THE GREEK SPIRIT VERSUS GREEK GRAMMAR.

WE congratulate the Congregation at Oxford upon their wise decision not to make Greek a compulsory subject for Responsions, and we most devoutly trust that Convocation will not reverse the decision of the teaching body. If they do reverse this decision (i.e., if they insist upon a compulsory minimum of Greek), it will be done, we are sure, under a misapprehension and in an endeavour to preserve one of the most precious things in the world— the Greek spirit—an endeavour which we believe we can show will defeat its own end. Though very strong advo- cates of the abolition of compulsory Greek in the interests of Oxford and the true learning, and of the maintenance of the Greek spirit, we are not so ignorant or so prejudiced as to suppose that the able and scholarly men who take the opposite view do so, as is sometimes foolishly alleged, out of a worship of elementary Greek grammar or from a pedantic desire to maintain the cultus of the Enclitic at. We fully recognise, and in recognizing honour a high purpose, that the real desire of our opponents is to main- tain the influence of the Greek mind and to keep alive that anti-utilitarian inspiration which was the priceless contri- bution of the Hellenes. The Greeks taught us the love of beauty and the thirst for truth, and intellectual progress has always been linked with the soul of Greece. When the torches in the great race have been temporarily extinguished, they have always been relit at the Grecian altar. But realizing our debt to the Greeks as fully, nay, as passion- ately, as we do, and recognizing as we also do that the education worthy of the true citizen is not the accumu- lation of blocks of useful information, but the freeing of

nin,

the mind and the ope • of new and more windows on the fields of knowle g1 e, we ardently desire the abolition of compulsory Gree . We go even further than we have yet said in our agreement with our antagonists. We do not want to see Spanish, or French, or Italian, or any other modern tongue—not even Modern Greek—substituted for Ancient Greek in Responsions, especially as those who suggest this course appear to justify their proposal on the ground that these languages are useful. We do not want the young student at Oxford, especially at the beginning of his University career, to acquire especially which will be useful in later life," but rather to obtain that which will teach him how to learn and how to think, and which will perchance in a certain percentage of minds kindle the fire that thenceforth nothing will be able to extinguish, and create the ties which bind the intellectual freemen- of all the earth. We want Oxford to remain the place where, true to her motto, a divine illumination of the soul can be obtained, and not to become a place where men shall learn how to make synthetic butter, or to write a good business letter in Spanish or even Chinese. And in order to reach this ideal there can be no better road than the cultivation of the Greek spirit and keeping in touch with Greek history, Greek philosophy, and Greek poetry. But we hear the supporters of the minimum vote in Congregation declaring : " Then you are really with us, though you appear to have some pedantic ground for contradicting your own views and not working with your own friends t ' Not at all. Let us look at the matter practically. The opponents of freeing the undergraduate from the study of the Greek language in his first year at Oxford avowedly base their opposition on the ground that if people can go to Oxford without acquiring any knowledge of the Greek language, they will give up learning Greek at school. But if compulsory Greek disappears from the schools, then there will gradually follow that neglect of and indifference to the Greek spirit which we all dread. Our answer to this is that the fears suggested are per- fectly groundless. There is no more reason why Greek and the Greek spirit should be neglected because unfortunate little boys will no longer be made to study Greek grammar, and still more unfortunate masters grow grey in the effort to get rearm into their heads, than that the influence of Jewish religion and literature should disappear with the disappearance from general study of the Hebrew grammar. The tremendous influence exerted by Hebrew literature and the Hebrew spirit, though only a tiny band of scholars know the Hebrew language, is the answer- to those who say in effect that literature cannot live in translations, and that we must cease to be in touch with the Hellenic spirit or to be Phil-Hellenes at heart unless our wretched children, in wrestling with the Greek grammar, spend years which might more profitably be spent in learning something about the Greek spirit itself. Compulsory Greek, if we are sincere with ourselves and face the facts, means for the mass of boy-kind compulsory. Greek grammar, and this only too often involves the poisoning of the mind against the Hellenic spirit. That this is true can easily be put to the test by any one who likes to inquire of his Oxford and Cambridge friends between the ages of thirty-five and forty- five how far they imbibed the Hellenic spirit through the old fortifying Classical Curriculum of Responsions and Pass Mods. The present writer can take his own case. Thoughfond of literature per se. in the case of Greek he never emerged from the grammar state, and imbibed nothing but a profound dislike for a language which involved things so incomprehensible and so dull as Aorists and the rules for accentuation. The whole thing was an intellectual night- mare. He did not even feel with the impressionable and rhetorically minded Attila the certenninis pendia, the rapture of the strife with language, but only a brooding, deadening sense of dullness which poisoned for him the very look of the Greek script. Yet when in later years he began to read Greek in translations—Jowett's Plato, Jowett's Thucyclides, Dakyns's Xenophon, Butcher and Lang's Homer, and Gilbert Murray's Greek Tragedians, his mind soon caught fire and he could say truthfully :— " Ah, lift the lid a moment,

Ah, Dorian Shepherd, speak I Two souls shall flow together, The English and the Greek."

