Part 4

§ 4. When I speak of the discovery of the ancient literatures as rivalling that of America, this use of the word “discovery” may be disputed. It may be urged that though the Greek language and literature were unknown in the West of Europe till they were brought there by the fugitives after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, yet the works of the great Latin writers had always been known in Italy, and Dante declares himself the disciple of Virgil. And yet I cannot give up the word “discovery.” In the life of an individual it sometimes happens that he suddenly acquires as it were a new sense. The world around him remains the same as before, but it is not the same to him. A film passes from his eyes, and what has been ordinary and unmeaning suddenly becomes a source of wonder and delight to him. Something similar happens at times in the history of the general mind; indeed our own century has seen a remarkable instance of it. In reading the thoughts of great writers of earlier times, we cannot but be struck, not only with their ignorance of the material world, but also with their ignorance of their ignorance. Little as they know, they often speak as if they knew everything. Newton could see that he was like a child discovering a few shells while the unexplored ocean lay before him; but in those days it required the intellect of a Newton to understand this. To the other children the ocean seemed to conceal nothing, and they innocently thought that all the shells, or nearly all, had been picked up. It was reserved for the people of our own century to become aware of the marvels which lie around us in the material world, and to be fascinated by the discovery. If the human race could live through several civilizations without opening its eyes to the wonders of the earth it inhabits, and then could suddenly become aware of them, we may well understand its retaining unheeded the literatures of Greece and Rome for centuries, and at length as it were discovering them, and turning to them with unbounded enthusiasm and delight.

As students of education we can hardly attach too much importance to this great revolution. For nearly three centuries the curriculum in the public schools of Europe remained what the Renascence had made it. We have again entered on an age of change, but we are still much influenced by the ideas of the Renascence, and the best way to understand the forces now at work is to trace them where possible to their origin. Let us then consider what the Renascence was, and how it affected the educational system.

§ 5. In endeavouring to understand the Renascence, we cannot do better than listen to what Mark Pattison says of it in his “Life of Casaubon”:—“In the fifteenth century was revealed to a world which had hitherto been trained to logical analysis, the beauty of literary form. The conception of style or finished expression had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric. It was not the despotic act of Justinian in closing the schools of Athens which had suppressed it. The sense of art in language decayed from the same general causes which had been fatal to all artistic perception. Banished from the Roman Empire in the sixth century or earlier, the classical conception of beauty of form re-entered the circle of ideas after near a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance. Cicero and Virgil, Livius and Ovid, had been there all along, but the idea of composite harmony on which their works were constructed was wanting. The restored conception, as if to recoup itself for its long suppression, took entire possession of the mind of Europe. The first period of the Renascence passed in adoration of the awakened beauty, and in efforts to copy and multiply it.”

§ 6. Here Mark Pattison speaks as if the conception of beauty of form belonged exclusively to the ancients and those who learnt of them. This seems to require some abatement. There are points in which mediæval art far excelled the art of the Renascence. The thirteenth century, as Archbishop Trench has said, was “rich in glorious creations of almost every kind;” and in that century our great English architect, Street, found the root of all that is best in modern art. (See “Dublin Afternoon Lectures,” 1868.)

But there are expressions of beauty to which the Greeks, and those who caught their spirit, were keenly alive, and to which the people of the Middle Age seem to have been blind. The first is beauty in the human form; the second is beauty in literature.

The old delight in beauty in the human form has never come back to us. Mr. Ruskin tells us we are an ugly race, with ill-shapen limbs, and well pleased with our ugliness and deformity, and in reply we only mutter something about the necessity of clothing both for warmth and decency. But as to the other expression of beauty, beauty in literature, the mind of Europe again became conscious of it in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The re-awakening of this sense of beauty we call the Renascence.

§ 7. Before we consider the effect of this intellectual revolution on education, let us be sure that we are not “paying ourselves with words,” and that we know exactly what we mean by “literature.”

