has become more or less of a stylist and knows how to hew out modes of
expressing his own individuality in great language. There is a sense in which
Macaulay was not an Englishman at all, but a Ciceronian Latinist who foisted an
alien style upon our tongue; and even Addison is a foreigner compared to the
virile Kipling. The nature and needs of the adolescent mind demand bread and
meat, while Latin rudiments are husks. In his autobiography, Booker
Washington says that for ten years after their emancipation, the two chief
ambitions of the young negro of the South were to hold office and to study Latin,
and he adds that the chief endeavor of his life has been against these tendencies.
For the American boy and girl, high school too often means Latin. This gives at
first a pleasing sense of exaltation to a higher stage of life, but after from one to
three years the great majority who enter the high school drop out limp and
discouraged for many reasons, largely, however, because they are not fed.
Defective nutrition of the mind also causes a restlessness, which enhances all the
influences which make boys and girls leave school.
II. The second cause of this degeneration is the subordination of literature and
content to language study. Grammar arises in the old age of language. As once
applied to our relatively grammarless tongue it always was more or less of a
school-made artifact and an alien yoke, and has become increasingly so as
English has grown great and free. Its ghost, in the many textbooks devoted to it,
lacks just the quality of logic which made and besouled it. Philology, too, with
all its magnificence, is not a product of the nascent stages of speech. In the
college, which is its stronghold, it has so inspired professors of English that their
ideal is to be critical rather than creative till they prefer the minute reading of a
few masterpieces to a wide general knowledge, and a typical university
announces that "in every case the examiners will treat mere knowledge of books
as less important than the ability to write good English" that will parse and that
is spelled, punctuated, capitalized, and paragraphed aright. Good professors of
English literature are hard to find, and upon them philologists, who are plentiful,
look with a certain condescension. Many academic chairs of English are filled
by men whose acquaintance of our literature is very narrow, who wish to be
linguistic and not literary, and this is true even in ancient tongues.
At a brilliant examination, a candidate for the doctor's degree who had answered
many questions concerning the forms of Lucretius, when asked whether he was a
dramatist, historian, poet, or philosopher, did not know, and his professor