Articles From The Classical Teacher

The Greatest Single Defect of My Own Latin Education
Dorothy Sayers

I was born at Oxford, in the fourth year before Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. My father was at that time Headmaster of the Cathedral Choir School, where it was part of his duty to instruct small demons with angel-voices in the elements of the ancient Roman tongue.

I was rising seven when he appeared one morning in the nursery, holding in his hand a shabby black book, which had already seen some service, and addressed to me the following memorable words: “I think, my dear, that you are now old enough to begin to learn Latin.” ... In those dark ages, half a century ago, before modern educational improvements had set in, that was the age at which one did begin to learn Latin. My father, seeing his offspring approach that age, reacted automatically to the situation. In the absence of little boys, he seized upon such infant material as was at hand, and went to work with the customary tool, which was, in fact, Dr. William Smith’s Principia.

I was by no means unwilling, because it seemed to me that it would be a very fine thing to learn Latin, and would place me in a position of superiority to my mother, my aunt, and my nurse—though not to my paternal grandmother, who was an old lady of parts, and had at least a nodding acquaintance with the language. My father sat down in the big chair, put his arm round me to restrain me from wriggling and, opening the book, confronted me with the mysterious formula:

mensa: a table
mensae: of a table
mensae: to or for a table
mensam: a table
mensa: by, with, or from a table

Presumably at this point he explained that the ancient Romans had had the un-English habit of altering the endings of their nouns according as the case was altered. I have no recollection of finding anything particularly odd about this: I was far too young. Life was full of odd things which one accepted without protest, as simple facts. A dog had four legs, a beetle six, a spider eight: why not? I do remember finding it, at some later point, entertaining that a sailor, a poet, or a husbandman should have feminine endings.

When we had rendered Exercise I, Part 2, into Latin, my father rose up and went away, leaving the book with me, and recommending that I should commit the declension of mensa to memory. This I immediately did, being at that time of life when the committing to memory of meaningless syllables and inconsequent lists of things is as easy as “Hey-diddle-diddle.” I chanted the rigmarole aloud until I was familiar with it, and hastened away to show off my prowess in the kitchen.

From that time on, the Latin lesson became a daily event. I will not pretend that the first fine careless rapture of achievement endured forever. Dominus, I seem to remember, was well-received, though slightly complicated by neuters; and a new and highly satisfactory chant was soon added to the repertory, which went with a noble swing:

bonus, bona, bonum
bonum, bonam, bonum
boni, bonae, boni

and so forth, reaching a fine galumphing crescendo in

bonorum, bonarum, bonorum

before declining into a softly reiterated burden of

bonis, bonis, bonis.

With the Third Declension, the high and austere order of Imperial Rome seemed to lose grip a little. Irregularities set in: there were nouns like rex, and mus, and caput, whose nominatives seemed to have lost their roots, and there was a tiresome difference of opinion between noun and adjective about the correct termination of the ablative singular. On the whole, however, the lack of symmetry was atoned for by a certain whimsicality and coloratura. The Fourth and Fifth Declensions remained rather exotic: one never got sufficient opportunities for using those fascinating terminations in -uum, -ubus, and -erum; on the other hand, there was always the perilous but exciting adventure of the double-barrelled declensions of respublica and, later on, of jusjurandum, where—alas!—pride in the two-handed engine nearly always betrayed one into saying juremjurandum, and being scolded for not thinking.

I am convinced that the age at which I began was the right one. An acquaintance of mine whose boy is just starting life at a grammar school tells me that the boys there do not begin Latin until they are eleven. I am sure that this is too late. In acquiring the Accidence, everything depends upon getting declensions and conjugations firmly fixed in the memory during the years when the mere learning of anything by rote is a delight rather than a burden. The jingle of “mensa, mensae, mensae" or “amo, amas, amat” belongs properly to the same mental age as “eeny, meeny, miney, mo,” or “This is the house that Jack built.” By the time that the reasoning and arguing faculty is awake, the capacity for assembling sounds by aural memory is weakening, and by the age of puberty it is practically lost. One can, of course, learn by heart at all ages if one earnestly puts one’s mind to it—in the sense that one can memorize a thing ad hoc, as an actor memorizes a part. But the thing learnt at a later age does not abide graven upon the very foundations of memory like the thing learnt in childhood. And the more rational one becomes, the more tedious and difficult it is to learn strings of sounds which are not logically associated.

Abstract nouns in -io call
Feminina one and all;
Masculine will only be
Things that you can touch or see,
As curculio, vespertilio,
Pugio, scipio, and papilio,
With the nouns that number show
Such as ternio, senio.

