How I ended up being cornered in a schoolyard by a teacher over that formidable fossil Latin, is a strange tale, and not one I intend to tell; suffice to say I undertook to defend that antiquity in the capacity of a bystander, not being properly a Latin teacher myself, but honoured to have taught a moderate minting of Latin these past few years; and suffice it to say that I was interrogated in the capacity of precisely that office I lay no claim to, that of a Latin teacher. Nevertheless my antagonist discovering that I might be buttonholed by that name proceeded to buttonhole me roundly and tactlessly, to the tune of, ‘Oh, Latin… but what will they – do with it?’
To which question there are any number of well-bruited answers, so that one would begin to wonder why people still ask it, were not those answers invariably rather poor. They dry in the mouth; I lay at their door half the antics of the anti-antiquarians of the world. Indeed, I believe any standard reason to learn Latin is as good as a reason not to trust Latinists. Hence I begin my explanation of ‘What They Will Do With It’ with a little polite altercation against the champions of Latin themselves.
The truth is they are so very amiable and concessive that they begin their defence with a frank admission that Latin is indefensible. They make it clear from the outset that no one would learn Latin if it did not help them with a thousand other things, like music and maths and science and sociology, which they readily allow, in keeping with their preposterous politeness, need no justification. Of course everyone ought to learn maths – such is their supposal; and as Latin will help them on their way, they might as well learn it too. But why it is more useful to learn maths than to learn Latin remains a mystery to me.
They have reached a truly precipitous angle of argument by the time they suggest that if you learn Latin you will find it easier to learn Italian; as if anyone could choke down the idea that it is easier to learn two languages than one. However good that tried and tested operation might be, the argument is a bad one; and to bang into a bad argument before the door is half open is a sure sign that all the good arguments are out to stroll. Things are desperate if one of the leading reasons to learn a particular language is that it might help you with another language. But that is how the defendants of Latin argue; though no Italian enthusiast would rush to assure us that the study of Italian is the most excellent preparation for the study of Latin. The golden rule of Latinism is that Latin must be taught so that the poor students can learn anything and everything but Latin itself.
What is remarkable is that the teachers of French and Japanese do not fiddle such a saltarello. Even teachers of drama and art are not so disoriented. And especially not the teachers of physics and maths, who would rebuff any inquiry into the value of their subjects out of hand. And yet it would perfectly satisfy the cannons of logic and learning for the Latin teacher to respond, ‘Why, they will do with Latin exactly the same thing as they will do with drama and with physics. But pray, do remind me what that is?’
As is, there is an incumbency upon the Latin teacher to come up with some absurd scaffolding of motives that has nothing to do with Latin; you must say something silly in its defence simply to satisfy expectations. Latin, you must say, is good training for your brain. It improves the precision of the mind and trains one to think analytically. It expands one’s knowledge of English, teaching all sorts of elephantine words of erudition that will significantly increase one’s employability. Latin is the ancestor of the French, Romanian, and Spanish languages, so if you have any intention of learning them you ought to learn Latin; and it will help you to understand musical terms. – And these arguments all stumble on the selfsame block. It is far easier to learn Spanish and French than to learn Spanish, French, and Latin; and it is far, far easier to learn musical terminology than to learn Latin. What is most absurd is that it is all quite beside the point, off cue, and entirely unrelated to the topic in hand. We are not discussing brain-training or approaches to music; we are discussing Latin. Now call in the home ec. teacher; wind them the same way. “How could you doubt that cooking is a most useful skill to learn? It teaches innumerable invaluable life skills! Where to start! It teaches patience and precision, caution and creativity, ensuring beyond a shadow of doubt employment in a high-paying profession. It is the surest gateway to a deeper study of chemistry and minerology, and how could you approach the biology of beef without knowing how to cook it?”
But of course the truth is they taught us cooking for only one reason – so that we could cook. And I would venture to suggest that amidst all the innumerable absurdities of Latin apologetics, there really is one good reason why a child might be taught Latin – so that they can understand Latin. Dispel, please, any illusions about cooking being an essential life skill, and Latin not. Cooking is an art, and Latin is no less. But if you want a more even comparison, French will do. People do not learn French because they will ever need it, but because they are interested to know it; because it is natural for people to be curious. The only reason we see Latin in a different light from French is that somewhere down the line someone decided that French is ‘a good thing’ and did a much better job at persuading the world than did the purveyors of Latin.
Thus it comes to pass that this feeling of doubt about the value of Latin is no less common amongst those who learnt it than it is amongst those who praise… no one – that they were spared that. Which is a grievous issue; for they have something valuable without knowing that it is valuable. And all the while it requires no profound revolution to overturn this doubt – just the modest claim that Latin is itself something good.
