Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 346
In the matter of physiology, the knowledge of the human body (for people who are never to be students of medicine), I think I would go slow. I would be inclined to leave it out altogether. This is a heretical opinion, no doubt, and very different from the dogma, current since Huxley, that the wise child must know its own body. I doubt whether it is good for society that the ordinary plain man should know much of the details of how his body works. The man who has learned to think of his heart as a pump, with an intake in it as valves that get out of order, is on the way toward having a weak one. Better let him think of it as the seat of love and generosity, and it will beat away happily till it stops. Let him think of his stomach as where he puts his dinner, not as a fierce chemical furnace where acids are tearing up tissues and sending up exhaust gases like the back end of a tannery. Let him think of his bowels as the bowels of compassion, as gentle as the New Testament, and his blood as part of his lineage, not as the battleground of a myriad of good and evil corpuscles, some on his side and some dead set against him. Any man who has realized that he has in him about twenty-five feet of colon and semi-colon — a sort of string of sausages — can never think the same of himself again.
These little scraps of knowledge, you see, are of no practical use, and the mental effect of them is to turn the man, in his own eyes, from the vague image of God that he was to the dirty contraption full of mess that one year’s physiology makes of him. There he sits on his bench in the doctor’s consulting room, full of rumblings and inward visions. Cure him? You can’t. That’s just the trouble. Ask any of your medical friends. The man is all in the wrong frame of mind to be cured. To cure him you have to revert to that image of God which, to higher vision, turns out to be true after all, and which heals an ailment with a thought. This man can’t. He knows too much, or too little. His first-year physiology sends him to his death when a peasant or a sailor or a child, being still an image of God, would go on living.
It is easy for a student, as for anybody else, to learn the few simple laws of health — to come in out of the wet, not to eat more than he can pay for, to wear a hat in the sun and to sleep with his window open and his mouth shut. Public health, also — if you like, teach that in college, even to ordinary students. That sewers stink, phew! that mosquitos carry yellow fever; that people died of the Great Plague because of dirt, and that everybody needs fresh air every minute, indoors and out — all of this you can study and feel all the brighter and more wholesome for knowing it. But this, or as much of this as educated people need, a student, apart from a medical student, can learn in a few afternoon lectures as a listener-in, and stay convinced and be a clean, well-ventilated citizen ever afterward.
For physiology at large — as for certain other things that masquerade as sex-education and which I leave out of this book as not fit to go into it — I put in a plea for a snug corner of ignorance. But the topic is too large to treat here, and I leave it for a later opportunity.
CHAPTER III. WHAT GOOD IS LATIN?
THE VITAMINS OF education — Latin the mainstay of the technical study of language — Latin as ballast — Greek only for philologists and Apostles — Latin composition for business correspondence — Mediaeval versus stream-lined Latin — You can’t read Latin? Neither could the Romans
Our medical people of today talk much of vitamins. Just what they are I do not know, but they are subdivided and named, with the rich imaginative fancy of the scientist, Vitamin A, Vitamin B, and so on as discovered. These I understand enter into our diet and have a peculiar importance in it. If we are misguided enough to stop eating any one of these vitamins, it is all over with us. When I first learned this, I was inclined, if only for precaution’s sake, to give up bacon and eggs and roast beef and adopt an exclusive diet of vitamins as everywhere freely advertised at a price equal merely to what we have got. But I have since been told by an eminent medical authority that it would be very hard for an ordinary human being, fed in the ordinary way, to avoid eating all the vitamins that there are; in fact, he can’t help eating them. The good they do is so universal and so unobtrusive that for thousands of years it was never analyzed and specified.
Now, I regard Latin as one of the vitamins of education. If mathematics is Vitamin A, and reading and writing is Vitamin B, Latin can certainly get in somewhere not far down the alphabet. The study of Latin has in two thousand years so worked itself into the living tissue of our education that we only realize on reflection the peculiar part it plays. It gives us our first real consciousness of what language is. We discover that language is not, as it must seem to savages, “inevitable.” After its first twilight beginnings in onomatopoeia and muscular grunts, it becomes a mere convention between sound and significance. Readers of Mark Twain will recall how Huck Finn and Nigger Jim fell into a linguistic discussion as to whether or not it was believable that a Frenchman didn’t call a cow a “cow.” Jim easily proved to Huck that, if he knew it was a cow he’d have to call it so. The humour of the passage rests on the missing postulate as to what language is. Unconsciously students of elementary Latin acquire this new detachment from words. With it they begin to change from the servants to the masters of language. They can reset, remake it, and turn it to new use.
And here in the technical study of language, with a view to improving our mastery of our own, I find Latin of incomparable utility. It is sufficiently near and yet sufficiently far from our own idiom to turn translation into an art, involving a nice sense of language meaning and a nice ingenuity in handling language forms. To translate back and forward two kindred modern languages is of little linguistic value. It only occasionally involves translation in the higher sense. It is simply mere substitution. On the other hand, as between our languages and an agglutinative Asiatic speech, like Japanese, the distance is too great for the form of exercise of which I speak. I remember years and years ago in teaching elementary French in school asking a pupil how you say in French, “Give me some bread.” He answered, “You can’t say it; you have to say something else.” So it is with Japanese; you must get the idea, start over again, and “say something else.”