The first four lines of that mnemonic make sense, and so do the last two; if I had not known them from the cradle, I could learn them tomorrow. But the fifth and sixth lines are different. If I had to learn them fresh today, I should have forgotten them by tomorrow, because they make no connected sense. But I remember them now, although I have not the faintest recollection of what any one of the words means, except papilio. I could not possibly forget them, any more than I could forget hic, haec, hoc. And it is all nonsense to pretend that small children hate and are bored by learning things by heart. They like it. They have a passion for it. If they are given no outlet for this passion in school, they will devote themselves to memorizing number-plates or cricket averages. The love of memorizing for memorizing’s sake is the hallmark of the sub-rational intellect, and it is simply silly not to take advantage of it while the going’s good.

What is, I am sure, a strain and vexation to the young mind is to be compelled to reason before the time; just as it is a strain and vexation to have to memorize after the best time for that kind of thing is past. It is (as Wordsworth rightly pointed out) extremely unwise to keep bothering a young child with “Why, Edward, tell me why?” Wait until Edward asks “Why?” before burdening his mind with reasons. And meanwhile, let him chant “mensa, mensae, mensae” at the top of his voice. His grown-ups will get tired of it before he does. But do not on any account waste those precious years when declension and conjugation can be learned without difficulty and without boredom.

[My father and I] marched with Caesar, built walls with Balbo, and admired the conduct of Cornelia, who brought up her children diligently in order that they might be good citizens. The mighty forest of syntax opened up its glades to exploration, adorned with its three monumental trees—the sturdy accusative and infinitive, the graceful ablative absolute, and the banyan-like and proliferating ut and the subjunctive. Beneath their roots lurked a horrid scrubby tangle of words beginning with u, q, and n, and a nasty rabbit warren of prepositions. There was also a horrid region, beset with pitfalls and mantraps, called Oratio Obliqua, into which one never entered without a shudder, and where, starting off from a simple accusative and infinitive, one tripped over sprawling dependent clauses and bogged one’s self down in the consecution of tenses, until one fell over a steep precipice into a Pluperfect Subjunctive, and was seen no more.

I do not know why the recollection of all this is pleasant to me. Why, for example, did I in those days greatly prefer Latin to the French, of which I later became a master? I do not think my father was a particularly inspired teacher; his methods would now be called unimaginative and old-fashioned to the last degree. One reason may, I fancy, have been that the pronunciation, being flat-footedly English, gave me no trouble; another, that the complications of the morphology and syntax released in me some kind of low cunning which today finds expression in the solving of crossword puzzles.

I was, indeed, introduced to the Latin authors. The day arrived on which, toiling very slowly with a vocabulary, I began to work my way line by line through the episode of Pyramus and Thisbe from the Metamorphoses. After which we embarked, at the same snail’s pace, upon the second book of the Aeneid.

As soon as I took up residence in Oxford, I was sent to a warrior called Mr. Herbert May. So far as I know, he spent all his time with people like me. He was the indefatigable seagull, forever winging his way through the clashing rocks of Latin Prose and Greek Unseens with a fleet of dismal and inexperienced Argonauts thrashing the seas at his tail. A kindlier and more imperturbable man I never met. In two terms he accomplished what my school-teachers had not ventured to undertake in four years.

We pounded our way through the Hecuba and the Alcestis; we coped with the Aorist; we mowed down under our feet that weedy growth of repulsive particles with which the Greek language is infested. Oddly enough, I cannot recall what the Latin set books were, if any; but from the fact that I still remember a few lines of the Sixth Aeneid, I am inclined to think that we may have had to tackle it. My only distinct recollection is of making my way through a series of Latin Proses, and of Mr. May, choking with laughter and snuff over some more than usually preposterous howler, recovering himself to say encouragingly: “Well, Miss Sayers, you do make the most elementary errors, but I will say for you that what you write is Latin.” By which I took him to mean that I did instinctively frame the sentence after the high Roman fashion, collecting everything into a vast articulated complex of clauses and sub-clauses before proceeding to adorn the structure with passive deponents and the non-existent parts of defective verbs. And I conclude from this that it was not my linguistic sense that was at fault, but that with more imaginative teaching I might have made as good a job of Latin as of German or French.

Yet I believe that it was about this time that a dim glamour which had haunted me all my childhood, and haunts me to this day, began to shine into my mind like the sun rising through a mist—the shimmering, spell-binding magic of the medieval Latin.

