Page:Dawn of the Day.pdf/225

Rh they did? Did we unceasingly practise dialects in rhetorical contests? Did we learn to move as beautifully and proudly as they, to wrestle, to throw, to box as they? Did we learn some of the practical asceticism of all Greek philosophers? Were we trained in a single antique virtue, in the way in which the ancients practised it? Was not all reflection on morals utterly neglected in our education?—how much more its only possible criticism, those carnest and courageous attempts at living according to this or that morality! Did they even stir up in us any feeling more highly valued by the ancients than by moderns? Dil they in an antique spirit disclose to in the divisions of clay and life and the goals higher than life? Did we learn the classical languages in the same way in which we learn those of living nations—for the purpose of speaking them fluently and well? Nowhere a real proficiency, genuine ability as the result of toilsome years! Only a knowledge of that which men men were proficient in an able to do in times of yore! And what knowledge! As years roll by one thing seems to become more and more evident to me that all Greek and antique nature, however simple and manifest it appears to our eyes, is very difficult to understand, nay, hardly accessible, and that the conditional ease with which we gabble of the ancients, is either a piece of levity or of the old hereditary conceit of our thoughtlessness. The resemblance of words and notions deceives us: but at the root of them