Men remain on their own Level.
Languages do not elevate the Mind.
Mean Use made of Languages.
The future towards which we are rapidly tending may already be seen in the distance. Latin and Greek will be given up for ordinary schoolboys, both in England and France, but the study of them will be maintained by a small élite. This élite will have a better chance of existence in England, where superiorities of all kinds are not only tolerated but respected, than it can have in France, where the modern instincts all tend to the formation of an immensely numerous, half-educated middle class. When the classical literatures shall be pursued, as the fine arts are now, by their own elect, and not imposed on every incapable schoolboy, they will be better studied and better loved. Now, with regard to modern languages I have no illusions left. You cannot convert a Philistine into a lover of good literature by teaching him a foreign tongue. If he did not love it in his own language, he is not likely to take to it in another. Every man has his own intellectual level, and on that level he will remain, whatever language you teach him. To make a Frenchman appreciate Milton or Spenser, it is not enough to teach him English; you would have to endow him with the poetic sense, with the faculty that delights in accompanying a poet’s mind—in a word, with all the poetic gifts except invention. Neither are all men fit to read noble prose. Minds incapable of sustained attention read newspaper paragraphs in English, and in French they would still read newspaper paragraphs. What I mean is that languages do not elevate the mind, they merely extend the range of its ordinary action. Teach a French gossip English and she will gossip in two languages, she will not perceive the futility of gossiping. This explains the poor and mean use that is constantly made of modern languages by many who have acquired them, and the remarkable unanimity with which such people avoid every great author, and even all intelligent intercourse with foreigners, reading nothing and hearing nothing that is worth remembering.
Hollow Pretensions.
Smallness of the Studious Class.
Idleness of the unintellectual.
Libraries in French Houses.
Expenditure on Books in England.
In all things connected with education we are in a world of hollow pretensions. The speeches at prize distributions assume that pupils will make use of their knowledge afterwards. They are told that the wonderful literatures of Greece and Rome now lie open before them like gardens where they have but to wander and cull flowers. If they have studied modern languages they are told that European literature is theirs. The plain truth is, that both in England and France, and especially in France, there is a small studious class isolated in the midst of masses occupied with pleasure or affairs, and so indifferent to intellectual pursuits that the slightest mental labour is enough to deter them. Whatever reading they do is in the direction of least resistance. They have no enterprise, they find all but the easiest reading irksome, and the obstacle of the easiest foreign language insurmountable. They will play cards or dominoes in the day-time rather than take down a classic author from his shelf. A guest in a French château told me that on seeing the ennui that reigned there, whilst nobody read anything, she asked if there were any books in the house, and was shown into a library of classics formed in a previous generation but never opened in this. All testimony that comes to me about French interiors confirms the belief that the number of people who form libraries has greatly diminished. It was once the custom in the upper class, but nobody would say that it is the custom now. In twelve or fifteen country houses known to a friend of mine there was only one library, and, what is more significant, only one man deserving the name of a reader. Even in England, where people read certainly three times as much as they do in France, the expenditure on books bears no proportion to income, except in the case of a few scholars. How many English houses are there, of the wealthy middle class, where you could not find a copy of the representative English authors, and where foreign literatures are unknown!