The witty Heinrich Heine says, in bitter remembrance of his early sufferings,—“The Romans would never have conquered the world, if they had had to learn their own language. They had leisure, because they were born with the knowledge of what nouns form their accusatives in im.”
Now we are not among those who decry the Greek and Latin classics. We think it a glorious privilege to read both those grand old tongues, and that an intelligent, cultivated man who is shut out from the converse of the splendid minds of those olden times loses a part of his birthright; and therefore it is that we mourn that but one dry, hard, technical path, one sharp, straight, narrow way, is allowed into so goodly a land of knowledge. We think there is no need that the study of Greek and Latin should be made such a horror. There is many a man without a verbal memory, who could neither recite in order the paradigms of the Greek verbs, nor repeat the lists of nouns that form their accusative in one termination or another, who, nevertheless, by the exercise of his faculties of comparison and reasoning, could learn to read the Greek and Latin classics so as to take their sense and enjoy their spirit; and that is all that is worth caring for. We have known one young scholar, who could not by any possibility repeat the lists of exceptions to the rules in the Latin Grammar, who yet delightedly filled his private note-book with quotations from the “Æneid,” and was making extracts of literary gems from his Greek Reader, at the same time that he was every day “screwed” by his tutor upon some technical point of the language.
Is there not many a master of English, many a writer and orator, who could not repeat from memory the list of nouns ending in y that form their plural in ies, with the exceptions under it? How many of us could do this? Would it help a good writer and fluent speaker to know the whole of Murray’s Grammar by heart, or does real knowledge of a language ever come in this way?
At present the rich stores of ancient literature are kept like the savory stew which poor Dominie Sampson heard simmering in the witch’s kettle. One may have much appetite, but there is but one way of getting it. The Meg Merrilies of our educational system, with her harsh voice, and her “Gape, sinner, and swallow,” is the only introduction,—and so, many a one turns and runs frightened from the feast.
This intolerant mode of teaching the classical languages is peculiar to them alone. Multitudes of girls and boys are learning to read and to speak German, French, and Italian, and to feel all the delights of expatiating in the literature of a new language, purely because of a simpler, more natural, less pedantic mode of teaching these languages.
Intolerance in the established system of education works misery in families, because family pride decrees that every boy of good status in society, will he, nill he, shall go through college, or he almost forfeits his position as a gentleman.
“Not go to Cambridge!” says Scholasticus to his first-born. “Why, I went there,—and my father, and his father, and his father before him. Look at the Cambridge Catalogue and you will see the names of our family ever since the College was founded!”
“But I can’t learn Latin and Greek,” says young Scholasticus. “I can’t remember all those rules and exceptions. I’ve tried, and I can’t. If you could only know how my head feels when I try! And I won’t be at the foot of the class all the time, if I have to get my living by digging.”
Suppose, now, the boy is pushed on at the point of the bayonet to a kind of knowledge in which he has no interest, communicated in a way that requires faculties which Nature has not given him,—what occurs?
He goes through his course, either shamming, shirking, ponying, all the while consciously discredited and dishonored,—or else, putting forth an effort that is a draft on all his nervous energy, he makes merely a decent scholar, and loses his health for life.