his studies, what courses would he cunningly avoid? Courses in the 'dead languages'! A dead language, then, is one that some persons are too indolent to learn-or, when they attempt to learn it, they find their spirits running bankrupt. To tell the truth, the written language remains just what it was and is, a fountain of life if it be Greek, and something less if it be Choctaw; but the discovery is made that certain persons, who seemed to be alive, are dead to the language. Lacking some measure of vitality or sensitiveness, they desire, as they say, to study the things of the present.

What is the present? Is it this minute, or day, or year? Is it 'our era'? And what is our era? Not the past ten years certainly. Strictly speaking, the present can hardly be anything that is past, the very form of words precludes this. We may describe the present as an advancing line, and only a line, between the future, of which we know nothing (save through a study of the past), and the past, from which, if we choose our methods wisely, we may learn much. Paradoxically enough, we can only know the present when it has ceased to be such, and has become history. The past is the field of human experience; if recorded, it is the field of human knowledge. Accordingly, for the individual, speaking more generally, the present is so much of human experience as he may at any moment revive within himself. For the artisan it may include his memory of the last strike; for the statesman it may embrace the political and economic history of Europe and America from the age of Pericles in Athens to this very day. It is one thing for Milton, who first relived the life of antiquity as a scholar, then served his country as an officer of state, and finally bequeathed the best he knew in human life to succeeding ages in his immortal poetry. It is another thing for the modern youth who hears the word 'Czar' or 'Kaiser,' and does not recognize in it a Latin word which for twenty centuries has issued daily from the lips of living men; and who does not know that 'Christ' is a Greek word that will never die.

There are, then, no dead languages, though there be men and women who have a name that they live, and are dead. And the present is either a line without breadth, or it is a tract as extensive and as full of life and meaning as the insight of the student can make it. The only real limit is the measure of his sympathy. He fills the present with life and meaning by a study of the past.

By a study of all the past? No, that is impossible; no one could examine all the records of the past, or even all the main ones. By

a study of the past ten years, then? No, ordinarily that will not be wise. Every decade in its time has been a past ten years, and a decade or a century must have something to recommend it beyond the fact that it preceded a certain date. We will permit the historian to say that to him one period is as instructive as another, since he must add that, in order to know one as a historian should, he must know many others. But for the ends of a preliminary education, we must allow that some periods have shown a more abundant life than others. And the farther back our rich and vital period happens to be, within recorded history, the longer will it have been studied and elucidated by the gifted in succeeding ages, and hence the clearer and fuller will its message be to us. Witness the great age of creative activity in Greece: for an interpretation of this we of to-day are indebted first to the poems and other works of art themselves, then to the critics of Alexandria, then to the literary men of Rome, then, in some sort, to the Middle Ages, then to the scholars of the Renaissance-Italian, Dutch, and English-then to the universities of France and Germany, and finally to the last generation of learned men in every civilized nation.

One patent aim in these reflections has been to suggest the idea of a continuity in human life. To sever our connection with the past means cutting ourselves off from humanity; it means spiritual atrophy; it means death. Another aim has been to emphasize our need of selecting parts or periods of civilization for intensive study as especially deserving it. What are such periods?

It will be conceded that the epoch which has most vitally influenced the subsequent culture of Europe, and of peoples like our own that derive from Europe, is what we call the beginning of our era, the years that furnished the world with a Christian civilization. If it is the function of humane study to provide mankind with a self-perpetuating and ever more exalted ideal of human life, and thus to make life more and more abundant, there can be little doubt as to the century that first demands the attention of serious students. It is the century embracing the life of Christ and the lives of his immediate followers; and the chief document by virtue of which one may include it in one's experience is a little book in Greek, containing four biographies, with a sequel to one of them, twenty-one letters, and a vision-all commonly misunderstood by those who read about the work more than they read the work itself. Here we have the living and life-giving record of a human ideal so ennobled that we term it, no longer human, but divine. In

spite of constant misinterpretation, it is ever present among us. May I add that a so-called higher education which does not enable the student to read the highest things as they ought to be read is not worthy of the name? Yet a good teacher of Greek can put any intelligent undergraduate in America into vital contact with the New Testament within the space of three or four months.

Next in importance we may set the thirteenth century, 'the age which of all whose memory remains to us [except the one just mentioned] produced the greatest number of great men. This was the age of Frederick the Second, Lewis the Ninth, Simon of Montfort, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon; the age which saw the revival of painting in Cimabue and Giotto, of sculpture in Nicholas; while Amiens and Westminster, the Old Palace of Florence and the Holy Field of Pisa, are living evidence of what it could do in the noblest of all the arts."2 It was the representative century of the Middle Ages, which have given us the modern nations of Europe, modern as distinct from Roman law, government through elected deputies, modern languages and modern poetry in the vernacular, the Divine Comedy, and the French cathedrals. Here again the contribution of the epoch may be summarily described as the establishment of an ideal pattern for the life of posterity. How clearly we may behold this exalted ideal of humanity as it forms, reforms, and transcends itself in the poem of Dante-in the poet himself as he travels from Hell through Purgatory to Heaven, in his Virgil, type of the wisdom of classical antiquity, in Matilda, in Beatrice, in Bernard, rising ever higher until, suffused with the light of the eternal, the human is merged in the divine! Nor am I aware of any substitute from the rest of secular literature that will perform in the education of our youth just the service that this poem will render if properly studied, that is, in connection with its age. Assuredly, in more than one respect the classics will not take its place.

