ENGLISH AND THE 
 
 Dr. S. P. 
 
 There is a popular rumor abroad, 
 [which threatens to become an article 
 of faith, to the effect that the only 
 persons seriously concerned for the 
 future of Latin studies are the teach¬ 
 ers of Latin and certain amiable old 
 gentlemen who received their educa¬ 
 tion before Darwin announced the 
 Origin of Species. The prosperity of 
 this rumor is partly to be explained 
 by the fact that the believers in Latin 
 have too persistently stood upon the 
 defensive; so that to the eyes of an in- 
 discriminating and not over-interested 
 public they have appeared always to 
 be fighting for their own altars and 
 their own fires. They have demanded 
 on the one hand, a unique place in the 
 curriculum on the ground that Latin 
 literature possesses a unique and im¬ 
 mediate humanizing value. On the 
 oth^r hand, they have stood upon the 
 preeminent virtue of Latin as a formal 
 intellectual discipline. The objection 
 to entire dependence upon these two 
 positions is that they are exposed to 
 constant and violent assault; though 
 they may be impregnable, they are by 
 no means indisputable. As an agent 
 of culture, Latin has been obliged to 
 struggle for a foothold with jealous 
 rivals ranging from economic history 
 to nature-study and wood-carving. As 
 
 *A paper read at the Illinois Hig-h School 
 
 LATIN QUESTION* 
 
 Sherman 
 
 an agent of discipline, it has been hard 
 pressed by physics and mathematics. 
 And now comes the psychologist edu¬ 
 cator, and offers to cut that ground 
 from underfoot by denying assent to 
 the “dogma of formal discipline.” 
 
 It is possible at the present hour 
 that the Capitoline Hill may best be 
 defended by leaving it, and by join¬ 
 ing forces with the allies outside the 
 city; I mean, by ceasing for a time to 
 insist upon the independent value of 
 Latin, and by concentrating attention 
 upon its value in relation to other stud¬ 
 ies—particularly English. The strate¬ 
 gic advantage of the shift would rise 
 from the fact that English is now very 
 strongly intrenched in both second¬ 
 ary and college education. Further¬ 
 more, we are all—more or less delib¬ 
 erately—students of English; we all 
 recognize the value of accurately ex¬ 
 presing our ideas and of exactly un¬ 
 derstanding the ideas of others. Now, 
 though the notion has never dawned 
 upon that large, good-humored, unen¬ 
 lightened public opinion which indi¬ 
 rectly shapes our educational policies, 
 to the serious student of English some 
 acquaintance with Latin is not merely 
 convenient, not merely valuable, but 
 quite literally indispensable. At every 
 onward step toward the mastery of 
 Conference, Nov. 24, 1911. 
 
 REPRINTED FROM SCHOOE AND HOME EDUCATION FOR APRII, 1912. 
 
2 
 
 ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 his own language and literature he 
 must use his Latin lamp if he has one, 
 or stumble and go astray in the dark¬ 
 ness if he has not. In this position 
 the value of Latin is unique. To pro¬ 
 pose the equivalence of economic his¬ 
 tory or nature-study or wood-carving 
 or physics or mathematics is sheer im¬ 
 pertinence. The reasons why this is 
 so, impressively impinge upon one’s 
 consciousness only after one has been 
 dealing for some time with students 
 of English who have no Latin. I 
 speak not as a Roman citizen but as 
 a provincial ally, who sees that the 
 safety and perpetuity of our provincial 
 institutions is bound up with security 
 of Rome. 
 
 II. 
 
 We grant Latin readily enough to 
 grammarians and lexicographers, but 
 are rather reluctant to admit that it is 
 a key which should be in the hands 
 of every one who has occasion to open 
 an English dictionary. Yet we know 
 that the invasion of Latin words into 
 English speech began nearly 2,000 
 years ago, and has continued with un¬ 
 abated vigor ever since. It has been 
 estimated by competent investigators 
 that one fourth of the Latin vocabu¬ 
 lary has passed into English. 1 * Of 
 these Latin words a very large num¬ 
 ber have come in without change of 
 
 form, and some of them still retain 
 their original inflections. We must 
 give our students an inkling of Latin 
 grammar before we can expect them 
 to employ correctly such common 
 forms as data, strata, and the like. 
 Besides this group, we have an im¬ 
 mense host of naturalized foreigners 
 derived directly from the Latin and 
 indirectly through the Romance lan¬ 
 guages, In the Bible and Shakespeare 
 only 60 per cent of the vocabulary is 
 of native stock; in the poetry of Mil- 
 ton, only 33 per cent. 3 The great 
 bulk of the remainder is of Latin ori¬ 
 gin. The technical language of phil¬ 
 osophy, theology, law, and the sciences 
 —constantly growing and constantly 
 overflowing into the language of every¬ 
 day life — is mainly Latin. In the 
 time of Chaucer, French and Latin 
 were rival forces in the introduction 
 of new elements into our speech, but 
 since the Renaissance far the greater 
 number of the new coins have come 
 from the Roman treasury. In one 
 sense, then, Latin is even less a dead 
 language than English. It is the ele¬ 
 ment in our composite vocabularly 
 which has shown, as compared with 
 Anglo-Saxon, the more abundant pow¬ 
 ers of growth and reproduction. It is 
 almost as fairly to be called our father 
 as English is to be called our mother 
 tongue. 
 
 l - Greenough and Kittredge, Words and their Ways in English Speech, 1901; seep. 106. 
 
