MASTER NEGATIVE NO. 91-80249-14 MICROFILMED 1991 COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES/NEW YORK as part of the Foundations of Western Civilization Preservation Project Funded by the NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES Reproductions may not be made without permission from Columbia University Library COPYRIGHT STATEMENT The copyright law of the United States - Title 17, United States Code ~ concerns the making of photocopies or other reproductions of copyrighted material . . . Columbia University Library reserves the right to refuse to accept a copy order if, in its judgement, fulfillment of the order would mvolve violation of the copyright law. AUTHOR: RICHMOND, OLIFFE TITLE: CLASSICS AND THE SCIENTIFIC MIND PLACE: EDINBURGH DA TE : 1919 Restrictions on Use: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES PRESERVATION DEPARTMENT Master Negative it DIDLIOCR APHIC MICROFORM TARHFT Original Material as Filmed - Existing Bibliographic Record Acquisitions NYCG-PT CP:nyu PC:r MMD: 040 100 10 245 10 ST:p CSC:? GPC:? REP:? FRN MOO BIO CPI 7 DM: RR: MS SNR FIC FSI COL ? ? A0:08-21-91 U0:08-21-91 BKS/PROO Books FUL/BIB NYCG91-B75732 Record 1 of - Record added today ID:NYCG91-B75732 RTYP:a CC:9668 BLT:ani OCF:? L:eng INT:? P0:1991/1919 OR: POL: NNC}:cNNC Richmond, Oliffe Legh. Classics and the scientific mind{:hrmicrof orm].{:bAn Inaugural Lecture h Edinburgh, JibJames Thin,}:cl919 29 p, ORIG 08-21-91 EL: ATC: CON:??? ILC:???? EML: MEI:? GEN: II BSE 260 300 LOG QD TECHNICAL MICROFORM DATA REDUCTION RATIO: //^^^ FILM SlZE:_^Sj^^_ IMAGE PLACEMENT: lA "^^ IB IIB DATE FlLMED:__^2j^yiJ^ INITIALS ^^^ HLMEDBY: RESEARCH PUBLICATIONS. INC WOODDRrDGE7cF """" c Association for information and image iManagement 1100 Wayne Avenue. Suite 1100 Silver Spring. Maryland 20910 301/587-8202 Centimeter 1 2 3 4 5 6 iiii 7 8 9 10 11 iiiliniliiii liiiiliii liiiiliiiiliiiilniili 12 13 14 15 mm iiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiiliiiil I I Inches 1 1 1 I T [ T I T 1 1.0 I.I 1.25 TTT U£ IIIIIM 150 "'"= 1^ IM Li itt lU UL bk u. 116 1.4 2.5 2.2 2.0 1.8 1.6 ,M|,TT 5 1 MRNUFRCTURED TO RUM STRNDPRDS BY APPLIED IMRGE. INC. ,«^ Z^TWT^^^^" "■^;VC/ -• > "'^>-r^*.U: \. , •■:-*<-^ ^' V* - 1. -v. •- Jj A- '•■' '■'^' .2- «"-.'■ CLASSICS AND THE SCIENTIFIC MIND ^n Inaugural Lecture delivered in the University of Edinburgh^ i ^th October 1 9 1 9 BY OLIFFE LEGH RICHMOND, M.A. Professor of Humanity EDINBURGH JAMES THIN, 54, 55, AND 56 South Bridge PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY I919 CLASSICS AND THE SCIENTIFIC MIND The first words addressed by me to an Edinburgh audience must be words of humble and reverent piety to the dead. I have been elected to fill a Chair which has been held by a line of distinguished men. I have boyish memories of the families of Professor Sellar and Professor Goodhart ; and their colleague at Glasgow, Professor G. G. Ramsay, vouched for me at the font. Little did I dream in early days that I should ever be enthroned amid the austere sanctities of a Scottish professorship ; and the feelings of real awe with which I regarded such thrones quicken in me now a consciousness all too keen of my new and unex- pected responsibilities. I am called to follow one who conferred fresh and individual lustre upon this Chair ; one who gave himself for his pupils to a degree hardly to be imagined by any who were not in contact with him — by any who cannot examine upon the spot the evidence of his far-reaching sympathy and zeal or the fruits of his inspira- tion. He would not have had it otherwise than that he should die in harness, to the last unsparing of his strength for the sake of his Edinburgh men and women. " Si monumentum requiris, circumspiceP Hardie's monu- ment is in the hearts of all Edinburgh men and women for whom he ever worked, and it is very doubtful whether any other sort of monument is so well worth winning. But ever since my election last May, I have been both obsessed and inspired rather by my personal duty to those younger, unforgotten dead through whose sacrifice I, and all of you, are here to-day, free and in full hope of life. The schoolmaster and the college lecturer have had to mourn a far greater toll of personal bereavements than any other classes of men. Generation after generation of pupils has been mown down ; and who will deny that an altogether undue proportion of our very r^oblest were taken from us ? I say, then, that it is impossible for me, who have in- gloriously survived this fiery ordeal, to inaugurate my career here among you without making it clear that for the next decade all our work together will be carried out with the full consciousness of what it has cost the founders of the new age. It is our difficult but sacred duty to make good in part the lost contributions of all those brilliant brains to Learning and of all those brave kind hearts to the moral forces of which our distracted times will stand so sorely in need. This sentiment all over the world will bind, let us hope for long years, the brotherhood of scholars more closely than ever together, and give it added strength and influence. Before my induction I had taken part in but two public acts of this University — the Laureation of the Field -Marshal, and its Address of Congratulation to the young University of Dalhousie at Halifax, in the new Scotland over the water. You will not have forgotten the earnest call to the Universities made by the great Scottish soldier. I venture to quote — because the monumental quality of Latin suits so well the expression of reverent duty — the last sentences of the Address which our Senate has sent to Dalhousie for its centenary cele- brations, sentences framed indeed for friends at a distance but whose sense is common to us all : — " Orbe terrarum uix tandem pacaio, humanitate ac ius- titia uindicata, nobis artium liberalium antistitibus, physicae et mathematicae, legum et medicinae cultoribus, pro rebus splendide peractis spern certani et fructum auguramur. " Liceat modo nobis, o fratres.piae laudationi rite adsentiri^ dum tristi gaudio roborati memoratis, ut decet, futuri saeculi conditoreSy qui libertatis uniuersae sacramentum pio amore magnanimi ac morte sanxerunt.