E.— GEOGRAPHY. 115 



meanwhile the contradictory objection finds voice, that geography is (for 

 this or that reason) sO unsuited to school teaching that it is best postponed 

 till after leaving school. 



Here again let me begin with the thick end of the wedge, and insist 

 that while very considerable progress has been made in primary and 

 modern-side-secondary education, in the provision for geographical studies, 

 and even for their careful correlation with historical and literary courses, 

 it is in the schools with ' classical ' traditions, and a considerable ' classical 

 side ' at all events in their upper forms, that geographical teaching most 

 lags and is least organically connected with the humanities. 



A Retrospect and a Remedy. 



There are of course, here too, historical reasons for this, and on the 

 sound tactical principle of stimulating those with whom one disagrees 

 by explaining that they cannot be expected from their antecedents to 

 be other than they regrettably are, I propose to look in this direction for 

 excuses, and also for a remedy. In difficult country, if a man has taken 

 the wrong road it is safest to avoid short cuts, and bring him back to the 

 point where he went astray. The right road is often obvious to him then. 



In the early days of the Renascence the scholars themselves were 

 mainly of Mediterranean origin, or at least had made acquaintance with 

 Mediterranean conditions by pilgrimage to Italian libraries and lecture- 

 rooms. Moreover, as long as Venice and Genoa held the seas, even the 

 Levant was familiar to Western society at large, in a way which became 

 impossible for nearly three centuries, after the evacuation of Rhodes and 

 Famagusta. There was therefore little need for interpreters of the classics 

 to dwell on the physical surroundings of the ancient world, for in essentials 

 they were the same as their own. But when the centres of humanist 

 activity shifted beyond the Alps, and the Turk, in his decline, laid more 

 jealous hold on Greek lands, empirical knowledge of the Near East faded, 

 and classical weather, classical flowers and herbs, and still more those 

 classical customs and institutions, such as seasonal warfare, a national 

 outdoor drama, and democracy itself, which depended on Mediterranean 

 conditions for their realisation, passed, with much else that was incapable 

 of realisation on the Atlantic seaboard, from common knowledge into 

 academic oblivion. 



The same thing happened elsewhere. Troubadour songs from a land 

 where the hawthorn really blooms in May, and it is possible for outlaws 

 to disport themselves ' under the greenwood tree ' without the rheumatic 

 sequel of our Whit Monday, forged a link between flower and month 

 which centuries of the ' jocund spring ' of these islands have failed to 

 break. Or, to take a reverse instance, an occasion 



' When shepherds watched their flocks by night, 

 All seated on the ground,' 

 is still accepted by many as a credible description of Palestine in December. 

 What meaning, again, does the normal British citizen attach to that 

 graphic time-signal (II Samuel xi. 1) : ' And it came to pass, at the return 

 of the year, at the time when kings go out to battle '? — that is how that 

 evening is depicted when David first saw Bathsheba. The pendant picture 

 is Alcman's phrase about spring in early Greece ' when buds grow green 



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