OXFORD AND GREEK 633 



their teaching. Then, they had to square their Latin quotations 

 of Aristotle with the newly printed Greek original. Now, they 

 are afraid of having to- lecture on Aristotle in such a way as 

 to be intelligible to the Ruskin men who read him, as they 

 read Moses and Matthew and Marx, in the vernacular. Painful 

 and sad, that these things should be; but what a satire on a 

 place of " learning and education." 



Nor is the gulf between the Grecian and the modern 

 " Trojan " really filled by the discovery, which I think is a 

 real one, of another pair of contradictories — a small but growing 

 class of persons who though they have Greek and love it, 

 do not love it so well as to insist upon casting it like pearls 

 before swine ; and another, at present smaller class — but one 

 which I think grows even more rapidly — who, though they 

 have no Greek themselves and in great measure because they 

 have none, realise that those who have it have something better 

 than pearls and desire earnestly that others whom they know 

 to be better than swine should have opportunities — hitherto 

 withheld — of acquiring it. 



The Plaintiff's Evidence 



I have never met any one nor anybody who had heard of 

 any one who was really proficient in Greek or chemistry or 

 shorthand either and yet disliked the subject of his proficiency. 

 So I venture to assume forthwith that it is not " Greek " itself 

 to which people object but something in the process by which 

 proficiency in " Greek " is acquired : either the process itself or 

 (what really amounts to the same thing) some disproportion, 

 in their own experience, between the effort and the result. 

 People do not attack Greek-in-general as bad. What they 

 regret is the ill success of their own attempts at Greek ; and 

 the reason why they regret them is simply that these attempts 

 have failed. 



But in education there are two parties to failure, the taught 

 and the teacher ; and since, again, I have never met anybody 

 who knew of a man who had taught himself Greek and regretted 

 it, I take leave to assume as probable that when a man has 

 been taught Greek by some one else and has survived to regret 

 it, the blame is not to be put upon the learner only. I would 

 even go further and suggest that it is probably because there is 

 something the matter with our teaching of " Greek " that so 



