Culture and Social Bounce

Dealing With the Classics as a Highroad to Success in Business

F. M. COLBY

TEE practical utility argument, for or against the study of Latin and Greek, seems to me to break down for the same reason that the German efficiency argument broke down during the war. That is to say, it does not take into consideration the imponderables.

From a good many articles setting forth to what extent Latin and Greek have helped or hindered the respective writers in their careers it would appear that the only test that they apply is that of contemporary social importance.

If I were to say, for example, that but for my firm grasp at the age of twelve on the exact difference between the gerund and the gerundive, I should not have risen to what I have risen to, it would not be accounted an argument for the classics, but rather as a warning against them. People would look me up and find that I had not risen to anything.

But if I should stand splendidly forth as president of the All-Columbian Amalgamated Boot and Shoe Concern and attribute my well-known organizing talent to the mastery at an early age of Xenophon's Anabasis, there would be instant cheering in the classical ranks; whereas if I said that had it not been for Xenophon's Anabasis, I should have got ahead much faster, should, in fact, have fairly whizzed along in the shoe business, shouts of triumph would at once ascend from the Modern School.

The "Practical Mart' Standard

THERE you have the sort of test that is regarded as really practical—what the classics actually did to some large, perfectly substantial and hard-headed shoe man. It is a test much valued in this debate.

It rests, I think, on an unwarranted assumption. It assumes that any influence was harmful if it delayed these not very interesting persons in blossoming into the sort of beings they afterwards become. From reading their articles it is impossible to discern the reason for their confidence. Each one implies that if he had had his way, he would have become the man he is much sooner. But how does he know that he did not become the man he is too soon ?

There is no argument whatever for a course of study in the mere fact that it has speeded miscellaneous successful persons along the way they went toward the places where you happen to find them, when so far as any sensible man can see, they might just as well be somewhere else.

Prove that the study of Latin and Greek so sapped a man's vitality that he lost five years in getting to the top of his gas company, and you have really proved nothing against it. Prove that the extraordinary mental energy acquired by the perusal of Mica, mica, parva stella in the original, shot him into the United States Senate at thirty-six and you have not said one word in its favor. This seems fairly obvious, but the contrary assumption underlies a vast area of educational printed matter on the subject—all based on a standard of momentary success without any regard even to its quality.

The Bernard Shaw System

OF course, these speed tests of education applied to public careers are unconvincing, simply because the larger part of life does not consist in publicly careering. And distrust of the usual middle-aged successful man on the subject of his own education is justified, because he is an instinctive partisan of his own success. It would be a cruel thing to entrust writers on education with their own education. If they had been brought up on their own writings many of them would never have pulled through.

Take, for instance, the illustrious case of Mr. Bernard Shaw. Mr. Shaw favored a system of education which began by abolishing almost everything and which would certainly have resulted in abolishing Mr. Shaw. It was a good, clean, consistent sweep of every tradition. It abolished homes, marriage, fathers, mothers, schools, rules, text-books, settled residence, settled convictions, moral, social and religious preconceptions or controls; it rid the child of family ties, personal affections, local customs and every other narrowing influence, and turned him out to roam and learn and so have a chance of free development; everybody's children to be brought up by everybody else, and thus escape the danger of spoiling and all to be kept in constant motion all over the British Isles lest they contract a local prejudice—each to be perfectly free in all respects except that he must not entertain a settled principle or meet a relative.

Now I do not criticize this system, nor do I deny that it may be just as sensible as the ideas of modern educational writers generally. But I do contend that if Mr. Shaw had been brought up under it the modem English and American stage would have lost its brightest light. He curses all restraints on his development. I am grateful to them, for I am quite sure they saved his life. A Shaw more Shavian than he actually became, would have been hanged at the age of twenty.

The Classics Not a Course for Raising Salaries

IT is not a matter that can be settled by the points at which persons happen to be perching in society at the present moment. The reading of Latin has no more to do with a man's climbing to a bank presidency than it has to do with his climbing a tree.

The classics are not and never have been chiefly valuable as the means of success. They are valued as the means of escaping its consequences. They are not nearly so much to be praised for getting one on in the modern world, as for getting one pleasantly out of it— that is to say for the exactly opposite reason to that which social statistics, psychological measurements of mental growth, testimony of engineers, educational specialists, chemists and bank directors always emphasize.

