"They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them." (Walden, 92-4)
Dale P. Woodiel
Conard High School
West Hartford, CT
The perennial argument over the teaching of "dead
languages," faced by many of us in our schools, reaches a particularly fevered
pitch during "economic downturns" when educational administrators and
school committees begin "eliminating frills" from budgets. Of what
real value, they ask, are Latin and Greek? Why should students learn to read
dead languages at all?
With these questions in mind, it might be instructive to
recall that there was a time in America - well into the nineteenth century, in
fact - when there was an intellectual climate, as well as an educational
system, in which respect for the classics was commonplace, when knowledge of
classical literature and minimal competence in the dead languages were central
to a young person's education.
The time is May 13, 1836. A middle-aged New Orleans
lawyer and Yale College graduate writes to his teen-aged daughter who has recently
returned home for the summer from her studies at Miss Apthorpe's School in New
Haven, Connecticut. The daughter is spending the summer out of the city at a
family retreat across the lake from New Orleans where she is being assisted in
her studies by her brother's tutor. Her father writes:
 |
| Henry David Thoreau 1817-1862 |
He goes on then to suggest that "in her leisure
hours" she could relax by reading French and recommends particularly the
tragedies of Racine. Before closing, however, as if suddenly realizing she is,
after all, a girl, he inquires whether she had thought of "aiding [her]
mother in her domestic arrangements," particularly in the management of
the younger children, as well as the care of the poultry and the garden. He
then inquires whether the Georgics
of Virgil (which apparently he had previously recommended to her) have
given her "a greater love for the country, or any new ideas about the
management of the farm" (Ibid.).
In other letters this father reveals that at least one of
his motives for urging his daughter to learn Greek springs from his fundamental
religious beliefs; he simply wants her to be able to read the New Testament in
the original.2 Such an emphasis on the study of these ancient tongues reflected
a tradition going back at least to the Middle Ages.
What do these letters reveal? Well, first they reflect
the views of an exceptionally well educated American of that time (a Yale
graduate, class of 1806, who had read the law) who desires for his daughter,
not just his sons, the best education available in the United States at that
time. And at the center of that education was the intense study of Latin and
Greek.
This educational tradition emphasizing classical
languages had been firmly established in eighteenth-century America by the
likes of Thomas Jefferson, who was said to have given up newspapers in favor of
Tacitus, Thucydides, Newton, and Euclid (Lind, 9)! In fact, it is said that at
the great Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 some of the
Founding Fathers became so absorbed in comparing the constitutions of classical
antiquity that Ben Franklin - himself an avid reader of Plutarch and Xenophon -
became so irritated that he rose to protest what he feared was a debate
"degenerating into a classical meeting" (Chinard, 48).3
This tradition of
respect for the languages and literature of the ancient world was not, however,
to go unchallenged for long. The view expressed by the New Orleans' lawyer in
1836 was soon to become in many quarters - even in New England - almost a minority
view.
In fact, save in our
earliest days when virtually all educated Americans, of which there were relatively
few, read or at least were introduced to Latin and Greek, the importance or
significance of these ancient languages in formal education has been seriously
debated. Certainly this was true by the middle of the nineteenth century when
Henry David Thoreau was being educated.
Henry Thoreau's parents were eager for one of their sons
to go to Harvard, and his studies at Concord Academy emphasized languages,
particularly Latin, Greek, and French. Classical languages were at that time
the central core of the Harvard curriculum, and the Harvard entrance exam alone
(which Thoreau only barely passed when he matriculated in 1833) required, among
other translations, the whole of Vergil and the four Gospels of the Greek
Testament (Sattelmeyer, 3). At Harvard Thoreau became an able classicist,
progressing from Horace and Xenophon through the Sophoclean tragedies and into
the epics of Homer during his first three years (Cameron, 13-16).
His love for classical literature remained strong after
his years at Harvard. He would note a decade later in Walden that he kept a copy of the Iliad on his desk much as Alexander kept a
copy with him in a special little casket like a relic (Walden, 90-93). Legend has it, incidentally, that Thoreau's copy of
the Iliad was the only
item stolen from Thoreau's cabin at Walden during his tenure there4 - apparently
by a thief more interested in reading than in surveying, or hoeing beans.