But with Latin the translator finds a phrase — let us take a simple one such as “Quae cum ita sint,” of which the meaning is clear and the single words ridiculous — for our use. He beats about the bush until he finds at quite a distance in a different thicket such a phrase as “This being the case.” Anyone not capable of a glow of intellectual pleasure at such an achievement is not fit to study language.
Words, of course, are nothing as beside things. The philologist and the grammarian seem to their active brethren to be groping among the dead. Yet even for them there must be moments of exultation, of despair, of triumph — as of Browning’s dying grammarian who settled “the enclitic De, dead from the waist down.” And I think, too, of the wonderful work of King James’ translators, balanced between literalism and innovation, and often conveying truth at its best when furthest from it in substance. Consider the verse, as it was written in the Greek, “O Death, where is thy sting, O Hades, where is thy victory?” Literal translation becomes either irreverent or comic. But how wonderful when they wrote, “O Death, where is thy sting, O Grave, thy victory?”
So much for the value of Latin as a mainstay for the technical study of language. But, to my thinking, a further reason for retaining it as the base of our education is because it can serve, so to speak, as ballast. It is the ballast in the hold of a ship, down in the dark and unseen, which governs every graceful dip and dive of the flag at the masthead and guarantees against disaster. Or we may take another metaphor from one of those odd little mantelpiece figures of mandarins or patriarchs whose nodding head rocks back and forward but never falls because of a controlling ball of lead suspended in his belly. For those of us trained in a classical education Latin is the ball of lead in our bellies which keeps our eyes properly focused on the horizon.
What I mean is this. We are in danger now, in our rushing mechanical world, of rearing a generation with no backward outlook, living in two dimensions only, without thought of the past. For such people history only goes back as far as the last presidential election, with dim figures such as Grover Cleveland and Queen Victoria as a sort of mythology. Yet for all wise thinking, for all careful social control, it is necessary to see things as they have grown, to look on our institutions in the light of their past. Such dim vision as we can have of the future depends absolutely on this. Cut off the human race from the knowledge and comprehension of its history, and its government will just turn into a monkey cage. We need the guidance of history. All our yesterdays it is true have only lighted fools the way to dusty death. But we need at least the dates of the yesterdays and the list of the fools.
Now a great deal of our necessary education of today consists of matter that has nothing to do with the past. Mathematics is eternal. Astronomy runs eternity a close second. Physics — dynamics, electricity and all that — is as instantaneous as a flash of lightning. These things are taught as existing simply “here” and “now”; and even “here” and “now,” since Einstein, must hurry up to get over. Other subjects there are which are certainly historical and old but fail to serve the purpose of a balanced outlook. Geology is old, but it is too old. Not even an English conservative can take a geological view of politics. Even the most cautious must move a little faster than palaeontology.
But ballast there must be. If the “instantaneous” subjects are left alone, the world of an intelligent school-boy becomes all present and no past, a huge shop window with no depth to it. One recalls the story of the man who knew himself to be addicted to boasting and exaggeration and used therefore to check himself suddenly and correct his statement. “My greenhouse,” he said, “is twenty feet high and a hundred feet long”; then he paused and added, “but it’s only a foot wide.” Such in aspect would be the kind of razzle-dazzle world of scarcely more than two dimensions that our practical and scientific education must tend to make. The other dimension that must be added to it, the ballast that must give it stability, is found in the historical subjects and in Latin, as a sort of open door leading into the great world of the past. Even the dullest draws his lesson from the millennium of its history.
It could be desired that every subject could be taught historically. The student might learn his mathematics from the counting of fingers and toes, that gave us our repeating ten, and our “score”; the “abacus” and the “counter” of the mediaeval shop; the Hindu-Arabian decimal system; Napier’s bones and Descartes’ co-ordinates and Newton’s calculus. Still better, if physics could be learned step by step and stage by stage as it was disclosed by the great minds that revealed it; and so with all the rest. Thus would the individual mind repeat the intellectual evolution of the race, as the individual body does from embryo to adult. But time forbids. Ars longa.
Yet within a possible degree the same effect on outlook may be produced by ballasting our education with the past world and with Latin as its representative tongue. For Greek I hold no brief. It is only for philologists and Apostles. It can no longer be a part of the education of every college man. Professors tell us that Greek literature is vastly superior to Latin. It may well be, without hurting itself, since Latin literature, apart from its setting in history, amounts to very little. It is claimed that Greek philosophy and the Greek drama are superior to modern. There is no way to disprove this. People who have never learned Greek are outside of the discussion. Those of us who learned Greek and dissent from it are ruled out of the argument. The dead judgment of authority rules. Personally I only know one department of literature in which I feel the full right to an opinion; that of the literature of humour. To my mind the wit of Aristophanes is about as funny as the jokes of a village cut-up. To name him in the class with people like Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and A. P. Herbert and Bob Benchley and myself is just nonsense. This statement is absolute and without appeal.
