PROFESSOR WILKINS ON CLASSICAL STUDIES.
IT is pleasant in a world like that we see around us, in which all new things are so vulgar, and all vulgarities are so intensely modern, to read a lecture like that which Pro- fessor Wilkins has just delivered at Owens College in defence of the older learning. That learning is not, we fear, winning the day. The direct controversy between classical and scientific study has been less noisy of late, and_ the leading teachers cling to the accustomed, method, strong, if not in argument, at least in the depth of their convictions; but the innovating doctrine still wins ground. The advocates of scientific teaching press their claims more strongly, and with more of their characteristic air of contemptuous tolerance for all opponents. The old .schools announce almost universally that they have acceded to that singular compromise, the establishment of a "modern side ;" the new colleges flaunt their preference for science; and. in the teaching profession, we hear that heresy only ceases to be rampant because it has assumed something "of that high calm" which announces victory, and "to which all else is weak." The tone of the believers in classics grows almost apologetic, so much so that one of the greater Latinists of the day, a distinguished Professor himself, in telling us the result of a meeting of educationists, said the attack on Latin was so over-vigorous, that he "really could not help putting in a word in its defence." The old cause suffers, too, as it has done for years, from the prominence of men who, though without Shakespeare's other attainments, have, like him, "small Latin and less Greek ;" and from the rush of demo- cratic representatives, who, but from a lurking fear of offending their chief, would gladly declare that a feeling for classical learning was a sure sign of hostility to the People, which has "to work and suffer" without consolation from any classic lore. Mr. Gladstone has not yet denounced the study of Homer as clearly a vanity of the "classes ;" but we expect every day to hear him apologise for it as a privilege of old age, and to listen to furious orations from the lips of his followers on the folly of wasting life over the thoughts of men who had never travelled by railway, or been bewildered by electric telegrams. There will be a reaction, no doubt, when the wise, obeying their one bad impulse, an impulse begot by scorn out of pusillanimity, retire from their contest with the multitude ; but in the meantime it is pleasing for fogies to read a lecture like that of Professor Wilkins, a lecture delivered in the very citadel of the modern movement, with its hearty defence of classical knowledge. It is a little too eloquent, doubtless, in phrase, the speaker feeling that with so cold an audience he must make his phrases burn; but it rings with conviction in every line, glows from beginning to end with a fervour of affectionate admiration for the anti- quated knowledge. This man at least believes in Greek as Professor Huxley does in biology, or Mr. Ray Lankester in vivisection. He is no Abdiel, for as yet there are only murmurs, not rebellings, in the host of heaven; but if the secession comes, he will be ready for Abdiers part.
In reading Professor Wilkins's lecture, we are impressed once more with what has often struck us before, the difficulty the friends of the classics have in reducing their thoughts into the form of arguments. They are as perplexed by the opposition, as the scholar is who talks to "intelligent artisans" and finds that while they have powerful minds, history is to them simply a blank, broken by little points of light emanating from a child-time acquaintance with the story of the Jews. He is bewildered by the uselessness, in their ears, of illustrations which seem to him final He is as puzzled as an orthodox preacher when disbelievers call on him.,.as is frequently done, to prove his case without quoting Scripture at all. To those who love the classics, it seems as if without Greece and Rome man, had no history, human thought in all departments .ha.d no begin- nings or explanations of its own development, literature had at once no standardsand no variety, poetry and art had no evidence to offer that they could ever reach simultaneously the double perfection of form and of idea. Mr. Wilkins is, if he will pardon us, a little unfair in casting ridicule on those who believe in translations, by quoting perhaps the most pre- posterous passage in Pope's Thad, where the grand old Greek, who, blind or not, at least knew Nature, is made to utter the pompous folly of the following lines, of which he never thought one, and of which " Satan " Montgomery might have been ashamed :—
"As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, O'er heaven's pure azure spreads her sacred light, When not a breath disturbs the deep serene, And not a cloud o'ereasts the solemn scene, Around her .throne the vivid planets roll, And stars unnumbered gild the glowing pole, O'er the dark trees a yellower verdure shed, And tip with silver every mountain head : Thenahine the vales, the rocks in prospectrise ; A flood of ,glory bursts from all the sides : The conscious swains, rejoicing in the sight, Eye the blue vault, and. bless the useful light."