Either from his innate interest in the classics, or
simply from his desire to fulfill curricular requirements, Thoreau developed a
classical competency at Harvard. However, about the time he was leaving the
yards of Harvard College for the woods of Walden, the role of Classics in the
curriculum of America's oldest university was already diminishing. Henry Adam's
account of his Harvard education, less than twenty years later in 1854, the year
Walden was published, indicates
much had changed. Education at Harvard at mid-century for Henry Adams was worth
little more than an opportunity for maintaining or acquiring social
connections. In his autobiography Adams is particularly frank about his
exposure to the classics. "Beyond two or three Greek plays," says
Adams, "the student got nothing from the ancient languages" (Adams,
65). The classics were by this time clearly being shifted from their central
position in the university's curriculum. In fact, within thirty years President
Charles Eliot would be asking in Century Magazine what President Qunicy in Thoreau's time had no reason to ask:
"What is a Liberal Education?" (Lind, 10).
Among the first salvos in the battle over the place of
dead languages in the education of young Americans would (fittingly, perhaps)
be fired in Concord, Massachusetts, arguably the most literate village in
America in the 1850's and the intellectual incubator of the so-called New
England Renaissance. The featured combatants would be the famed minister and
essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson and his slightly younger disciple Henry David
Thoreau, two of the era's superstars.
Emerson, as a seventeen-year-old junior at Harvard
College, resolved in his journal "to make [himself] acquainted with the
Greek language and antiquities and history with long and serious attention and
study" (Perry, 5), and one must assume that he did so, since his journals
and essays are peppered with classical references. However, by 1844, having
reached the ripe age of forty years, his view of the place for classical
languages in schools and colleges had more than moderated. In a lecture
entitled "New England Reformers," Emerson makes clear his new
priorities:
In
a hundred high schools and colleges this warfare against common sense still
goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and
as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts
those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our
colleges in this country every year, and the persons who at forty years still
read Greek can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five
persons I have seen who read Plato. . . . But is not this absurd, that the
whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on
studies which lead to nothing? (Essays,
267)
Such a strong and no doubt influential statement was not
to go unchallenged. In the same intellectual community, less than ten years
later, there would come forth in the chapter entitled "Reading" of
Henry David Thoreau's Walden what might well be the most eloquent
defense of Classics written in America. Even today its message proves
particularly inspiring to the teacher of a "dead language" frustrated
by shrinking budgets and declining enrollments.
To better understand the power and importance of
Thoreau's argument, however, one must first recognize the mood of America in
the 1840's.
The powerful voices of the likes of Horace Greeley were
bemoaning the decline of a rich and powerful but already lazy America which
lived only for the moment. "A few men are wanted," Greeley
proclaimed, "able to think and act upon principles of an eternal
value."5 It is in this spirit that Thoreau defends the ancient writings -for
their "eternal value"-a point of view which might well have been
nurtured by his Harvard teacher C. C. Felton, then Eliot Professor of Greek
Literature, who expressed the belief that "the study of antiquity has a
noble power to elevate the mind above the low passions of the present, by fixing
its contemplation on the great and immortal spirits of the past"
(Sattelmeyer, 8). In short, only degenerate readers find languages dead.
Thoreau begins his classical apology by professing his
belief in the immortality of the truths set down in all of the ancient
literatures "even," he says, "when printed in the language of
our mother tongue" (Walden, 91).
He especially admires the works of
Aeschylus and Homer, whose words represent for him simply "the noblest
recorded thoughts of man" (Ibid.).
This point made, he emphasizes the need for learning the
ancient languages. "It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly
hours," says Thoreau, "if you learn only some words of an ancient
language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street" (ibid.).
For
what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the
only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most
modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit
to study Nature because she is old. (Ibid.)
Apparently Thoreau's feeling about words and languages
was almost mystical. Words, written as well as spoken, seem to have had for him
a magical and sacred power. He goes to some length in "Reading" to discuss
the difference between the written and spoken word, observing how the ancient
works lost much of their power during the Middle Ages when those men who spoke
Greek and Latin were not allowed to read the great works written in those
tongues. He goes on eloquently to suggest that one will never be able truly to
appreciate the classics unless one learns the ancient languages, and even then
something is lost.
Those
who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they
were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human
race, for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into
any modem tongue. . . as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as
the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have
rarely, if ever, equaled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and
heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who
never knew them. (Walden, 92-4)
At this point his argument takes on a familiar almost
contemporary ring. There is little point, he argues, in having great books in
general, and translations of classics in particular, if no one reads them. And
Thoreau seems to think that few folks in mid-nineteenth-century Concord read
seriously. "The best books," he says, "are not read even by
those who are called good readers. . . even in English literature. . . ."