 *• Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, Ed. 4; See p 123. 
 
ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 3 
 
 But why attack this Latin element 
 in English by way of the Latin gram¬ 
 mar and the Latin lexicon? How 
 specifically does the study of Latin 
 facilitate the use of Latin words which 
 have become English? Well, three or 
 four years of Latin will acquaint the 
 student with the original force of most 
 * of the prefixes and suffixes, and so 
 guard him from sqme of the common¬ 
 est improprieties, and even, if he has 
 any instinct for these things, assist 
 him materially in the art and mystery 
 of English spelling. Furthermore, 
 his possession of merely the simplest 
 and most limited Latin vocabulary 
 will give him a great advantage over 
 a student without Latin in approach¬ 
 ing the apparently formidable Eng¬ 
 lish polysyllables. To the man without 
 Latin our sesquipedalian abstracts re¬ 
 main impenetrably abstract; to the 
 man with Latin they disintegrate into 
 their physical elements. To the one, 
 words like fratricide and matricide, 
 for examples, look strange, learned, 
 and difficult. To the other, who has 
 met frater, mater, and caedere in the 
 Latin lexicon, fratricide looks easy and 
 familiar—just as Bradermord looks 
 easy and familiar to a German. A 
 modest grasp of Latin, then, does in¬ 
 deed unlock the difficult words in Eng¬ 
 lish. And it helps not merely in ac¬ 
 quiring them but also in retaining them 
 and in employing them with assurance 
 and accuracy. This is no negligible 
 
 *Krapp, Modern English , 1909: See p. 282 
 
 consideration; nothing so obstinately 
 balks the progress of our English stu¬ 
 dents in reading and in writing as the 
 short tether at the end of which they 
 rotate around the English dictionary. 
 
 It is often urged that the meaning 
 of English words of Latin derivation 
 has so changed that a knowledge of 
 the roots is practically valueless—that 
 the meanings may better be learned 
 directly from English usage. This is * 
 a particularly pernicious error. In 
 this fashion our lighter-hearted jour¬ 
 nalists acquire their mother tongue. 
 This is the easy and rapid method for 
 the corruption of speech—the means 
 by which all fineness of shading and 
 nicety of application are lost. This 
 is why we find students and journal¬ 
 ists saying aggravate for irritate, stu¬ 
 pendous for immense, amazing for re¬ 
 markable, splendid for delicious, redo¬ 
 lent for full of, supine for prone, ar¬ 
 dent for energetic, optimistic for ami¬ 
 able ^ etc.—indefinitely. Coleridge de¬ 
 clared that the first thing to consider 
 in the choice of a word is its root; and 
 he was right. No writer or speaker 
 who ignores the roots of Latin deriva¬ 
 tives is secure from egregious error. 
 Some years ago the post office depart¬ 
 ment, for example, sent out directions 
 that all letters of a certain class 
 should be endorsed on the face of the 
 envelope.* The physical image buried 
 in these words is galvanized 
 into an awkward activity by 
 
 P 
 
4 
 
 ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 the grasp of an unskillful hand. Just 
 as truly, there is a sleeping beauty 
 in them ready to waken at the touch 
 of the prince of style. But there is 
 no prince of style in English who has 
 not given days and nights to the study 
 of Latin; and I do not believe there 
 ever will be. It is a condition imposed 
 upon us by the wealth of our word- 
 hoard. It is a burden and a privilege 
 committed to us by innumerable an¬ 
 cestors, which we must sustain under 
 peril of forfeiting our inheritance. 
 
 III. 
 
 When we pass from the considera¬ 
 tion of vocabulary and style to the 
 consideration of English literature in 
 general, the necessity of Latin becomes 
 even more obvious. Merely in pass¬ 
 ing, it may be recalled that for nearly 
 a thousand years Englishmen wrote 
 in Latin a very large body of their 
 history, their philosophy, their relig¬ 
 ious and their political thought. Every 
 one knows that in the Anglo-Saxon 
 and mediaeval periods Latin-trained 
 monks and churchmen were the Eng¬ 
 lish scholars, and that the works which 
 they thought worth preserving were 
 mainly addressed to the Latin-reading 
 world in the language qf that world. 
 It is not so generally remembered how 
 far down toward our own day poets 
 and prose writers continued to some 
 extent the serious use of Latin in orig¬ 
 inal composition. It is a good peni¬ 
 
 tential exercise for a modernist to run 
 over from time to time some of these 
 names: in Anglo-Saxon times, Bede 
 for church history, Anselm for the¬ 
 ology and philosophy; in the twelfth 
 century, Geoffrey of Monmouth for the 
 origins of Arthurian romance,—and a 
 whole troop of Latin chroniclers; Rog¬ 
 er Bacon for philosophy in the thir¬ 
 teenth century; Matthew Paris for 
 history; John Gower for poetry in the 
 age of Chaucer, Wycliff’s earlier writ¬ 
 ings for divinity; in the sixteenth cen¬ 
 tury, More’s “Utopia,” and poetry like 
 that of the great Scotch humanist, 
 George Buchanan, and Shakespeare’s 
 contemporary Thomas Campion; in 
 the seventeenth, the more serious scien¬ 
 tific work of Lord Bacon, a flood of 
 occasional verse, some of the prose 
 and poetry of Milton, poetical, politi¬ 
 cal, and philosophical works of Hob¬ 
 bes; and so it continues down toward 
 the end of the eighteenth century in 
 the Latin poems of Vincent Bourne 
 and Thomas Gray. It does not con¬ 
 cern the “man in the street” or even 
 the ordinary student to read this mat¬ 
 ter in Latin or, indeed, to read most 
 of it at all. It does concern the schol¬ 
 ar frequently. And in it are some of 
 the most interesting and the darkest 
 spots of our literary history. 
 
