indeed, has in it much that is admirable ; but at present, in some respects at least, it has become antiquated and inadequate. It makes the mistake of treating the classical writers too much as isolated phenomena, of not payingenough attention to the essential relations they bear one another and to modern life and literature. Mr. Walter Pater, one of the most distinguished humanists of these recent times, fell under the suspicion of being a dilettante, if not a decadent, and there are some who think they detect a touch of dilettanteism even in a book like that of Professor Jebb on Greek poetry. This defect, so far as it exists, comes from a failure on the part of the interpreter of the classics to relate them in a large and vital way to modern life ; it springs from his disposition to retire, as Sainte-Beuve would say, into his tower of ivory, and to seek in ancient literature merely a source of exquisite solace for his aesthetic faculty. It would seem, then, that new life and interest are to be infused into the classics not so much by a restoration of humanism as by a larger application to them than has heretofore been made of the comparative and historical methods. Especially in the case of a language like Latin, whose literature is so purely derivative, and which has in turn radiated its influence along so many different lines to the modern world, any mere disconnected treatment of individual authors is entirely insufficient. The works of each author, indeed, should first be considered by themselves and on their own merits, but they should also be studied as links in that unbroken chain of literary and intellectual tradition which extends from the ancient to the modern world. It is by bringing home to the mind of the American student the continuity of this tradition that one is likely to implant in him, more effectually, perhaps, than in any other way, that right feeling and respect for the past which he so signally lacks. For if the fault of other countries and other times has been an excess of reverence for the past, the danger of this country to-day would seem rather to be an undue absorption into the present. No great monument of a former age, no Pantheon or Notre Dame, rises in the midst of our American cities to make a silent plea for the past against the cheap and noisy tendencies of the passing hour. From various elements working together obscurely in his consciousness, — from the theory of human perfectibility inherited from the eighteenth century, from the more recent doctrine of evolution, above all from the object lesson of his own national life, — the average American has come to have an instinctive belief that each decade is a gain over the last decade, and that each century is an improvement on its predecessor ; the first step he has to take in the path of culture is to realize that movement is not necessarily progress, and that the advance in civilization cannot be measured by the increase in the number of eighteen-story buildings. The emancipation from this servitude to the present may be reckoned as one of the chief benefits to be derived from classical study. Unfortunately, this superficial modernism, appearing at the outset under the form of prejudice or at least indifference, turns many away from the study of the classics altogether, and tends to diminish even in those who do study them that faith and enthusiasm so necessary to overcome the initial difficulties.

The American, it is true, is often haunted, in the midst of all his surface activity, with a vague sense that, after all, his life may be deficient in depth and dignity ; it is not so often, however, that he succeeds in tracing this defect in his life to its lack of background and perspective, to the absence in himself of a right feeling for the past, — that feeling which, as has been truly said, distinguishes more than any other the civilized man from the barbarian. As has already been remarked, this feeling is to be gained, in the case of the classics, not so much by treating them as isolated phenomena as by making clear the manifold ways in which they are related to the present, by leaving no chasm between ancient and modern life over which the mind is unable to pass. One of the important functions, then, of the classical teacher should be to bridge over the gap between the Greek and Roman world and the world of to-day. No preparation can be too broad, no culture too comprehensive, for the man who would fit himself for the adequate performance of such a task. His knowledge of modern life and literature needs to be almost as wide as his knowledge of the life and literature of antiquity. The ideal student of the classics should not rest satisfied until he is able to follow out in all its ramifications that Greek and Latin thought which, as Max Müller says, runs like fire in the veins of modern literature. In the case of an author like Virgil, for instance, he should be familiar not only with the classical Virgil, but also with the Virgil of after-centuries, — with Virgil the magician and enchanter who haunted the imagination of the Middle Ages, with Virgil the guide of Dante, and so on down to the splendid ode of Tennyson. If he is dealing with Aristotle, he should be able to show the immense influence exercised by Aristotle over the mediaeval and modern European mind, both directly through the Latin tradition and indirectly through Averrhoës and the Arabs. If his author is Euripides, he should know in what way Euripides has affected modern dramatic art; he should be capable of making a comparison between the Hippolytus and the Phèdre of Racine. If he is studying Stoicism, he should be able to contrast the stoical ideal of perfection with the Christian ideal of the perfect life as elaborated by writers like St. Bonaventura and St. Thomas Aquinas. He should neglect far less than has been done heretofore the great patristic literature in Greek and Latin as giving evidence of the process by which ancient thought passed over into thought of the mediaeval and modern types. These are only a few examples, chosen almost at random, of the wide and fruitful application that may be made of the comparative method.

