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as much intensity do they worship the product of our present schools and colleges. 
The pedagogue is not alone in his false worship; this is the day of small men, 
commonplace men, men manufactured like so many buttons, so that it is almost 
impossible for a great man to appear; everybody is compelled by custom or 
by law to go to school, and the school ideal is just as false and mean and 
material as any false religion ever was. Every ciever man who has gone to 
a public school and to Oxford or Cambridge worships the system which has 
taken from him his spiritual birthright, his individuality, his initiative, 
his originality, his common sense, his power to think for himself—yes, and I 
may say his belief in himself. He has become too much like a sheep, ready 
to follow the bell-wether; he is a man who has greatly lost his soul. Average 
boys leaving a public school all speak in the same way, in the same words, 
about anything. They are nearly as much alike as things manufactured by the 
same machine. An expert easily tells from what school a boy has come, because 
there is nothing left in his mind which is not common to the whole school. 
The education given in England to boys till they leave school at twenty and 
till they graduate at a University is almost altogether classical: that is founded 
on the language and literature of Greece and Rome. On the day on which I wrote 
this there was a report of an address in 7'he Zimes which said that this study 
was the cause ‘of all imaginative aspirations, of all intellectual interests’; ‘ it 
enabled men to appreciate, not only Homer and Virgil, but equally Dante and 
Milton, Goethe, and Wordsworth, all the great thoughts of all ages and all lands, 
and to be awake to the movements of their own day.’ It said that this study 
made a man ‘a better man of business, a better lawyer, a better merchant, a better 
stockbroker, a less hidebound politician.’ ‘Those who would banish Greek or 
would make it the peculiar property of a select few did a grave disservice to the 
whole cause of intellectual and spiritual life.” The writer then described his own 
diligent reading in the train every morning; in the course of a few months he had 
read the ‘ Iliad,’ the ‘ Odyssey,’ the ‘ Aeneid,’ five books of Livy, and the whole of 
* Catullus’ and ‘Martial.’ It seems almost as if he must have all extant classical 
literature off by heart. He must have enormous satisfaction as he sits in the 
train looking at the quite common travellers who are reading about the affairs of 
the nation in English newspapers. I quote the above statements because they 
are typical. All our classical friends say that sort of thing. But I do not pay 
much attention to them, because I know that the greatest classical scholars only 
devote themselves to editing some Greek text that has been edited over and over 
again. ‘These men rave about the glory of youth and beauty as preached by the 
Greeks, but their enthusiasm is not shown in any practical way. We must 
believe that this enthusiasm exists, because these men tell us themselves that 
they experience it. But what is a fair man to say when he hears his friends talk 
of the beauties of Sophocles and Euripides if he knows that these friends never 
read Shakespeare, or Jane Austen, or Goldsmith, or Dickens? I have not 
referred to the fact that classical scholarship leads to power and wealth in the 
Church and State, to palaces and baronies, to purple and fine linen. Leaving 
such things out of account, I have a suspicion that this worship of classics is like 
one’s fondness for the rhymes, often rubbishy rhymes, that associate themselves 
with our infancy and boyhood, or like Johnson’s belief that his wife was amiable 
and beautiful. It is even possible that the very best scholar is of but little use 
to the world. It would be easy to show that, since the sixteenth century, the 
classical pedant has done little but to spoil the rich English language of our 
Bible. We want now a man like Bishop Pecock to delatinize our language. 
Let us, however, consider a boy of another class—the boy called clever, say, 
one in twenty of the whole. At the age of twenty or twenty-one, stale and 
tired with the reception of ancient learning, of other men’s thoughts, he gains 
a fine scholarship at the University, where he is supposed to be almost a free 
man, and all the use he can make of his freedom is to go on absorbing ancient 
learning, keeping his nose to the grindstone as if he were still a schoolboy. 
Treated as a boy from seventeen to twenty-one, he remains a boy till he is twenty- 
four, and he cannot help becoming a small-minded, though clever and learned, 
man, who fails to see that literature is no longer the possession of a small class. 
Yet if he had left school for the University at sixteen or seventeen we might hope 
that University freedom and association with others and with learned men 
might have made him great, a great poet, a man of cultivated imagination, fit 
1914. QQ 
