The real educational problem is to discover what boys
Greek will be good for, and what boys will only waste time and
dawdle over it. Certainly to men of a literary turn (a very minute
percentage), Greek is of an inestimable value. Great poets, even,
may be ignorant of it, as Shakespeare probably was, as Keats and
Scott certainly were, as Alexandre Dumas was. But Dumas regretted
his ignorance; Scott regretted it. We know not how much Scott's
admitted laxity of style and hurried careless habit might have been
modified by a knowledge of Greek; how much of grace, permanence, and
generally of art, his genius might have gained from the language and
literature of Hellas. The most Homeric of modern men could not read
Homer. As for Keats, he was born a Greek, it has been said; but had
he been born with a knowledge of Greek, he never, probably, would
have been guilty of his chief literary faults. This is not certain,
for some modern men of letters deeply read in Greek have all the
qualities of fustian and effusiveness which Longinus most despised.
Greek will not make a luxuriously Asiatic mind Hellenic, it is
certain; but it may, at least, help to restrain effusive and
rhetorical gabble. Our Asiatic rhetoricians might perhaps be even
more barbarous than they are if Greek were a sealed book to them.
However this may be, it is, at least, well to find out in a school
what boys are worth instructing in the Greek language.
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