A PARABLE REVERSED

In the dim past of the Middle Ages, when the upstart poet Dante Alighieri began to write serious verse in the "vulgar tongue", and his work was accepted by scholastic Europe, a new precedent was established. It took six centuries for that precedent to make its influence dominant, and not until a few years ago, when the rule requiring a reading knowledge of Latin for entrance to college was repealed, was its full meaning apparent. Even now to most minds a liberal education, without a knowledge of Latin, is like the house built upon sand,--without a solid foundation.

Under the existing rules a student who wishes to become a candidate for a degree with distinction in the field of English labors under the same sort of difficulty which troubled students of a decade ago in every field. He must now not only gain a complete knowledge of the Bible and Shakespeare--a knowledge which would seem to be sufficient foundation--but he must take three specified courses; selected from Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton and Bacon, and Anglo-Saxon. If, at the end of his college career, he has not a complete knowledge of the earlier English writers, it is his own fault. He has built his structure of learning not upon a rock, but upon a whole rock-pile.

In an early number of the Alumni Bulletin appeared a communication from a Harvard graduate, in which was pointed out the lack of any English courses dealing with modern literature or contemporary writing of any kind. There is very little difference between the English courses offered for the present year, and those of fifteen years ago. Moreover, the Anglo-Saxon and Chaucer requirements are the same.

The supposedly serious-minded student, who hopes for a degree with distinction, is sentenced to years of hard labor on the rock-pile of the Middle Ages, before he can turn his energies to the building of his house. Even then he has only the heavy timber of the 18th century novelists, or the romantic poets, with which to raise his super structure. He very seldom gets far enough even to consider adding a roof. The natural question arises: what is the good of a house founded upon a rock, if there is no thatch of sufficient thickness to keep out the rains and the flood of contemporary fiction?