When the conceptions of an individual mind are expressed in a permanent form of words, we get literature. The sum total of all the permanent forms of expression in one language make up the literature of that language; and if no one has given his conceptions a form which has been preserved, the language is without a literature. There are then two things essential to a literary work: first, the conceptions of an individual mind; second, a permanent form of expression. Hence it follows that the domain of literature is distinct from the domain of natural or mathematical science. Science does not give us the conceptions of an individual mind, but it tells us what every rational person who studies the subject must think. And science is entirely independent of any form of words: a proposition of Euclid is science; a sonnet of Wordsworth’s is literature. We learn from Euclid certain truths which we should have learnt from some one else if Euclid had never existed, and the propositions may be conveyed equally well in different forms of words and in any language. But a sonnet of Wordsworth’s conveys thought and feeling peculiar to the poet; and even if the same thought and feeling were conveyed to us in other words, we should lose at least half of what he has given us. Poetry is indeed only one kind of literature, but it is the highest kind; and what is true of literary works in verse, is true also in a measure of literary works in prose. So great is the difference between science and literature, that in literature, as the first Lord Lytton said, the best books are generally the oldest; in science they are the newest.

§ 8. At present we are concerned with literature only. There are two ways in which a work of literature may excite our admiration and affect our minds. These are, first, by the beauty of the conceptions it conveys to us; and second, by the beauty of the language in which it conveys them. In the greatest works the two excellences will be combined.[4]

Now the literary taste proper fastens especially on the second of the two, _i.e._, on beauty of expression; and the Renascence was the revival of literary taste. “It was,” as Mark Pattison says, “the conception of style or finished expression which had died out with the pagan schools of rhetoric, and which re-entered the circle of ideas after a thousand years of oblivion and abeyance.” If we lose sight of this, we shall be perplexed by the unbounded enthusiasm which we find in the sixteenth century for the old classics. What great evangel, we may ask, had Cicero and Virgil and Ovid, or even Plato and the Greek dramatists, for men who lived when Europe had experienced a thousand years of Christianity? The answer is simple. They had none whatever. Their thoughts and conceptions were not adapted to the wants of the new world. The civilization of the Christian nations of the sixteenth century was a very different thing from the civilization of Greece and Rome. It had its own thoughts, its own problems, its own wants. The old-world thoughts could not be thought over again by it. This indeed was felt though not admitted by the Renascence scholars themselves. Had it been the thoughts of the ancients which seemed to them so valuable they would have made some effort to diffuse those thoughts in the languages of the modern world. Much as a great literary work loses by translation, there may still be enough left of it to be a source of instruction and delight. The thoughts of Aristotle, conveyed in a Latin translation of an Arabic translation, profoundly affected the mind of Europe in the Middle Ages. The Bible, or Book _par excellence_, is known to few indeed in its original form. Some great writers—Cervantes, and Shakespeare, and the author of the “Arabian Nights”—please and instruct nations who know not the sound of the languages wherein their works are composed. If then the great writers of Greece and Rome had been valued for their matter, their works would have been translated by the Renascence scholars as the Bible was translated by the Reformers, and the history of modern education would have taken a very different turn from that which awaited it. But it was not so. The Renascence scholars did all they could to discourage translations. For the grand discovery which we call the Revival of Learning was, not that the ancients had something to say, but that whatever they had to say they knew how to say it.

§ 9. And thus it happens that in the period of change, when Europe was re-arranging its institutions, developing new ideas and settling into new grooves of habit, we find the men most influential in education entirely fascinated by beauty of expression, and this in two ancient languages, so that the one thing needful for the young seemed to them an introduction to the study of ancient writings. The inevitable consequence was this: education became a mere synonym for instruction in Latin and Greek. The only ideal set up for the “educated” was the classical scholar.

§ 10. Perhaps the absurdity of taking this ideal, an ideal which is obviously fitted for a small class of men only, and proposing it for general adoption, was partly concealed from the Renascence scholars by the peculiar circumstances of their age. No doubt they thought literature would in the future be a force capable of much wider application than it had ever been before. True, literature had till then affected a small class only. Literature meant books, books meant MSS., and MSS. were rare and costly. Literature, the embodiment of grand thoughts in grand words, had existed before letters, or at least without letters. The Homeric poems, for example, had been known to thousands who could not read or write. But beauty of expression naturally got associated and indeed confounded with the art by which it was preserved; so the creations of the mind, when embodied in particular combinations of words, acquired the name of literature or letters, and became almost exclusively the affair of those who had opportunities of study, opportunities afforded only to the few. During the Middle Ages every one who could read was allowed his “privilege of clergy;” that is, he was assumed to be a clergyman. Literature then was not thought of as a means of instruction. But at the very time that the beauty of the ancient writings dawned on the mind of Europe, a mechanical invention seemed to remove all hindrances to the spread of literature. The scholars seized on the printing press and thought by means of it to give all “the educated” a knowledge of classics.

