THESE lectures, delivered in Boston at the invitation of the Curator of the Lowell Institute, in December and January, 1908-9, are now published owing to many requests both from those that heard them and from those that did not. They are an attempt to cover the whole field of Greek influence, not only in the various arts in which such influence is generally realised, but also in those departments of thinking in which moderns arrogate to themselves an unquestioned superiority. Yet it will be found, even in the following necessarily brief and popular sketch, that, as regards thinking, the Greeks were as supreme in science as in other departments, and, though they did not discover the powers of steam or electricity, they nevertheless carried out in mechanics works that no modern builder, with all his vaunted control of nature, has yet equalled, and so in other pursuits, not only Greek form, but Greek thought, has been the greatest and the clearest that the world has yet seen.

And yet I believed that the high honour in which Greek studies were long held had been exchanged for indifference, or even contempt, especially in America, where a hurried education planned for “practical life” was said to be taking the place of the old liberal education intended to breed gentlemen. But I found, during my actual visit to America, that I had been misled as to the completeness of this degradation of Greek. As is usual, the stranger begins by getting false impressions of the country he visits, and can only correct these gradually by detailed experience. There were many symptoms that public opinion in the States is by no means satisfied with the thought of an absolute reign of modern science, or of specialising education at the fancy of the ignorant youth or the more ignorant parent. Even employers in factories are beginning to find out, with that plain good sense which marks the solid core of American society, that young men who receive a liberal education are more intelligent and useful as tradesmen or mechanics than those who have mastered only one subject. The intellectual outlook tells even upon the handicraft of the apprentice.

There is therefore some prospect that the mistakes of the last generation (possibly due to the influence of Harvard and other universities) will be corrected, and that a proper college education will again replace the bread-and-butter studies in the earlier years of all good courses of training. If such a recovery of sound education takes place, it is impossible that Greek shall not resume its old importance. We now know far more of Hellenic work than did our fore-fathers. We can vindicate Greek studies in a manner wholly strange to them, had they ever thought a vindication called for. But, on the other hand, the teaching of Greek must be reformed. It must be made a human and lively study, taught like a modern language by dictation and recitation, as well as by written composition and reading of authors. In many English public schools, there has been a fashion not only of teaching the old languages as if they were indeed dead, but of spoiling the teaching of modern languages by copying this mistake. Much of the prejudice against the learning of Greek has been created by this blunder, and by its radiation into kindred studies. But this also I trust will be mended, and we shall have a more intelligent method of teaching all languages as living vehicles of human expression. Among these, the Greek is far the most perfect.

If this little book may help toward this great reformation, it will have amply succeeded in its purpose.

I must not send it out without thanking my many American friends for their sympathy and encouragement. During my visit, everybody seemed ready to hear what I had to say, and in some of the discussions which were the result, notably at Philadelphia, there seemed to be quite a body of opinion in my favour. Two observations are worth making here before I conclude: The American professors of Greek and Latin have exactly the same experience that we have in Ireland regarding the abandonment of Greek while professing to retain Latin. Neither there nor in Ireland have we failed to note the deterioration of Latin teaching, and the conviction grows upon us that a teacher who knows no Greek cannot be a Latin scholar in any real sense.

So much for the boasted retaining of Latin while sacrificing Greek.

The next observation concerns the now fashionable attending of courses in English Literature. In no case during my visit did I hear a literary conversation spring up among these students of English.

They have no doubt admirable professors in great numbers, specialists on every English poet and prose writer worth naming. But apparently poetry learnt without labour in the mother tongue is not assimilated or appreciated as is the poetry of classical languages, and from them the delight in literature as such spreads into kindred studies. Wherever I cited the poets, or indeed great prose such as the Bible, among the young people who had studied English as a subject for graduation, I found a strange ignorance of what ought to have been most familiar. I was almost driven to believe the paradox that without a classical education even the proper appreciation of English literature is unusual.

J. P. M.

On board S. S. Celtic, January 20, 1909.