Men turn to the classics in the hope of meeting precisely the sort of people who would not write these articles on the classics. Men turn to the classics to escape from their contemporaries. Current arguments do not affect the central point, namely the wisdom of breaking with a tradition that has bound together the literatures of the world for twenty centuries and has vivified a large proportion of the greatest authors in our own.

But I do not believe that any muddle of present-day education policy can do any lasting damage. Suppose it goes from bad to worse. Suppose after ceasing to be required, the study of Latin and Greek ceases even to be admitted. Suppose this is followed by another plunge of progress that would dazzle even Mr. H. G. Wells and a mere parsing acquaintance with a Latin author is regarded as not merely frivolous, or eccentric, like foxtrotting or button-collecting, but as downright heinous, like beer-drinking in the teeth of a Prohibition gale.

Imagine even graver changes—imagine the era of scientific barbarism dawning in 1920, as the unscientific era of barbarism dawned in 476 and Soviets set up everywhere in America, and paper scarce as almost everything would be under Bolshevism, and Latin and Greek books turned again into palimpsests and obliterated and replaced with strange dark Bolsheyik texts presumably all written in the Yiddish language. Nevertheless, at the blackest moment of black Bolshevism they would still be read just as they were still read at the very darkest moment of the ages which we call dark.

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The Bolshevists could be no worse for them than were the German tribes. Here and there half-human Bolshevists would preserve a text just as here and there the less fanatical monks did, and there would be a vast deal of subterranean scholarship at work, all the keener on account of persecution. Probably Bolshevist suppression would do no more harm than the teaching of American Germanized college professors did during the last generation. In fact, it might actually be a great deal better if we were to persecute the classics than to teach them as we do.

Make the Classics Illegal

WHEN you read the notes in the usual school Virgil, simple illiteracy takes on a certain charm. Make Latin and Greek illegal, and caves in the mountains will gradually fill up with refugees bearing dictionaries— refugees from the great sprawling documentary modern novel, from modem philosophies gone stale in ten years, from new thoughts better expressed twenty-four hundred years ago, from the yearly splash of new poets swimming along in schools, from religions of good digestion, competitions for public astonishment, the shapeless solemnity of presidential messages and serious magazines, in short, from all the incoherency and formlessness of the tremendous opinions of the too familiar present moment which somehow for the life of him nobody can manage to remember the next moment.

It may not be a bad experiment. It will inevitably be followed by a renaissance.

When men of letters attack the classics because they themselves have not consciously benefited from them they are taking a very short view of letters. So far as they are good writers they arc themselves the product of the classics, whether they have read a word of them or not. Mr. H. G. Wells, I suppose, would deny indignantly that they had done anything to him but bore him and hold him back, and therefore he is quite sure that they are of no use on earth to anyone.

So far as his conscious experience goes this may be true. But what Mr. Wells believes to have happened to him in his lifetime is not nearly so important in determining Mr. Wells as a literary quantity as what actually did happen to English literature during many centuries before Mr. Wells was bom. For it is certain that Mr. Wells as a man of letters did not spring full-grown and fully armed out of the head of Herbert Spencer.

Attacking the Classics in Classic Vein

HE was born and raised in a literary milieu saturated with the classics for ages and if he has contrived to escape all contact with a Greek or Latin text-book he has nevertheless been hopelessly exposed. The antecedent conditions of English literature have had far more to do with Mr. Wells as a writer than all the geology, biology, sociology, and palaeontology he has ever consumed. He cannot shake off the consequences in one generation or two.

If he did not get the stimulus directly he got it second hand. The best books in his own language have conveyed it to him. He is the product, once removed, of the humanism he disowns, and when he attacks the classics, if he does so eloquently, it is the classics which are determining the style of his attack.

I mention Mr. Wells as the most conspicuous example of failure to take into account the imponderables. I believe that it is these imponderables which account in a large measure for anything in Mr. Wells that is likely to prove to be permanent.

I believe that so far as Mr. Wells or any other exceptional living writer is, in a permanent sense lively, he is in reality dancing to tunes played by persons for centuries dead.