§ 11. We cannot help speculating what would have been the effect of the discovery of printing if it had been made at another time. As there may be literature without books, so there may be books without literature. If at the time of the invention of printing there had been no literature, no creations of individual minds embodied in permanent forms of speech, books might have been used as apparatus in a mental gymnasium, or they might have been made the means of conveying information. But just then the intellect of Europe was tired of mental gymnastics. It had taken exercise in the Trivium like a squirrel in its revolving cage, and was vexed to find it made no progress.[5] As for information there was little to be had. The age of observation and of physical science was not yet. So the printing press was entirely at the service of the new passion for literature and the scholars dreamed of the general diffusion of literary culture by means of printed books.

§ 12. For some two centuries the literary spirit had supreme control over the intellect of Europe, and the literary spirit could then find satisfaction nowhere but in the study of the ancient classics. The natural consequence was that throughout this period the “educated man” was supposed to be identified with the classical scholar. The great rival of the literary spirit, the scientific spirit which cares for nothing but sequences independent of the human mind, began to show itself early in the seventeenth century: its first great champion was Francis Bacon. But by this time the school course of study had been settled, and two centuries had to elapse before the scientific spirit could unsettle it again. Even now when we speak of a man as “well-educated” we are commonly understood to mean that in his youth he was taught the two classical languages.

§ 13. The taking of the classical scholar as the only ideal of the educated man has been a fruitful source of evil in the history of education.

I. This ideal exalted the learner above the doer. As far back as Xenophon, we find a contest between the passive ideal and the active, between the excellence which depends on a knowledge of what others have thought and done and the excellence which comes of thinking and doing. But the excellence derived from learning had never been highly esteemed. To be able to repeat Homer’s poetry was regarded in Greece as we now regard a pleasing accomplishment; but the dignity of the learned man as such was not within the range of Greek ideas. Many of the Romans after they began to study Greek literature certainly piqued themselves on being good Greek scholars, and Cicero occasionally quotes with all the airs of a pedant; but so thoroughly was the contrary ideal, the ideal of the _doer_, established at Rome, that nobody ever dreamt of placing its rival above it. In the decline of the Empire, especially at Alexandria, we find for the first time honours paid to the learned man; but he was soon lost sight of again. At the Renascence he burst into sudden blaze, and it was then discovered that he was what every man would wish to be. Thus the Renascence scholars, notwithstanding their admiration of the great nations of antiquity, set up an ideal which those nations would heartily have despised. The schoolmaster very readily adopted this ideal; and schools have been places of learning, not training, ever since.

§ 14. II. The next defect I observe in the Renascence ideal is this: it attributes to literature more direct power over common life than literature has ever had, or is ever likely to have.

I say _direct_ power, for indirectly literature is one of the grand forces which act on all of us; but it acts on us through others, its most important function being to affect great intellects, the minds of those who think out and act out important changes. Its direct action on the mass of mankind is after all but insignificant. We have seen that literature consists in permanent forms of words, expressing the conceptions of individual minds; and these forms will be studied only by those who are interested in the conceptions or find pleasure in the mode in which they are expressed. Now the vast majority of ordinary people are without these inducements to literary study. They take a keen interest in everything connected with their relations and intimate friends, and a weaker interest in the thinkings and sayings and doings of every one else who is personally known to them; but as to the mental conceptions of those who lived in other times, or if now alive are not known even by sight, the ordinary person is profoundly indifferent to them; and of course delight in expression, as such, is out of the question. The natural consequence is that the habit of reading books is by no means common. Mark Pattison observes that there are few books to be found in most English middle-class homes, and he says: “The dearth of books is only the outward and visible sign of the mental torpor which reigns in those destitute regions” (see “Fortnightly Review,” November, 1877). I much doubt if he would have found more books in the middle-class homes of the Continent. There is only one kind of reading that is nearly universal—the reading of newspapers; and the newspaper lacks the element of permanence, and belongs to the domain of talk rather than of literature.

