6$6 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



Administered even in very small parcels, Greek literature, 

 like all great literatures, like Greek art and like all human 

 masterpieces, makes indeed its appeal to our common humanity. 

 But it gives its message in its own way. It has its own forms, 

 its own conventions and pre-suppositions, intimately correlated 

 with the social circumstances of its growth. To neglect these 

 and confront boys, brought up in what (for all our Hellenistic 

 varnish) is really quite a different kind of society, with the bare 

 elements of a language and a few short isolated bits (however 

 splendid) of a literature and no background at all, is like trying 

 to teach the art and the critical enjoyment of painting by lessons 

 in brushwork and three or four "set pictures" selected each 

 from a different Italian school ; or to teach chemistry by elemen- 

 tary glass-blowing and three or four " set elements " — say 

 carbon, iron, gold and phosphorus — selected likewise so as 

 to "cover the ground" and be as incoordinate with each other 

 as possible. The result could be foreseen, if experience counted 

 with dons. So miserable is the classical equipment of the 

 average undergraduate, in almost all departments of Greek 

 literature, thought and life — quite apart from the question how 

 far he takes interest spontaneously even in such " Greek " as 

 he knows — that I confess to a perennial surprise that he 

 acquires as much as he does even of mere " grammar and 

 language." The scrappy subject-matter of his " books " seems 

 to me so much mental rubbish. 



Now the reason both why he seems to the examiner to know 

 so much and why, outside narrow limits, he has yet really 

 learned so little, is that since " cram " is quicker for the pupil 

 and easier for the teacher than " education " of any sort, the 

 attempt of the older universities to " save Greek," by making it 

 compulsory in Responsions, enforced the substitution of cram 

 for teaching, as soon as the requirements of other public bodies 

 began to limit the time available for Greek at all. Exactly the 

 same disaster has befallen the preparatory schools for upper- 

 class boys, because until quite recently the great public schools 

 still exacted the same standard of Greek as it was natural to 

 require when hardly anything but Greek and Latin was being 

 taught to little boys at all. Admirable elementary grammars 

 are still printed and sold to little boys ; but at one school of my 

 acquaintance the boys are actually instructed to strike out the 

 explanatory matter in them, lest their attention should be dis- 



