our education has followed? Perhaps some kinds of
study would have fared better if their defenders had dwelt more upon
the pleasure they afford and less upon their supposed utility. The
champions of Greek and Latin have dilated on the value of grammar as a
mental discipline, and argued that the best way to acquire a good
English style is to know the ancient languages, a proposition
discredited by many examples to the contrary. It is really this
insistence on grammatical minutiae that has proved repellent to young
people and suggested the dictum that "it doesn't much matter what you
teach a boy so long as he hates it." Better had it been, abandoning
the notion that every one should learn Greek, to dwell upon the
boundless pleasure which minds of imagination and literary taste
derive from carrying in memory the gems of ancient wisdom which are
more easily remembered because they are not in our own language, and
the finest passages of ancient poetry. There are plenty of
things--indeed there are far more things--in modern literature as
noble and as beautiful as the best of the ancients can give us. But
they are not the same things. The ancient poets have the freshness and
the fragrance of the springtime of the world [2]. Or take another sort
of instance. Take the pleasures which nature spreads before us with a
generous hand, hills and fields and woods and rocks, flowers and the
songs of birds, the ever-shifting aspects of clouds and of landscapes
under light and shadow. How few persons in most countries--for there
is in this respect a difference between different peoples--notice
these things. Everybody sees them few observe them or derive pleasure
from them. Is not this largely because attention has not been properly
called to them? They have not been taught to look at natural objects
closely and see the variety there is in them. Persons in whom no taste
for pictures has ever been formed by their having been taken to see,
good pictures and told what constitutes merit, are, when led into a
picture gallery, usually interested in the subjects. They like to see
a sportsman shooting wild fowl, or a battle scene, or even a prize
fight, or a mother tending a sick child, because these incidents
appeal to them. But they seldom see in a picture anything but the
subject; they do not appreciate: imaginative quality or composition,
or colour, or light and shade or indeed anything except exact
imitation of the actual. So in nature the ave