154 ON SCIENCE AND ART 



us to appreciate truth, and to profit by those sources of 

 innocent happiness which are open to us, and at the 

 same time, to avoid that which is bad, and coarse, and 

 ugly, and keep clear of the multitude of pitfalls and 

 dangers which beset those who break through the natural 

 or moral laws. 



I address myself, in this spirit, to 'the consideration of 

 the question of the value of purely literary education. 

 Is it good and sufficient, or is it insufficient and bad? 

 Well, here I venture to say that there are literary edu- 

 cations and literary educations. If I am to understand 

 by that term the education that was current in the great 

 majority of middle-class schools, and upper schools too, 

 in this country when I was a boy, and which consisted 

 absolutely and almost entirely in keeping boys for eight 

 or ten years at learning the rules of Latin and Greek 

 grammar, construing certain Latin and Greek authors, 

 and possibly making verses which, had they been Eng- 

 lish verses, would have been condemned as abominable 

 doggerel, if that is what you mean by literary edu- 

 cation, then I say it is scandalously insufficient and 

 almost worthless. My reason for saying so is not from 

 the point of view of science at all, but from the point 

 of view of literature. I say the thing professes to be 

 literary education that is not a literary education at 

 all. It was not literature at all that was taught, but 

 science in a very bad form. It is quite obvious that 

 grammar is science and not literature. The analysis of 

 a text by the help of the rules of grammar is just as 

 much a scientific operation as the analysis of a chemical 

 compound by the help of the rules of chemical analysis. 

 There is nothing that appeals to the aesthetic faculty in 

 that operation; and I ask multitudes of men of my own 

 age, who went through this process, whether they ever 

 had a conception of art or literature until they obtained 