 Yet let the intrinsic value of this 
 great body of Anglo-Latin literature 
 be rated as low as one pleases, there 
 it lies behind us like a sunken Roman 
 
ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 5 
 
 wall stretching from our immediate 
 past across the wide tract of the mid¬ 
 dle ages to the uttermost borders and 
 beginnings of English thought — an 
 imperishable reminder of our intimate 
 and age-long alliance with that elder 
 culture and speech, under the shadow 
 and protection of which ( our own 
 speech and culture have developed. To> 
 itemize our indebtedness to that great 
 alliance is impossible. It is equally 
 impossible, moreover, to exaggerate it. 
 Though our English authors have now 
 at last ceased to entrust to Latin any 
 ideas which they wish the world to 
 consider, every great English writer 
 of prose or poetry from the time of 
 King Alfred to the time of Alfred 
 Tennyson has—almost without excep¬ 
 tion—been schooled in the Latin lan¬ 
 guage, has known well some of the 
 Latin masterpieces, and, consciously 
 or not, willingly or not, has written 
 under the influence, sometimes indis¬ 
 tinct, sometimes overmastering, of the 
 Latin models. 
 
 King Alfred tells us that upon a 
 time he fell awondering why in the 
 good old days when Latin learning 
 flourished in England none of the 
 scholars had bethought themselves of 
 turning anything into their own lan¬ 
 guage. “But straightway,” says the 
 old king, “I answered my thought in 
 this wise: They did not conceive that 
 men were ever to become so careless; 
 that learning was ever so to decline!” 
 
 In the dearth of the higher educa¬ 
 tion, however, the king hastens to give 
 his people the second-best, an English 
 translation of the “Pastoral Care/’ dis¬ 
 creetly following the Latin—“just as 
 I learned it from Plegmund my arch¬ 
 bishop, and from Asser my bishop, 
 and from Grimbold my mass-priest, 
 and from John my mass-priest.” And 
 so, following the humility of this well- 
 disciplined sovereign, all the Middle 
 Ages sit at the feet of ancient Rome, 
 great schoolmistress of the mediaeval 
 world. For Chaucer and his contem¬ 
 poraries, with all their freshness of 
 observation, literary composition still 
 consists in great measure in retelling 
 classical story, in retailing classical 
 thought. In the Renaissance, transla¬ 
 tion and imitation receive new impetus 
 from closer contact with the best mod¬ 
 els; and a whole generation of writers 
 tries to classicize English thought, and 
 style, and vocabulary, and even Eng¬ 
 lish prosody. In the seventeenth cen¬ 
 tury, religious poets are still plunder¬ 
 ing Ovid to express their love for God 
 and the Virgin, and a prose writer so 
 late as Sir Thomas Browne declares 
 that “if elegancy still proceedeth, and 
 English pens maintain that stream we 
 have of late observed to flow from 
 many, we shall within a few years be 
 fain to learn Latin to understand Eng¬ 
 lish, and a work will prove of equal 
 facility in either.” 1 Just as the sonor¬ 
 ous and golden prose of men like 
 
 Cited in the historical introduction to the International Dictionary , p. xxxiv. ( 1901 ). 
 
6 
 
 ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, Browne, 
 and Jeremy Taylor betrays the potent 
 spell of Cicero and the Roman elo¬ 
 quence, so typical eighteenth century 
 poetry acknowledges the sway of Hor¬ 
 ace; and his odes, epistles, and Ars 
 Poetica are edited, translated, parod¬ 
 ied, and imitated by hundreds—per¬ 
 haps by thousands. In the nineteenth 
 century the influence of Latin models 
 becomes possibly more diffuse but 
 scarcely less persistent. Cardinal New¬ 
 man, whom we recognize as a genuine 
 representative of classical English in 
 an age when Carlylese flourishes, has 
 undergone the discipline of all the Ro¬ 
 man prose masters, and can dis-‘ 
 course learnedly of their several quali¬ 
 ties. Tennyson professes himself a 
 lover of Virgil since his days began, 
 echoes ever and anon the “Lydian 
 laughter” of Catullus, or tunes his 
 graver harp to the solemn music of 
 Lucretius. The stylist Stevenson 
 studies Tacitus and reads his 
 Livy amid the tempest of the South 
 Pacific Sea. Nor does the story end 
 there. I have heard of an editor who 
 chastens his style for the morning’s 
 editorial by an hour before breakfast 
 with a Roman historian. Eugene 
 Field adapts Horace to the meridian 
 of Chicago. In a recent article we 
 ffiear of Mark Twain’s well-thumbed 
 copy of Suetonius, which he read till 
 his very last day; on page 492, “there 
 is a reference to ‘Flavius Clemens, a 
 
 man of wide repute for his want of 
 enebgy,’ opposite which Mark Twain 
 writes in the margin—‘I guess this is 
 where our line starts.’ ” Mark Twain’s 
 strong common sense does not fail him, 
 where many professional educators 
 stumble. Our line does start there, or 
 thereabouts! 
 
