THE GREEK QUESTION:-III.

In closing my last article I quoted from the opinion of the faculty of the Berlin University, written in 1869, to the effect that the modern languages do not furnish a substitute for the ancient languages, "for, since as a rule the only thing aimed at in their study is a certain facility of use, they cannot serve in equal manner as an instrument of culture." In this quotation, I said, the keynote of the whole question was struck. We must keep the ancient languages in our colleges as they furnish the only successful instrument of culture. I do not believe that this aspect of the question has been sufficiently studied, particularly here at Harvard. The entire discussion of the Greek question has been made on so-called practical grounds. Our professors and our magazine-writers have confined themselves in their debates on the subject to what a speaker in the Harvard Union so aptly called the "bread-and-butter" view. "We must consult the spirit of the times in which we live. That spirit tends entirely towards progress, towards the substitution of new and more practical ideas for those which have governed the world for centuries past. We must keep abreast of the modern movement and more especially consult the needs of the time and place in which we live." This is the cry which is raised by the opponents of Greek and it is to the spirit of this cry, though not to the words, that we at Harvard should take most emphatic exception. We deny the statement that our colleges should be influenced in any but a negative direction by the popular opinion which assails them. This doctrine may do very well for the "fresh-water" and second-rate colleges, whose only object is to cause a steady stream of gold dollars to flow into the pockets of their managers, but it will not do for a college like Harvard, which aspires to be the first university in the land. The duty of a true university is not to follow the bent of public opinion and yield to the demands of the agitators of the time but to lead public opinion. "We should consult the needs of the time and place in which we live." Exactly! But we must not always take the judgment of outsiders as to what those needs are. We must use our own judgment on those points and our judgment is very apt to differ from the judgment of the outside world. A university should occupy a position above the petty disputes of the time and should use its influence to calm those disputes and lead back those engaged in them to a calm contemplation of their demands and of the excesses into which these demands have led them.

It is strange that the recent visit of the apostle of "sweetness and light" should not have brought home to us to a greater degree the need, the crying need of our time and our country,-culture. The influence of Mr. Arnold's writings has probably been stronger at Harvard than the writings of any other living Englishman, and yet at this critical moment of Harvard's history we seem to have forgotten the moral of all his teachings. At no time and in no place has the conflict between Hellenism and Hebraism reached the height it has reached at the present moment and in Cambridge. If "sweetness and light," if the power of "seeing this as they really are" is at present the great need of England, how much more are these things lacking in America, in the land of practical ideas? Says Mr. Arnold in the fourth chapter of "Culture and Anarchy": "For more than two hundred years the main stream of man's advance has moved towards knowing himself and the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of consciousness (Hellenism); the main impulse of a great part, and that the strongest part, of our nation has been towards strictness of conscience (Hebraism). They have made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal they have at the wrong moment treated as secondary. Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a clue to some sound order and authority. This we can only get by going back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life." If these words apply with any force to England, with how much greater force do they apply to America? And it is to her universities that America should look for the spread of "sweetness and light." Harvard should be and has been the principal seat of culture of this country, but how much longer will she remain so if she throws aside the study of the language and customs of the people who were "the great exponents of humanity's bent for sweetness and light, of its perception that the truth of things must beat the same time beauty." To quote a little more from Mr. Arnold: "Sweetness and light evidently have to do with the bent or side in humanity which we call Hellenic. Greek intelligence has obviously for its essence the instinct for what Plato calls the true, firm, intelligible, law of things; the law of light, of seeing things as they are. Even in the natural sciences, where the Greeks had not time and means adequately to apply this instinct, and where we have gone a great deal further than they did, it is this instinct which is the root of the whole matter and the ground of all our success; and this instinct the world has mainly learnt of the Greeks, inasmuch as they are humanity's most signal manifestations of it. Greek art, again, Greek beauty, have their root in the same impulse to see things as they really are, inasmuch as Greek art and Greek beauty rest on fidelity to nature,-the best nature,-and on a delicate discrimination of what this best nature is. To say we work for sweetness and light, then, is only another way of saying that we work for Hellenism."

Culture then is the need of America, and classical culture is the only true basis of culture. Even so ardent an opponent of Greek as Professor Josiah P. Cooke, said no earlier than 1875, in his address opening the summer school of chemistry, that if he were compelled to choose, he should take classical culture in preference to what he called "science culture."

Dr. Mark Hopkins, of Williams College, in a recent letter speaks as follows: "I would like also, if I might, to say a word in favor of the college idea as it has existed in this country_that is, the idea of an education distinctively liberal. It has been toward the realization of that idea that my life work has been devoted. My wish has been to have here an institution that should have the means of doing and should do for young men in the forming period of their lives the best that can be done for them in four years in the way of a liberal education." Such should be and has been the education that Harvard has to offer. Whether or not in the future it will become an advanced high school depends upon the action of its faculty. Mr. Arnold's remars upon Oxford form a fitting close to this article. "We, in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth,-the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly that this one sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements. And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in defeat. We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries' advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries' position when it seems gained, we have kept up our communications with the future." Such has been the story of Harvard's past; what of her future?

G.