Volume 3 — REASONS FOR THE STUDY OF GREEK.
Reading edition
By Prof. H. LUMMIS.
By those best qualified to judge, the thorough study of Greek is conceded to be the very highest kind of mental discipline and culture.
George P. Marsh, in his lectures on the English language, thus speaks: “Let me repeat, that so far from dissuading from the study of Greek, as a branch of general education, I do but echo the universal opinion of all persons competent to pronounce on the subject, in expressing my own conviction that the language and literature of ancient Greece constitute the most efficient instrument of mental training ever enjoyed by man: and that a familiarity with that wonderful speech, its poetry, its philosophy, its eloquence, and the history it embalms, is incomparably the most valuable of intellectual possessions.” Such testimony from so eminent a scholar, and from so critical a mind is decisive in regard to the value of the study of Greek as a discipline, as well as in respect to the richness of the literature which it contains.
In the field of art we admit that he who would be great must study the great models, and be directed by competent masters. Even a Raphael owes something of his high renown to the patient diligence with which he studied the best pieces of his master Pietro Vanucci, the most noted artist of his day. So he who aspires to become a master in the expression of thought will wisely seek the masterpieces of those who have embalmed great thought in the most finished and excellent language. That the writers of Greece are preëminently the writers who have done this as profound and widely read a linguist as Max Müller testifies. He says: “What the inhabitants of the small city of Athens achieved in philosophy, in poetry, in art, in science, in politics, is known to all of us; and our admiration for them increases tenfold if, by a study of other literatures, such as the literatures of India, Persia, and China, we are enabled to compare their achievements with those of other nations of antiquity. The rudiments of almost everything, with the exception of religion, we, the people of Europe, the heirs to a fortune accumulated during twenty or thirty centuries of intellectual toil, owe to the Greeks; and strange as it may sound, but few, I think would gainsay it, that to the present day the achievements of these, our distant ancestors and earliest masters, the songs of Homer, the dialogues of Plato, the speeches of Demosthenes, and the statues of Phidias, stand, if not unrivalled, at least unsurpassed by anything that has been achieved by their descendants and pupils. Like their own goddess, Athene, the people of Athens seem to spring full armed into the arena of history; and we look in vain to Egypt, Syria, or India for more than a few of the seeds that burst into such marvellous growth on the soil of Attica.”
He belittles human nature who thinks the practical value of commercial arithmetic to be greater than such a mastery of language as shall enable one to express himself correctly in his own tongue. To study an instrument for the expression of thought, so wonderfully flexible, so admirably exact, so widely comprehensive, so astonishingly strong, is to the student of his native tongue what training in a great international exposition of machinery, like that exhibited in Philadelphia in our centennial year, would be to a bright young mechanic, a schooling of incalculable worth. What an insight it gives into the subtle changes in the forms of words; what a comprehension of the root meanings of words, what an idea of the power of arrangement in words, what a conception of the music and beauty in the sounds of words.
Coleridge has admirably characterized the excellence of this queen of languages: “Greek—the shrine of the genius of the old world, as universal as our race; as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility; of indefatigable strength; with the complication and distinctness of Nature herself; with words like pictures; with words like the gossamer film of summer, at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer; the gloom and intensity of Æschylus; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, nor fathomed to the bottom by Plato; not sounding with all its thunders nor lit up with all its ardors under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes.” The thorough drill of a competent teacher in introducing the student to the Greek tongue, is a most valuable discipline to the memory; the acquisition of multitudes of roots and affixes is of high importance to a full comprehension of the meaning of words in our own language, the exercise of the judgment in distinguishing words of like or of opposite meanings, the fine force of the particles of the language, and the delicate shades of thought given by variation in mode or tense, has far higher value as a broad training of that faculty than the most thorough mathematical discipline.
The improved methods of instruction have removed the old objection that it takes a lifetime to acquire the language. The objection applies as much to music, or even to a single kind of music: it takes a lifetime to become perfect master of the violin.