 Inevitably, therefore, the study of 
 the origin and development of literary 
 forms in English leads us back to Lat¬ 
 in. The English drama struggling 
 out of the Middle Ages remains crude 
 and half-articulate till it is reenforced 
 and inspired by contact with Seneca 
 and Terence and Plautus. Formal 
 English satire arises when Joseph Hall 
 and John Marston apprentice them¬ 
 selves to Juvenal and Martial and 
 Persius, The investigator of the 
 sources of English prose fiction cannot 
 neglect Petronius and Apuleius. Ba¬ 
 con, the essayist, points a significant 
 finger over the head of Montaigne to 
 the Roman moralists. As soon as 
 one begins to consider Spenser’s 
 eclogues, if not before, one must be¬ 
 gin to consider Virgil. Elizabethan, 
 Jacobean, and Caraline epigrammatic, 
 lyric, and elegiac verse perfects itself 
 in emulation of Ovid and Horace, of 
 Catullus and Propertius and Tibullus. 
 Ben Jonson’s critical theories develop 
 and crystallize under the influence of 
 Quintilian and Horace. English epic 
 attains speech and form divine in 
 “Paradise Lost” only after a great 
 
ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 7 
 
 classical scholar has spent a life time 
 in intimate companionship with Virgil 
 and Homer. English epistolography 
 is indebted to Cicero’s correspondence 
 with Atticus, and so late as the eight¬ 
 eenth century we find an English 
 s slave-trader, later to be known as the 
 eminent divine John Newton, enditing 
 love letters to his wife from the west 
 coast of Africa under the inspiration 
 of Pliny. Even the masters of pulpit 
 eloquence, those who developed the 
 English sermon, learn many of their 
 arts under pagan Roman rhetoricians. 
 And Burke, the most philosophical of 
 English orators, and one of the no¬ 
 blest of English statesmen, acknowl¬ 
 edges that he has formed his character 
 on the model of Cicero. 
 
 IV. 
 
 As a consequence of this situation 
 —of these facts of literary history— 
 the student of English literature is 
 continually confronted with definite 
 and important problems to the under¬ 
 standing of the terms of which ac¬ 
 quaintance with Latin is absolutely 
 ^ prerequisite. Let us set down a few 
 of these problems in rather concrete 
 form by way of illustration: 
 
 i. In the sixteenth century English 
 stylists are divided into two groups: 
 the vernacular party and the classical 
 party—a division which continues well 
 into the seventeenth century. What 
 are the specific issues? Unless the 
 
 student can recognize for .himself the 
 difference not merely between words 
 of Anglo-Saxon and words of Latin 
 origin but also the difference between, 
 say, the style of Cicero and the style 
 of John Bunyan, he cannot proceed 
 one step beyond the naked assertion 
 of text-book or teacher. Without Lat¬ 
 in, and Latin in the original, he can¬ 
 not realize the issues. 
 
 2. In the same period began a long 
 controversy about rhymed and rhyme- 
 less verse, and about the quantitative 
 and accentual verse systems. Unless 
 the student has at least scanned his 
 Virgil, it is vain labor to present the 
 matter to him. 
 
 3. Shakespeare, let us say, repre¬ 
 sents romantic comedy; Jonson con¬ 
 sciously opposes him with classical 
 comedy. What is the essential nature 
 of the opposition ? If your student 
 knows not at least a play or two of 
 Terence or Plautus, he cannot feel the 
 significance of Jonson’s appeal to the 
 authority of the ancients. Pie must 
 remain in the dark concerning the con¬ 
 flicting dramatic movements after 1600 
 —concerning the force of that pro¬ 
 found impulse which in the end pro¬ 
 duced Restoration comedy. 
 
 4. Even elementary text-books speak 
 of the classical school of seventeenth 
 century lyric poets. Why “classical?” 
 If your student has never read an 
 Horatian ode, an epigram of Catullus, 
 an elegy of Tibullus, if he cannot catch 
 
8 
 
 ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 the echoes of these elder singers, per¬ 
 ceive the likeness of spirit and form 
 in the songs of Ben and his “sons,” 
 in Herrick and Carew and Suckling— 
 this distinction becomes pedantic sound 
 and fury signifying nothing. 
 
 5. The age of Anne is commonly 
 ^called the Age of Classicism. Schol¬ 
 ars who know their Greek and Latin 
 classics prefer to call it the age of 
 pseudo-classicism. Once more, why 
 “pseudo 1”/ Obviously it is of the 
 highest importance to clear thinking 
 to be able to compare, if only on a 
 small scale, the literatures on which 
 that distinction is based. 
 
 If we are unable to deal with such 
 problems as these, we must abandon 
 all pretensions to critical study; we 
 cannot claim for the study of English 
 any high seriousness or philosophical 
 depth. If we neglect these problems, 
 we neglect everything that gives dis¬ 
 tinctive features and character to the 
 face of English literature. We can¬ 
 not pass over the Latin element, and 
 attend to the native element alone; be¬ 
 cause, to all mtents and purposes, the 
 native element never is alone. Eng¬ 
 lish literature is not composed of a 
 bundle of independent parallel forces; 
 it is the resultant of forces uniting at 
 many points and from many angles. 
 What makes it distinctive is not this 
 or that stream but the confluence of 
 many streams of influence — to 
 which Latin is almost always 
 
