Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/133

Rh bound to live in the ark after the deluge had subsided." At present there is an abundance of good reading in the modern languages. If the choice were given us whether to give to the flames the entire English literature of the last three centuries, or all the writings of the Greeks and Romans, the classics would have to perish. If we superadd to the English authors the German, French, and Italian writers of the modern period, there can be no question as to the literary value of the aggregate of these treasures when compared with the literature of antiquity, collectively taken. A man who has studied Lessing, Goethe, and Kant, Pascal, Molière, and Sainte-Beuve, Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, and Wordsworth, with Luther's Bible or the authorized English version, can not be regarded as an uncultured person, even if he has never opened the covers of a Latin and Greek classic. Still less can he be thus stigmatized if he has acquainted himself with Homer and Thucydides, Tacitus and Horace, Plato and Cicero, through the medium of fairly good translations into the vernacular.

The sweeping assertion sometimes hazarded, that classical training is in all cases necessary for distinctively literary excellence—for perfection of style—is contradicted by too many facts. Every one who has read the pages of John Bunyan, or the speeches of John Bright, knows better. Johnson was much more of a classical scholar than Goldsmith, but Goldsmith's English is far better than Johnson's. Native genius and tact have too large an influence in this matter to admit of any such universal rule or test as the classical bigots would lay down.

It is a very narrow view which holds that there is only one method of education—one beaten track on which all must walk.

It is not all persons who aspire after an intellectual life who are to be recommended to spend their time upon Greek, or even upon Latin. There is no good reason why many young persons, who devote a series of years to mental training in schools and colleges, should not, in case their aptitudes and intended vocation so prompt them, dispense with Greek, and pursue, in the room of it, the natural and physical sciences, or the modern languages, or both.

These cautious concessions, though no doubt entirely candid, have evidently been extracted from the professor by the strain which has been recently put upon the classical question, for he recognizes that the movement which broke out at Harvard College under the impulse of Mr. Adams's address, and which is understood to be favored by the president of that institution, will probably result in a modification of the collegiate course, and that "in this case the example of Harvard is likely to be followed by a greater or less number of other colleges." But, while yielding these several points, Dr. Fisher is careful not to surrender the main classical position, which is, to maintain the prestige of Greek and Latin as the essential elements of a broad, liberal education. He here stands upon the old ground and plies the old arguments, the most important of which seems to us strikingly unsatisfactory. Dr. Fisher says:

Man as an object of study is here separated from nature, and the separation is held to be so complete as to give rise to two great divisions of study. These are independent of each other, may be separately pursued, and result in two distinct systems of education.