THE CLASSICS THAT EDUCATE US. 151 



Small wonder that imposing facts contradict it. The Greeks them- 

 selves were acquainted with no foreign tongue. Did they know no- 

 thing of their own ? They declined to seek culture in " self-aliena- 

 tion," 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, Phoenicians, 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 splen- 

 dor 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 Ice- 

 landic " Xjcila," a biographical work at once of surpassing excellence 

 in style and of purely native culture. Witness, furthermore, the Chi- 

 nese, 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 exclusive- 

 ness 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 Brit- 

 ish 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 vig- 

 orous growth ; but, taking no pride in dwarf intellects, their plan of 

 education goes on the opposite principle the tap-root of the moth- 

 er-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 