 a heavy contributor. English poe¬ 
 try in particular is a Euphorion 
 uniting the richest and most varied 
 ancestral strains—the novel and unex¬ 
 pected offspring of an Anglo-Saxon 
 mother by a Latin father descended 
 from a Greek, cradled by a Celtic god¬ 
 mother, nursed by a French aunt, edu¬ 
 cated by an Italian governor, and con¬ 
 verted by a Hebrew prophet. When 
 an English poet is writing as nearly 
 as possible in a pure native tradition, 
 he gives us something like the “Battle 
 of Maldon.” When Christian religious 
 culture is united to his native serious¬ 
 ness he gives us the “Piers Plowman.” 
 But when the whole mediaeval stream 
 with its freight of Greek and Roman 
 stories, popular superstitions, Celtic 
 folk-lore, French chivalry, and the rest 
 sweeps into the classical stream of the 
 Renaissance, then first our English 
 poet can give us the Elizabethan lyric, 
 the “Fairy Queen,” and the “Midsum¬ 
 mer Night’s Dream.” Consider for a 
 moment how the ends of the earth meet 
 and all times melt together in this ex¬ 
 change of views between Shakespeare’s 
 Titania and his Oberon.: 
 
 Titania: I know 
 
 When thou hast stolen away from fairy-land 
 And in the shape of Corin sat all day, 
 Playing on pipes of corn and versing love 
 To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here, 
 
 But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon, 
 Your buskin’d mistress and your warrior love, 
 To Theseus must be wedded, and you come 
 To give their bed joy and prosperity. 
 Oberon: How canst thou thus for shame, 
 Titania, 
 
 Glance at my credit with Hippolyta, 
 
 Knowing I know thy love to Theseus? 
 
ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 9 
 
 Didst thou not lead him through the glim¬ 
 mering night 
 
 From Perigenia, whom he ravished? 
 
 And make him with fair Aegle break his 
 faith. 
 
 With Ariadne and Antiopa? 
 
 This is not Greek nor Latin nor 
 Celtic nor Saxon; it is the full blown 
 flower of English poetry. But you 
 cannot inhale its bewildering frag¬ 
 rance unless you can remember in one 
 divine confusion the enchanted fields 
 of fairyland and the wide wilderness 
 of classical mythology. Is it not a 
 shame to cast such pearls before stud¬ 
 ents who have never read Ovid? 
 
 But the remorseless modernist roam¬ 
 ing up and down the jungles of edu¬ 
 cational theory does not hesitate to 
 declare that we have outgrown Shake¬ 
 speare as we have outgrown Latin. 
 There is this shadow of a dismal truth 
 in what he says: In proportion as we 
 forget and ignore the Latin classics 
 we shall find all our great elder writers 
 growing obsolete and inaccessible. To 
 the modernist this peril brings no dis¬ 
 may. “Who reads Shakespeare, any¬ 
 way?” he cries cheerily. “Let our 
 boys and girls have a poet of their own 
 time, interested in the ideas and emo¬ 
 tions that interest them. Let them 
 read Tennyson!” Of course, we can¬ 
 not retreat from Latin by that avenue. 
 Nor can we leave Latin behind, and 
 read with real intelligence any import¬ 
 ant English poet. For all great poe¬ 
 try, like the lost face of Leonardo’s 
 Monna Lisa, is haunted and subtleized 
 
 by memories, fixed or fleeting, of old 
 unhappy far-off things and battles long 
 ago. It is a hall echoing the voices 
 of forgotten singers, and tremulous 
 with the lights and shadows of all the 
 ages. It is but the magical arch 
 through which we peer into time’s 
 dark backward and abysm; if we are 
 not seeing through and beyond it, we 
 are not seeing it aik- all. “Why have 
 people ceased to care for poetry?” 
 runs the tedious refrain. Because— 
 if the question is a fair one—they 
 have ceased to understand it. Because 
 they cannot rise to the level on which 
 poetry has its being. They have ceased 
 to understand it, because, having neg¬ 
 lected the ancient classics, they have 
 lost their share in the common stock 
 of traditional thoughts, images, and 
 feelings in which formerly every edu¬ 
 cated man participated. Reading Eng¬ 
 lish poetry, therefore, no more can 
 yield them its legitimate pleasure and 
 reward by uniting them with the im¬ 
 passioned history of human experience 
 which it is the special function of 
 great poetry to preserve. 
 
 For the sake of the modernist, let 
 me illustrate what I mean with the aid 
 of a few lines from the “Passing of 
 Arthur”—the five quiet lines closing the 
 Idyls of the King. After the body of 
 the dying Arthur, borne in the en¬ 
 chanted barg'e with the three queens 
 of faerie, had drifted out to sea, Sir 
 Bedivere, last of the knights, climbed 
 
10 
 
 ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 the crag by the wintry mere, hoping 
 to catch one more glimpse of his sov¬ 
 ereign. When he had reached the 
 highest point, straining his eyes Sir 
 Bevidere saw, says Tennyson, 
 
 Or thought he saw, the speck that bare the 
 king 
 
 Down that long water opening on the deep 
 Somewhere far off, pass on and on, and go 
 From less to less and vanish into light. 
 
 And the new sun rose bringing the new year. 
 
 Now, what was Tennyson thinking 
 and feeling when he wrote that final 
 line— And the new sun rose bringing 
 the new yearf Out of what deeps of 
 memory and experience do those sim¬ 
 ple words rise into consciousness, and 
 break on the shores of light— digs in 
 luminis orasf What is the effect of 
 that line upon the duly prepared read¬ 
 er? What did Tennyson—classical 
 scholar, like all our English poets— 
 have a right to expect it to do? Well, 
 he had a right to expect that it would 
 link itself subtly but instantaneously 
 with the close of the second book of 
 the Aeneid— 
 
 Iamque iugis summae surgebat Lucifer Idae 
 ducebatque diem, Danaique obsessa tenebant 
 limina portarum, nec spes opis ulla dabatur: 
 cessi et sublato montes genitore petivi. 
 