How much, again, might be done to enhance the value of classical study by a freer use than has hitherto been made of the historical method ! The word “ historical ” is intended to be taken in a large sense: what is meant is not so much a mere cataloguing of the events of ancient civilization as an investigation of the various causes that led to the greatness or decline of ancient societies, — history, in short, as understood by Renan, “ theoretical ” rather than “ curious.” The last word on the reasons for the rise and fall of the Romans has not been spoken by Montesquieu. An investigation of the kind referred to would allow the application of many of the theories of modern science, but its results would have far more than an abstract scientific interest; they would provide us with instruction and examples to meet the problems of our own times. From the merest inattention to the teachings of the past, we are likely, in our national life, to proceed cheerfully to

A sober reflection on the history of the ancient republics might put us on our guard against many of the dangers to which we ourselves are exposed. It might cure us in part of our cheap optimism. It might, in any case, make us conscious of that tendency of which Machiavelli had so clear a vision, — the tendency of a state to slip down an easy slope of prosperity into vice : —

How much light might be shed — to give but a single illustration of what is meant — on contemporary as well as on Roman politics by a course, properly conducted, on the correspondence of Cicero !

The method just suggested of studying the classics might possibly render them less liable to the complaint now made that they are entirely remote from the interests and needs of the present. It is this feeling of the obsoleteness of the classics, joined to the utilitarian instinct so deeply imbedded in the American character, that is creating such a widespread sentiment in favor of giving, at least in part, the place they now hold to modern languages. It was interesting to note with what general approval Professor Grandgent’s strong plea for this substitution was received at a recent meeting of the Harvard Teachers’ Association. At so conservative an institution as Williams it is already possible to get the bachelor’s degree without Greek, by taking in its place a sufficient amount of French and German before and after entering college. The American student of the future is evidently going to have a chance to follow in the footsteps of that remarkable young woman, Miss Blanche Amory of Pendennis, who, it will be remembered, “ improved her mind by a sedulous study of the novels of the great modern authors of the French language.” It would appear, from a comparison of the catalogues of one of our Eastern universities, that its undergraduates now have an opportunity to read La Débâcle of Emile Zola, where twenty years ago they would have been required to read the Antigone of Sophocles.

Space will not permit a full discussion of this important question as to the relative educational value of ancient and modern languages, but a few reasons may be given briefly in support of the view that modern languages, however valuable as a study supplementary to the classics, are quite inadequate to take their place.

M. Paul Bourget, in a recent autobiographical sketch, tells us that, as a young man, he steeped his mind in the works of Stendhal and Baudelaire and other modern literature of the same type. He fails to explain, either to himself or to others, the fact that these modern books, though written, as he says, in all truth and sincerity, should yet have given him a view of life which later led only to bitter disappointment and disillusion. M. Bourget’s difficulty might have been less if he had taken into account that the authors of whom he speaks, so far from serving as a stimulus to his will and reason, merely invited him to retire into a corner and try strange experiments on his own emotional nature, and draw new and novel effects from his own capacity for sensation ; that they held out to him, in short, the promise of a purely personal and sensuous satisfaction from life, — a promise which life itself may be counted upon not to keep. Now, modern authors are not all, like Baudelaire, of the violently subjective type, but the intrusion of the author and his foibles into his work, the distortion of the objective reality of life by its passage through the personal medium, is much more frequent in modern than in ancient literature. So much of modern literature merely encourages to sentimental and romantic reverie rather than to a resolute and manly grappling with the plain facts of existence. Romanticism may not mean the Commune, as Thiers said it did, but we may at least say that literature of the romantic type, compared with that in the classical tradition, is so deficient in certain qualities of sobriety and discipline as to make us doubt its value as a formative influence upon the minds of the young. Classical literature, at its best, does not so much tend to induce in us a certain state of feelings, much less a certain state of the nerves; it appeals rather to our higher reason and imagination, — to those faculties which afford us an avenue of escape from ourselves, and enable us to become participants in the universal life. It is thus truly educative in that it leads him who studies it out and away from himself. The classical spirit, in its purest form, feels itself consecrated to the service of a high, impersonal reason. Hence its sentiment of restraint and discipline, its sense of proportion and pervading law. By bringing our acts into an ever closer conformity with this high, impersonal reason, it would lead us, although along a different path, to the same goal as religion, to a union ever more intimate with

By a complete and harmonious development of all our faculties under the guidance and control of this right reason, it would raise us above the possibility of ever again falling away

This high message contained in classical literature calls for the active exercise of our own best faculties, of our intellect and imagination, in order to be understood. It may be because of this purely intellectual appeal of the classics that there is so much initial inertia to overcome in awakening an interest in them, — especially if it be true, as Mr. Goschen claimed in a recent address, that the modern man is losing more and more his capacity to think ; and indeed, to transform into a Greek scholar the average young man of to - day, whose power of attention has been dissipated in the pages of the American newspaper, whose mind has been relaxed by reading the modern erotic novel, — this, to borrow one of Phillips Brooks’s phrases, would sometimes seem about as promising an enterprise as to make a lancehead out of putty. The number of those who can receive the higher lessons of Greek culture is always likely to be small. The classical spirit, however, is salutary and formative wherever it occurs, and if a man is not able to appreciate it in Pindar, he may in Horace ; and if not in Horace, then in Molière. French literature of the seventeenth century is, as a whole, the most brilliant manifestation of the classical spirit in modern times, and one might teach French with considerable conviction, were it not for the propensity of the American student to confine his reading in French to inferior modern authors, and often, indeed, to novels of the decadence.

