THE "QUARTERLY REVIEW ON GREEK. AT THE UNIVERSITIES.
ONE of the great weapons of Conservative controversy has always been mystification ;—we are not so bigoted as to speak of intentional or wilful mystification ; on the contrary, we are persuaded that the mystification in which Conservatives in- dulge so freely is the mere instinct of unconscious prejudice seek- ing all forte of natural cover from the eyes of its pursuers ; but mystification is its most effective weapon nevertheless, and we have never seen it more plentifully used than in the article on 'Greek at the Universities,' in the Quarterly which has just appeared. What that article maintains is that the University of London in rendering Greek optional at the matriculation examination,—not, be it remembered, for the higher examinations for degrees in Arts, —has conformed itself to "the demand of ' second-grade ' schools to be received into the Universities," and formed "not only a degraded class of graduates themselves," but degraded "the whole meaning of a degree for future time ;" and the deepest thankfulness is expressed that Oxford and Cambridge "have not yet consented to become second-grade Universities." The reviewer, of course, will delight his readers by thus speaking of the University of Loudon, never very popular in Tory circles, as a voluntarily degraded University, but he omits to inform them that in this respect it does not differ from the very highest Universities on the Continent ; for we believe it has been ascertained—it has certainly been declared on very high authority —that neither in Germany, nor in Italy, nor in France, is there any University where Greek is now absolutely required as a sine qua non in gaining access to every academical degree. And,—though here again we attribute no iutentioual unfairness to the reviewer,—one of the points which no one will colleet from his article is, what the London University still requires as compared with the other Uni- versities, for her degrees, and what she has really done to de- serve this carefully-chosen word degradation.' _No one not well versed in the controversy could read this paper without being mystified,—without believing, for instance, that the University of London deliberately depreciates Greek literature and Greek philo- logy as instruments of literary education ; that the arguments of those who brought about the recent change were in the main, and avowedly, arguments in favour of lowering the standards of learning," and encouraging and rewarding "a lowered standard of elementary training ;" in a word, that they wished to substitute mere utilitarianism and professional views of education, for that higher view of education which regards it as its true object to train and discipline the whole group of the intellectual facul- ties before proceeding to admit of a curriculum branching off into specific studies like literature, physical science, or medicine. No impression could be less true. Of course certain advocates of the change—they have been very few—have brought extremely unten- able arguments to support a very wise change. Few causes are so fortunate as to be unencumbered by the support of danger- ous advocates. But the reviewer, in his haste to catch at such arguments, has given a totally misleading impression both of what has been done by the University of London, and of the motives which induced those who were foremost in advocating the change to attempt it.
And first, as to what has and has not been done. Nothing has been done to diminish the necessity of a real knowledge of the Greek language and literature for all who want to take degrees in Arts. When the change which has been decided upon has been fully carried out, theBachelor of Arts degree of the University of London will imply a more considerable knowledge of Greek than either a Bachelor of Arts degree of the University of Cambridge or a Bachelor of Arts degree of the University of Oxford. For all students who take the B.A. of the University of London mupt have passed through two good examina- tions in Greek, and most of them will have passed through three, since the great majority of men intending to take Arts degrees will of course take the option of Greek at the Matriculation examination, which, for them, will be easier than the alternative subject. Now Cambridge Bachelors of Arts can get their degree by the very mild modicum of Greek required for the "Little Go," after which they may proceed in mathematics alone, in which indeed the larger number of Cambridge honours men do actually proceed. Oxford men, on the other hand, as the reviewer him- self states, will not after 1874 require to present either Latin or Greek for the final examination, and will therefore only require as much as is now needed for the two preliminary examinations called Responsions and Moderations, examinations certainly not as thorough for mere pass-men as the two BA. examinations of the University of London. Let our readers, then, remember that for men who choose the literary degree, the degree in Arts, as much Greek will still be required for the future as is required even by Oxford, and much more than is required by Cambridge. It is only for men who are intending to take degrees in Science or Medicine that it will no longer be necessary to study Greek.