 He had a right to expect that his echo 
 of this Virgilian music would trans¬ 
 port us for a moment to the ridges of 
 Mt. Ida after the desolation of the 
 Royal city of Priam; that with ex¬ 
 panded vision and sympathies we 
 should enter into the solemn reflections 
 of Aeneas looking before and after— 
 backward, over the burning towers of 
 
 Ilium and the pomp of Homeric times 
 into the world’s pale unhistoric morn¬ 
 ing—forward, down the long imper¬ 
 ial vista of Roman history melting in¬ 
 sensibly into the Dark Ages; that there 
 we should stand on another ridge with 
 another hero, mythical and symbolical 
 like the first—behind us, the dim Ar¬ 
 thurian realm receding vaguely into 
 the glimmering Celtic twilight—before 
 us, the distant and confused roar of 
 the “drums and tramplings of three 
 conquests,” the far .reaches of Eng¬ 
 lish history widening gradually and 
 brightening down to our own little 
 span of light and time; that, standing 
 here with these tidal memories stream¬ 
 ing through us, we, too, should feel 
 ourselves to be but myths and sym¬ 
 bols, momentary links between the 
 shadowy past and the new day; and 
 that so we, too, should become shar¬ 
 ers and communicants in the world’s 
 melancholy—the lacrimae rerum, and 
 the world’s hope—“the prophetic soul 
 of the wide world dreaming of things 
 to come.” 
 
 Thi$, I say, or something like this, 
 happens to the reader who is sufficient¬ 
 ly versed in the rudiments of general 
 culture to be prepared to understand 
 and enjoy English poetry. What hap¬ 
 pens to the reader who is not so pre¬ 
 pared, I cannot say; I suppose noth¬ 
 ing in particular happens. Till a 
 fairly recent date it has hardly been 
 necessary to raise the question. For 
 
ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 11 
 
 it may be said without much exagger¬ 
 ation that, till recent years, no one set¬ 
 ting up for an educated man would 
 have admitted without humiliation 
 that this passage failed to recall for 
 him the “glory that was Greece, the 
 grandeur that was Rome.” Reflect, 
 for example, on the significance of this 
 bit of advice from Lord Chesterfield, 
 that shrewd man of the world, to his 
 son on the study of the classics: “Pray 
 mind your Greek particularly; for 
 to know Greek very well is to 
 be really learned: there is no 
 great credit in knowing Latin, 
 for everybody knows it; and it is 
 only a shame not to know it” On 
 this point Samuel Johnson, who was 
 notoriously not a lover of the earl, 
 was wholly in accord with him. While 
 the Doctor and his biographer were 
 travelling one day by sculler to Green¬ 
 wich, Boswell inquired whether “he 
 really thought a knowledge of Greek 
 and Latin an essential requisite to a 
 good education.” To which Johnson 
 promptly replied: “Most certainly, 
 Sir; for those who know them have a 
 very great advantage over those who 
 do not. Nay, Sir, it is wonderful what 
 a difference learning makes upon peo¬ 
 ple even in the common intercourse of 
 life, which does not appear to be much 
 connected with it.” For the sake of 
 argument, Boswell continued to urge 
 that people can get through the world 
 and carry on their business success-, 
 
 fully without learning. Johnson con¬ 
 ceded that in some cases this might 
 be true—“for instance, this boy rows 
 us as well without learning, as if he 
 could sing the song of Orpheus to 
 the Argonauts, who were the first sail¬ 
 ors,” He then called to the boy, says 
 Boswell, “What would you give, my 
 lad, to know about the Argonauts?” 
 and the boy answered, “Sir, I would 
 give what I have”—a reply which was 
 rewarded with a double fare as an in¬ 
 dication that the lad’s sense for “edu¬ 
 cational values” was correct! If John¬ 
 son and Chesterfield should visit our 
 universities today, what would be their 
 comment on the position which Greek 
 and Latin hold in the curriculum? 
 Doubtless they would marvel together 
 on the multiplication of businesses, 
 other than sculling, which may be 
 prosecuted successfully “without learn¬ 
 ing.” Perhaps also they would agree 
 once more, and declare that it is eas¬ 
 ier now to pass for an educated man 
 than it ever was before in the world. 
 
 V. 
 
 I am confident that such would be 
 their verdict, if they considered the 
 results of a little experiment which I 
 have recently made upon some 400 uni¬ 
 versity freshmen and sophomores chos¬ 
 en at random from the colleges of lib¬ 
 eral arts, law, engineering, and agri¬ 
 culture. ' For the purposes of this pa¬ 
 per the results of this experiment may 
 
12 
 
 ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 be summarized briefly in the form of 
 “laws” as follows: 
 
 A. A student’s power over the Eng¬ 
 lish dictionary varies directly with the 
 number of years in which he has stud¬ 
 ied Latin. 
 
 B. A student’s acquaintance with the 
 commonplaces of classical allusion var¬ 
 ies directly with the number of years 
 in which he has studied Latin. 
 
 C. A student’s ability to read a page 
 of Shakespeare varies directly with the 
 number of years in which he has stud¬ 
 ied Latin. 
 
