The rudiments of knowledge may be instilled by compulsory tasks; but to form the scholar, to really educate the man, there should intervene between the years of compulsory study and the active duties of life a season of comparative leisure. By leisure I mean, not cessation of activity, but self-determined activity,—command of one's time for voluntary study.
There are two things which unless a university can give, it fails of its legitimate end. One is opportunity, the other inspiration. But opportunity is marred, not made, and inspiration quenched, not kindled, by coercion. Few, I suspect, in recent years, have had the love of knowledge awakened by their college life at Harvard,—more often quenched by the rivalries and penalties with which learning here is associated. Give the student, first of all, opportunity; place before him the best apparatus of instruction; tempt him with the best of teachers and books; lead him to the fountains of intellectual life. His use of those fountains must depend on himself. There is a homely proverb touching the impossibility of compelling a horse to drink, which applies to human animals and intellectual draughts as well. The student has been defined by a German pedagogue as an animal that cannot be forced, but must be persuaded. If, beside opportunity, the college can furnish also the inspiration which shall make opportunity precious and fruitful, its work is accomplished. The college that fulfils these two conditions—opportunity and inspiration—will be a success, will draw to itself the frequency of youth, the patronage of wealth, the consensus of all the good. Such a university, and no other, will be a power in the land.
Nothing so fatal to inspiration as excessive legislation. It creates two parties, the governors and the governed, with efforts and interests mutually opposed; the governors seeking to establish an artificial order, the governed bent on maintaining their natural liberty. I need not ask you, Alumni, if these two parties exist at Cambridge. They have always existed within the memory of "the oldest graduate."
Professors should not be responsible for the manners of students, beyond the legitimate operation of their personal influence. Academic jurisdiction should have no criminal code, should inflict no penalty but that of expulsion, and that only in the way of self-defence against positively noxious and dangerous members. Let the civil law take care of civil offences. The American citizen should early learn to govern himself, and to re-enact the civil law by free consent. Let easy and familiar relations be established between teachers and taught, and personal influence will do more for the maintenance of order than the most elaborate code. Experience has shown that great reliance may be placed on the sense of honor in young men, when properly appealed to and fairly brought into play. Raumer, in his "History of German Universities," testifies that the Burschenschaften abolished there the last vestige of that system of hazing practised on new-comers, which seems to be an indigenous weed of the college soil. It infested the ancient universities of Athens, Berytus, Carthage,[C] as well as the mediæval and the modern. Our ancestors provided a natural outlet for it when they ordained that the Freshmen should be subject to the Seniors, should take off their hats in their presence, and run of their errands. This system, under the name of "Pennalism," had developed, in the German universities, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a degree of oppression and tyrannous abuse of the new-comer unknown to American colleges, and altogether incredible were it not sufficiently vouched by contemporary writers, and by the acts of the various governments which labored to suppress it. A certain German worthy writes to his son, who is about to enter the university: "You think, perhaps, that in the universities they sup pure wisdom by spoonfuls,... but when you are arrived there, you will find that you must be made a fool of for the first year.... Consent to be a fool for this one year; let yourself be plagued and abused; and when an old veteran steps up to you and tweaks your nose, let it not appear singular; endure it, harden yourself to it. Olim meminisse juvabit."[D] The universities legislated against this barbarism; all the governments of Germany conspired to crush it; but in spite of all their efforts, which were only partially successful, traces of it still lingered in the early years of this century. It was not completely abolished until, in 1818, there was formed at Jena by delegates from fourteen universities a voluntary association of students on a moral basis, known as "The General German Burschenschaft," the first principle in whose constitution was, "Unity, freedom, and equality of all students among themselves,—equality of all rights and duties,"—and whose second principle was "Christian German education of every mental and bodily faculty for the service of the Fatherland." This, according to Raumer, was the end of Pennalism in Germany. What the governments, with their stringent enactments and formidable penalties, failed to accomplish, was accomplished at last by a voluntary association of students, organizing that sense of honor which, in youth and societies of youth, if rightly touched, is never appealed to in vain.
The question has been newly agitated in these days, whether knowledge of Greek and Latin is a necessary part of polite education, and whether it should constitute one of the requirements of the academic course. It has seemed to me that those who take the affirmative in this discussion give undue weight to the literary argument, and not enough to the glossological. The literary argument fails to establish the supreme importance of a knowledge of these languages as a part of polite education. The place which the Greek and Latin authors have come to occupy in the estimation of European scholars is due, not entirely to their intrinsic merits, great as those merits unquestionably are, but in part to traditional prepossessions. When after a millennial occultation the classics, and especially, with the fall of the Palæologi, the Greek classics burst upon Western Europe, there was no literature with which to compare them. The Jewish Scriptures were not regarded as literature by readers of the Vulgate. Dante, it is true, had given to the world his immortal vision, and Boccaccio, its first expounder, had shown the capabilities of Italian prose. But the light of Florentine culture was even for Italy a partial illumination. On the whole, we may say that modern literature did not exist, and the Oriental had not yet come to light. What wonder that the classics were received with boundless enthusiasm! It was through the influence of that enthusiasm that the study of Greek was introduced into schools and universities with the close of the fifteenth century. It was through that influence that Latin, still a living language in the clerical world, was perpetuated, instead of becoming an obsolete ecclesiasticism. The language of Livy and Ovid derived fresh impulse from the reappearing stars of secular Rome.
It is in vain to deny that those literatures have lost something of the relative value they once possessed, and which made it a literary necessity to study Greek and Latin for their sakes. The literary necessity is in a measure superseded by translations, which, though they may fail to communicate the aroma and the verbal felicities of the original, reproduce its form and substance. It is furthermore superseded by the rise of new literatures, and by introduction to those of other and elder lands. The Greeks were masters of literary form, but other nations have surpassed them in some particulars. There is but one Iliad, and but one Odyssee; but also there is but one Job, but one Sakoontalà, but one Hafiz-Nameh, but one Gulistan, but one Divina Commedia, but one Don Quixote, but one Faust. If the argument for the study of Greek and Latin is grounded on the value of the literary treasures contained in those tongues, the same argument applies to the Hebrew, to the Sanscrit, to the Persian, to say nothing of the modern languages, to which the College assigns a subordinate place.
But, above all, the literary importance of Greek and Latin for the British and American scholar is greatly qualified by the richness and superiority of the English literature which has come into being since the Græcomania of the time of the Tudors, when court ladies of a morning, by way of amusement, read Plato's Dialogues in the original. If literary edification is the object intended in the study of those languages, that end is more easily and more effectually accomplished by a thorough acquaintance with English literature, than by the very imperfect knowledge which college exercises give of the classics. Tugging at the Chained Prometheus, with the aid of grammar and lexicon, may be good intellectual discipline, but how many of the subjects of that discipline ever divine the secret of Æschylus's wonderful creation, or receive any other impression from it than the feeling perhaps that the worthy Titan's sense of constraint could hardly have been more galling than their own.
Give them Shakespeare's Tempest to read, and with no other pony than their own good will, though they may not penetrate the deeper meaning of that composition, they will gain more ideas, more nourishment from it, than they will from compulsory study of the whole trio of Greek tragedians. And if this be their first introduction to the great magician, they will say, with Miranda,
"O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
... O brave new world,
That has such people in it!"