That is unfair, for translations need not be so bad as that, and it would be better to say that no notation can quite convey the full charm of music; bat to those who know them intimately, it seems as if the-specialty of the Greek, and in a less degree of the Latin writers—as witness Tacitus and Virgil, the historian who never used a word which did not weigh, and the "wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man"— is an absolute harmony of essence and form which can no more be reproduced in another tongue than it can be quite equalled by another race. They have reason for the faith that is in them, reason perhaps even stronger than that by which Mr. Wilkins would justify the paragraph in which he sums up
• his arguments for studying Greek,—arguments, we may add, which are probably not extended, in a varied form, to Latin, only because it is their author's life-business to teach and expound the latter :—
"Pour words above all others come home to the heart of civilised man : these four are beauty, freedom, truth, and good- ness. And it is literally accurate to say of three out of the four that the passion for them was first awakened in Greece. The Greeks were the first who, impelled by the love of beauty, never rested till, the rude and clumsy attempts to produce it, inherited by them from races who started earlier in the pathway of civilisation, were transformed into those ideal forms which have been the standard, rarely attained to and. never surpassed, among all succeeding generations. They were the first who, inspired by the love of freedom, cast off the yoke of despots and of 'oligarchs, and lived in communities, not of lawless anarchy, but of freemen, yielding a ready obedience to the laws to which they had given a voluntary and convinced allegiance. They were the first who, urged by a passion for reasoned truth, ventured to meet the traditions of the elders, or the dogmas of priesteraft, with a demand for the proofs which should justify and claim their faith. And, if in the region of goodness, intellectual curiosity at times proved too strong for the primary intuitions of the heart and allowed itself to tamper perilously with the springs of conduct, this was not wholly for evil. It was needful for moral progress that the foundations of righteousness should be tested, and that obedience to its laws should come no longer from the unreasoning docility of children, but from the deliberate convic- tions of intellectual manhood. It is true that, as M. Ronan puts it, there was one great Jack in the morality of Greece ; she despised the humble, and felt no. need of a God of justice,' to which he might have added, and the author of L'Abbesse de Jouarre' ought to have added, that she had no conception of a God of purer eyes than to look upon iniquity. But her service, even to religion, is not without importance in the history of its development. And for the rest, the story of the early struggles of man after beauty, and freedom, and truth, is to be learnt only in the literature of Greece."
But then, granting it all, and more—for we ourselves should not forget that in a bad age of a rotting civilisation, it was a Greek of Alexandria, probably a coward and possibly a scoundrel, who first made clear to his scholars absolute
geometrical truth—how are such convictions to be conveyed to those who know nothing of the evidence on which they rest? How convince even the most open-minded among them that Greek has for the mind a vitalising power, Latin a supreme though more commonplace utility, for which there are and can be no substitutes? Other literatures are as noble —take the German,—nearly as beautiful—take the Raglish,— and fuller of knowledge—take the French when French is serious,—but none like these invigorate the very springs of the mind, and act on its strength as some climates act on the strength of the diseased, or, better still, as some diets act on enfeebled childhood. We scarcely see the method of inspiring such conviction save through experience, and certainly should not try to inspire it, as Professor Wilkins once at least does, by slightly ecstatic encomium on a particular specimen of Greek poetic thought. It could not be adequately translated, and would be rejected by those who seek, not for an instance, but for a train of reasoning. We should be disposed much more to rely on that argument from authority which, let the century carp as it may, will never entirely lose its weight, on the mass of the evidence which has accumulated through the ages, 011 the fact that the greater the sculptor, or the archi-
tect, or the thinker, the more he appreciates Greek work, and on the argument of which Professor Wilkins fully feels the force, but on which, lecturing to students, he could hardly dwell at sufficient length. The most dominant and the leastsusoeptible class that ever appeared on earth, men with whom ruling was a faculty and conquest a satisfying delight, the Roman patricians, overthrew Greece in a campaign; and then, through all the centuries during which they lasted, were mastered by the intelligence of Greeks, and finally were content to reign for a few centuries more as Greeks themselves. Then once again Greece fell, fell finally, and as she fell, the shattered morsels of her thought were scattered—accidentally, we should say, but that there is no accident—over a Europe still half- barbarian; and as they fell, there arose from the mere contact with them a new world, and the iron-clad brutes of the Middle Ages became capable of development into the leaders of the modern world. What, it has been said, would Europe have been without Marathon ? What, we may add, would it have been without the fall of Constantine's city, that columbarium wherein was stored the ashes of dead Greek thought?
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