MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THE Master of the Rolls, as President of the Classical Associa- tion, delivered last week an address upon " Classics and the Social Revolution of our Time." Lord Greene foresaw that for many years to come the main energies of this country must be directed to the recapture of a material standard of life ; there would be few of the younger generation, therefore, who would have the leisure to acquire " the inestimable benefit of a full classical educa- tion." This was a lamentable reflection, since it was from the balanced education which the humanities provided that had grown " the fresh flower of British culture." It was not merely, Lord Greene contended, thlt a knowledge of the humanities gave us beauty and delight ; it was that ignorance of the humanities had a cramping effect upon the human intelligence. " It would be deplor- able," said Lord Greene, " if the ever-increasing army of boys and girls were sent out into life 'without a knowledge of what the humanities could give them. It would not be too much to expect that they should start life with the possibility of distinguishing a good book from a worthless one, and slovenly thinking from accuracy and precision, with some power to detect superfluity when they saw it and at least the habit of appreciating things of beauty." Education in the humanities, Lord Greene rightly said, does not end when school and university are left behind. The process con- tinues throughout life. But how, in a material world, are we to induce people to spend time and trouble on studies which can serve no material purpose? Lord Greene makes the original sug- gestion that if the classics are to survive they must conclude an offensive and defensive alliance with science. The scientist and the humanist, he said, had too long scowled one upon the other. They must now make friends. A race that thought only about science would " become as soulless and mechanical as the formulas that it invented and the engines it created ": a race which knew and cared for nothing but the humanities would " end its life in dreams or in some cloister of the mind." That, more or less,• is what Lord Greene is reported to have said ; and since he is a good and wise man, we should pay attention to his remarks.
* •* The arguments for and against Latin and Greek are apt to become infected with personal or subjective passions. The scholar, having devoted much of his life to acquiring a quite useless amount of learning, becomes enraged with those who deride, or deny the value of, the precious treasure which he has amassed with so much pains. The man or woman who has missed the opportunity of learning the classics will only rarely admit the merits of what he has lost. And the man who, in his boyhood, was too stupid or too lazy to progress beyond the grammatical rudiments of Greek and Latin, is apt to transfer to those dead languages the bitterness of what should be his self-reproach. I am not impressed by those who contend that if when at school they had devoted as many hours to the study of Russian as they did to that of Greek and Latin they would now be able to converse rapidly with the members of the Politburo. One knows very well that the boy who never advanced beyond Cornelius Nepos would not in fact have made much progress with Pushkin. These prejudices and affections do in fact blur the con- troversy : it is only rarely that a great scholar, such as Sir Richard Livingston; can write a dispassionate defence of classical education. Most people get cross before they even be 'n to argue. Nor am I ever certain that it is fair to identify "the humanities" with a knowledge of Greek and Latin ; an orientalist can surely claim that he also has studied the more human letters. And what bitter- ness is introduced into the argument by the intrusion of class sensi- tiveness and by the assumption that an acquaintance with Greek and Roman literature is in some mariner a badge and assurance of aristocracy!
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We are assured by some educationalists that the value of a classi- :al training is that it creates nimble and precise habits of thought. It is said by those who hold this view that the intricacy of the two dead languages, the actual complexity of their grammar, syntax, vocabulary and prosody, imposes upon the young mind habits of discipline and accuracy such as no other form of education can impose. I do not believe that argument. An equal effort of applica- tion, an equal discipine in precision, is provided by the study of Arabic, Chinese or Russian. It is argued also that, as our whole' civilisation derives from that of Greece and Rome, one cannot claim to be a civilised man unless one has access to the thoughts of the ancient philosophers and poets. Here again is an argument which seems to me fallacious. If it is merely for information that one is seeking, then one can derive that information equally well from any adequate translation of Thucydides or Plato. I have heard it con- ended also that no writer can hope to achieve the perfection of
le unless he has been steeped in the great masters of a forgotten literature.. Such an argument is absurd. It may be true that Milton, Shelley, Walter Pater and Lanaor had a profound humanistic culture ; but Shakespeare had small Latin and less Greek, Mr. Shaw is not erudite in the classics, and H. G. Wells knew no . dead languages at all. What modern writer could honestly contend that his style has been influenced by Tacitus or Petronius? I am not conscious that my own style, poor little thing, has been in any way moulded by the hours which I have devoted to Greek and Latin ; if it has any shape at all it has been shaped by the books I read when young, by Henty, Merriman and, above all, the French. No man could admire Homer more than I do ; but it is not Homer who affects my sentences ; it is Barres and Anatole France.
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I am not a classical scholar: it would be pretentious even to assert that I "have kept up my Greek and Latin" ; yet not .a day passes in which I do not read some Greek or Latin for at least half an hour. I retain enough of my former aptitudes to be able, when I read my crib, to refer to the original and to appreciate the actual words used. If asked for what purpose I indulge in this pastime, I reply, " For no purpose at all." If asked what I get out of it, I reply, " Pleasure." What is the nature of that pleasure? I am conscious of course of an element of satisfied vanity. It is not, I trust, an ostentatious form of vanity ; it is a quite private form. It pleases me to feel that all those years which I spent studying the dead languages at school and at the university have not been wasted, that they pay to me in. my later years a rich dividend of interest and delight. But there is much more to it than cultural vanity. It is not possible, for instance, to enjoy Homer unless one can catch the torrent rush of his music and the sparkle of his lovely words. A photograph, even a motion picture, of a waterfall is never the same as the thing itself ; one misses the changes and the roar. It is not possible again to appre- ciate the loveliness of the lyrics of Aristophanes, unless one can catch the change of tune and mark their contrast with his anapaests. I doubt even whether the beauty of Plato's style can ever be estimated from a translation ; one misses the vowel sounds and the small neat particles and the actual charm of the script. And how, in, any other form, can one thrill to the endless variations of stress in the Virgdian hexameter? No, this is no vain pleasure ; it is a wide warm world of music ; in a crib that music is lost ; one cannot translate the "Persian Odi" without losing the tune.
I believe that in our social democracy we shall succeed, once the present flurry has passed, in raising levels and not in depressing levels. It saddens me to feel that the pleasure that I, having had a luxury education, still derive from Greek and Latin should not be open to all those who like the sounds of words. When Lord Greene speaks of the inestimable benefit of a classical education, I know what he means. The arguments that classical studies have some material purpose, such as Swedish exercises, seem to me fallacious arguments. The purpose of a liberal education is that it should have no purpose. It provides us, in a world of engines, with an area in our minds which has nothing at all to do with things.
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