THE CLASSICS.
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.
[72]. History of Civilisation in England.