In a word, and not to make any mystery about it, he learnt to feel the glory of Grecian letters as practically every one has learnt to feel the glory of the Hebrew poets, to feel the story's heart beat against its side in Homer as he had already felt it in Isaiah, to learn the march of history in Thucydidee as he had learnt it in Judges, Chronicles, and Kings. Very possibly if a kinder fate had given him the instinct for languages and a little leisure, translations might have led him to grammar and the originals, but that there is no necessity for this can once more be shown by a reference to the Hebraic analogy. If the greatest of English poets, philosophers, lawgivers, and rulers have been perfectly content to know the story of the Jewish people through translations, surely we may be content to know that of the Greeks in the same way.

Let no one suppose for a moment that we underestimate the advantages of making men learn what is hard, disagreeable, nay, repellent. We thoroughly understand and appreciate the argument here, but we venture to sap that what we are going to propose as a substitute forRespon- sions can be, and in some senses ought to be, made quite as hard, formidable, and difficult a ditch, quickset hedge, or stone wall for the young horse's training as Greek grammar. We do not want to make learning easy, but we do want to make it inspiring, or at any rate not to make it lead.to the slamming of the door on the Greek spirit.

Now for a practical point. Why should not Convocation plainly and straightforwardly abandon the attitude whch we remember to have been amusingly set forth in an Oxford skit some thirty-five years ago, under the guise of a perora-

tion to a Para-Newdigate 1— "Thus when pale Oxbridge dreads her coming fate,

And Gaul and Teuton thunder at her gate, Her sons, all mindless of concession weak, Undaunted guard the minimum of Crook, Flaunting in face of spurious R.A.'s

Four books of Xenophon and two Greek playa

So may we tend 'gamst rude barbarian roar The holy relics of her ancient lore, And watch upon our mother's saddening face The deathless lustre of Hellenic grace."

What we want those who tend the Grecian flame to do is to substitute for their miserable "minimum of Greek "— i.e., their minimum of Greek grammar and a misunderstood specimen of Greek literature—a study by means of trans- lations, which will put men who have got any soul in them in touch with the Greek spirit and preserve in Oxford, as our poet has said, " the deathless lustre of Hellenic grace." We propose that this should be done by making compul- sory a preliminary study. of Greek Literature, Greek History, and Greek Philosophy for Responsions. In this study we would not dream of allowing text- books, however good, to stand between the man and the real authority. We would let the would-be undergraduate offer for Greek Poetry either the Iliad or the Odyssey of Homer, and two Greek plays, one of which might of course be by Aristophanes. In Philosophy we would make the four Socratic Dialogues essential, since no man who has never read them can be said to understand humane letters any more than he can be said to do so if he has never read Isaiah or the Book of Job. We do not forget, however, the division between Aristo- telians and Platonists, and would therefore add, though we would not make it compulsory, a choice between Aris- totle and the Pre-Socratics, hoping for ourselves that Heraclitus and Anaximander might usually " have it." In History we would make the choice between Herodotus's account of the Invasion of Xerxes and the 2nd,15th, and 7th Books of Thucydides, the books which contain Pericles's speech, the Mellon Controversy, and the Syracusan tragedy. Finally, in order not to make the learner suffer too pro- found a discouragement of heart through the despicable depravity of Greek social life and morals, we should like to see him given selections from the Memorabilia and the Economics, selections which would show that after all and in spite of everything it was possible for a Greek to be an officer and a gentleman, and not to regard his wife, his mother, and his daughters as something very little higher than the beasts that perish.

Of course we shall be told that such a series of studies for Passmen and Freshmen is ridiculous. Not a bit of it. The mass of boys would of course make acquaintance with most of the books at their schools, perhaps not always in translations but very often in the original Greek. In any case two great goods would have been accomplished. The youth's mind would have been set free—not from grammar, for grammar per se is a noble thing, but from grammar as it is taught at school and college, and would also have been brought happily into touch, as it now seldom is, with some of the greatest things in all literature. At the same time no man would be debarred from Oxford or from imbibing Greek History, Literature, and Philosophy because he did not happen to have a turn for languages. Finally, complete touch would be maintained with the Greek spirit. We should have taught men to remember the glory that was Greece, and that:

" There the blue sea gave them greeting when their triremes' conquering files

Swam superb with rhythmic oarage through the multitude of isles.

There they met the Mede and brake him, beat him to his slavish East ; Who was he, a guest unwished-for bursting on their freeman's feast ?

There the ancient celebration to the maiden queen of fight Led the long august procession upward to the pillared height.

. . . . .

There they sought the feet of Wisdom, pilgrims on a holy quest ; Ray by ray the sun of knowledge dawned upon the wakening West. Every thought of all their thinking swayed the world for good or ill,

Every pulse of all their life-blood beats across the ages still."

In the name of all that is good and beautiful, let us decide not to allow re...e and the verbs in at to prevent us feeling the full force of that divine pulsation.