Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/656

 The recent agitation in Cambridge, in Oxford, and indeed all over the country, for remitting the study of Greek as an essential of the Arts Degree, has led to a reproduction of the usual defenses of things as they are. The articles in the March number of this "Review," by Professors Blackie and Bonamy Price, may claim to be the derniers mots.

Professor Blackie's article is a warning to the teachers of classics, to the effect that they must change their front; that, whereas the value of the classics as a key to thought has diminished, and is diminishing, they must by all means in the first place improve their drill. In fact, unless something can be done to lessen the labor of the acquisition by better teaching, and to secure the much-vaunted intellectual discipline of the languages, the battle will soon be lost. Accordingly, the Professor goes minutely into what he conceives the best methods of teaching. It is not my purpose to follow him in this sufficiently interesting discussion. I simply remark that he is staking the case for the continuance of Latin and Greek in the schools on the possibility of something like an entire revolution in the teaching art. Revolution is not too strong a word for what is proposed. The weak part of the new position is that the value of the languages as languages has declined, and has to be made up by the incident of their value as drill. This is, to say the least, a paradoxical position for a language-teacher. If it is mere drill that is wanted, a very small corner of one language would suffice. The teacher and the pupil alike are placed between the two stools—interpretation and drill. A new generation of teachers must arise to attain the dexterity requisite for the task.

Professor Blackie's concession is of no small importance in the actual situation. "No one is to receive a full degree without showing a fair proficiency in two foreign languages, one ancient and one modern, with free option." This would satisfy the present demand everywhere, and for some time to come.

The article of Professor Bonamy Price is conceived in even a higher strain than the other. There is so far a method of argumentation in it that the case is laid out under four distinct heads, but there is no decisive separation of reasons; many of the things said under one head might easily be transferred without the sense of dislocation to any other head. The writer indulges in high-flown rhetorical assertions rather than in specific facts and arguments. The first merit of classics is that "they are languages; not particular sciences, nor definite branches of knowledge, but literatures." Under this head we have such glowing-sentences as these: "Think of the many elements of thought a boy comes in contact with when he reads Cæsar and Tacitus in succession, Herodotus and Homer, Thucydides and Aristotle!. . . See what is implied in having read Homer intelligently through, or Thucydides, or Demosthenes; what light will have been shed on the essence and laws of human existence, on political society, on the relations of man to man,