THE CLASSICS IN EDUCATION.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 19941, 30 May 1930, Page 11

THE CLASSICS IN EDUCATION.

NEGLECT BY MODERN UNIVERSITIES. DR. TEMPLE ON LIMITED VALUE OF SCIENCE, (raOH OT7B OWW COEHSSPOJTDINT.) LONDON, April 24. The annual meeting of the Classical Association is being held this vear in the University College of Hull, and last night the Archbishop of York, at a gathering in the Assembly Hall, delivered the presidential address, taking as his subject "The Distinctive Excellencies ol Greek and Lalin.'' The special need ot encouraging the studies ot Ureek and Latin, said Dr. i'emplo, seemed to nun so great that those who were in any way responsible lor commending the classics to this generation must do whatever they could to let them display beiore men's gaae the plenitude of their power and charm. He did not think that our present or traditional wav of handling them fully met this requirement. He did not refer to those sorry pedants who treated the text of the "Agamemnon" as if it were no more than a museum of manuscript readings, and suggested emendations. or read through the "Phaedo" with attention only to its syntax. Every one knew that Mich persons were poisoners of the wells of culture, vandals who would smash the Charioteer at Delphi to settle some question about the bronze that was used for making it. His criticism went deeper than that Was it not true that we tended to treat Latin and Greek iust alike? And did we not all realise that there was in fact a groat difference between themP We tended to obscure the distinctive excellence of each by applying to both a common method not specially adapted to the characteristics of either. Greece and Borne. Briefly stated, his contention was this:—Latin literature should be studied mainly with a view to understanding Roman history; Greek history should be studied mainlv with a view to understanding Greek literature. In other words: In the case of Rome, literature should be subordinate to history; in the case of Greece, history should be subordinate to literature.

The Greeks had influenced us, not by establishing a political structure of which we nad become the heirs, but bv educating the Romans, who did establish such a structure, and by the impact of their thought and feeling upon our minds through their artists in language, in stone, and in bronze. Ancient Rome built up an empire and cemented it together with a system of law which was to this day the foundation of social order in most of Western Europe. Tbe great ideas expressed in Roman literature were either borrowed from the Greeks, or else found another expression, more oonßtant in its influence, in the political and social structure which snbmittine indeed to profound modification in the course of centuries, had nroved as enduring as that literature itself.

- Individualism In Greece. The genius ot Greece was individual, not corporate. The phases of its history were oi importance cmeny for the setting which they provided tor individuals of gouius, on wiiose account alone we now took interest in the Confederacy of Delos or the Pelopounuaiun War. In the Persian Wars and in the Macedonian conquests great historic issues were at stake. But, in the mam, events in Greece derived their importance from individuals whom they iniiuenced, whereas the events of Roman history were themselves the focus of import. .The Gallic War was important to us chiefly because it established the sovereignty of Home in Gaul and laid the foundations ot modern France, not because Julius Csesar wrote an account of it; the I'eloponneaian War was important to us chieily because it provided subject matter for Thucydides.

When we turned from our treatment ol the histories to our treatment of the literatures the case for differentiation was still stronger. In Greek literature there was most conspicuously a Golden Age, which occupied about five generalions. In the century and three-quar-ters between the Persian wars and the death of Alexander all that wonderful efflorescence took place. Homer indeed stood apart, solitary, incomparable; even if that venerable name represented a whole bardic tradition rather than any individual poet, this remained true, for we were concerned with books, not persons, and, however they came into being, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" were there—twin peaks to which, in their sublime serenity, we looked across an interval of dark and uninviting spaces Homer apart, the works of imperishable and unequalled splendour were all produced within a little more than a century and a half. That period included the "Persse" of Aeschylus and the Odes of Pindar, the speech on "The Crown," and Aristotle's "Metaphysics." From that short period came almost the whole of the influence of Greece upon the world; almost, not quite the whole, for the continuity of Greek philosophy had an importance of the same kind as the continuity of Roman polity.

