From a paper read before the Eclectic Institute of Hiram, Ohio, in 1867, and printed in the Library Magazine.
NEAR the close of the fifth century we date the beginning of those Dark Ages which enveloped the whole world for a thousand years. The human race seemed stricken with intellectual paralysis. The noble language of the Cæsars, corrupted by a hundred barbarous dialects, ceased to be a living tongue long before the modern languages of Europe had been reduced to writing.
In Italy the Latin died in the tenth century, but the oldest document known to exist in Italian was not written till the year 1200. Italian did not really take its place in the family of written languages till a century later, when it was crystallized into form and made immortal by the genius of Dante and Petrarch.
The Spanish was not a written language till the year 1200, and was scarcely known to Europe till Cervantes convulsed the world with laughter in 1605.
The Latin ceased to be spoken by the people of France in the tenth century, and French was not a written language till the beginning of the fourteenth century. Pascal, who died in 1662, is called the father of modern French prose.
The German as a literary language dates from Luther, who died in 1546. It was one of his mortal sins against Rome that he translated the Bible into the uncouth and vulgar tongue of Germany.
Our own language is also of recent origin. Richard I. of England, who died in 1199, never spoke a word of English in his life. Our mother tongue was never heard in an English court of justice till 1362. The statutes of England were not written in English till three years before Columbus landed in the New World. No philologist dates modern English further back than 1500. Sir Thomas More (the author of “Utopia”), who died in 1535, was the father of English prose.
The Dark Ages were the sleep of the world, while the languages of the modern world were being born out of chaos.
The first glimmer of dawn was in the twelfth century, when in Paris, Oxford, and other parts of Europe, universities were established. The fifteenth century was spent in saving the remnants of classic learning which had been locked up in the cells of monks; the Greek at Constantinople, and the Latin in the cloisters of Western Europe.
During the first three hundred years of the life of the older universities, it is almost literally true that no modern tongue had become a written language. The learning of Europe was in Latin and Greek. In order to study either science or literature these languages must first be learned. European writers continued to use Latin long after the modern languages were fully established. Even Milton’s great “Defense of the People of England” was written in Latin,—as were also the “Principia,” and other scientific works of Newton, who died in 1727.
The pride of learned corporations, the spirit of exclusiveness among learned men, and their want of sympathy with the mass of the people, united to maintain Latin as the language of learning long after its use was defensible.
Now mark the contrast between the objects and demands of education when the European universities were founded—or even when Harvard was founded—and its demands at the present time. We have a family of modern languages almost equal in force and perfection to the classic tongues, and a modern literature, which, if less perfect in æsthetic form than the ancient, is immeasurably richer in truth, and is filled with the noblest and bravest thoughts of the world. When the universities were founded, modern science was not born. Scarcely a generation has passed since then without adding some new science to the circle of knowledge. As late as 1809 the Edinburgh Review declared that “lectures upon Political Economy would be discouraged in Oxford, probably despised, probably not permitted.” At a much later date, there was no text-book in the United States on that subject. The claims of Latin and Greek to the chief place in the curriculum have been gradually growing less, and the importance of other knowledge has been constantly increasing; but the colleges have generally opposed all innovations and still cling to the old ways with stubborn conservatism. Some concessions, however, have been made to the necessities of the times, both in Europe and America. Harvard would hardly venture to enforce its law (which prevailed long after Cotton Mather’s day) forbidding its students to speak English within the college limits, under any pretext whatever; and British Cantabs have had their task of composing hexameters in bad Latin reduced by a few thousand verses during the last century.
It costs me a struggle to say anything on this subject which may be regarded with favor by those who would reject the classics altogether, for I have read them and taught them with a pleasure and relish which few other pursuits have ever afforded me. But I am persuaded that their supporters must soon submit to a readjustment of their relations to college study, or they may be driven from the course altogether. There are most weighty reasons why Latin and Greek should be retained as part of a liberal education. He who would study our own language profoundly must not forget that nearly thirty per cent. of its words are of Latin origin,—that the study of Latin is the study of universal grammar, and renders the acquisition of any modern language an easy task, and is indispensable to the teacher of language and literature, and to other professional men.
Greek is, perhaps, the most perfect instrument of thought ever invented by man, and its literature has never been equaled in purity of style and boldness of expression. As a means of intellectual discipline its value can hardly be overestimated. To take a long and complicated sentence in Greek—to study each word in its meanings, inflections, and relations, and to build up in the mind, out of these polished materials, a sentence, perfect as a temple, and filled with Greek thought which has dwelt there two thousand years, is almost an act of creation; it calls into activity all the faculties of the mind.
That the Christian oracles have come down to us in Greek will make Greek scholars forever a necessity.
These studies, then, should not be neglected; they should neither devour nor be devoured. I insist they can be made more valuable and at the same time less prominent than they now are. A large part of the labor now bestowed upon them is devoted not to learning the genius and spirit of the language, but is more than wasted on pedantic trifles. More than half a century ago, in his essay entitled “Too Much Latin and Greek,” Sydney Smith lashed this trifling as it deserves. Speaking of classical Englishmen, he says: “Their minds have become so completely possessed by exaggerated notions of classical learning that they have not been able, in the great school of the world, to form any other notion of real greatness. Attend, too, to the public feelings—look to all the terms of applause. A learned man!—a scholar!—a man of erudition! Upon whom are these epitaphs of approbation bestowed? Are they given to men acquainted with the science of government? thoroughly masters of the geographical and commercial relations of Europe? to men who know the properties of bodies and their action upon each other? No; this is not learning: it is chemistry, or political economy—not learning. The distinguishing abstract term, the epithet of Scholar, is reserved for him who writes on the Æolic reduplication, and is familiar with the Sylburgian method of arranging defectives in ω and μι…. The object of the young Englishman is not to reason, to imagine, or to invent; but to conjugate, decline, and derive. The situations of imaginary glory which he draws for himself are the detection of an anapest in the wrong place, or the restoration of a dative case which Cranzius had passed over, and the never-dying Ernesti fail to observe. If a young classic of this kind were to meet the greatest chemist, or the greatest mechanician, or the most profound political economist of his time, in company with the greatest Greek scholar, would the slightest comparison between them ever cross his mind? would he ever dream that such men as Adam Smith and Lavoisier were equal in dignity of understanding to, or of the same utility as, Bentley or Heyné? We are inclined to think that the feeling excited would be a good deal like that which was expressed by Dr. George about the praises of the great king of Prussia, who entertained great doubts whether the king, with all his victories, knew how to conjugate a Greek verb in μι.” He concludes another essay written in 1836 with these words: “If there is anything which fills reflecting men with melancholy and regret, it is the waste of mortal time, parental money, and puerile happiness, in the present method of pursuing Latin and Greek.”
To write verses in these languages, to study elaborate theories of the Greek accent, and the ancient pronunciation of both Greek and Latin, which no one can ever know he has discovered, and which would be utterly valueless if he did discover it; to toil over the innumerable exceptions to the arbitrary rules of poetic quantity which few succeed in learning and none remember—these, and a thousand other similar things which crowd the pages of Zumpt and Kühner, no more constitute a knowledge of the spirit and genius of the Greek and Latin languages than counting the number of threads to the square inch in a man’s coat and the number of pegs in his boots makes us acquainted with his moral and intellectual character. The greatest literary monuments of Greece existed hundreds of years before the science of Grammar was born. Plato and Thucydides had a tolerable acquaintance with the Greek language, but Crosby goes far beyond their depth.
