104 chapter 3
equivocation and failure in the History, however, reveals deeper insecurity
that all prosodic investigations and perhaps even all national identifications,
no matter how ardently we assert that they are “natural,” are matters of sheer
and stubborn faith—unstable, historically contingent categories that may be
artificial constructions both then and now.
So far we’ve seen how Bridges and Saintsbury can be used to represent two
opposing camps in the “Prosody Wars.” Saintsbury sought a purely “English”
metrical scheme that depended upon a perpetuation of the class differences in
education, whereas Bridges sought a naturalization of English meter through
universal accessibility. Given the climate of the Victorian education system, it
is not surprising that Saintsbury’s behemoth crusade against a conception of
meter flexible enough to incorporate the dynamics of time and the differences
of class and nationality took precedence. The Victorian bias—that a mind un-
trained in classics was somehow unprepared for the larger world—persisted
long into the Edwardian and Georgian periods and particularly during the
First World War.^67 Despite the growing popularity of English as an efficient
means to educate the masses and even, toward the turn of the century, the
creation of English departments in the major universities, the association be-
tween the elite public schools and classical education remained secure, creat-
ing a network of gentlemen whose academic knowledge was specific to the
insulated world of their particular alma mater.
The characteristics of a classical education went beyond the mere acquisi-
tion of Latin and Greek; it included a nostalgia for past glory directly tied to
England’s potential for greatness, a guarantee of postgraduate success and a
mark of refined taste, rigorous study based on approved pedagogical methods
meant to discipline the character of young men, a stubborn and determined
ignorance of English literature (which was not yet a course of study at Oxford
when Bridges and Saintsbury were students there),^68 and specialized academic
knowledge down to the particular pronunciation of Latin at each school. And
yet, during Bridges’s and Saintsbury’s lifetimes, the characteristics of classical
learning would be adopted, altered, defended, and questioned by the progress
of English literature and language as an alternative seat of humanist learning.
Their ideas about English prosody and how it should be taught must be under-
stood, in part, as a consequence of the ways that their generation was marked
by the loss of, and anticipatory nostalgia for, the valuable English characteris-
tics that were seen as a unique result of a classical education.
And yet, despite the ways Bridges was clearly marked by his classical educa-
tion, he did not believe in classical pedagog y, nor did he think that Greek
should be compulsory by any means. In 1919, Bridges summarized his posi-
tion in a humorous poem: “For teachers know examination / To be the crown
of education: / Since minds like plants cannot be trusted / To keep their root-
lets well adjusted, / They who would rear them must examine’em / To gauge
th’effect of what they cram in ’em.”^69 Methods of classical education shifted