But for the rest of Greek literature, let it pass. The world has no time for it, excepting only those, the fortunate few, who go to college and stay there for ever, whose happy lot I eulogize in the concluding chapter. For them, the real scholars, trustees of the world’s heritage of learning, let there be Greek. For them the six cases, and the three numbers — you, and you two, and you all — and all the moods and voices and tenses that fill a book as large as Goodwin’s so full that no student ever sees the last page. For that, and for our heritage of the New Testament, Greek must stay. But for the ordinary scholar, none of it. You can’t learn a little Greek; it won’t divide; it’s like a billiard ball. Half of it is no good.
But even taking Latin on the terms of the plain business man, who wants to see the dollars and cents in everything, there is a great deal to be said for it. I know no better asset for a young man entering business life than the ability to express himself well in speech and in writing. Anyone with enough of this ability and training need never wonder where to find a living. Not everybody can be a literary genius or an orator. But everybody can learn to speak and to write to the full extent of his natural endowment, just as everybody can learn to swim, and nobody can swim without learning. A course in Latin is about the best training in this direction. Boys learn to write good English sentences by writing bad Latin ones. The notion that there is a special technical language for use in business correspondence is a myth sedulously fostered by commercial colleges. Technical business language consists of a few such things, as “F.O.B.,” “ex-dividend,” “your Mr. Smith,” “our Miss McCarthy,” “yours of the third ult. received and would say,” etc., etc. A Latin student could learn it all on one page. As for writing, so for speech. Practice and opportunity are needed, but the basis is words. Salesmanship, or the art of over-persuasion, can be learned as Latin prose composition.
But granting that we are to teach Latin in the schools and colleges and make it in a way the bedrock basis of linguistic study, we have to try to get rid of some of the dead weight that has carried down the ages. Latin comes to us from earlier days when it was the one great study, the very ground on which education stood. So it was taught, as they did everything in the Middle Ages, regardless of time and with one eye on eternity. In the Middle Ages when they built a wall they built it as for five hundred years to come; and when they taught Latin, they did it in the same way, with the foundations laid away down below ground, and “underpinned,” like the wall of a cathedral resting on a bed of white oak.
That is to say, in the schools of the past, when they taught the third declension, they taught it all; not the genitive and the gender of some of the nouns but the genitive and the gender of all of the nouns. There is something absolute and admirable in the very completeness of it. They did it with infinite repetition and with little rhymes and tags, what they called memoria technica, such as:
Substantives in do and go
Genus femininum show;
But ligo, ordo, praedo, cardo,
Are masculine, and common margo.
Such a system was all right for the people of the age. It took an infinity of time, but there was little else to learn.
People who underwent the same kind of training as I had fifty years ago learned their Latin on this mediaeval system. They came away from it with the impression that they had nearly reached the promised land but failed to get there, shipwrecked in sight of port. A little more and we would have “known Latin.” As it is, we only carry with us still a lot of little tags and lists from which the meaning has gone but which still keep their outline like the gossamer skeleton of a dead dragon-fly.
A, ab, and absque, cum, coram, de,
E or ex, prae, pro, tenus, sine —
What about them? I don’t know.
Die, due, fac, fur — what’s wrong with them? Something crooked there, I’m sure, but I forget it.
Now I think I could get all the result we want as mental and literary training and cut out at least fifty per cent of Latin instruction. I would teach Latin grammar in a plain way with very little attention to oddities and exceptions. Let the pupils live and die without knowing that bobus can also be written as bubus; that the Latin for “liver” is irregular and the verb “I drink” is peculiar in the past. Let them wait a while to learn that the dative plural of dea is deabus; wait till they meet goddesses in actual life. People taught in this way will be reading Caesar almost as soon as they begin the language and writing plain Latin sentences as regular as a Roman wall.
I say that I think that I could get all the cultural result needed and cut out fifty per cent of the time taken. But I admit there’s a certain doubt about it; my friends who are today professors and teachers of Latin tell me that the antiquated system of which I speak has quite gone out. It has been superseded by newer methods which some of them like to call “stream-lined” Latin. The phrase is typical of our day; we all move in the mass, holding one idea at a time. Because the aeroplane had to be “stream-lined,” on account of its excessive speed, we stream-line everything, down to a hearse. The metaphor spreads like a ripple in a pond. A professor teaches stream-lined Latin to a class of stream-lined girls. But let the phrase pass and take it for what it means, Latin learned quickly.
Now in the first place I don’t believe there’s as much stream-lining in the schools as its chief advocates believe. There are many teachers who by instinct value an exception more than a rule. Hide the exceptions at the back of the grammar, after the index, and they’ll find them as a cow finds water. So with the examiners; they lived on a diet of exceptions too long to swear off. You never know when they may break out into irregularities. Better learn them.