 Though I shall proceed to show 
 from what data these conclusions were 
 drawn, these “laws” are not to be read 
 with too solemn a face; regard them, 
 if you please, as convictions of the 
 author supported by a certain amount 
 of general observation and specific evi¬ 
 dence. 
 
 (i) For the test on vocabulary I 
 made a list of sixteen words of Latin 
 derivation, as follows: temporizing, 
 subservient, concatenation, concomi¬ 
 tant, decorum, exculpation, latent, mit¬ 
 igate, extenuate, plenipotentiary, ret¬ 
 rospective, taciturnity, matricide, 
 dormitory, incarnation, mortification. 
 (This is not a harder list than that 
 recently employed for testing jurymen 
 in Chicago.) I gave this list to 216 
 students, and asked them to define the 
 words in a simple way,—if possible, 
 with reference to the meanings of their 
 roots. When I had graded the papers, 
 
 I arranged them in five groups: writ¬ 
 ers in the first group had studied no 
 Latin; in the second group, one year; 
 in the third, two years; in the fourth, 
 three years; in the fifth, four years. 
 Those who had studied Latin four 
 years reached an average grade of 40 
 per cent; three years, 35 per cent; two 
 years, 29 per cent; one year, 23 per 
 cent; no Latin, 20 per cent. That is, 
 those who had four years of Latin 
 were twice as efficient as those who 
 had none; and the difference between 
 one and none was practically negligi¬ 
 ble. 
 
 The blunders were both numerous 
 and suggestive. They revealed with 
 remarkable plainness the nature of the 
 disastrous psychological accidents that 
 occur to those who pick up the mean¬ 
 ings of words from the context, and 
 do not examine the roots. The most 
 instructive illustrations are afforded 
 by the various definitions or synonyms 
 for incarnation. A foreign student re- 
 jpicing in the Christian name of a 
 Greek dramatist defines incarnation 
 as, “the way J. C. was born from the 
 Virgin Mary”—the context is obvious. 
 A second writes, “referring to animals 
 after death”—evidently a confusion 
 with reincarnation. A third, “filled 
 with badness”—perhaps suggested by 
 some such phrase as “the incarnation 
 of evil.” A fourth, “fierce, horrible” 
 —apparently related to “a fiend in¬ 
 carnate,” or “an incarnate devil.” A 
 
ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 13 
 
 fifth, “bloodshed”—associated with 
 “carnage.” A sixth, “the occasion on 
 which a king is crowned”—“corna- 
 tion.” A seventh, “the name of a cer¬ 
 tain occasion” (sic)—“cornation” as 
 before, but foggier. Four of these 
 students had studied Latin two years; 
 three of them, not at all. A little timely 
 etymologizing in a Latin course would 
 have saved them from several kinds of 
 error. As it is, they will probably go 
 forth into the world and poison the 
 wells of English till they die. 
 
 (2) To this same group of 216 stu¬ 
 dents I gave a list of names familiar 
 in Roman history, poetry, and myth¬ 
 ology, and asked for brief identifica¬ 
 tions: Plautus, Aeneas, Vulcan, Hor¬ 
 ace, Diana, Hector, Mercury, Cicero. 
 Virgil. I asked also for the approxi¬ 
 mate dates of Caesar, Hannibal, and 
 Virgil; for comment on the propriety 
 of certain words of Latin derivation 
 in English sentences—e. g., “The air 
 of spring is redolent with the song of 
 birds;” and for the analysis of an Eng¬ 
 lish sentence. Taking the paper as a 
 whole, including the test on vocabu¬ 
 lary, I obtained the following results: 
 
 Years of 
 
 Latin Study. 
 
 Grade. 
 
 Number 
 of Papers. 
 
 4 
 
 48% 
 
 21 
 
 3 
 
 39 % 
 
 29 
 
 2 
 
 33 % 
 
 45 
 
 1 
 
 24% 
 
 2 9 
 
 0 
 
 24% 
 
 
 To take a single instance of a classi¬ 
 cal author, 154 out of 216 students had 
 no idea whatever concerning Horace; 
 here are a few specimen guesses: “a 
 Greek historian,” “a fictional Greek,” 
 “a Greek god,” “a Greek orator,” “a 
 character of mythology.” That is val¬ 
 uable information. It means that to 
 a large majority of the miscellaneous 
 students in elementary English 
 courses, it is mere jargon to mention, 
 say, “the Horatian ideal”; it means 
 that I may as well speak of the jab- 
 berwockian attitude toward life as to 
 speak of the Horatian spirit of the 
 eighteenth century; it means that I am 
 merely adding one confusion to an¬ 
 other when I try to explain the move¬ 
 ment of seventeenth century poetry by 
 reference to the classical influence. The 
 distribution of those who had heard 
 of Horace in my five groups was as 
 follows : four years, 62% ; three years, 
 41%; two years, 31%; one year, 
 25% ; no Latin, 17%. 
 
 Of the 92 students who had no 
 Latin, one third, approximately, had 
 heard of Diana. One thirteenth, or 
 seven in all, could identify Aeneas. 
 Of Cicero, I learn that he was “a 
 Greek philosopher,” “a Greek general,” 
 “a great Grecian poet,” “the greatest 
 Grecian poet” — a character which 
 would .certainly have been grateful to 
 Cicero! Hector is described as “a 
 Grecian princess who was stolen by 
 the Troy prince, thus causing the war.” 
 