Even when we get among the so-called “educated,” we find that those who care for literature form a very small minority. The rest _have_ of course read Shakespeare and Milton and Walter Scott and Tennyson, but _they do not read them_. The lion’s share of our time and thoughts and interests must be given to our business or profession, whatever that may be; and in few instances is this connected with literature. For the rest, whatever time or thought a man can spare from his calling is mostly given to his family, or to society, or to some hobby which is not literature.

And love of literature is not shown in such reading as is common. The literary spirit shows itself, as I said, in appreciating beauty of expression, and how far beauty of expression is cared for we may estimate from the fact that few people think of reading anything a second time. The ordinary reader is profoundly indifferent about style, and will not take the trouble to understand ideas. He keeps to periodicals or light fiction, which enables the mind to loll in its easy chair (so to speak) and see pass before it a series of pleasing images. An idea, as Mark Pattison says, “is an excitant, comes from mind and calls forth mind; an image is a sedative;” and most people when they take up a book are seeking a sedative.

So literature is after all a very small force in the lives of most men, and perhaps even less in the lives of most women. Why then are the employments of the school-room arranged on the supposition that it is the grand force of all? The reason is, that we have inherited from the Renascence a false notion of the function of literature.

§ 15. III. I must now point out a fault in the Renascence ideal which is perhaps the most remarkable of all. Those by whom this ideal was set up were entirely possessed by an enthusiasm for literature, and they made the mistake of attributing to literature a share in general culture which literature seems incapable of taking. After this we could little have expected that the new ideal would exclude literature from the schoolroom, and yet so it has actually turned out.

As a literary creation contains the conceptions of an individual mind expressed in a permanent form of words, it exists only for those who can understand the words or at least the conceptions.

From this it follows that literature for the young must have its expression in the vernacular. The instances are rare indeed in which any one below the age of fifteen or sixteen (perhaps I might put the limit a year or two higher) understands any but the mother tongue. In the mother tongue indeed some forms of literature exercise a great influence over young minds. Ballad literature seems especially to belong to youth, the youth of nations and of individuals. Aristotle educated Alexander with Homer; and we can easily imagine the effect which the _Iliad_ must have had on the young Greeks. Although in the days of Plato instruction was not confined to literature, he gives this account of part of the training in the Athenian schools: “Placing the pupils on benches, the instructors make them read and learn by heart the poems of good poets in which are many moral lessons, many tales and eulogies and lays of the brave men of old; that the boys may imitate them with emulation and strive to become such themselves.” Here we see a very important function attributed to literature in the bringing up of the young; but the literature so used must obviously be in the language of the learners.

The influence of a literary work may, however, extend itself far beyond the limits of its own language. When our minds can receive and take pleasure in the conceptions of a great writer, he may speak to us by an interpreter. At the Renascence there were books in the world which might have affected the minds of the young—Plutarch, Herodotus, and above all Homer. But, as I have already said, it was not the conceptions, but the literary form of the ancients, which seemed to the Renascence scholars of such inestimable value, so they refused to give the conceptions in any but the original words. “Studying the ancients in translations,” says Melancthon, “is merely looking at the shadow.” He could not have made a greater mistake. As far as the young are concerned the truth is exactly the reverse. The translation would give the substance: the original can give nothing but the shadow. Let us take the experience of Mr. Kinglake, the author of “Eothen.” This distinguished Eton man, fired by his remembrances of Homer, visited the Troad. He had, as he tells us, “clasped the _Iliad_ line by line to his brain with reverence as well as love.” Well done, Eton! we are tempted to exclaim when we read this passage: here at least is proof that some _literature_ was taught in those days of the dominion of the classics. But stop! It seems that this clasping did not take place at Eton, but in happy days before Eton, when Kinglake knew no Greek and read translations. “Heroic days are these,” he writes, “but the Dark Ages of schoolboy life come closing over them. I suppose it’s all right in the end: yet, by Jove! at first sight it does seem a sad intellectual fall.... The dismal change is ordained and thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody) with small shreds and patches of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all your early lore; instead of sweet knowledge, vile monkish doggrel, grammars and graduses, dictionaries and lexicons, horrible odds and ends of dead languages are given you for your portion, and down you fall from Roman story to a three-inch scrap of ‘Scriptores Romani’—from Greek poetry down, down, to the cold rations of ‘Poetæ Græci,’ cut up by commentators and served out by schoolmasters!” (“Eothen,” the Troad.)