Which we claim. And for that very reason we defy the world to prove that it is useful. For here is a strange and hoary truth: the good and the useful are opposite and incompatible. God is good; for that very reason it is the rankest irreverence to assert that God is useful. Something is useful if it helps you get to something good, but if something is truly good it ought to be appreciated in its own right, not for what it gets you. And though we sometimes call things ‘good’ when we simply mean they are useful, it would be senseless to call something ‘useful’ if we truly believed it was good. As soon as they start explaining that it is useful to learn Latin they insinuate that Latin is not worth learning for its own sake. And this is not merely a matter of misevaluation. It is fatal to any genuine understanding of Latin.
It is like when people offer reasons for reading story books by explaining how reading stories is good for you. At best, if they succeed, they will cause an unwilling reader to sit down with a book in an exceptionally unfavourable state of mind to try and gain profit from something they should be instinctively enjoying or ignoring altogether. The defenders of fiction betray their cause from the outset, for no amount of morality and psychology really justifies reading stories, since stories should need no justification. If someone suggests to me that we should stop telling stories or reading them, I do not argue with them: I simply smile and ask them why. We are in different worlds; there can be no real argument. Again, if someone were to tell me that music is unprofitable or that it is a drain on the economy or that it fosters gross sentimentalism, why would I argue with them? They could prove their point as comprehensively as possible, and they would not have scathed my interest in music in the slightest. Now there is just as much reason to learn Latin as there is to read stories or to play the cello.
To stand on the balcony and cry out that Latin is useful is to guarantee that you do not think it is good absolutely, and that you have little interest in it in its own right. This is not scholastic logic-chopping; it is an issue as live as our twelve-year olds. For our whole educational system is built on the assumption that skill or knowledge of any kind is good; and our generation, not stopping even to question whether skill and knowledge are good, have rushed straight to the extreme of asserting on a case by case basis that they are useful. The axe is laid to the beanstalk; and as smoke follows fire the giant must come down.
This is the kind of issue one takes a stand on; and many have. It turns out that in select circles you are not expected to promenade any rickety reasonings in defence of the Roman cause. You may simply remind the dear sectarians that knowledge is not power, it is pleasure and dignity, valuable in and of itself. There are even writers with the good sense to declare that it is democratic to spread such useless knowledge amongst the masses, and oligarchic to feed them only what serves their prospects and pockets. This attitude I consider admirable and sound; except on one small count – that I would not go so far as to say that knowledge is invariably good.
Not, that is, that there are things it is bad to know; but there are priorities. A kindly fool might very nobly provide for their own ignorance for fear of becoming a know-it-all; and a knave might search out all the secrets of science in the interests of self-aggrandisement. I prefer the fool. There is one absolute, and everything else below takes its station on Jacob’s ladder: and on it character ranks higher than knowledge. It might be a very fine thing to know a lot – if in knowing a lot I am also a very fine person. The chief and head of my quarrel with both the critics and defenders of Latin is that they are not interested in Latin for its own sake; and the reason is that care more about success than about character. The one says ‘what will they do with Latin?’ and the other says, ‘they will do many great marvels with their Latin, and become very successful’. The critics do not say, ‘They will learn Latin and become pompous imperialists’ – would that they did. Would that they said, ‘At all costs they must not learn Latin: it will convert them to Christianity’. Then at least they would be dealing with the real issue at stake: the issue of character. As is, they are cut from the cloth of the world, concerned primarily with efficiency and business. And the defenders of Latin, who should be monkish medievalists talking about nothing but virtue and tradition, are all too happy to skip across the Lethe and meet them on their own ground. I myself would answer those pinstripe pragmatists whose only thought is their spreadsheets in this manner:
“You, sir, believe in the romance of success. You think the finest thing in life is to be a millionaire, and live every minute of your materialistic life in the public eye. Or maybe I have mistaken you; maybe you merely think that to own a large house and drink beers around a barbeque is the closest modern approximation of the earthly paradise. I admire you for that; you are like a character from a story – though I am afraid to say, not likely the hero. I too would like to be a character in a story, but a different one: Nestor, who had seen two generations come and go and now ruled over a third; or Gandalf, or a book-learned sage. I would much rather be the man with the wisdom of the years who can give good counsel and a seasonable word. And today my seasonable word is that learning Latin does not make a man successful like you, and I would be a truant and a villain to pretend that it does. It does not make a man smarter or richer or even wiser, though a wise man might fall in love with it. If you are asking why you should learn Latin, then I suppose you should not. If you are asking why I think everyone should learn Latin, I assure you that I do not. But some people should; and they should need no other justification than that such is the sort of person they want to be. Such knowledge is like art: we seek to know things because it is adventurous and romantic to be wise. Yes – it is as a romantic that I prize my knowledge of Latin. The romantic in me loves to converse on equal terms with all those dazzling generals and cruel emperors and saints and poets from ages long past. The romantic in me loves to poke my nose into the monasteries and castles of the Middle Age. That is why I am mortified at the thought of answering you on your own terms; not for anything would I sink so low as to explain to you the intellectual or social advantages of learning Latin. I would rather down-sell it, alas: one day I fear I will be caught desperately assuring you that learning Latin reduces one’s employability to practically nothing and plunges one into certain poverty, just to prove that there doesn’t need to be the slightest sliver of a practical reason for learning it. It is perfectly right and healthy to want to be wise, if that means knowing the jokes that the old Kings of France used to crack with their courtiers or roaring out the glorious pomp of the old Latin hymns; and it is perfectly wicked to stunt the development of that desire. I admit, I must (regrettably) confess that learning Latin has stood me in good stead and brought me many tangible benefits. But with joy I may reassure you that it has also taught me to prize that a poor pittance in the scheme of things.”