14 
 
 ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 Dido was “queen or king and went to 
 Africa,” Aeneas was a protean crea¬ 
 ture—“the lover of Virgil—lived 1000 
 B. C.,” “one of the goddesses in favor 
 of the Trojans,” “god of the winds,” 
 “goddess of the hearth.” Caesar, it ap¬ 
 pears, lived “500 A. BA; the writer 
 has studied no Latin, but knows at 
 least the value of an academic A. B. 
 A sophomore student of agriculture 1 
 without Latin writes : “Caesar lived 
 1200 B. C.; Hanibal, still earlier; Vir¬ 
 gil, no idea.” This man, to whom a 
 thousand years are as yesterday, can 
 define no one of my sixteen English 
 words. He knows none of the histor¬ 
 ical or mythological names. At the 
 foot of his paper he adds this post¬ 
 script: “If I had time, I should like 
 to study Latin, a knowledge of it would 
 be very handy in the sciences, but since 
 it is of no practical value I do not see 
 why it is studied by so many students.” 
 When I meet this student, I shall reas-I 
 sure him on this last point—-the num¬ 
 bers are not large enough to occasion 
 any great apprehension. 
 
 But what is the effect of this agri¬ 
 cultural attitude toward Latin upon 
 the student of English literature? Sim¬ 
 ply this: when you set him down be¬ 
 fore the “Fairy Queen” or “Paradise 
 Lost,” he discovers, or you discover, 
 that he is unable to study English. 
 Language, images, allusions, form— 
 all is as Hebrew to him. He must be¬ 
 gin, as Spenser and Milton began, by 
 
 studying Latin—but at a long remove 
 from the proper sources of informa¬ 
 tion. He cannot be reasoned with in 
 his state of innocence about the spe¬ 
 cial qualities of the versification, the 
 literary sources or affinities of the 
 poem, its representative character, its 
 rich and magical suggestiveness and 
 beauty. He cannot pluck the fruit of 
 the tree without climbing the trunk. 
 Pie must now at last open the pages 
 of some “Who’s Who?” in classical 
 mythology—breathlessly inquire who 
 Hector was? who Helen? who Dido? 
 who Aeneas?—cast a hurried glance 
 at Olympus, scrape a momentary and 
 undignified acquaintance with Jove— 
 and rush into class with the news. 
 
 But that is not studying English, 
 though, alas, it passes under that name 
 in too many of our class rooms. It 
 is not even tasting English. It is 
 merely making a futile attempt to con¬ 
 ceal one’s ignorance of the classics.. 
 For when a boy comes to the “Fairy 
 Queen” or to a play of Shakespeare 
 or to “Paradise Lost,” all these things 
 should lie in his mind as rich and splen¬ 
 did reminiscences. This post haste 
 culture of the eleventh hour is, more¬ 
 over, generally valueless. At the end 
 of the year, all that this boy will know 
 of the gods of the elder world could 
 be engraved in full on an English pen¬ 
 ny. 
 
 (3) I support this assertion in part 
 by the results of the second half of 
 
ENGLISH AND THE LATIN QUESTION. 
 
 15 
 
 my investigation. I had a page of the 
 “Merchant of Venice” typewritten and 
 distributed to 198 students. It was 
 the exquisite passage between Jessica 
 and Lorenzo in the first scene of the 
 fifth act, beginning: 
 
 The moon shines bright. In such a night as 
 this, 
 
 When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees 
 And they did make no noise—in such a night 
 Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls 
 And sigh’d his soul toward the Grecian tents 
 Where Cressi.d lay that night. 
 
 So it runs on, Jessica and Lorenzo cap¬ 
 ping reminiscences, and living over 
 again under the moonlight the passion¬ 
 ate moments of vanished lovers—Dido 
 and Aeneas, Pyramus and Thisbe, 
 Medea and Jason, The tritest eternal 
 commonplaces! — household words, 
 familiar in our mouths as the names 
 of Washington and Lincoln. I asked 
 each student to name the author, the 
 dates of his birth and death, and the 
 play from which the lines were taken; 
 to describe the meter; to explain the 
 allusions; and to comment on the lit¬ 
 erary quality of the selection. Some¬ 
 what to my surprise a very large per 
 cent placed' the passage, named the 
 author, dated him, and described the 
 metre correctly. But only a very few 
 of those who had studied Latin less 
 
 than three or four years could explain 
 any of the allusions. And only those 
 who could explain the allusio,ns could 
 say anything at all about the literary 
 quality. The scale of percentages for 
 my five groups ran on this test par¬ 
 allel with that on the first: 
 
 Years of 
 
 
 Number 
 
 Latin Study. 
 
 Grade. 
 
 of Papers. 
 
 4 
 
 40% 
 
 38 
 
 3 
 
 30% 
 
 34 
 
 2 
 
 24 °/o 
 
 43 
 
 1 
 
 1 7 % 
 
 42 
 
 0 
 
 17% 
 
 4 i 
 
 The 17% 
 
 earned by 
 
 the last two 
 
 groups represents mere memory work 
 applied to dates, verse-form, etc., and 
 indicates no understanding or appre¬ 
 ciation of the poetry, whatever. 'So 
 far as my figures have any value, they 
 tend to show that a man may as well 
 try to reach England without a boat 
 as to attain proficiency in English 
 without Latin. This conclusion is in 
 general confirmed by my daily experi¬ 
 ence in the classroom. If other teach¬ 
 ers of English do not assent, then we 
 probably differ as to the “values” 
 which should be realized in the study 
 of English. 
 
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