Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/569

Rh about 1570 fully seventy per cent. of books published were in Latin. Those printed in the vernacular were for the most part of a popular character and considered by scholars beneath their notice. One hundred years later the number of Latin and German books issued from the press was about equal. But in fifty years from that date the proportion of the latter to the former was about as one to two. This effort to keep alive a language that no longer had its roots in contemporary thought required a prodigious amount of labor. Nevertheless, the books written by scholars for scholars thus obtained a wider currency than they would have had if any of the vernaculars had been employed. On the other hand, all works that were intended to be contributions to literature were failures. Petrarch wrote most of his books in Latin; yet they are virtually forgotten while his Italian sonnets are known to all students of his vernacular. Many of his contemporaries spent their time in equally fruitless labor. Dante knew better. Although he wrote Latin with ease, he realized that he could not express his inmost thoughts in an alien tongue. He seems to have been the first man of modern times to discern a truth that Macaulay has expressed in his essay on Frederick the Great: "No noble work of imagination, so far as we can recollect, was ever composed by any man, except in a dialect which he had learned without remembering when or how, and which he had spoken with perfect ease before he had analyzed its structure."

When we try to answer the question whether it is worth while to study a language which conveys little or no information that we can not get in our own we are confronted with a serious problem. We can not draw a hard and fast line between what is useful and what is useless, perhaps not even between what is more and what is less useful. Few persons will deny that the beautiful is also useful and that the esthetic taste is as well worth cultivating as any other of our mental powers. The fairest flowers produce no fruit. Music is absolutely of no value, while sculpture and painting in their higher aspects are equally so. The same affirmation may be made of architecture. No man has championed more vigorously and more eloquently the claims of esthetics than the high priest of utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill. He indignantly repudiates the charge that his system would exclude the cultivation of any art that makes life richer or more worth living than the pursuit of the narrowly practical. There is no room for doubt that a student whose native language is English, with an occasional exception, will get a more correct conception of Plato's philosophy, for example, from Jowett's translation and comments than from the original text. Some knowledge of Greek will be serviceable, but it is not essential. If it be answered that no man of scholarly tastes and scientific training will be satisfied with second-hand information, the patent answer is that if we knew nothing except what we have