Latin Self-Consciousness. In Latin literature, also, we bad marked off a Golden Age; it was a very brief period indeed, from about 70 B.C. to A.D. 20. half the length of the great Greek period, and on investigation it turned out to be the period when Latin was, not most itself, but most successfully an imitation of Greek models. Ft was indeed a flowering time of the Roman race; the achievements were of the highest quality in all respects but one; yet that one was, in the- judgment of some of them, of such importance that lack of it was alone sufficient to prevent the attainment of the verv highest perfection He was one of those to whom Latin poetry meant, first and foremost not Virgil and Horace, but Lucretius nnd .Catullus. These seemed to him to reach the very topmost. heights of moments, the one in short passages, the other in short poems; in such brief compass spontaneity, and with it perfection, was attained. But this phase of Latin literature was deeply imitative and therefore lacking, as a general rale, in perfect spontaneity. It missed perfection through a certain self-consciousness. In Hie "Aeneid" there was the consciousness of the destiny of Rome. Not Aeneas, but the yet unborn Eternal City was the real hero of the poem. \nd this greatly damaged its poetic value.

Tacitus. The Augustan age was the supreme achievement of imitative artifice in human literature. But for that very reason it did not display Latin at its most characteristic. The author who first fully revealed the distinctive genius of Latin was Tacitus. He did with LatiD what only Latin could do. The pene trating terseness of Tacitus was an authentic instance of spontaneity. What his rhythmic principles might have been

Dr Temple did not know. But whereas Virgil, as an epic poet, was partly second-hand Homer, and Cicero, as an orator, was partly secondhand thenos, Tacitus was himself alone. And after his date Latin continued as the language belonging to thp social foundations of Europe. We should, in recognition of this, take our models of Latin style wherever in any period we found effective expression of thought or feeling, and ourselves try to write Latin, observing, indeed, the rules of its grammar and syntax, but otherwise making

our own style freely for ourselves. *or it was the language not primarily of a literature, but primarily of a civilisation; and that civilisation was our own. Greek Poetry. There was no poetry in Europe which had the freshness of grace, the childlike spontaneity, the completeness of self-oblivion in concentration on the ot>iect, which were characteristic of Greek poetry. All later poets were in greater or less degree sophisticated by the mem-->r\ of the Greeks. What art-critics called presentation as distinct from representation here received its perfect exemplification. There was no adornment for adornment's sake: there was no intrusion of the author's pernonal emotion: but there was a seizure and exposition of the eternally significant fact; and because significance was thus surely •seized and presented, perfect beauty was achieved. Scientific Curriculum.

The great feature of our period in educational development had been the arrival, and, for the moment at least, the establishment of an almost purely scientific curriculum for a large proportion of those who received any higher education at all. That we needed a development in this direction was certain. That we should welcome it and favour

it was in the true tradition of Platonism. But there was a balance to be ob served in the interest of the scientific outlook itself. The aim of a scientific education, so far as it was more than commercial, was to train up human beings who understood their environment and .were able to respond to it intelligently and to control or shape it for the general good. But the most important part of any human being's environment was spiritual, not physical; the most important of his relationships were those between himself and God, and those between himself and his neighbours. We were denizens of the solar system; we were also denizens of European civilisation in its English form. Except for those who were to be specialists in the study or application of the natural sciences, it was more important to know about European civilisation than to know about the solar system. Danger to Modern Universities. We had seen spring up a great number of secondary schools ana modern Universities in which the opportunities for social activity and corporate life were meagre, and itwas precisely in these that economicpressure was leading so many students to an almost exclusive concentration on scientific study. If Oxford, Cambridge, and the so-called public schools became predominantly scientific. while the other secondary schools and the modern Universities specialised in the humanities, said Dr. Temple; he would be very much less alarmed than he was t-ow at the educational trend of our country. But it was impossible to achieve such a reversal. What we must do was in all possible ways to increase the humanising elements in secondary schools and modern Universities by developing the opportunities for social life and corporate activity while by our example and testi-

mony we upheld the claim of the humanities—literature, history, philosophy—to a foremost place in education, and among these supremely the literature, history, and philosophy ot ancient Greece and Rome.

"To these reasons for attributing respectively to the philosophy, the history, and the literature of the ancient world a special superiority as disciplines of the modern mind." Dr. Temple concluded, ''must be added the reason common to all the three, that the civilisations of Greece and Rome, each along the line of its distinctive excellence, are, together with the religious influence that has its source in Palestine, the fountain-heads of European culture. The stocks from which the modern nations have sprung brought energies and traditions of their own; but thesf were raw material, like the shapeless block of marble before the sculptor endues it with form and significance. The influences that have given form and significance to our life are , the three that have been named; we mav eaten something of their spirit by merely snaring in the life they have helped to mould; hut we only understand that life when we ascend the stream of our civilisation to its source in the bright li<?ht and fresh breezes of the ancient hills."