(Walden, 96). As for the "recorded wisdom of
mankind,"
. . . the ancient
classics and Bibles, which are accessible to all who will know of them, there
are the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them. . . . Or
suppose [one] comes from reading a Greek or Latin classic in the original. . .
he will find nobody to speak to, but must keep silent about it. . . .
A man, any man, will go
considerably out of his way to pick up a silver dollar; but here are golden
words, which the wisest men of antiquity have uttered, and whose worth the wise
of every succeeding age have assured us of [but] our reading, our conversation
and thinking, are all on a very low level, worthy only of pygmies and manikins.
. . . We are underbred and low lived and illiterate. (Walden, 96-7)
Finally, in the final stretch of this marvelous chapter,
Thoreau's voice is that of the reformer, arguing for what Greeley [and Emerson,
as well] had called for-a new awareness by a few intelligent and courageous
minds in the direction of what can only be truly called liberal education - education,
cradle to grave, concerned with "principles of eternal value." We
need, he says, "to be provoked, goaded like oxen, as we are, into a
trot" (Walden, 98). It is time,
he says, that we have "uncommon schools, that we . . . not leave off our
education when we begin to be men and women" (ibid.).
In this spirit, of course, one recognizes Thoreau is
embracing at least the spirit of Emerson's historic "American
Scholar" address (Whicher, 63 tI.), in which he called for a still
fledgling America to get up off its rump and recognize its potential. There can
be, Emerson argued, a great and literate and democratic culture right here at
home; the citizenry need only desire it and, of course, be willing to pay for
it.
Yet, when looking back more than a century later at the
views of Thoreau, one must recognize that, while he must have accepted on some
level the inevitability of change, Thoreau was hardly its advocate. For him,
even the post office (Walden, 84)
and the coming of the railroad (Walden,
82-3) were, in the long run, clear steps backward for civilization. In
retrospect, such an extreme view is more that of a prophet than a realist,
whose warnings as set forth in Walden might
today have already been substantiated.
One can only imagine his reaction to what we know today
as the so-called "knowledge explosion." David Maybury-Lewis, host of
the recent televison series "Millennium," devoted to a consideration
of the state of modem civilization at the end of this century, observed that
"knowledge cuts up the world, [but] wisdom makes it whole." I think
Thoreau would have agreed.
Thoreau is well known for having repeatedly advanced the
notion that an individual is rich in proportion to the number of things he can
afford to let alone or do without. He sought constantly to simplify his life in
order to focus on those few strands of existence that pointed in the direction
of the eternal truths - which, for him, were reality. At the center of his
concentration lay the ancient literatures written in dead languages. It was
only as the classics were related to his quest for the truth that they had
meaning and value for him (Seybold, 21). I suspect this might well be the one
value shared by all of us with a fondness for "dead languages."
[This essay developed from a paper read to the 1993 annual
meeting of the Classical Association of New England and was later published in
the New England Classical Newsletter
& Journal: Volume XX May 1993 Number 4]
End Notes:
1 This letter is
contained in the Hennen-Jennings Papers, more than two hundred manuscripts and
printed volumes dated 1803-1918, in the Special Collections of the Hill
Memorial Library, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
2 Letter dated 16
October 1832 in the Hennen-Jennings Papers.
3 Noted in Lind, 9.
4 Noted in The
Annotated Walden. edited by
Philip Van Doren Stern. New York (Barnes & Noble), 1970, 231.
5 Editorial page of the New
York Tribune, July 4, 1845.
Bibliography
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York: Time Inc., 1964.
Bloom, Harold,
"Introduction" to Walden,NewHaven:
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"Chronology of Thoreau's Harvard
Years," Emerson Society Quarterly 15,Quarter 1959, 13-18.
Chinard, Gilbert,
"Polybius and the American Constitution," JHI 1 (1940).
Emerson, Ralph W., Essays
and English Traits, New York: Harvard Classics, 1909.
Harding, Walter, A
Thoreau Handbook, NewYork:
NYU Press, 1959.
Lind, L. R.,
"Nineteenth-Century American Attitudes toward the Classics," CML, XII 1, Fall 1991.
Myerson, Joel, Critical
Essays on Henry David Thoreau's Walden, G. K. Hall: Boston,
1988.
Perry, Bliss, ed., The Heart of Emerson's Journals, New York: Dover, 1938.
Seybold, Ethel, Thoreau:
The Quest and the Classics New Haven:Yale, 1951.
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Intellectual History, Princeton, 1988
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Thoreau, Henry David, Walden
and Other Writings ed.
by Brooks Atkinson,
New York: Modem Library, 1937.
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Boston:
HM & Co, 1957.
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