८

ideas of the Gracchi than they do about the notions that such people as, for example, Mr. Cole and Mr. Mellor and the editor of the New Age, are spreading industriously in the country." 1

I do not know how far the writer of the letter from which I quote is acquainted with Oxford, but in my experience intelligent undergraduates are not in that state of innocence which he supposes; indeed many of them are in more danger of thinking too much of the New Age than too little. And even if they were not, it is doubtful whether an education in which the notions' of Mr. Cole and Mr. Mellor took a prominent place, would really be so satisfactory after all. Of course no one supposes that a study of thought and history is complete when we have mastered the classics. But the simplicity and lucidity with which they raise one after another the fundamental problems of life and thought, make them a better introduction to these than modern writers. They give, as a German writer has said, not mass of knowledge, but clearness of fundamental principles (Klarheit der Grundanschauungen). We require both: but the first is useless without the second. It does not need much knowledge of education to realise that

1 Letter by D. P., Times, July 24, 1916.

the whole power of the mind to judge rests on Klarheit der Grundanschauungen, the grasping quite clearly the simple elements, of which the infinitely complex forms of modern society and thought are composed. Want of such clearness is the greatest source of error, and produces the type of man common and dangerous in the age of journalism, who is at the mercy of the last bee that happens to have lodged in his bonnet.

Because the first task and greatest need of education is to secure this clearness, it is continually forced back into the past. It is compelled, for instance, in its first stages to take Mill or Rousseau or Hobbes or Aristotle as its text-book of political science rather than Mr. Wallas or Mr. Sidney Webb, or the notions' of Mr. Cole and Mr. Mellor. The moderns are more complicated; they presuppose, for their full understanding, knowledge of their predecessors, and they contain, mixed with much truth, errors on which time has not yet passed judgment, and which are therefore difficult to detect. This makes them unsuitable food for the young student, and education turns to the older writers, who have the principles of the subject in a simpler form, whose views have been scrutinised, and whose errors laid bare. By so doing she loses

touch for a moment with the most modern developments; but she does so deliberately, knowing that the student will grasp them more quickly and judge them more accurately, if he has made his ground principles sure. The study of the classics follows from a logical application of this theory. We might, it is true, go back to Mill or Rousseau (in the Oxford Greats school this is to some extent done); but we should still be open to the objection that we were losing touch with contemporary problems, and we should be slaking our thirst at less pure and inferior streams. back to the great fountain heads. ground principles presented in

Instead, we go

Greek has the their first and

simplest form by writers of genius whose mistakes are not likely to mislead us, because after the criticism of 2000 years they are well known.

And meanwhile, in studying the classics we are acquiring standards independent of our own age and its prejudices, by which to judge ourselves and it. Without some such standards we are like boys who have been brought up entirely at home, and have never been disciplined by coming to know dispositions and ideas and habits foreign to a narrow circle. Hazlitt has well described the dangers of such an education. Writing in circum

stances not unlike our own, and defending the classics against attacks made on them after the Napoleonic Wars by critics who wished to give science a predominant place in education and to substitute the education of things for the education of words (as they called it), he says: "It is hard to find in minds otherwise formed" (than by a classical education) "either a real love of excellence, or a belief that any excellence exists superior to their own. Everything is brought down to the vulgar level of their own ideas and pursuits. Persons without education certainly do not want either acuteness or strength of mind in what concerns themselves, or in things immediately within their observation. But they have no power of abstraction, no general standard of taste or scale of opinion. They see their objects always near, and never in the horizon. Hence arises that egotism which has been remarked as the characteristic of self-taught men, and which degenerates into obstinate prejudice or petulant fickleness of opinion, according to the natural sluggishness or activity of their minds. For they either become blindly bigoted to the first opinions they have struck out for themselves, and inaccessible to conviction; or else (the dupes of their own vanity and shrewdness)

are everlasting converts to every crude suggestion that presents itself, and the last opinion is always the true one. Each successive discovery flashes upon them with equal light and evidence, and every new fact overturns their whole system. It is among this class of persons, whose ideas never extend beyond the feeling of the moment, that we find partisans who are very honest men, with a total want of principle, and who unite the most hardened effrontery and intolerance of opinion to endless inconsistency and self-contradiction." We may not agree with every word of this criticism, but we all know instances of the type which Hazlitt is attacking; and there is no better medicine against its dangers, than to be able to withdraw from the modern world, and view and judge it in the light of other civilisations than our own.

1

If so, we are driven to Greece and Rome. Not only are they "two cities set on a hill, which could not be hid; all eyes have seen them, and their light shines like a mighty sea-mark into the abyss of time." But nowhere else in European history shall we find two civilisations which satisfy the necessary conditions. They, unlike the states which grew up on their ruins, have run their full The Round Table, No. 2.