^* You will remember the first words of i^neas, indeed the first mention, in the ^neid, of the name of that founder of a new age. " Swart night broods on the deep. The heavens thundered ; with myriad fires flashes the upper air, and all things bode present death to the hero-band. Straightway ^Eneas' frame grows limp and chill ; he groans, and with twin palms outstretched towards the stars thus gives tongue : * O thrice and four times blessed, who before their fathers' eyes, beneath Troy's lofty ramparts, had the fortune to find death ! O Diomede, bravest of the Danaan race ! That upon Ilium's plains to fall was not mine, and at the stroke of thy right hand to pour out this life ; there, where fierce Hector lies beneath Achilles* spear, and giant Sarpedon, where Simois has snatched beneath his waters so many shields and helms and brave bodies of heroes and tosses them on the tide.* " O terque quaterque beati Quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis Contigit oppetere ! O Danaum fortissime gentis Tydide ! mene Iliacis occumbere campis Non potuisse tuaque animam banc effundere dextra, Saeuus ubi Aeacidae telo iacet Hector, ubi ingens Sarpedon, ubi tot Simois correpta sub undis Scuta uirOm galeasque et fortia corpora uoluit ? • How many of us have prayed in moments of doubt that we too might have died " beneath Troy's lofty ramparts," B 6 turning like ^neas from the future's burdens in a world left desolate ! But we who have been fated to survive must never lose sight of the promised city of the regeneration — I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand. We return from to-day to the normal courses of this University ; yet how can our course be normal in more than its syllabus and time-tables? The bald framework of our studies may be the same, but we are not the same — the men and women who must fill in the details and give the structure reality. We, both students and teachers, are conscious as never before of an incalculable debt and of a responsibility for the future almost greater than we can bear. This is no season for idling ; and there are literally thousands of men and women clamouring for the places of any such idlers and unable to obtain the desired University education for sheer want of room. But it is a season, such as may never return, of self-criticism, of the testing of ideals and of practice in the light of what the last five years have taught us; and students and parents have every right to ask that no intellectual lumber, no outworn and merely conventional trappings of education, should survive into the new age. If one felled a wood to build a house, when six trees would have amply sufficed, the rest of the logs would be lumber; and having so much of it lying about, one would be tempted to give the house a high fence and heavy shutters and double doors afid an uncomfortable crowd of furniture. But it might have been, more healthy and more beautiful if we had left the rest of the trees standing to shelter the house or give shade at need, while our rooms allowed space for free movement and our windows stood wide open for the uninterrupted view of things near and far. Am I not right in thinking that there is a temptation in Classical studies to overcrowd the details, to confuse means with ends, to go on hacking at the trees merely to keep the axe sharp, to go on chopping up the brushwood when the yard is full, though all the while there were fields to sow and tracks to clear at a distance, and range beyond mountain-range to explore ? We must not do Latin proses just for the sake of doing Latin proses, because we have ground our axe as children and now cannot see the wood for the trees. We must not collect in hideous heaps the brushwood of grammatical or metrical abnormalities, just because it is brushwood and we have a yard handy. We want to learn how and where to wield an axe, how to sharpen it and how to keep it sharp ; we want enough brushwood on hand to light our fires with, not enough to burn the house down. It is always easy to fetch it from the living wood, and has often a natural beauty there, which we remark even if we clear it away. But once on our heap it is a dead thing, even though we consider it intelligently and name its species, and compare it favourably or unfavourably with other sticks we have known. We need to build at a University, each of us, his own house of Learning, warmed by his own hearth-fire, lit by his own windows steadily facing the world ; and all the teacher can do is to suggest and guide and supply deficiencies, while building and maintaining for himself a habitation fit to inspire others. For one must presume that the University student has received at school his first training in the use of the axe and the detection of good and bad wood ; and many will have already begun 8 the building of that house of comfort and security for the mind But a sense of space and distance, and of true proportion and perspective, only comes with maturity; it should be conveyed by University teachers, teaching grown men and women to think for themselves. I propose in some part of this lecture to discuss with you frankly the meaning of Classical education and Classical research, even descending to domestic detail of administra- tion where I think that I can thereby make my own purpose plainer. It seems to me probable that I shall find the study of the Classics here as ardent as anywhere in the United Kingdom ; the very stones of this city cry out your admiration for Greece and Rome. But it also seems probable that I shall find them backward, from my particular point of view. Your tradition has demanded from Professors of Humanity so much direct teaching, and so much of it elementary, that it has been exceptionally difficult for those Professors to contribute to Higher Learning on their own account, or to bring their pupils as much as they must have wished to do into contact with the original work and broader aspirations of the leaders of our clan. But the names of Sellar, Goodhart, and Hardie witness to a difficulty in part overcome. I shall have failed if I cannot keep before my pupils a view of the whole dominating its details, and breathe even into incidental valleys of bones the spirit of life. My special aim will be to give to the study of Latin a literary bias ; and, according to my faith. Literature dwells in a temple spacious and of many soaring columns, to which Grammar contributes the bases indeed, but only the bases. Let me