So much preliminary to the business before us, to meet changed conditions as practical men, with the reinforcement born of hope or with the strong resolution of despair.
For what does this Association stand? What are these classical interests that you represent? Take a familiar simile. By a very simple trick, you remember, did Empedocles give Menippus in the moon-halt—the first stage of his memorable trip—such long and clear vision that he saw the tribes of men like a nest of ants, a seething mass going to and fro at their different tasks. Of the function of the classical members in this myrmecic community there can be no question. Neither warriors, nor slaves, nor neuters, you live in a well-protected social environment, heretofore free from enemies, and have been well taken care of. I hate to speak of you as larvÆ, but as such you perform a duty of the greatest import in this trophidium stage of your existence. Let me explain. From earliest days much attention has been paid by naturalists to the incredible affection "—incredible st????," Swammerdam calls it—which ants display in feeding, licking, and attending the larvÆ. Disturb a nest, and the chief care is to take them to a place of safety. This attention is what our symphilic community—to use a biological term—bestows on you. So intensely altruistic, apparently, is this behaviour, that for the very word "st????," which expresses the tenderest of all feelings, there is a difficulty in finding an equivalent; indeed, Gilbert White used it almost as an English word. The truth is really very different.
It has been shown that the nursing function—or instinct—is really trophallactic. In the case of the ant the nurse places the larva on its back, and the broad ventral surface serves as a trough for the food, often predigested. The skill and devotion with which this is done are among the wonders in the life of the insect to which moralists have never tired of urging a visit. But listen to the sequel! The larva is provided with a pair of rich honey-bags in the shape of salivary glands, big exudatoria from which is discharged an ambrosia greedily lapped up by the nurse, who with this considers herself well paid for her care. In the same manner, when the assiduous V.A.D. wasp distributes food to the larvÆ, the heads of which eagerly protrude from their cells, she must be paid by a draught of nectar from their exudatoria, while if it is not forthcoming the wasp seizes the head of the larva in her mandibles and jams it back into its cell and compels it to pay up. The lazy males will play the same game and even steal the much-sought liquid without any compensatory gift of nourishment. [7]
What does the community at large, so careful of your comforts, expect from you? Surely the honey-dew and the milk of paradise secreted from your classical exudatoria, which we lap up greedily in recensions, monographs, commentaries, histories, translations, and brochures. Among academic larvÆ you have for centuries absorbed the almost undivided interest of the nest, and not without reason, for the very life of the workers depends on the hormones you secrete. Though small in number, your group has an enormous kinetic value, like our endocrine organs. For man's body, too, is a humming hive of working cells, each with its specific function, all under central control of the brain and heart, and all dependent on materials called hormones (secreted by small, even insignificant-looking structures) which lubricate the wheels of life. For example, remove the thyroid gland just below the Adam's apple, and you deprive man of the lubricants which enable his thought-engines to work—it is as if you cut off the oil-supply of a motor—and gradually the stored acquisitions of his mind cease to be available, and within a year he sinks into dementia. The normal processes of the skin cease, the hair falls, the features bloat, and the paragon of animals is transformed into a shapeless caricature of humanity. These essential lubricators, of which a number are now known, are called hormones—you will recognize from its derivation how appropriate is the term.
Now, the men of your guild secrete materials which do for society at large what the thyroid gland does for the individual. The Humanities are the hormones. Our friend Mr. P. S. Allen read before this Association a most suggestive paper on the historical evolution of the word "Humanism." I like to think of the pleasant-flavoured word as embracing all the knowledge of the ancient classical world—what man knew of nature as well as what he knew of himself. Let us see what this university means by the LiterÆ Humaniores. The "Greats" papers for the past decade make interesting study. With singular uniformity there is diversity enough to bear high tribute to the ingenuity of the examiners. But, comparing the subjects in 1918 with those in the first printed papers of the school in 1831, one is surprised to find them the same—practically no change in the eighty-seven years! Compare them, again, with the subjects given in John Napleton's "Considerations" in 1773—no change! and with the help of Rashdall we may trace the story of the studies in arts, only to find that as far back as 1267, with different names sometimes, they have been through all the centuries essentially the same—Greek and Latin authors, logic, rhetoric, grammar, and the philosophies, natural, moral, and metaphysical—practically the seven liberal arts for which, as you may see by the names over the doors, Bodley's building provided accommodation. Why this invariableness in an ever-turning world? One of the marvels, so commonplace that it has ceased to be marvellous, is the deep rooting of our civilization in the soil of Greece and Rome—much of our dogmatic religion, practically all the philosophies, the models of our literature, the ideals of our democratic freedom, the fine and the technical arts, the fundamentals of science, and the basis of our law. The Humanities bring the student into contact with the master minds who gave us these things—with the dead who never die, with those immortal lives "not of now nor of yesterday, but which always were."
