Looking back on my eight years of Harrow and Cambridge and judging them by results, I find that Classics have supplied me with a mass of interesting and amusing facts to think about, whereas Mathematics only taught me how to think on abstract things. Hardly any Mathematics linger in my mind. Sometimes, when I am going to sleep, I think of Space and wonder whether it is circumnavigated by the curves that go away to Negative Infinity and come back again from Positive Infinity, as if the two Infinities met. Sometimes I snap at people for saying Two and Two make Four as if it were an axiom, instead of being a result attained by rigid proof. And I sometimes lose my temper when they talk of what would happen if there were a Fourth Dimension. I tell them they can get a Fourth Dimension by putting Tetrahedrals for Cartesians, and it makes no more difference than putting Centigrade for Fahrenheit and thereby getting 15° of cold instead of 5° of heat.
Until I went to Harrow, I had a tutor at home, and he taught me to read Virgil as anyone reads Dante, not stopping over every word to consider it as grammar. But this did not assist me there. “Optative Future used where Indicative Future would be required in Direct Oration.” That is my note on Æschylos, Persæ, 360. I remember that my mind was far away at Athens, watching the gusts of passion sweep across the audience when the play recalled the battle they had fought at Salamis seven years before. And my mind came back to Harrow with a jerk at hearing the suave voice of Dr Butler addressing me by name, repeating this, and recommending me to note it down.
In my Cambridge days the Mathematical Tripos and the Classical Tripos were still in their primæval shape. It had gone on for half a century with little change, and lasted until 1882. If you were going in for either of these, you had no examinations (except Little Go) until the middle of your fourth year there, and then came these two Triposes with only four weeks interval between them. The system had worked well, but subjects were enlarged till it became unworkable—Electricity and Magnetism were reckoned as Mathematics, and so on with many other things. Down to 1850 nobody could go into the Classical Tripos unless he had already got honours in the Mathematical: in the next four years, 1851 to 1854, there were about thirty men each year who got honours in both; but in the four years I was there, 1877 to 1880, this average of thirty had fallen to an average of two, and in 1880 I was one of the two. I was a Senior Optime in the Mathematical Tripos and got a bad Third in the Classical—a result that always puzzles me, as I had a considerable knowledge of the Classics even then.
I knew Greek enough at Harrow to get the prize there for Greek epigram, but I did not go seriously into Greek until after I came down from Cambridge. A few years later on, German reviewers were remarking that I knew Greek inscriptions and Greek literature from Homer onwards to the Fathers of the Church and the Byzantine authors, and that nothing escaped me even in neglected writings like the Almagest. I was doing other things as well, and cannot imagine now how I found time for all.
But my interest in the Byzantines was not quite keen enough to satisfy Krumbacher. One day at Munich in 1896 he was advising me to read a book in Russian instead of its translation into French, and I said I knew too little of the language. He fired out—“You cannot read the Russian book? You go to Patmos. Go to Patmos.” I told him I had been to Jericho—or rather to its site—and had not found it very attractive; and Patmos had looked just as unattractive when I had seen it from a ship. But he meant it literally. I should learn good Russian from the monks, and could collate Byzantine manuscripts as well. It really was a first-rate plan, but somehow I did not go to Patmos.
He was remarkable to look at—his hair had turned snow-white when he was only twenty, and he had eyes like coals of fire. In his own line he was unquestionably the greatest man since Ducange; and there at Munich he was a colleague of Furtwaengler, the greatest since Winckelmann in one aspect of archæology. I knew Furtwaengler from 1885, when he was still at Berlin, and Krumbacher from 1891. They both died far too young, at 53 or 54. With a further twenty years of life, they might have achieved far greater things than they had yet attempted. They were unaffected men and never posed, as Mommsen sometimes did when he thought of his resemblance to Voltaire.
Once in Berlin I went to a sitting of the Archaeologische Gesellschaft, 3 March 1896. It was all plain living and high thinking there, and they debated Pheidias and Plato amidst great bursts of Wagner that came in from a concert-hall close by. I have a letter here that I wrote my brother next day—“They manage their meetings in a much more formal way than the people at the Institut at Paris; and they are more long-winded. One of the men last night got his notes in such a muddle that he made nearly all his statements three times over; but nobody seemed to mind.” In my next letter, Dresden, 10 March 1896, I said that I had been to call on Fleckeisen, and described him as “an old man with long white hair, toddling about his study in a dressing-gown.” I regret to see that in another letter I spoke of a society of learned men as “a cellar-ful of beer-barrels.”
Amongst the learned Germans whom I used to meet, some few talked politics quite freely; and I used to hear that everything that Bismarck did was right, and everything that the young Emperor did was wrong. I should like to hear what they are saying about the causes of this War.
I remember the abdication of the Emperor of the French in 1870; and now in 1918, at the abdication of the German Emperor, the feeling of relief is just the same. Both men had kept all Europe in alarm for years before their fall. In turn they had the greatest army on the Continent and a navy that was second to our own; and no one could foresee how they would use their strength, as their foreign policy was all adventure and sensation. There was very little sympathy with France at the disaster of Sedan. It is the fashion now to talk as if we sympathised with France all through. My recollection is that people were mostly against France in 1870 until Paris was besieged: then they realized that Germany was getting dangerous, and began to change their views.
After the war of 1870 the French did not get possession of their Lorraine frontier till the indemnity was paid and the occupying army was withdrawn. Then they fortified it so effectively from Belfort to Verdun that everybody said the Germans would come round through Switzerland or Belgium, if ever they came again. (I remember people saying this, about 1878 and onwards, quite as a matter of course.) Against Switzerland there was the fortress of Besançon, and against Belgium there was supposed to be a line from Verdun to Dunkirk through Lille. But this line never was made effective, and gradually fell into decay. That certainly was no affair of ours in the days of the Two Power standard, when we were building ships to fight the French and Russians. But after the Entente I thought we might request the French to pay attention to their Swiss and Belgian frontiers. No doubt, they could not make as strong a line from Dunkirk to Verdun as from Verdun to Belfort; but the Germans were not likely to embroil themselves by going through Belgium, if they had to face a line on the French frontier there of anything like the same strength as the French line in Lorraine.