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We offer no opinion, also, on the "oral method" of teaching both modern and classical tongues, as we have no experience at all to guide us. Surely, too, the third of the three R's should include a knowledge of book-keeping, balance sheets, etc. Here we join hands heartily with the "utilitarian" school of educational reformers.
The Adam Brothers, of whom Robert was the more important, showed strong classical influence in their work, and much of it resembles that of Louis XVI, which was influenced from the same source. Chairs had square or round or oval backs, and they also used a lyre-shaped splat which was copied later by Sheraton. Often the top rail was decorated by small and charming painted panels.
The day before, after a matinee of Andromaque at the Theatre-Francais, in a moment of rebellion and reaction against all things classical, they had both thrown themselves upon Hernani. She had read it aloud to him in a green corner of the Bois, having a faculty that way, and bidding him take it as a French lesson.
This is to be understood as simply referring to the habit of going direct to the sources, and treating definite problems. Without doubt a day will come when all the documents relating to the history of classical antiquity shall have been edited and treated critically.
Uncultured children, on the other hand, pass blind and deaf close to things, just as an ignorant man passes by a work of art or listens to a performance of classical music without recognition or enjoyment.
Recalling the classical story, familiar to his youth, and the judgment of the gods "Henceforth be blind for thine eyes have seen too much!" the young man concealed himself from view from the lake and waited for some time before venturing to regain the cliff overhead.
Edward Wortley Montagu, who was then twenty-five, was already a person of some distinction. He was a good classical scholar, acquainted with modern languages, and versed in what his grand-daughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, styled "polite literature." He was interested in the pretty, clever girl, and encouraged her to talk to him of her reading and writing.
This lecture was not then published in full: but part of the original text is printed in the third chapter of the work we have next to notice, "The Queen of the Air." In spite of a "classical education" and the influence of Aristotle upon the immature art-theories of his earlier works, Ruskin was known, in his younger days, as a Goth, and the enemy of the Greeks.
The English, as may be supposed, made various additions and alterations suited to their rougher habits and ideas, and what at one time probably retained somewhat of the elegance of its classical origin, became the strange burlesque it now appears. Another nautical custom still in vogue is also derived from remote antiquity.
But if this be a fair picture of the results of classical teaching at its best and I gather from those who have authority to speak on such matters that it is so what is to be said of classical teaching at its worst, or in other words, of the classics of our ordinary middle-class schools ? I will tell you. It means getting up endless forms and rules by heart.
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