Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/163

 Small wonder that imposing facts contradict it. The Greeks themselves were acquainted with no foreign tongue. Did they know nothing of their own? They declined to seek culture in "self-alienation," as they might have done, by studying to think in the idioms and to give their thoughts the forms and words of the Pelasgians, Egyptians, Phœnicians, or Persians, although some of them, it is true, when already cultivated, picked up what they thought worth taking among the intellectual possessions of these people, as was sensible; but their own language was the exclusive instrument of their culture, as the study of it was their exclusive means of knowing it. The "special-culture study" of the Greeks was their mother-tongue; and the method that sufficed for them—which trained Homer, Socrates, Plato, Thucydides, Demosthenes—will suffice for us. It has sufficed for us. Shakespeare, the greatest master of expression that the race has produced, knew no tongue but his own; and from the solar splendor of this supreme instance the argument, as no English scholar need be told, shades downward through one radiant name after another in the firmament of our literature. And the method is vindicated by not less significant products in other tongues, as witness, notably, the Icelandic "Njála," a biographical work at once of surpassing excellence in style and of purely native culture. Witness, furthermore, the Chinese, who, though the Chinese language consists of upward of forty thousand characters, and is in other respects amazingly cumbrous, have made of their vernacular, by dint of studying it exclusively, and in spite of the pernicious extreme to which they have carried exclusiveness in other directions, an instrument of culture that turns out, in the department of affairs at all events, some of the most highly developed intellects of the time. Sir Frederick Bruce, who represented the British Government at Washington after having represented it at Peking, avowed when in this country that the ablest statesman he had ever met was a mandarin. The Chinese, by the way, make dwarf trees, of which they are very proud, by cutting off the tap-roots, and resting the mutilated ends against stones, thereby striking at the seat of vigorous growth; but, taking no pride in dwarf intellects, their plan of education goes on the opposite principle—the tap-root of the mother-tongue being carefully preserved, never cramped, and continually nourished, the upshot of which is that, while they keep dwarfs in their flower-pots, they have giants in their councils. The facts of which these are examples admit of no answer. They make short work of Goethe's aphorism, and its pretty offspring, the paradox of Harris, breaking down their letter, cutting up their spirit, and sweeping them away to a common limbo. Nor do they leave any solid ground in a course of English for the Anglo-Saxon and its Teutonic congeners. What knew Demosthenes, for instance, of the lineage and affinities of Greek? Before they were fixed he was dead, and, for that matter, Greek itself was dying, although Plato, Aristotle, and some others, to