illustrate in detail. The writing of Latin prose must always be an extremely important subdivision of a Latin course, and Professor Hardie has left us a handbook which it will not be easy to surpass ; but it is an exercise which both student and teacher should practise and understand as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself. It is a means to acquiring powers of concentration, of hard, clear thinkingi of analysis and comparison, of distinguishing the relevant from the irrelevant, of seeing things through the- eyes of others. By practising composition in a fully inflected language, which is the basis of so many modern languages and has profoundly influenced our own, we obtain a reasoned insight into secrets of form and balance, and into the lights and shades of feeling and expression, which we can obtain in no other way at all. By handling, even as novices, the very material used by the great masters of formal style, we can come much nearer to their point of view. In so far we are improving our chances of acquiring a good English prose style, because if we learn to differentiate alien manners by analysis, we are more capable of the most difficult of all arts, self- criticism. By all means let us take pride in such an exercise, and cultivate thereby those moral and intellectual powers it assists, and incidentally our familiarity with the authors imitated. But it is far more valuable to under- stand an author's point of view and environment than to acquire a trick of imitating his expression. From the one we can draw lessons for our own day ; the other is at best a tour de force. Do not let us make a fetish of any tour de force^ or see even in a so-called "fair copy" absolute qualities which after 2000 years we can as little recover as the exact intonation of the spoken language. To learn Latin we must read, and read again, the Latin authors ; to understand the Roman world we should lose no opportunity of studying also its monuments. Even those students who penetrate but a short distance should, in a University course, acquire some knowledge of an C H\ h ■ ♦•a lO II ancient world surprisingly like our own, some skill in detecting true and false style in literature, some pride in accuracy and clearness, some love of beauty and sense of form. They must not be called upon merely to collect lumber, but to work with purpose and with conviction, adapting means to ends; they must not be forced, for instance, to an artificial facility in Latin composition disproportionate to their knowledge of the language, but reading and insight must be the causes of a true progress of the mind ; and their skill in classifying grammatical anomalies should not outrun their power of enjoying fine literature. So far as in me lies I shall make clear in the years to come what sort of an ideal of ancient learning befits a great University, training minds for the modern world. Pass classes will always have to be content with partial expedients; it may be very difficult to create in such short courses an atmosphere favourable to ideals, and the version and the grammar paper must remain the chief educational media as long as school-standards and school- discipline of the mind cannot wholly give place to the love of learning for its own sake. But an Ordinary class at a University must receive some teaching differentiating it from a school class and appealing to qiaturer instincts ; it must not drop the subject after a year without an inkling of what its professor and others greater than he are really thinking about and working at. I therefore regard no lecture in the week more important than that which, following Professor Hardie*s precedent, I propose to give to the combined Ordinary class on literary subjects. I think it expedient to devote the bulk of these lectures to wider literary considerations arising out of the set books to be read in detail during the rest of the week. You will not find me giving you notes on authors you barely know by name, unless a knowledge of them is required for the understanding of the central authors of the year ; and you will find that even in dealing with these writers, as a whole I shall keep the actual " set books" constantly in view. It happens that both your books of Virgil for this session have been happy hunting- grounds of my own, and it will be a test of your goodwill as much as of my power of expression if I interest you in questions not much treated in text-books. But of the learning by heart of notes which bear no relation to the learner's experience, I have a horror. And I propagate only with caution the saving virtue of technical terms. In the first Ordinary examination paper set here last year I find the question : " What do you know of Bucolic Diaeresis; Synapheia?'' And I should sympathise with any candidate's devout hope never to suffer from either of them. I expect to find that the standard of work done in the Pass class is already high, and that the students themselves will be desirous of maintaining it so. No one can afford to mark time nowadays, even for five or six hours of the week, and any subject worthy of study under University conditions is worthy of scientific treatment. That literary bias which I should like to give to the Ordinary class will be more easily acquired by Honours ; indeed most of them will possess it already. But, seeing that Ancient History, Art, and Archaeology have their own teachers like Philosophy and Logic, and that the Professor of Greek has brought back to us an Edinburgh expert in Philology, we are free to give Latin its natural development, and to keep a central purpose steadily in view. 12 The first things a student for Latin Honours must learn are to read for himself and to read in bulk. By no means must he mistake the syllabus of set books for the sum of knowledge, or lectures for its only channels of communication. It is true that I design to supply with the aid of my increased staff more classes, if not more regular lectures, than heretofore. But the readingjwe shall do together is only to enlighten your private reading and to take you deeper here and there than you would penetrate by yourselves. Here too I shall devote one lecture a week to a wider review of Latin literature than the detailed books allow, spreading the course over two years; and the books I read in lecture will be usually chosen, one