Decadent novels and other fungous growths of a similar nature are not peculiar to French, but are multiplying with alarming rapidity in all the great European literatures. Modern literature has been more or less sentimental since Petrarch, and a morbidly subjective strain has existed in it since Rousseau, while of late a quality is beginning to appear which we cannot better describe than as neurotic. We may say, to paraphrase an utterance of Chamfort’s, that the success of some contemporary books is due to the correspondence that exists between the state of the author’s nerves and the state of the nerves of his public. Spiritual despondency, which under the name of acedia was accounted one of the seven deadly sins during the Middle Ages, has come in these later days to be one of the main resources of literature. Life itself has recently been defined by one of the lights of the French deliquescent school as “ an epileptic fit between two nothings.” It is no small resource to be able to escape from these miasmatic exhalations of contemporary literature into the bracing atmosphere of the classics ; to be able to rise into that purer ether

We can, then, by no means allow the claims of those who find in modern languages an adequate substitute for the classics. We must, however, agree with those who assert that if the classics are to maintain their traditional place, they must be related more largely to the needs and aspirations of modern life. With this end in view, it would seem desirable that classical study take a somewhat new direction : we need to emulate the spirit of the great scholars of the Renaissance, but to modify their methods. As to the present excess of German tendency in American classical scholarship, it may, so far as it exists, be left to remedy itself. The German research method appeals, indeed, to certain hard, positive qualities in the American mind, but other sides of the German ideal the American will find distasteful, on closer acquaintance; above all, he will prove incapable, in the long run, of the sublime disinterestedness of the German specialist, who, so far from asking himself whether his work will ever serve any practical purpose, never stops to inquire whether it will serve any purpose at all. Some reaction, then, against the exaggerations of the German method will do no harm ; but the scientific spirit itself, in the study of the classics, we need to retain. Let the classics benefit by the fullest application of the scientific spirit, but let that spirit be directed less toward philological research than toward a freer use of the comparative and historical methods. There is needed in the classics to-day a man who can understand the past with the result, not of loosening, but of strengthening his grasp upon the present. There is needed a type of scholar intermediary between the high school pedagogue and the university specialist, who can interpret the classics in a large and liberal spirit to American undergraduates, carrying with him into his task the consciousness that he is forming the minds and characters of the future citizens of a republic. The teaching of the classics thus understood could be made one of the best preparations for practical life, and less might be heard of the stock complaint about wasting time in the study of the dead languages. As to this last charge, we may quote from the most eloquent appeal that has been made of late years for a more liberal study of the classics, — that of Lowell in his Harvard Anniversary address. “If the language of the Greeks is dead,” he there says, “ yet the literature it enshrines is rammed with life as perhaps no other writing, except Shakespeare’s, ever was or will be. It is as contemporary with to-day as with the ears it first enraptured, for it appeals, not to the man of then or now, but to the entire round of human nature itself. Men are ephemeral or evanescent, but whatever page the authentic soul of man has touched with her immortalizing finger, no matter how long ago, is still young and fair as it was to the world’s gray fathers. Oblivion looks in the face of the Grecian Muse only to forget her errand. . . . We know not whither other studies will lead us, especially if dissociated from this ; we do know to what summits, far above our lower region of turmoil, this has led, and what the many-sided outlook thence.”

There was never greater need of the Hellenic spirit than there is to-day, and especially in this country, if that charge of lack of measure and sense of proportion which foreigners bring against Americans is founded in fact. As Matthew Arnold has admirably said, it is the Greek writers of the great period who best show the modern mind the path that it needs to take; for the modern man cannot, like the man of the Middle Ages, live by the imagination and religious faculty alone ; on the other hand, he cannot live solely by the exercise of his reason and understanding. It is only by the union of these two elements of his nature that he can hope to attain a balanced growth, and this fusion of the reason and the imagination is found realized more perfectly than elsewhere in the Greek classics of the Golden Age. Those who can receive the higher initiation into the Hellenic spirit will doubtless remain few in number, but these few will wield a potent influence for good, each in his own circle, if only from the ability they will thereby have acquired to escape from contemporary illusions. For of him who has caught the profounder teachings of Greek literature we may say, in the words of the Imitation, that he is released from a multitude of opinions. We may apply to authors like Sophocles and Plato, and to those who have penetrated their deeper meaning, the language the Buddhists use to describe their perfect sage, — language which will at once remind the scholar of the beginning of the second book of Lucretius : “ When the learned man has driven away vanity by earnestness, he, the wise, climbing the terraced heights of wisdom, looks down upon the fools, serene he looks upon the toiling crowd, as one that stands on a mountain looks down on them that stand upon the plain.”

Irving Babbitt.