Romans." 1 The immediate sequel was a reduced importance of the classics in secondary education, but recent years have revealed more questionable aspects of the movement. Not only has Germany been obliged to supplement the poverty of her literature by claiming Dante as a German, because, among other reasons, "he has a characteristically Germanic countenance," 2 and Shakespeare, "because Germany is his spiritual home"; but also this concentration on Deutschtum has encouraged the monstrous egoism which, sitting in rapt contemplation of its virtues, finds everywhere its Own vast shadow glory-crowned

And sees itself in all it sees.

This argument can be pressed too far. There is no absolute protection against self-absorption and blindness to our own weaknesses. Still a knowledge of other civilisations, with which we can compare ourselves, is some help. And when we look for such civilisations, where can we find them except in the classics? Surprising as it may seem, there are no really satisfactory alternatives.

1 Quoted in Mr. J. W. Headlam's report (p. 21) (Board of Education Special Report, vol. 20, The Teaching of Classics in Secondary Schools in Germany).

2 Chamberlain, o.c. p. 538.

Feudal societies are useless for the purpose, and to study them in this connection would be like studying modern warfare by the light of the Crusades, possible, but unprofitable. Nor does the rest of European history offer any instances either so complete or so modern in their ideals and difficulties as Greece and Rome. It may seem paradoxical to call the ideals and difficulties of Greece and Rome modern, and some will think that the parallel about the Crusades might be extended to the study of Greek and Latin as a whole. If they will have patience, I hope to have justified myself by the end of this chapter. Meanwhile I pass to my third point, the general educational advantages of the classics. The most obvious of these are their completeness, simplicity and the fact that they resemble us sufficiently to admit of comparison, yet are sufficiently different to admit of contrast.

Consider for a moment their completeness. In their literature we see the evolution of epic, lyric, tragic, poetry: the comedy of broad humour is succeeded by the comedy of manners; the literary epic, the elegy, the pastoral, the epigram follow. Then there is their prose, historical, oratorical, philosophical, and finally, artistic prose for its own

sake. Then there is their thought, commencing in bold scientific speculation, developing in the fields of morals, politics, psychology, logic, metaphysics, and branching out in hedonism of different types, materialism, idealism, scepticism, stoicism, asceticism, mysticism; then there are the later developments of the Alexandrian epoch, when the various sciences are mapped out, and each tills laboriously its own field. Most of the adventures of the human mind are in Greek literature, one developing into another with a method and logic that is as wonderful as, and indeed explains, their completeness. Or turn from literature and thought to history, and see the examples of various forms of government, absolute, military and limited monarchies, oligarchies, democracies of different types, followed by absorption into the Roman empire with more or less autonomy: note the colonising activity of Greece (two of the three great colonising epochs of the world fall in its history); note the incessant political experiment and speculation, theories of communism, federal governments, arbitration treaties, commercial treaties, problems of naturalisation of aliens, of emigration, of the position of women and slaves. And so far I have not spoken of Rome. Let critics of the classics

produce any other civilisation so complete, so fitted to introduce boys to the activities and adventures of the human mind, so able in every direction to open windows on to life.

Further, Greek literature has a curious inner completeness, which for educational uses gives it a singular advantage. By some chance its great writers wonderfully supplement each other's deficiencies, so that we have in Greek not only famous tragedians, historians, orators and philosophers, but different and representative types of the human mind in each of these branches of art and thought. Greek literature is like a picture gallery, which is small, but has perfect examples of all the great schools of art. In tragedy Aeschylus, austere, tremendous, elemental, his atmosphere charged with mysterious forces, his characters survivals from a heroic age, his plots crude, his imagery audacious, is followed by Sophocles, the perfect artist, a master of plot and language, yet a great poet besides; and he again by Euripides the human,' with his interest in the life of the common people, his sympathy with the oppressed and suffering, his hatred of wrong, his acute restless brain, sceptic and dreamer, intellectualist and poet. The circle is complete. Or take oratory, and note

how Lysias, the genius of plain, natural, spontaneous style, is supplemented by Isocrates, with his elaborate rolling periods, a little wanting in spontaneity or fire, and he again by passion incarnate in Demosthenes. Or take history, where Thucydides, intent on tracing step by step the progress of his country's tragedy, has almost banished personalities from his pages, and tells us nothing of the common life of Athens, while Herodotus is interested in every human being he meets, and records the gossip of the market, and the quaint customs of the foreign countries he visited. With philosophy it is the same, as we are reminded by the saying that every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian.

This richness, this completeness of the civilisations of Greece and Rome is one of their recommendations; another is their simplicity. They exhibit an epitome of man in himself and in his relations with other men; the web of human character and society is there, as it is in modern literature; but it has a far simpler form, so that we can trace the several strands out of which it is woven, and examine them more easily. The difficulty with modern history and modern thought