WHY TEACH MODERN LANGUAGES? 23 



The native language was a free land of artistic endeavor unhampered 

 by teaching. English literature was not taught in universities; no 

 credit was given for it; but the English poets were read far more 

 widely than under the present system with its fifty electives in drama 

 and other forms of English. What candidate for the degree of 

 Doctor in Philosophy comes to the examiners with that wide reading 

 in English, authors accomplished by Tennyson without credit at 

 Cambridge in England or by Phillips Brooks at Cambridge in Massa- 

 chusetts? In those days of leisure young men would take up an 

 author in Greek or in English and read him entire for the pleasure 

 of the thing, without credit. What student now reads authors 

 either in Greek or in English? The student exists to read notes 

 appended to brief extracts. 



If we take a long look over English writers we find that modern 

 languages were to them largely outside the curriculum; that these 

 subjects, like English, were among the play things; but that also like 

 the English they were not neglected. Our English writers of prose 

 and verse have looked to France, to Italy, to Spain for form, for 

 inspiration and often for matter. The mighty Teutonic race had a 

 crude art-form in alliterative verse of uncounted and unmeasured 

 syllables; it could have produced no Spenser, no Shakespeare, no 

 Shelley. From marriage with the new south — the south of Italy, 

 France and Spain — arose an unequaled prosody; the wealth of rhyme, 

 of assonance, of couplets, of stanzas; the pastoral, the sonnet, blank 

 verse; all the movement, the flow, the ornament, the sparkle, the 

 richness of poetic form from the rhymed pentameter of Chaucer, 

 through the mighty verse of Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton, to 

 the myriad melodies of our own day. The father of English poetry 

 with his Latin education was very fond of Ovid; in his first produc- 

 tive period he is a student of French matter, meter and modes; in 

 his second period he comes under the more imaginative sway of 

 Italy; and in his third period he is the great master of English. 

 Chaucer's art life is typical: the strict discipline of the classics, the 

 blossoming under sunny influences from the south and the final 

 vintage of English soul wine. 