for its prose style, one for its difficulty, and one for sheer enjoyment of poetry. My junior lecturer and my assistant, both of them distinguished for original research, will read with Honours classes, so far as possible, books where their own special studies will contribute ; and for the criticism of compositions and other paper work they will so divide with me the whole class that students will, as a rule, meet us in rotation and "pick the brains" of each of us in turn. That is to say, that the teachers in the Humanity school will break definitely with an old tradition which, since the great advance of the scientific study of antiquity, has not had much to recommend it. The assistant's labour was once slave-labour, and not so very long ago. He " devilled," in fact Now, though Mr James Mill has been raised to the status of Senior Lecturer (but Edinburgh's debt to his devoted service is past all assessment), a new junior Lectureship has been generously granted me by the University, and Mr Mountford, who comes to us from the staff of Armstrong College, Newcastle-on-Tyne, will fill that office and take responsi- bility under me for the Higher Division of the Ordinary ^3 class, as Mr Mill, for the Lower Division. He will expect to be treated by his own students as a sort of tutor and director of studies, as well as lecturer ; and Miss Steuart, my assistant, who has been for five years doing valuable work for Honours students in Cardiff University College, will expect to be so treated by the women students for Honours here — not at all to set a barrier between them and me, but to make doubly sure that nothing escapes me that would serve them. I have ventured to ask your patience for these domestic details of proposed administra- tion for this reason — that the value of a teacher's work is directly proportionate to his or her pride in it, and that, for such pride to be generated, responsibility must be to some extent deputed and a definite aim and duty made clear. So only will an assistant come to take a pride not only in his own work, but in the prosperity of the Humanity school as a whole, and by throwing his whole soul into it help to bind staff and students in friendly bonds of personal contact and sympathy. We are not omniscient or infallible ; I myself have done no teaching since May 1916, and shall crave indulgence for a little rust; but we are all here at your service and at the service of Learning ; and the most valuable thing we can teach you is to teach yourselves. As Whitman says — Not I, not anyone else can travel that road for you, You must travel it for yourself. And again — I am the teacher of athletes. He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own, proves the width of my own ; He most honours my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher. An Honours course at a University should bring students into touch with researchers and research, and doors should easily swing open which lead them to the H pleasant borderland between experience and discovery. I was myself an undergraduate of twenty-one when I crossed that borderland and found myself in print ; and I owed my first little exploit to an essay I wrote for a College Classical Society. Your University Classical Society is waking from an enforced sleep, and has done me the honour of inviting me to herald in the dawn. I hope to be a frequent listener at its other meetings, and that its officers will not hesitate to call upon me for any help they may require. And I propose to found, not a rival, but a supplementary Society, to be called the Edinburgh Roman Society^ at which papers will be read and informal addresses given on subjects bearing upon any side of Latin or Roman research, and to which I hope to attach not only my own Honours students but some of our friends in the city. I shall be glad to hear of any such who would like to join us and receive notice of our meetings. The papers read to us, and discussed among us, would often be drafts of work to be put out eventually by the Edinburgh School of Humanity in a learned journal or a book ; for our teachers must be original workers or their teaching will stale, and our best students must try their wings. Meanwhile we have a pleasurable omen of goodwill outside our walls, in an offer by the Society of the Writers to H.M. Signet to renew a long-discontinued annual prize of books to the value of ten guineas " for the best student in the Senior Humanity Class." It is a prize which was withdrawn in the sixties of last century, when the " Senior Humanity Class " would have meant our Ordinary class. But Sir George Paul assures me that the Society intend this prize to be awarded entirely at my discretion, but to the actually best scholar of the year, whom we should all expect to be an Honours student. 15 So far I have dealt with the practice of Classical teach- ing as I conceive it under our special circumstances at Edinburgh. My colleagues in Greek and French will, I know, watch my performance with benevolence and assist me at every turn. But I have not yet tried this practice ; I cannot yet gauge how far an atmosphere favourable to my ideal is already present. The picture I have given may seem to outline a course less austere and grey, a softer doctrine, a more humane humanity than the old. You may doubt the wisdom of any attempt to lighten the routine work all round, in order that pleasurable work may flourish. Yet, if you think of it, culture need not be a painful process after the first ordering and early restraint. Once the apple tree is past the tender age we allow its branches to curve at will, so long as they bear fruit ; it is often the wind of chance that masses them more on one side than the other. The moral and mental discipline of a University course is but a stepping-stone to freedom of judgment ; it is stultifying itself if it only restrains and does not suggest, if its students remain like Peter Pan, " the boy who wouldn't grow up." The scientific mind is being developed, and it does not matter that my students are not to use it to make engines or aniline dyes. They will be the lawyers and ministers and civil servants of to-morrow, and some of them the schoolmasters. But they will carry to those works the minds we have helped to give them, and memory of their studies according to their pleasure and pride in them. The culture