After the conditions which had given to the study of Latin and Greek their high import had ceased to exist, the traditional curriculum, naturally, was retained. Then, the different effects of this method of education, good and bad, which no one had thought of at its introduction, were realised and noted. As natural, too, was it that those who had strong interests in the preservation of these studies, from knowing no others or from living by them, or for still other reasons, should emphasise the good results of such instruction. They pointed to the good effects as if they had been consciously aimed at by the method and could be attained only through its agency.
One real benefit that students might derive from a rightly conducted course in the classics would be the opening up of the rich literary treasures of antiquity, and intimacy with the conceptions and views of the world held by two advanced nations. A person who has read and understood the Greek and Roman authors has felt and experienced more than one who is restricted to the impressions of the present. He sees how men placed in different circumstances judge quite differently of the same things from what we do to-day. His own judgments will be rendered thus more independent. Again, the Greek and Latin authors are indisputably a rich fountain of recreation, of enlightenment, and of intellectual pleasure after the day's toil, and the individual, not less than civilised humanity generally, will remain grateful to them for all time. Who does not recall with pleasure the wanderings of Ulysses, who does not listen joyfully to the simple narratives of Herodotus, who would ever repent of having made the acquaintance of Plato's Dialogues, or of having tasted Lucian's divine humor? Who would give up the glances he has obtained into the private life of antiquity from Cicero's letters, from Plautus or Terence? To whom are not the portraits of Suetonius undying reminiscences? Who, in fact, would throw away any knowledge he had once gained?
Yet people who draw from these sources only, who know only this culture, have surely no right to dogmatise about the value of some other culture. As objects of research for individuals, this literature is extremely valuable, but it is a different question whether it is equally valuable as the almost exclusive means of education of our youth.
Do not other nations and other literatures exist from which we ought to learn? Is not nature herself our first school-mistress? Are our highest models always to be the Greeks, with their narrow provinciality of mind, that divided the world into "Greeks and barbarians," with their superstitions, with their eternal questioning of oracles? Aristotle with his incapacity to learn from facts, with his word-science; Plato with his heavy, interminable dialogues, with his barren, at times childish, dialectics—are they unsurpassable?[119] The Romans with their apathy, their pompous externality, set off by fulsome and bombastic phrases, with their narrow-minded, philistine philosophy, with their frenzied sensuality, with their cruel and bestial indulgence in animal and man baiting, with their outrageous maltreatment and plundering of their subjects—are they patterns worthy of imitation? Or shall, perhaps, our science edify itself with the works of Pliny who cites midwives as authorities and himself stands on their point of view?
Besides, if an acquaintance with the ancient world really were attained, we might come to some settlement with the advocates of classical education. But it is words and forms, and forms and words only, that are supplied to our youth; and even collateral subjects are forced into the strait-jacket of the same rigid method and made a science of words, sheer feats of mechanical memory. Really, we feel ourselves set back a thousand years into the dull cloister-cells of the Middle Ages.
This must be changed. It is possible to get acquainted with the views of the Greeks and Romans by a shorter road than the intellect deadening process of eight or ten years of declining, conjugating, analysing, and extemporisation. There are to-day plenty of educated persons who have acquired through good translations vivider, clearer, and more just views of classical antiquity than the graduates of our gymnasiums and colleges.[120]
For us moderns, the Greeks and the Romans are simply two objects of archæological and historical research like all others. If we put them before our youth in fresh and living pictures, and not merely in words and syllables, the effect will be assured. We derive a totally different enjoyment from the Greeks when we approach them after a study of the results of modern research in the history of civilisation. We read many a chapter of Herodotus differently when we attack his works equipped with a knowledge of natural science, and with information about the stone age and the lake-dwellers. What our classical institutions pretend to give can and actually will be given to our youth with much more fruitful results by competent historical instruction, which must supply, not names and numbers alone, nor the mere history of dynasties and wars, but be in every sense of the word a true history of civilisation.