Page:Essays on the Higher Education.djvu/135

 language, put on record so that the thoughts and feelings thus expressed can remain for other generations of thinking, feeling men to contemplate sympathetically and yet critically.

Language, then, is the only pass-key to literature; and to be a cultured student of language is the only possible way to possess the key which unlocks the treasure-house of literature. You will notice that I have used this important word in the singular number. I have not said that a liberal education includes of necessity the prolonged scholastic study of many languages, much less the glib-tongued use of many languages. It is undoubtedly a very convenient thing in these days to speak in several of the principal forms of human speech; it is even, if you please, a pretty accomplishment quite worth spending some years of time and some thousands of dollars upon. But it is not an essential, it is not even a very vital and impressive, part of a truly liberal education. The empty-headed hotel clerk, the boorish globetrotter, the frivolous boarding-school miss, may have this accomplishment of languages, and not have the first rudiments of a liberal culture in language.

When, then, I speak of the prolonged and scholastic study of language as an essential of a liberal education, I have reference to acquiring the science and art of interpretation and the cognate science and art of expression. For the