of the State depends to no small degree upon them. We must see to it that an atmosphere favourable to culture surrounds them here. The educational advantage which Oxford and Cam- bridge possess over all the other British Universities lies in the crowd of specialists that congregates in their i6 various colleges. If you have a professor lecturing three times a week only, and only to advanced students, almost free from administrative duties, and taking no part in the normal routine of papers or in individual coaching, you can expect that his lectures will be of superlative excellence, and that his output of original work will be considerable. If you have, as here, distinct professors or lecturers for many subdivisions of classical learning, your University staff may be but little less numerous than the University staff of Oxford or Cambridge. But this staff of ours is also doing the work which at Oxford and Cam- bridge falls entirely upon college tutors and lecturers, other than those who represent the University in such subjects. Some colleges, indeed, are so well served that there is a temptation not to attend any University lectures outside their walls ; college lecturers, too, become specialists, and attract students from outside to hear them. In my own college, before the war, about ten to twelve candidates a year would be taking the Classical Tripos, or about thirty in three years. For this group of thirty Honours men working together we had generally five teachers within the college, doing all the routine work ; then all the University teachers to choose among, and special courses available in one or two outside colleges. Besides that there were scholars of inexhaustible learn- ing and goodwill all about us to whom one could turn for any sort of special inspiration or advice. While these advantageous conditions prevail at Oxford and Cambridge — and I hope they will never be altered for the worse — it is no wonder that the best Scotchmen tend to complete their University course at one or the other ; for the only way of counteracting that tendency, if it was desirable, would be to offer an equally wide field for specialisation at home. This would necessitate 17 the separation, in a University like this, of the purely routine work from the professorate, and the creation of a class of tutors and assistants more numerous than our present staffs, and much more highly paid, who would in so far relieve the professors and render them as free as German professors are to lecture on their own special subjects, conduct a Seminar, and publish their work with- out hindrance. Even so you could afford to leave no subdivision of Classical Study, such as Palaeography or Philology, unrepresented among your official lecturers. I think it probable that, as time goes on, Edinburgh, in particular, as being an ideal University city, and a true capital of the mind and soul, will chafe at the dominance of Oxford and Cambridge, and will aim at a self-support- ing, self-contained, school of advanced Classical learning, such as so many German Universities provide. But owing to the generous spirit in which Edinburgh has already met my proposal for a new junior lecturer, it will be entirely my own fault if I do not find time for the publication of long-overdue research work, with which I hope now to identify this, for me, too illustrious Chair. Large sections of the public, especially those which have not benefited by a University education — but they, find leaders much closer home — while crying out for what they call "Science" and "Research," have been crying down Classical education as a system antagonistic to their ideals. You will bear with me, I hope, if I devote some time to this popular conception of the Classics, even though it is impossible to say much that is new, and though Mr Livingstone's recent book in their defence stands un refuted. University lecturers in Faculties of Science (I use the i8 19 m Jli ' il term also for convenience) are, as you know, very far from unanimous in desiring specialisation in Science at school; at my own college there were none who did not prefer a student to come to them, if possible, fresh from a general Classical education. The reason was, and is, that the scientific attitude of mind is far more likely to be induced in the young by the concentrated critical and logical training of a Classical education than by the simple formulas and self-evident classifications of the first stages of the so-called " modern " subjects. But there was a further reason, which perhaps they would hardly have admitted. Henry James, the American by birth, used to say that "more has gone to make an Englishman than any other human being." (I have no doubt he meant no slight to the Scot.) And it* is certain that, as a rule, " more has gone to make " a young Classical scholar than a young scientist of the same standing ; that his training has been more arduous, more detailed, more exact and more exactly tested^ and has set him more problems and left him more to himself in their solution. Also, he is often far better equipped for the leadership of men and for the experience of life ; for his chief study has been of men and of their thoughts and acts and records, and he has put out work daily which, for better or worse, is his very own and not the reproduction of formulas or the clock-work of inevitable calculations. Whereas the young scientist's training, from the season of specialisation, has been almost entirely concerned not with men but with things, not with personality but with external laws. Of course these opinions will be combated ; but they are opinions held not only in my College, which has a most distinguished record in Science (I am its only representative on the Arts sjde of your staff, but you have three more glorious luminaries of Science thence proceeding), but in every German University. And the science of education has been nowhere more closely studied. Of course, I am as little demanding that every boy should specialise in Latin and Greek as that every boy so trained at school should continue the subjects at the University, or that these subjects, if treated only linguistically, should qualify even their most brilliant students for its highest degree. I was speaking of the educational value of a concentrated linguistic training for a young mind susceptible