girls—inevitable with their increasing numbers, the sense that Latin means
entering upon a higher education, the special reverence for it by Catholic
children, the overcrowded market for Latin teachers whom a recent writer says
can be procured by the score at less rates than in almost any other subject, the
modern methods of teaching it which work well with less knowledge of it by the
teacher than in the case of other school topics, have been attended perhaps
inevitably by steady pedagogic decline despite the vaunted new methods; until
now the baby Latin in the average high school class is a kind of sanctified relic,
a ghost of a ghost, suggesting Swift's Struldbrugs, doomed to physical
immortality but shriveling and with increasing horror of all things new. In 1892
the German emperor declared it a shame for a boy to excel in Latin composition,
and in the high schools of Sweden and Norway it has been practically
abandoned. In the present stage of its educational decadence the power of the
dead hand is strongly illustrated by the new installation of the old Roman
pronunciation with which our tongue has only remote analogies, which makes
havoc with proper names which is unknown and unrecognized in the schools of
the European continent, and which makes a pedantic affectation out of more
vocalism. I do not know nor care whether the old Romans pronounced thus or
not, but if historic fidelity in this sense has pedagogic justification, why still
teach a text like the Viri Romae, which is not a classic but a modern pedagogue's
composition?
I believe profoundly in the Latin both as a university specialty and for all
students who even approach mastery, but for the vast numbers who stop in the
early stages of proficiency it is disastrous to the vernacular. Compare the evils of
translation English, which not even the most competent and laborious teaching
can wholly prevent and which careless mechanical instruction directly fosters,
with the vigorous fresh productions of a boy or girl writing or speaking of
something of vital present interest. The psychology of translation shows that it
gives the novice a consciousness of etymologies which rather impedes than
helps the free movement of the mind. Jowett said in substance that it is almost
impossible to render either of the great dead languages into English without
compromise, and this tends to injure the idiomatic mastery of one's own tongue,
which can be got only by much hard experience in uttering our own thoughts
before trying to shape the dead thoughts of others into our language. We
confound the little knowledge of word-histories which Latin gives with the far
higher and subtler sentence-sense which makes the soul of one language so
different from that of another, and training in which ought not to end until one