T HE Classical Association, founded in December last, held , its
first meeting last Saturday at Oxford. The choice of the meeting-place, or, rather, the fact that the University "organised a Committee to receive the Association at its chosen meeting-place, is significant, of course, in view of the fact that Oxford is still agitated by the question whether or not Greek shall continue to form a compulsory subject at "Responsions." For the Classical Association came into being, as its treasurer, Mr. J. W. Macke% explained in a charming speech, partly owing to a desire for better organisation, more scientific methods, and increased efficiency in dealing with the study of the classics ; but partly, also, owing to "an uneasiness which in some minds approached terror." The classics appeared before the world, " not, as once, candidate and crowned, but in a garb, an attitude of humility, almost of supplication." Three hundred years of education based on Greek and Latin Lad produced an anti-classical reaction, but that reaction, he believed, was being followed by another in favour of the classics. "The classics included certain specific things which were unique in the world, and without which human culture was, and always must be, incomplete." They would always come back to the classics, then, however far they ranged in trying to find -a substitute for them; but meanwhile the object of the Association should be to "quicken the spirit and renew the methods of classical education, and remove from it a dead weight of indolent tradition."
It is admirably expressed, and if the Classical Association can succeed in quickening the spirit of classical education, and getting rid of the "indolent tradition" which has pro- voked so much uninstructed remonstrance, it will be doing invaluable work. It is true that the protests against a system of education founded on the classics which have been made so often during the past few years have at times been indis- criminate, and have come frequently enough from those who, having little education of their own, have yet succeeded in life, and have concluded, therefore, that a classical education ' must be useless. But it is also true that the schoolmasters and the University Examiners have supplied the parents—both the utilitarian and the liberal-minded—with_ a very presentable ease against the classics. The utilitarian parent has asked the schoolmaster: "Of what use is Greek to my boy now; and what use will it ever be to him ? Look it me. -I was made to learn Greek ; I hated it ; I can't read a word of any- Greek author; Greek is of no use to me. Whereas German and French, which I picked up, in a few months by living abroad, are of inestimable value to me every day of ray life. 'Contrast the use of German and French to the business man with the use of Greek or Latin, and how can you go on drilling your pupils in these empty, obsolete, effete languages ? " To which question the schoolmaster has found it difficult to give a satisfying reply. He can only urge that the end aimed at by his educational methods is not immediately utilitarian ; it does not produce so many pounds, shillings, and pence as a visible reward directly obtained, by Study of the classics. Rather he claims that he has taught the boy how to learn; he has made it possible for him to "pick up" useful languages like French and German and Spanish with little effort and in a very short space of time; he has, in short, exercised and strengthened the delicate functions of the boy's mind by the best mental gymnastics possible. But, of course, that is not an answer completely satisfactory to the man who demands a quick return for the money he has spent on his son's education.
But it is not only the utilitarian who has in the past had cause of complaint against the schoolmaster and the University Examiner. The more liberal-minded parent would grant-that there is plenty to be said for the use of Mental gymnastics, even if they may be as immediately unproductive of money- earning capacity as Greek, and for that matter as some kinds of mathematics. • But be might with considerable justice urge that, in the case of Greek, for instance, almost everythinglas been sacrificed to the 'gymnastic exercise ; the Greek: spirit Las seldom been allowed to illumine the boy's mind. He has not been taken into the spacious realms of Greek poetry; into the life and action and glory of Homer, or the profound con- templation Of Plato; or the mighty tragedies of Aeschylus. Instead, he has been plagued by grammar-papers ; has been pestered with perpetual insistence on the vagaries of the verbs in pt; be has been aiked for genitive singulars and dative plurals instead of being shown the knightly splendour of .Glaucus and Sarpedon and Patroclus and Achill* 'be has been taught that the manliness and courage and piety'of h ) herqes are not half so. important as the particular meanings of 1171 and •zecpc2 and xar 02, conjoined with datives and accusa- tives and genitives ; he is severely examined in his knowledge of exceptions rather than in his knowledge of rules. The grammar-paper has been the end, not the means ; what wonder that so many boyish intellects have withered in the .dry, parching atmosphere surrounding the schoolmaster scholiast ? The wonder is, indeed, that' even a small per- centage carried away with them from school in the past so -much of the Greek spirit of honour and freedom.
But the frankly utilitarian and the liberal-minded alike ought to realise that methods of teaching the classics have greatly changed during the past generation. The grammar- paper still holds far, too important a place; but there are many schoolmasters who have come to see that it is not the best way of interesting a boy, either in the Greek language -Or r in Greek thought, to drag him through weary pages of Xenophon, marching so many parasangs before breakfast; or to insist that he shall write sesquipedalian essays on the -various forms of the conditional sentence. Much of this,they have realised, means that the schoolboy is asked .to listen to the chimera bombinans roam), and then to write papers criticising the grammatical particles heard in the buzz,—of all forms of mental exercise the most profitless. Instead, they. have seen clearly that it is possible to begin Greek as, in Mr. Andrew Lang's language, Ascham. and Rabelais began it, "by jumping into Greek and splashing about tall they learned to swim." To inculcate in the schoolmaster some such attitude as that towards the teaching of Greek is, we believe, one of the first objects which the Classical Association should try to attain; not of course, to abolish the grammar-paper altogether, but at least to dethrone it. And if it succeeded in dethroning the grammar-paper, the Association would incidentally throw an extremely valuable light on the question whether or not Greek should be re- tained as a compulsory subject for entrance examinations at the Universities. If the schools were allowed to spend less time on boring into grammars, and encouraged to read more widely and more quickly, they would develop what is at present lacking in the minds of the great majority of . schoolboy candidates for admission into the Universities.—a
• Majority would choose to -go on with it; mit that is, with s ,view to answering poky 'questions about nominative absolute's, -and ethic datives, and subjective complements, and all the rest • -of it, but because the story and the literature of Greece are a 'sermon and an illumination of men's lives for all time.
A word, in conclusion, on a .point that hat hardly yet 'received the attention it deserves, even from the modernising 'iconoclast. It is a point to whieh the Classical Association might well direct its attention if it is determined to get rid. Of the "indolent tradition" 'of the teaching Of classics. The teaching of Greek and Latin history at many pliblic schoels -is absurdly 'jejune' and insufficient. Dates and narnes are 'insisted upon ; general tendencies are ignored: A boy will 'readily' give you the years in Which half-a-dozen classical 'battles were fought,' With the names 'of 'the generals: on "either side, and yet be unable to franie any kind of 'an answer to a question asking him what the world of to=day owes to the great men Of Greece or Rome. No doubt the reason for that is clear, for dry bones are easily counted, and it takes a trained mind to appreciate the strength or the beauty of a -statue. But the training which insists: -first and foremost on the -accurate counting of dry bones is not the most valuable training- possible. Here, just as in the domain controlled for so long by the grammarian-enthusiastic -over "the enclitic de," the "indolent tradition" does only harm. To quote Mr. Lang once more, in the learning of history in this way "the boys. straggle along with Xenophon, knowing not whence or whither. One by one they fall out of the ranks; they mutiny against Xenophon; they murmur- . against that commander; they desert his flag." Why should they do so when he accompanied a march quite as interesting as Lord Kitchener's advance on Khartoum, about which they will read eagerly P The only answer can be that the teaching' has been wrchg,—a point, as we have suggested, which, among others, such bodies as the Classical Association might very . usefully consider.
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