to it. By this educational value the Classics will hold their place in the long run against all rivals. For we cannot afford to be a race of specialists without a background and basis of general education ; we cannot afford to let our literature and speech deteriorate or our study of human antecedents die out ; and we cannot arrive, as a nation, at the fullness of intellectual power by short cuts to practical success. Specialists in Science we must have in ever increasing numbers ; but surely it is not too late to become a specialist at nineteen, and the best educated boy will always be the soundest and most adaptable. But the section of the public which wants ** Science and Research" little suspects, I think, to what degree Classical studies contribute to both. There are compara- tively few men and women employed in Classical research, for a very good reason, to which I shall return. In Germany there have been far more so employed than in Britain, but of the most excellent new work done in 'the last thirty years we have contributed more than our proportional share. It is difficult to particularise names because of the omissions one would make, but let me give a few instances. First, on the purely literary side, one would name Oxyrhyncus and the work by Grenfell and Hunt and I 20 their collaborators upon the papyri there discovered. The chief treasures of that buried library in Egypt have immensely enriched our store of Greek masterpieces, but also our knowledge of the private life of the later Hellenistic world. The Latinist, who has so far obtained nothing equivalent from the charred library found at Herculaneum, may well groan with envy when he thinks of the copies of Cornelius Gallus, Ennius, and Varro which must yet lie under the lava. In the field of scientific textual criticism very eminent work is now being done upon the text of Livy by Professors Conway and Flamstead Walters; it is not so long since Professor Lindsay completed his new recension of Plautus, and we have among us in Professor Housman one of the most trenchant critics and most felicitous emendators of all time. But there is a remarkable amount of scientific spade-work proceeding in this field with the aid of sounder methods in palaeography. The recent appearance of Professor Lindsay's Notae Latinae and of Professor Albert Clark's Descent of Manuscripts shows how by concentration upon a particular region canons may be obtained which will affect a whole study. We are naturally interested here in Professor Lindsay's recruitment of young Scottish scholars for palaeographical research ; and Professor Hannay will tell you that without palaeo- graphical training Scottish historians cannot advance any more than editors of Latin texts. The whole science of Classical Archaeology has been evolved within about half a century from a dilettante anti- quarianism, but one does not now distinguish in method between the explorations of the Schools of Athens or Rome and those in Egypt, Palestine, Crete, Asia Minor, India— or the Firth of Forth. Piercing through the earliest ages of Greece and Rome, men like Professor Ridgeway 21 (but none are quite like him) have become pioneers of Anthropology ; others, like Sir James Frazer, have brought Folklore to the illumination of the Classics, the Bible, and modern life. Those who least agree with their results remain profoundly their debtors. And why ? Because of the scientific methods adumbrated and in general em- ployed ; because of the creative imagination which they turn to the study of Life. Strata of man's development all over the world are being laid bare and reconstructed by researchers trained almost all of them in the school of the Classics, and therefore endowed with patient, logical, inductive minds and a passion for the past as fierce as the Modern Side's preoccupation with the future. Yet which, on the whole, contributes most to To-day, Yesterday, or To-morrow? Science must not be confounded with Futurism — which would view with rapture the destruction of all memories of the past — nor the Spirit of Research be mistaken for a genius of Commerce. Now why are the numbers of Classical researchers in Great Britain so few ? Not certainly because our standard of attainment is limited. We have always been a race of discoverers and adventurers ; that has been the secret of our history, combined with our dogged refusal to admit defeat. The reason is that Classical research is not endowed. I have been one of the supremely fortunate ones, in that I obtained one of two annual travelling studentships at Cambridge, and was able in the two years of my tenure to cover the field of a particular study, and further in that, when I laid that studentship down, I was a Fellow of a great College, and secure at least from want for five years more. It behoves me all the more to declare, on such an occasion as the present, that the endowment of Classical research has been immeasurably less adequate in the past than that of Technical research ; and you iiif III III 22 know how the nation has awaked to the starved needs of the latter. The Government has paid to our schools of Athens and Rome a sum equivalent to the salary of one professor ; all other contributions fall upon the already underpaid learned world itself and a few private benefactors. There is no central fund upon which would-be researchers can draw, no subsequent security of career to which a professor could point even the most ardent pupil. Great enterprises like those of the Palestine Exploration Fund are allowed, even before the war, to be closed down. You here in Edinburgh have been indeed generously endowed with scholarships and studentships, but few of those open to Classical scholars have actually been applied to purposes of research, and most have been spent no further afield than England. Your largest fund, however, the Moray Endowment for the Promotion of Original Research, does open a door, which is only half closed by the fourth of its provisions : " in so far as the subject of the research admits, the investigation shall be conducted in the buildings of the University." Just as I should like to see your young architects visiting Rome with travelling scholarships, in order that the rest of Edinburgh may be no less beautiful than its central streets and the decoration of its domestic buildings not fall behind the age