The Teaching of the Classics

In this murky state of the educational atmosphere Prof. Irving Babbitt's "Literature and the American College" (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.) comes like a stroke of clear lightning. If our classical instructors have been in any doubt as to the growing sense of rebellion among thoughtful men against their ostrich-like attitude, they may get the needed enlightenment from these pages. For cutting satire nothing equal to this arraignment has been produced since Lowell's day. The book was not written by a member of the classical faculty and its survey is by no means confined to the classics, but it deals with them as the fons et origo. And it not only sets forth the evil of the present system of instruction, but points the way constructively to a wholesome reform. Starting with a definition of humanism as a disciplined balance of all the faculties and a state of equipoise between religious absorption in the one and naturalistic surrender to the many, Professor Babbitt then contrasts with that ideal Bacon's scientific humanitarianism and Rousseau's sentimental humanitarianism, and shows how these between them have gradually taken possession of the field of education.

Now the value of the classics lies first of all in the fact that more than any other study they are able to create that desired equipoise of mind between the one and the many. But to attain that result they need for our present life to be presented in a new manner, and to this exigency the keepers of the classical tradition have hitherto shown themselves blind. The purely linguistic and archaelogical ransacking of antiquity should always, of course, in any rational system of education, be kept in the background, necessary as a preparation but dangerous as a goal. As Quintilian said long ago: "These studies do no harm to those who pass through them, but to those who stick to them." Formerly there was less danger in such pendantry than now because always there was present the feeling that the wisdom of the world was bound up in these ancient books, and in a thousand different ways there was a continual and unconscious application of ideas to the criticism of life. Izaak Walton, in his account of Sir Henry Wotton as Provost of Eton, gives a beautiful example of this influence:

He was a constant cherisher of all those youths in that school, in whom he found either a constant diligence or a genius that prompted them to learning; for whose encouragement he was (besides many other things of necessity and beauty) at the charge of setting up in it two rows of pillars, on which he caused to be choicely drawn the pictures of divers of the most famous Greek and Latin historians, poets, and orators; persuading them not to neglect rhetoric because Almighty God has left mankind affections to be wrought upon. And he would often say that none despised eloquence but such dull souls as were not capable of it. He would also often make choice of some observations out of those historians and poets; and would never leave the school without dropping some choice Greek or Latin apothegm or sentence, that might be worthy of room in the memory of a growing scholar.

This age may decay, and another may rise,
Before it is fully revealed to our eyes,
That Latin and Hebrew, Chaldaic and Greek, To the shades of oblivion must certainly sneak;
Too much of our time is employed on such trash
When we ought to be taught to accumulate cash.

For such a shifting in the educational center of gravity our classical faculties are in no wise, or to a small degree, responsible. But they are censurable for their failure to adapt themselves to the change. They have been thrust from their preeminence as wardens of the sacred and stationary truth; instead of laying hold upon the new aspect of truth, they have clung desperately and almost despicably to their linguistic gerund-grinding and their archeological pothunting--infinitely skilled

... To chase
A panting syllable through time and space.

It is thus, by the breadth of our view, that while engaged in the changing phenomenal world of present, which Plato called the many, we may preserve the due humanistic balance. Nor would our inborn craving for the unchangeable pass unsatisfied. If much of Greek thought is valuable for what has grown out of it, there are achievements also in which they remain unsurpassed, seemingly unsurpassable, and to have trained the mind to an appreciation of these achievements is to hold forever after a touchstone to distinguish between the higher and the lower pleasures. No later writer of narrative verse has equaled Homer; no dramatist has ever surpassed Sophocles; no lyric poet ever sang more entrancingly than Sappho; no sculptor rivaled Phidias; no philosopher looked so deeply into the human soul as Plato. The work of these men is still a norm of taste, and the full and sane measure of artistic joy can be known only by those whose emotions have been trained to respond to these models. And who would ever guess this truth while sitting in the classical room of an American college?

If you ask why our classical teachers have failed to grasp their opportunities, many answers could be given. Perhaps the chief cause is their enormous ignorance. There are, no doubt, honorable exceptions, but as a body it is simply the truth that they have no solid reading outside of their prescribed field, and are hence incapacitated for the larger historical survey of their subject and for conveying ideas of life through their instruction. In some cases this is due to laziness and intellectual ineptitude. More generally it is the result of a system of study which consumes all their strength over vicious or worthless philological monographs out of Germany; no man of ordinary capacity, for instance, can master the whole literature of the so-called Homeric question--most of it foolish or dishonest--and have time to follow the track of Homer in modern times. The classical men in our larger universities, who give the tone of these studies for the country, have been brought up under the philological system, and they perpetuate their kind, not only by their influence, but by the selection of their successors. The gist of the whole matter is briefly this: We want men in our universities to continue the great work of linguistic and archeologic investigation--against these in themselves there can be no proper complaint; they are indeed the basis of all the rest --but we must also have, if the classics are to remain alive, men not strictly philologians, who have a large philosophic and literary training, and by their wider view of the growth of ideas, can teach the classics so as to relate them to the great currents of history.