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Updated: May 27, 2025
As it is painfully interesting to trace the gradual degeneration of a poetic faith into the ritual of unimaginative Tupperism, so it is amusing to see pedantry clinging faithfully to the traditions of its prosaic nature, and holding sacred the dead shells that once housed a moral symbol. What a divine thing the outside always has been and continues to be!
Goethe herein was indeed the type of a very large class of Germans: God grant that no generation may ever see such a type common in England; and that our race, remembering ever that the golden age of the English drama was one of private immorality, public hypocrisy, ecclesiastical pedantry, and regal tyranny, and ended in the temporary downfall of Church and Crown, may be more ready to do fine things than to write fine books; and act in their lives, as those old Puritans did, a drama which their descendants may be glad to put on paper for them long after they are dead.
In some of the stories indeed, which were composed no doubt at an earlier time, there is the tedium of the old romance or the pedantry of the schoolman; but taken as a whole the poem is the work not of a man of letters but of a man of action. Chaucer has received his training from war, courts, business, travel a training not of books but of life.
Macaulay himself has penned many biographies. Most of them are quite above the pedantry of small facts. Instead, they are crammed with deep philosophy, with abstractions, and with the balancing of antithetical qualities. They are bloodless frameworks, without life or humanity, bundles of peculiarities skilfully grouped, and ticketed with such and such a name. No one sees a man within.
Extravagance and sensuous enjoyment formed the main object with all, among the parvenus as well as among the Licinii and Metelli; not the polished luxury which is the acme of civilization, but that sort of luxury which had developed itself amidst the decaying Hellenic civilization of Asia Minor and Alexandria, which degraded everything beautiful and significant to the purpose of decoration and studied enjoyment with a laborious pedantry, a precise punctiliousness, rendering it equally nauseous to the man of fresh feeling as to the man of fresh intellect.
The model man must have a keen sense of honor, and wit without pedantry; he must be brave, heroic, generous, gallant, but he must also possess good breeding and gentle courtesy. The coarse passions which had disgraced the court were refined into subtle sentiments, and women were raised upon a pedestal, to be respectfully and platonically adored.
He opened his Virgil, brushed aside the cobwebs which monkish brains had spun over the beautiful lines, and met the old poet as one man meets another; and lo! there arose before him a new, untrodden and wholly human world, free from priestcraft and pedantry, near to nature and unspeakably alluring and satisfying."
If to throw off the shackles of Old World pedantry, and defy the paltry rules and examples of grammarians and rhetoricians, is the special province and the chartered privilege of the American writer, Timothy Dexter is the founder of a new school, which tramples under foot the conventionalities that hampered and subjugated the faculties of the poets, the dramatists, the historians, essayists, story-tellers, orators, of the worn-out races which have preceded the great American people.
The book entranced me, and I determined to read every word that I could get hold of by the same author. In the Imperial Library in Paris I read first of all The History of English Literature, of which I had hitherto only been acquainted with a few fragments, which had appeared in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Taine was to me an antidote to German abstraction and German pedantry.
The schools of all nations maintained their classical curriculum; boys still began, and often ended, their schooling with the Latin grammar, but this did not mean, as it had meant in the earlier days, that the influence was the same. There was indeed little in common between what we may venture to call the pedantry of Germany and the superficial elegancy of the Jesuit schools.
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