of Adams, so I should like all Honours students of Latin to have the chance of looking with their own eyes upon the monuments of the ancient world, and of proving to themselves that the races which made those are worthy of our understanding and our admiration to-day. But at least those with special aptitudes should somehow have that chance, and all who are worthy to teach in a University should be able to claim it as a right. In view of all I have gained there myself— in view, too, of the royal Order I have the honour 23 to hold from the King of Italy — I cannot do less than offer to conduct, organise, or direct any party of Edin- burgh students who, by private benefaction or public grant, may be enabled in the spring vacations to visit Rome. Convinced as I am that the training provided by the Classics remains without a rival for the development of the scientific mind, I contend that for the sake of the national culture its best products should be by every means encouraged and enabled to reach their authorities at first hand. Schools of Literature, Philosophy, History, and Art would equally reap the benefit of an enlightened national development of Classical research. One of the objects of an Inaugural Lecture is to indicate the point of view of a new professor ; another object is to introduce him, not without the spiritual support of his seniors, to some at least of his future pupils and friends. But if I am expected to say anything about myself, more than your eyes and ears have so far inferred, I shall dis- appoint you. It is at Edinburgh that I must make any fame that will be mine ; here my work begins. I recently read again Walt Whitman's " Song of Myself," and almost all I could cull from it, suitable for a professor's ego, I have quoted already. I have just passed a new birthday or I could have echoed his preface — " I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health begin. Hoping to cease not till death." But that reminds me of the words in my commission : ad uitam aut culpam. There are so many faults to which I am liable, not even excluding an occasional grammatical slip, that I shall be fortunate indeed to have Mr James Mill at hand to keep me firmly seated in my Chair. 24 25 lllii I I llli! I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture the first words of ^neas in the iCneid. I will close it with a reference to a recent attempt to drag in the ego of Virgil into the very first words of his final work, an attempt the frustration of which will suggest to us some considerations illustrative of the science of Humanity, and provide a brief example of method. First words to the ancient mind, far more than to ours, were words of omen, and, in a sense, signature. The traditional first words of the iEneid, Arma uirumque, are familiar friends even to the least classical memory; they are constantly quoted by ancient writers to indicate by allusion the poem itself whose subject they epitomise ; and they have the further claim to this position that they combine in one phrase allusion to the first words of both Iliad and Odyssey, iki\viv, the wrath of Achilles, and ai/Jpa, the wanderer Odysseus. The ^neid is an Odyssey for six books to which an Iliad in six books succeeds. Ask a schoolboy the first words of the iCneid and he will know them ; but turn to the Oxford text of Virgil, sent out from that great authoritative press since the year 1900 to be a Latin bible for schools and universities, and you will find a different state of affairs. Arma uirumque has become the fifth verse and lost all significance. In front of it has been inserted a passage to this effect : — " That I {ille ego) who once tuned my song on a slender reed and when I emerged from the woods constrained the neighbouring ploughlands to obey the yeoman howsoever greedy (dear was my work to husbandmen), now on the contrary Mars' bristling . . . arms and the man do sing, who first from Troy's beach to Italy came, by fate exiled, and to the Lavinian shores." [ille ego, qui quondam gracili modulatus auena carmen et egressus siluis uicina coegi ut quamuis auido parerent arua colono, gratum opus agricolis, at nunc horrentia Martis] arma uirumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Lauinaque uenit litora. . . . The Oxford editor tells us why he has made this change. The four verses are quoted from late com- mentators on Virgil, who report that one " Nisus, an elementary schoolmaster, used to say that he had heard from men older than himself that Varius (that is, one of Virgil's executors) corrected the beginning of the first book by removing these verses." The editor, after admitting that they are not found in the text of any of our better manuscripts of Virgil, remarks : *' These most magnificent verses have been wrongly held spurious by the majority of editors." Versus praeclarissimos : we will consider this last point first. The writer of them is linking the -^neid to Virgil's previous works, the Georgics (as we call them), concerned with every side of husbandry ; the Eclogues, with their woodland background ; and the " Gnat," a very immature poem to whose first line verbal allusion is made in the first line here. Has he done it well ? Is there the same economy and simplicity of words in these verses as in those which follow ? It will at once be seen that the word Martis adds nothing to arma except a slight incongruity ; for the " arms " of the " man " himself were not so much of Mars as of Vulcan. Horrentia is a merely conventional epithet. Then what is the distinction between the words colono (with arua) and agricolis^ both of which are derived from the root of colere^ to cultivate ? If there is no distinction, we have mere pleonasm. And how can the poet who incites the husbandman to " constrain the soil " to his will be properly said to " constrain the soil " himself for the husbandman's use? This is possibly Silver Latin, but not an earlier style. Finally, but most 26 27 important, could Virgil ever have spoken of a *• greedy husbandman" {quamuis auido colono)} One chief moral of his writings on husbandry is that the tiller of the soil has the simplest needs and is free from the avarice of the towns; nowhere does he suggest competition for profits. But this view of the country man might possibly occur to a town-bred man of the Silver Age, used to profiteering market