Then what of the value of the classics? The representative age of classic literature, and this must mean of Greece, the hundred years or so from Pericles to Alexander, we shall not rate too high if we put it third in importance among the epochs that have served to form and fashion modern life. That the influence of Greece has been exerted upon Europe mainly through the instrumentality of Rome does not at the moment concern us. And that modern Europe has learned grammar through Latin (which is a better way than trying to learn it from modern English) rather than from 2 Arthur John Butler, The Purgatory of Dante, Preface, p. xii.

Greek (which is better still)-this need not detain us, either; though no one could wish more ardently than the writer that the present generation might take this now neglected discipline more seriously. How indeed are we to study economics, or pedagogy, or domestic science (the latest fads, yet all with names betraying the vitality of Greek and Latin), when our pupils cannot keep the peace between two nouns and a verb, much less appreciate the meaning of scientific terms?-for our scientific terminology is still supplied by persons who know the ancient tongues. The value, disciplinary or otherwise, of linguistic study, however, great as it is in the case of the classics, is not my topic. My topic is the significance of the human ideal, considered in outline, which classic Greece transmitted to imperial Rome, and hence to modern times.

I have already tried to define this ideal in a negative way, for it has its limitations. The Magnanimous Man of the Nicomachean Ethics falls short, far short, of the Christian ideal; and, wise though she be, that reverend dame, Diotima, who unlocks the final truth for Socrates, has not the depth of knowledge, and has none of the tenderness, of Dante's Beatrice. The dialogues on love of Plato, his Phaedrus and Symposium, show what could be done by the Greek who was nearest in soul to the Christian, in representing the highest aspirations of the human heart; but they are pale and cold beside Dante's Vita Nuova, not to speak of the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians. The mediaeval doctrine of 'the gentle heart,' which created a literature of its own with the sweet new style of modern poetry, and which underlies our present-day notions of a lady and a gentleman, we shall hardly look for in the writings of pagan Greece and pagan Rome; occasionally, not often, we may find a something of the sort; the thing itself is lacking, unless perhaps in Virgil, in a few passages where he seems to be scarcely pagan.

For all that, when we have made allowance for his lack of Christian humility, and of 'the gentle heart,' the Magnanimous Man of Aristotle continues to be illuminating as a standard by which to judge the aims and deserts of our Roosevelts, Tafts, and Wilsons; the goddess Athena still typifies the utmost exaltation of pure intellect; and the myths of Plato still serve to disengage our higher from our lower impulses, and to put the higher in command. Above all, the Republic of Plato will never fail to attain its end as often as it is studied. The unthinking may complain of it as an impractical dream, incapable of being realized in actual life. It is realized whenever it is read, for the purpose of its

author is accomplished in the reader's mind. There a new ideal of human justice is always evoked, and an image of right action so distinct that no subsequent experience can wholly efface it.

Accordingly, we may pass from the negative to the positive value of the Greek ideal. In discussing this, I must say something of the Greeks as a race, taken at their best, and must illustrate a few of their characteristics from translations of their masterpieces; for it is the men themselves that are mirrored in their literature.

The Greeks were the most versatile and evenly developed race that nature has yet brought forth, our American stock not excepted. They had seemingly the most diverse powers, both intellectual and artistic, which were held in equipoise by a most unusual capacity for checking wayward impulse. 'The Hellene,' says Maurice Croiset, 'always possessed judgment in imagination, intellect in sentiment, and reflection in passion. We never see him entirely carried away in one direction. He has, so to speak, a number of faculties ready for every undertaking, and it is by a combination of these that he gives to his creations their true character." Others have reduced the essential qualities of the Greek to a single habit, variously displayed-that of constant unbiased observation. Thus Matthew Arnold says of Sophocles, 'He saw life steadily, and saw it whole.' And so George Herbert Palmer writes: 'After puzzling long about the charm of Homer, I once applied to a learned friend, and said to him, "Can you tell me why Homer is so interesting? Why can't you and I write as he wrote? Why is it that his art was lost with him, and that to-day it is impossible for us to quicken such interest as he?" "Well," said my friend, "I have meditated on that a great deal, but it seems to me it comes to about this: Homer looked long at a thing. Why," said he, "do you know that if you should hold up your thumb and look at it long enough, you would find it immensely interesting?" Homer looks long at his thumb; he sees precisely the thing he is dealing with. He does not confuse it with anything else. It is sharp to him; and because it is sharp to him it stands out sharply for us over all these thousands of years." I also, in a humble way, have reflected upon this very question; and it seems to me that the fundamental Hellenic traits are neither many nor one, but three: direct vision, a high degree of sensitiveness, and an extraordinary power of inhibition. Homer and Sophocles saw clearly, felt keenly, and refrained from much. Their power of inhibition enabled the 3 Croiset, Histoire de la Littérature Grecque 1:4; see below, p. 87. 4 Palmer, The Glory of the Imperfect, pp. 23-24.