Those would be my reasons for promoting Latin. And yet, when I talk of wisdom and knowledge I do not mean to imply that to choose to learn Latin is to choose to be an intellectual. If we assume that it is we are once again guilty of giving special treatment to the poor antiquity. Every other language is quite reasonably viewed as an induction into a culture; while Latin is supposed to be an induction into college. This is rather silly; to learn Latin is to Romanise oneself, and once you have leapt the hurdle of learning Latin you may be as anti-intellectual as you like and still be a Roman. You may be a Latin laundryman as easily as a English laundryman.
Now it is a peculiar circumstance that for the last fifteen hundred years nearly no one has been born Roman. It is the one culture that is entirely composed of proselytes. For the Roman Empire was so powerful that it managed to outlive itself and reach its acme after its own demise. Most of the greatest Romans came onto the scene when the Romans were no more. That is why, incidentally, it misses the mark so widely to say that Latin is a dead language, for what we call ‘dead’ is the very definition of life for Latin. And this shows, for however ‘dead’ Latin may be it is continually putting a word in; and the more dead it is the more boomingly audible its words are. Vast multitudes who do not understand more than a couple of phrases in Latin understand Latin itself; even if they understand only that it is the language of ceremonious Catholicism, that it is a gaudy and pompous language, and that it wears robes and crosses. And they understand that it is dead – which makes it very much alive. Most people don’t realise that Hurrian and Urartic and Syriac are dead.
This is very peculiar; but part of the pact for posthumous languages is that they must be taught, or they really will die. There is no such sense of urgency in the teaching of French; no one feels that if Australians and Americans stopped learning French the French millions would evaporate and France would be no more. But the question of Latin on the curriculum genuinely is a question of cultural genocide; and what we are really asking is, do we have a reason to want to preserve Roman culture, or should we give it the slip and let it go the way of all flesh?
Naturally the first to stand up in its defence will be the Latinists themselves. They need have no other motive than patriotism. We would despise a Spaniard or Russian who was willing to watch the demise of his nation without lifting a finger, and there is every reason why we should champion a Latinist who will not take the decline of Latin lying down. The Spaniard and the Russian pass their culture on to their children, the Latinists to theirs. The peculiarity that Spain and Russia are bred in the blood and tell in the hair and eyes, while Latin is taught in schools and universities instead, does not affect that principle. That people do not think of the matter in these terms may be justly blamed on the intellectualist approach of the advocates and adversaries of Latin, who would rather argue about the intellectual effects of learning the language, than the moral effects of entering the culture. But we ought to be wise enough to realise that this is broad humour at best; for from a worldfull of languages we know that it is absurd to judge a language primarily on its intellectual effects, and Latin is a language. Have you ever weighed the intellectual (not cultural) effects of learning Chinese against the intellectual effects of learning Arabic? That is not how these things work. Everyone knows that.
I take issue with those, whether Latinists or not, who march around trumpeting that Latin is a perfect language, or that it is composed of grammar triple-concentrate, or that it is more useful than Arabic and more intellectual than Chinese. None of these things are true; it remains the case that Latin is our language and we will fight to defend it.
Besides the patriotism of Latinists, it is my hope that, so to speak, the new world will come to the aid of the old. A candid generosity in me hopes that, were the old foe France on the brink of extinction, England would find in her some steel nerve of magnanimity and snatch her from the fire. Or that were England herself in mortal peril, she might plead with Scotland, and for all her crimes be not refused. For if England perished the whole world would feel it; and Scotland most of all. We hate our neighbours most nearly; but unbeknown sometimes even to ourselves we also love them most nearly. And it is a fact that the culture of the Roman tongue, in its way a global subculture, has been the nearest neighbour to, at the very least, every Western nation, for well over a thousand years. If there is still an ounce of nobility in them they would at the least be sorry to see her go.
These are reasons I think the world ought to defend Latin if it is in danger. But happily I can conclude by saying that Latin is not in danger; that it is still taught in schools and colleges, still spoken, if only in Rome and Oxford, and still honoured and abused as much as any living language in the world. We are not yet desperate enough to hedge it with any scrap of sophistry. But we must understand properly what it stands for, and that, we must take the effort to learn it.
theparsnipoftime 