gardeners. These four verses, then, do not seem to me to be even neat, certainly not Virgilian in diction. Now for Nisus' story. This otherwise unknown school- master flourished, in Nettleship's opinion, in the age of Tiberius, about half a century after Virgil's death. The grammatici did not deal in higher learning, as a rule, and his word would have weighed little in his own age against the greater scholars who accepted arma uirumque without demur. Had there been any truth in his story it would have been handed down to us on far better authority. But Nisus only claimed to have it by hearsay from unnamed older men ; and evidently did not himself read the verses where the Oxford editor has printed them. He says expressly that Varius, the first editor, corrected tJu beginning by the removal of these verses. Nor does he categorically assert that the verses removed were by Virgil. The story, like the verses, is feeble; but the later commentators rescued both, for the reason that every scrap of Virgil legend, true or false, interested them ; and they little expected editors to arise who would tamper with the true text of the iEneid, attested by countless references. Such editors did arise long before 1900. Spenser has even introduced an adaptation of the verses into the first stanza of his preface to the Faerie Queene : — Lo I the many whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught, in lowly Shepheard's weeds, Am now enforst a far unfit ter taske^ For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds, And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds ; Whose prayses having slept in silence long, Mcy all too inenaCy the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learned throng : Fierce warres and faithfuU loves shall moralise my song. The difference of tone is immense. Spenser is over- come with modesty at the threshold of his epic. Poor Colin Clout is far from home : he " constrains " nothing, but is himself enforst. And this brings me to the final reason why our verses must be spurious. Homer's ego is the most elusive of problems ; you have heard him even confused with another man of the same name. But Virgil by all accounts was the most retiring and modest of men ; it must be incon- ceivable to those who study his humane and sensitive mind that he could have set in the forefront of his epic of the Fates of Rome the words ille ego^ with its implication of fame and conceit. The editor, then, who attributes these feeble verses on such feeble evidence to VirgiPs pen inserts them in the last place in the world where Virgil could have consented to it, and that in the face of all the contemporary evidence to the contrary. Propertius early in the year 22 B.C. (as I hold), when Virgil had been at work upon the ^Eneid for more than four years, says of him in reference to that work :— " He who now rouses the arms of Trojan ^neas and the ramparts founded on Lavinian shores." qui nunc Aeneae Troiani suscitat anna iactaque Lauints moenia litoribus. He quotes the word arma in the emphatic last foot of the verse, and uses the exact phrase, Lauina litora^ employed 28 29 Plil! by Virgil in verses 2 and 3, even down to the contracted form of the adjective from Latiinium, So Propertius had read the beginning of the ^Eneid three years before it passed to VirgiFs executors for publication, and it began with the passage we know. It is easy enough to conjecture the occasion for the spurious lines. The fourth book of the Georgics does end with a modest autobiographical note, a mere sub- scription in verse, by which the poet claims as his own the first, second, and third books preceding, and also his earlier bucolic Eclogues, whose first verse he here quotes in his last. In a complete edition of Virgil, such as would not appear till long after the separate publication of the iEneid, this subscription would fall immediately before the first verse of the ^neid, and might suggest, either to an editor or a student, an exercise in imitation, which should purport to link up the iCneid also with the rounded whole of the rest. The author of this exercise I conceive to have been Nisus himself, the schoolmaster, whose legend is our only ancient source for the verses, and whose word would be of no value for any composi- tions but his own. I have not inflicted this fragment of criticism upon you merely to point out that even Oxford is not infallible, though I hope that pressure of opinion may some day cause the Clarendon Press to reset the one page con- cerned ; for it stultifies a handy book. I wished to close with a concrete and easy example of what scientific method in Classical studies means. A number of very delicate perceptions go to the formation of judgment on such a point as that I have briefly dis- cussed. One has to have a sense of the value of the particular manuscript tradition, as against hearsay evidence claiming far greater antiquity than any of our manuscripts. One has to have a sense of VirgiPs economy of language and to be acquainted with his personal char- acter. One must know what his contemporaries said of the .^neid, and how far their literal references can be weighed as evidence of his exact words. On the other hand, one must not be led away by critics of brilliant but imperfectly balanced judgment, such as Dr Henry, who probably influenced the Oxford editor, but whose note on this question is a monument of how cumulative evidence for one conclusion can be used as a proof of the opposite. The human element is always tripping us up in the Humanities; but only the accurate, independent, un- flinching judgment of the scientific mind, and the knowledge bred of reasoning research, will ever be worthy of the great studies you have elected me to represent. You may be able to decide in ten years whether I have the gifts required of a Professor of Humanity, and whether, after the last five years of "fierce warres," my teaching can make the Classics for your " Knights and Ladies " a well of clear thinking and reasoned delight, but something too of a romance of "gentle deeds" — Whose prayses having slept in silence long, Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds To blazon broad emongst her learned throng. PRINTKD BY OLIVKR AMD BOTD ■DINBUROU 5«^ --<: ■- i-:^^:^:ii ->_:* V- ^%r ^^^-i^r - "i-VJi '& i,r:.r<-. >. ■r-*- -•^ycr.\ ■%^'^- :e>> J V-: ■^^ A^^' r'