Ancient History in the Secondary School
WILLIAM FAIRLEY, Ph.D., Editor.
A REVIEW.[6]
Not a review of the work we teachers have been doing with our friends, the ancient Greeks; but a digression which will be in some sort a review of a notable book will occupy us for a little. There has recently appeared The Lowell Lectures for 1908-9 by Professor John P. Mahaffy, of Trinity College, Dublin, on “What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilization.” The book is altogether helpful to the lover of the Greek world. And to him not only; but to the reader who through early limitations of culture may have but slight ideas of the importance of the Greeks, a reading of this book should be what to one brought up in the dim light of a cave or in the dense shadows of some vast forest would be a first glimpse of the glorious orb of day, the source of all the shaded light and all the warmth that had hitherto been his to enjoy without suspicion of the existence of the master light. Professor Mahaffy’s gladsome task is to impress the primacy of Greece in all our best thinking and truest living. He is indeed an enthusiast. Occasionally the judicious reader will question some of the results of his enthusiasm. But the author is the Nestor of the Greek scholars of the English-speaking world. He says of himself at the close of his lectures: “So now, when my part in the race is nearly run, there remains to me no higher earthly satisfaction than this, that I have carried the torch of Greek fire alight through a long life—no higher earthly hope than this, that I may pass that torch to others, who in their turn may keep it aflame with greater brilliancy perhaps, but not with more earnest devotion ‘in the Parliament of men the Federation of the world.’” He bitterly decries the modern displacement of the study of the Greek tongue and the knowledge of Greek life at first hand; but at the same time serves as an interpreter of what was best in Greece to those of us who are not quite at home in this language of queer type and involved syntax.
So in this close of our study of Greece for the current school year, let me earnestly recommend the perusal of this book to all teachers of our department. We cannot give a hundredth part of it to our pupils, now, or in later courses; but it will serve to imbue ourselves deeply with the Greek spirit, and help us to enforce the true value of our heritage from the Greeks, the master minds of all our thinking. Some of us will not have opportunity to read the book. For them let me try to give a few glimpses of its worth.
There are eight lectures: Introductory; Greek Poetry; Greek Prose; Greek Art—I: Poetry and Sculpture; II: Painting and Music; Science; Grammar, Logic, Mathematics, Medicine; Politics, Sociology, Law; Higher Thinking, Philosophy, Speculative and Practical Theology. The thesis of the whole is that the best in life is wrought out elaborately and with pains by men of deep thought and long reflection. It is a glorifying of the ideal as over against the modern rush of practicality.
In his introductory lecture Professor Mahaffy seeks not to account for the Greek preëminence—that cannot be done; but to assert it, as one might extol the sporadic genius of a Mozart. He then shows how the Romans and the men of medieval Europe failed to grasp, as our modern world since the Renaissance has been grasping, the real meaning of Greece. And here comes in his plea for the study of Greek. He writes: “The danger I see before this generation is that which came upon the Roman world insensibly and which resulted in a decadence not arrested till it sunk into the night of the dark ages. The later empire was content to take Greek art and Greek letters at second hand, and to substitute Latin culture for the models which had educated their greatest masters. But ... the copy had not the life of the original. So we, too, with all our science, with our increase of material knowledge and our joyless running to and fro may sink into an ugly, tame, joyless conglomeration of societies, for whom new discoveries supply hosts of new conveniences, but no return to the happiness and contentment of a simpler age.... Happiness does not lie here, no, nor in motors, nor in turbines, nor in wireless messages across the globe, nor in daily newspapers full of inextricable fact and falsehood.”
In the chapters devoted to literature with wealth of argument and illustration is pointed out our well-known debt for rhythm and meter, period and cadence. In specific cases: “There can be no question that in the oratory of debate the Greeks taught the Romans, then through them mediæval Europe, then, after the Renaissance, modern Europe directly, so that even now they are the acknowledged masters in this splendid art.” And: “The laws of prose composition, as devised and perfected by Isocrates, are the most subtle and complete ever put into practice by any living man.”