Many of my friends,
who label themselves humanists, are in a panic about this, and look
upon me sadly as a renegade because I, who owe almost everything to a
"classical education," am ready (they think) to sell the pass of
"compulsory Greek" to a horde of money-grubbing barbarians who will
turn our flowery groves of Academe into mere factories of commercial
efficiency. But fear is a treacherous guide. They are the victims of
that abstract generalisation of which I spoke at the outset. I check
their forebodings by reference to concrete personalities, myself, my
children, and the hundreds of boys I have known. And I see more and
more plainly, as I study the infinite variety of our mental lineaments
and the common stock of human nature and civilised society which
unites us, that literature is a permanent and indispensable and even
inevitable element in our education; and that moreover it can only
have free scope and growth in the expanding personality of the young
in a due and therefore a varying harmony with other interests. I and
my children and my schoolboys have eyes and ears and hands--and even
legs! We have, as Aristotle rightly saw, an appetite for knowledge,
and that appetite cannot be satisfied, though it may be choked, by a
sole diet of literature. We have desires of many kinds demanding
satisfaction and requiring government. We have a sense of duty and
vocation: we know that we and our families must eat to live and to
carry on the race.
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