But does this imply that even for graduates in Science or Medicine the standard of learning is to be "lowered," and con- fessedly utilitarian and professional tests of knowledge to be substituted for tests of a larger and humaner culture ? So far is this from being the case that, we venture to say, without any risk of refutation, that the reformed matriculation examination of the University of London will be quite the widest and most stringent initial test of elementary knowledge through which any University in the United Kingdom puts its candidates for degrees. True, it will be no longer certain that a man who has passed it has a knowledge, however small, of Greek. But he will be re- quired to show a good elementary knowledge of three languages, Latin, English (including English history), and either Greek, or French, or German ; a thorough elementary knowledge both of mathematics and of the laws of physics; and an elementary know- ledge of chemistry. In other words, he must show thorough drill in two languages besides his own ; in geometry, arithmetic, and algebra ; and in the experimental sciences. And what was the chief motive which actuated those who advocated the option as regarded Greek? Avowedly, — and this the writer in the Quarterly evidently knew, though he makes as little of it as he can, and no one would have his attention awakened to it by the article, — because the area covered by the present examination is 80 mischievously great as to defy even the best first-grade schools to bring up the standard of attainment to a good uniform height in all the subjects. The great advances made in the methods of the study of the physical laws of Na- ture have rendered so large an encroachment necessary on the old school studies, that even the best prepared lads are apt to come up very weak on some side or other of their studies, and the result is that school teaching tends to become less and less thorough, and to lose in depth what it gains in extension. It had become abso- lutely necessary to diminish to some extent the burden of the general preparation. And this could only be done with any chance of gaining the desired increase in thoroughness, by giving lads who intended to pursue science less temptation for taking a wide range in Literature, and those who intended to pursue Literature more time for mastering the elementary science which the University thought it right to demand.
The true ground for the Quarterly reviewer to take would have been to traverse the policy of giving degrees in Science and Medicine at all, except to men who had previously taken degrees in Arts. The little knowledge of Greek required for the matricu- lation examination was not and never could have been a guarantee for the slightest knowledge of Greek literature ; it was at beat a security for a very meagre knowledge of the accidence, and nothing more. The argument of the Quarterly, and of all those who have taken the side of the Quarterly, really assumes that except through literature there is no such thing as a liberal education to be gained. Well, if that be true, all the Universities of the world are on the wrong track. Cambridge has always been on the wrong track, for she has always conferred her most famous degrees and honours in Arta on men who have had no substantial guarantees for culture except in mathematical science. Oxford is going on to the wrong track, for she is about to confer her degrees in Arts on men who will have given less guarantee of general culture than London men who have passed the matriculation examination,—though no doubt the little required of them will have a flavour of Greek in it,—and hose final examination need not have any classical tinge in it at all. The Foreign Universities have now for some time set the example which London has followed. And the simple fact is that with the enormous accumulation of modern studies any one of which is more than enough to task the energies of a lifetime,—with the increasing multiplicity and complexity of human knowledge,—it is becoming not so much wrong-headed as absurd to contend that no man has a right to the distinction of a man of culture who has not pro- ceeded in the ancient grooves of academic thought. If you were to try the only policy to which such articles as that in the Quarterly Review logically point, and refuse all specialist de- grees, all degrees in Science and Medicine, to those who had not attained the general or literary degree first, you would simply find that men would go without the degrees rather than satisfy the conditions. It is not a tenable position now-a-days that a man who has mastered the elements of two languages besides his own (even though Greek be not one of them), as well as the elements of mathematical and physical knowledge, and has then proceeded to study earnestly for two or three years such studies as (say) physiology, geology, and that cultivating and widening science of Palmontology which exercises in the highest degree both the judge- ment and the imagination by its attempt to restore for us the gene- ral features of the Stone age and the Bronze age of human society, is not a cultivated man in at least as good a sense as any which attaches to an ordinary Cambridge or Oxford or even London BA. of the present day. Yet this is the latent assumption on which such essays as that in the Quarterly Review are really built up.
So far from thinking that the University of London has degraded herself, as the reviewer maintains, by her recent step, we hold that it was a step taken exclusively in the interests of that more earnest and concentrative teaching and learning which the enormously wide diffusion of modern knowledge threatens with destruction ; and that if it tends to diminish the number of men who know the Greek alphabet and have once known how to conjugate a Greek verb, it will quite as powerfully tend to increase the number of men who, knowing this, know something also of the true genius of the Greek language and the Greek literature. The Tories may delight to fling the word " degraded " at the University which, from its first foundation, Tories have steadily disparaged. But hard words break no bones. And we believe the University has chosen a wise and a dignified course which will raise the literary character of her graduates, by acknowledging in good time that, the powers of the youthful mind being not unlimited, it is the part of true wisdom to encourage the learning of rnultuni rather than multa, and to bestow more honour on those men of science who have been well taught all the literature they have been taught at all, than on those who have compounded for a shallower knowledge of their other subjects by that mere dabbling in Greek which, to the ignorant, casts over an otherwise superficial school education some of the honorific shadow of a great name.
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