France resisted almost entirely this scientific obsession of literature. England held out long. In both of these nations composition in the classical languages was a fixed feature of the schools. Victorian literature is steeped in the classics, especially of Greece; the golden age of England’s eloquence, the age of Chatham, Fox and Burke, preceded the scientific era of classicism and was the product of artistic appreciation and of composition.
What of America? The earlier schools followed French and English traditions and taught the classics with literary appreciation and with fruitful results for the literature of America. Then later America sent its professors to Germany; specialism and the departmental system separated literature entirely from the classics; composition ceased except as a means of learning grammar, thus establishing a complete reversal of the original practice, where grammar was a means to composition.
It would be untrue to say that all the erudition, discovered and systematized by numerous sciences and centering upon the classics, was useless or unprofitable. Even the immense library which the Wolfian theory of Homeric origins brought into existence has not been entirely in vain. Germany of the nineteenth century was the Alexandria of the modern world, and as Alexandrian criticism was the forerunner of the best in Latin literature, perhaps the immense activity of scientific investigators may have an artistic outcome. A selection of what is good and true, and a clear, concise presentation of well-established facts, such as Père Laurand gives in his excellent series, Manuels des Etudes Grecques et Latines (Picard, Paris), will help the study of the classics. Erudition should take now its proper place of subordination. The classics should resume the functions which history, evolution, origins and other scientific approaches have taken away; the classics should once more be studied primarily as works of art. The medium and materials do not dominate other arts; they should not dominate literature. Self-expression is the goal of all art; it should be the goal of literature.
Have the teachers of the classics lost faith? Is artistic appreciation an idle thing or is it a thing of beauty, a joy forever? The experimental sciences are always changing in facts and theories. The chemistry of a century ago is absurd; the chemistry of twenty-five years ago is antiquated; the chemistry of today will be old tomorrow. As Remsen long ago saw and insisted on, what is valuable in the teaching of chemistry are the processes, not the theories, which will likely change tomorrow. Chemistry, as a science, is a bit of classified information always modified by research. Art and artistic appreciation is a thing of beauty and a joy forever. Give a man appreciation of literature; let him taste the beauty of Homer and of Sophocles and of Demosthenes, and you have given him, not a catalog of facts which must always be rectified, not a theory which must change with the facts, but a precious treasure in the mind which will always remain. In teaching chemistry the processes are more important than the temporary information; in the teaching of literature the processes are at least equally valuable, and besides last through life in abiding taste and in perfected self-expression.
Formerly reproduction was the aim of the teacher of the classics. “Reproduction is the soul of the explanation or prelection,” is the way early Jesuit pedagogy put it, and every student of philosophy knows what the soul or formal cause contributes to the effect. How many in explaining classical literature today guide themselves throughout by the principle that their students are to reproduce artistically the masterpiece which they explain? No doubt professors insist upon the formation of clear ideas and further demand explicit judgments in the way of propositions. Most too require that the links of reasoning be sharply and definitely stated. Interpretation, in a word, is well done. The intellectual element of the masterpiece is handled satisfactorily. But what of the artistic form? Does the literature take shape in the student’s imagination? Is the picture realized in the teacher’s imagination and then by suggestion, through the sparkling eye and sympathetic voice and interpreting gesture, by vivid, though not histrionic, dramatization, is the author’s message staged in the student’s imagination? Scientific analysis, especially where a text becomes a tag to some learned generalization, often prevents imaginative realization and thus precludes artistic appreciation of literature.
The teaching of the classics has been and is now justified by the general training they impart, but it is chiefly when taught as literature that they impart that general training. If the classics are subordinated to the university lecturer’s specialty, then the classics are imparting little general training and have hardly more right in the classroom, except for indirect results which may accrue from contact with art, than have special courses in conchology or entomology. Let the teacher look upon the classics as art to be reproduced after being appreciated, and a general training will be the outcome. Composition should be made the aim of literature.
Idioms of languages, and their vocabulary and their structure differ, but thought and imagination may be the same. Set all the languages of the world before a moving-picture, and each language will tell the common story on the screen to its children in its own way of speaking. So the student of any language may learn from Homer how to select details and group them into artistic wholes, how to carry on the narrative through significant and choice events, how to dwell on the important and touch lightly on the insignificant, how to relieve a story and intensify a part of it by appropriate comparisons. As the student learns how to tell a story, so too may he master the art of describing a scene, of creating a character, of making a speech. He will be taught the way to focus an idea and give it discriminating expression by the right word, the way to embody good or evil in concrete and picturesque words and the way to be proficient in all the elements and processes of composition. The Greek Homer made the Latin Æneid, the Greek Theocritus made the Latin Eclogue and, if Stedman is right, also the Tennysonian Idyll. The literary art of Greek and Latin has given and will give artistic form to the student’s vernacular.
The classics will give a general training if they are made to do so. Literature will not impart a general training automatically. Art is a habit arising from a repetition of acts. The art of thinking is mastered by thinking, and the art of imagining by imagining, and that thinking and imagining will be done well if done under the guidance of masters. Has the literary art of Greece, which created Latin literature and directly and indirectly shaped the literature of all civilization, done its full work? Who can believe it? Every generation since Homer has been influenced by the art of Homer in translation and imitation, and no generations more so than those of Cowper and Morris and Lang in England and of Bryant and Palmer in America. The time may come when literary taste and literary art will be as well studied and demonstrated in modern languages as in those of Latin and Greek; the time may come when modern classics may be as well adapted for education as the classics of Greek and Rome which have been in the classroom for century upon century, but that time does not appear to be tomorrow or the day after. If the art of self-expression is the best test of education, if the art of self-expression is the most practical thing in life and the most permanent treasure that can be gained in school, then Greek literature, the finest masterpiece of self-expression, should remain, and Greek literature should be taught, as for centuries it was taught, with interpretation and translation furnished to the student, leaving the time of training to be devoted not to special sciences proper to the university, but to the general training in appreciation and expression, proper to academy and college.
XIV
THE VITALIZER OF THE WORLD
This title is not an advertisement for a patent medicine; it is the brief statement of an important historical fact. “Every schoolboy knows” that the revival of learning in Italy came from the vitalizing touch of Greek. Out of that renaissance, which the Jesuits took over and embodied in their system of teaching, grew modern scholarship in England through Linacre, Lilly, Colet and More, the forerunners of the Elizabethans. It was the beginning of modern scholarship in Germany, through Erasmus, the friend of these Englishmen, and through Melanchthon, whose name, like that of Erasmus, marks the power of Greek: out of that renaissance sprang the rejuvenated civilization of our day. Every schoolboy knows that Greek brought the modern world to life, but is it as well known or remembered that Greek has always been vivifying everything it touched?