As true to-day as in the fifth century B.C. the name of Hellas stands no longer for the name of a race, but as the name of knowledge; or, as more tersely put by Maine, "Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves [intellectually, he means] in this world that is not Greek in origin." Man's anabasis from the old priest-ridden civilizations of the East began when "the light of reason lighted up all things," with which saying Anaxagoras expressed our modern outlook on life.
The Humanities have been a subject of criticism in two directions. Their overwhelming prominence, it is claimed, prevents the development of learning in other and more useful directions; and the method of teaching is said to be antiquated and out of touch with the present needs. They control the academic life of Oxford. An analysis of the Register for 1919 shows that of the 257 men comprising the Heads and Fellows of the twenty-three colleges (including St. Edmund's Hall), only fifty-one are scientific, including the mathematicians.
It is not very polite, perhaps, to suggest that as transmitters and interpreters they should not bulk quite so large in a modern university. 'Twas all very well
in those happy days when it was felt that all knowledge had been garnered by those divine men of old time, that there was nothing left but to enjoy the good things harvested by such universal providers as Isidore, Rabanus Maurus, and Vincent of Beauvais, and those stronger dishes served by such artists as Albertus Magnus and St. Thomas Aquinas—delicious blends of such skill that only the palate of an Apicius could separate Greek, Patristic, and Arabian savours.
It is not the dominance, but the unequal dominance that is a cause of just complaint. As to methods of teaching—by their fruits ye shall know them. The product of "Greats" needs no description in this place. Many deny the art to find the mind's construction in the face, but surely not the possibility of diagnosing at a glance a "first in Greats"! Only in him is seen that altogether superior expression, that self-consciousness of having reached life's goal, of having, in that pickled sentence of Dean Gaisford's Christmas sermon, done something "that not only elevates above the common herd, but leads not unfrequently to positions of considerable emolument." "Many are the wand-bearers, few are the mystics," and a system should not be judged by the exceptions. As a discipline of the mind for the few, the system should not be touched, and we should be ready to sacrifice a holocaust of undergraduates every year to produce in each generation a scholar of the type of, say, Ingram Bywater. 'Tis Nature's method—does it not cost some thousands of eggs and fry to produce one salmon?
But the average man, not of scholar timber, may bring one railing accusation against his school and college. Apart from mental discipline, the value of the ancient languages is to give a key to their literatures. Yet we make boys and young men spend ten or more years on the study of Greek and Latin, at the end of which time the beauties of the languages are still hidden because of the pernicious method in which they are taught. It passes my understanding how the more excellent way of Montaigne, of Milton, and of Locke should have been neglected until recently. Make the language an instrument to play with and to play with thoroughly, and recognize that except for the few in "Mods." and "Greats" it is superfluous to know how the instrument is constructed, or to dissect the neuro-muscular mechanism by which it is played. It is satisfactory to read that the Greek Curriculum Committee thinks "it is possible in a comparatively short time to acquire a really valuable knowledge of Greek, and to learn to read with accuracy and fair fluency some of the most important works in Greek literature." I am sure of it, if the teacher will go to school to Montaigne and feed fat against that old scoundrel Protagoras a well-earned grudge for inventing grammar—pace Mr. Livingstone, every chapter in whose two books appeal to me, except those on grammar, against which I have a medullary prejudice. I speak, of course, as a fool among the wise, and I am not pleading for the "Greats" men, but for the average man, whom to infect with the spirit of the Humanities is the greatest single gift in education. To you of the elect this is pure camouflage—the amateur talking to the experts; but there is another side upon which I feel something may be said by one whose best friends have been the old Humanists, and whose breviary is Plutarch, or rather Plutarch gallicized by Montaigne. Paraphrasing Mark Twain's comment upon Christian Science, the so-called Humanists have not enough Science, and Science sadly lacks the Humanities. This unhappy divorce, which should never have taken place, has been officially recognized in the two reports edited by Sir Frederic Kenyon, [8] which have stirred the pool, and cannot but be helpful. To have got constructive, anabolic action from representatives of interests so diverse is most encouraging. While all agree that neither in the public schools nor in the older universities are the conditions at present in keeping with the urgent scientific needs of the nation, the specific is not to be sought in endowments alone, but in the leaven which may work a much-needed change in both branches of knowledge.