It is being borne in upon me with more and more force, and with every year I live, that the greatest single defect of my own Latin education, and that (I expect) of many other people, is the almost total neglect of those fifteen Christian centuries. The great reproach cast up against Latin by those who would drive it altogether from the schools is that it is a dead language. But if it is dead today, it is because the Classical Scholars killed it by smothering it with too much love. Up to the time of the Revival of Learning, it was a living language, growing and developing like a living language alongside of its children and grandchildren and, like many a hearty and lively grandparent today, picking up much of their speech and slang as it went along. It is fascinating to watch it from the first century onwards, assimilating syntax and vocabulary from the vernacular Greek, weaving in the Hebrew through the Vulgate—after the same manner, though perhaps not to the same extent, as Anglo-Saxon assimilated the Norman-French; to see it renewing itself by contact with its own Romance languages as English renews itself by contact with American, becoming more analytic as they become more analytic, and developing a new vocabulary to express current ideas. Contamination and barbarism are one set of names for this sort of thing: another name is vitality. Everything which is alive tends to break out into vulgarity at times. Only the dead and embalmed can preserve forever their changeless marmoreal dignity.
The extent to which the legend of a sculpturesque classicism has fastened upon the popular English mind is curious and interesting. I find, for example, that the thing in my own plays which excites most outrage and contempt—not from scholars, who know better, but from the average semi-educated reviewer—is that I make the Roman common soldier talk British Army slang. It would, I imagine, be vain to point out that what Roman soldiers in fact talked was Roman Army slang. It is rooted in the popular mind that not merely the native Praetorians but also the mixed ranks of fourth-century foreign mercenaries conversed about the camp-fire in the periods of Cicero, or at the very least in those of Caesar—for which the correct equivalent is supposed to be Victorian Wardour Street. It was when I was digging down at Oxford for the roots of the French language that the origin of the word tête was first revealed to me: testa, a potsherd. In that disreputable period when the spoken word was passing into Romance, the Latin man-in-the-street was unregenerately referring to his pal’s face as his “mug.” That, I think, was the day on which I first saw the light.

There is another and profounder sense in which the Augustan Latin is felt to be dead. Our civilization, such as it is, remains in its living bones a Christian civilization—and the Augustan Latin was never Christian. Even those who most roundly assert that Christianity is dead bring it to the bar of their inherited Christian values, and by the concentrated rage which they bring to its obsequies proclaim that it is in many ways disconcertingly alive. Nobody is either annoyed or delighted over the assertion that Great Pan is dead and the Olympians only myths. And the language in which Augustine of Hippo fought the Manichees and—later, but without breach of continuity—Aquinas defended Aristotle, and Galileo fought Rome for the movement of the earth, is, if dead, dead with a different deadness from that of a language which officially recognizes only the Olympians. To set up a great gap in learning and literature between the days of Augustus and the Renaissance is not true to life or history.

And—to go back to my former point—the Medieval Latin is much easier than the classical. Not all of it; some of it is very crabbed, and there were always, in every age, men who tried to conform their living Latin to the Latin of the Augustans. But the true medieval Latin is akin to us, with its simplified construction and modern analytical syntax. The proof of that is that I, who cannot read a page of Virgil or Cicero or Horace without the pains of the damned, can read Aquinas without more difficulty than is involved in understanding what he is talking about. When I read Benvenuto da Imola on Dante, I can pass from Italian text to Latin commentary and scarcely notice the change-over. In short, my training in the Latin grammar, while it left me still unfitted to cope with the Augustans, did fit me to cope with the Medievals, whom I could have read easily and fluently, had anybody directed my attention to them in time.

And lest you should think I know too little to know what I am talking about, I will quote from the preface of a book which I met with only the other day after I had decided what I was going to say to you. I wish I had known of its existence earlier: it would have solved half my problems for me. That is H. P. V. Nunn’s An Introduction to Ecclesiastical Latin. He says:

Much of Classical Latin is highly artificial, not to say unnatural, in its modes of expression. The authors whose works are most generally read wrote for a fastidious and highly cultivated society of littérateurs ... and especially under the early Empire, they wrote with a view to reading their works to admiring circles of friends, whose applause they hoped to arouse by some novel or far-fetched term of expression.

And, having said that those who intend to use his book “should possess at least a knowledge of the conjugations of Latin verbs and the declensions of Latin nouns such as may be got from any primer”—and that was what I had, before I was in my teens—he goes on:

The author feels confident from experience that those who begin with the Latin Bible and the easier Ecclesiastical authors, will be able to go on to the study of the classics, if they desire to do so, with far more intelligence and profit than if they had tried to approach them without some previous preparation.

Well, I had begun to think that, but should have been afraid to say it, because I had never tried it, nor known anybody else who had. But his experience, it seems, confirms my instinct. And, after all, that is the natural way of learning any language—to begin with the more modern and go back to the more ancient, even if the ancient is the more noble and curial. It is true that many people, if started upon the Medievals, would, in this hurried century, never have time to go further. Even so, would half a loaf not be better than no bread? Their training in the Vulgate would not enable them to write like Cicero; but it would be something to be able to write Vulgate Latin. After all, few of us actually ever succeed in writing like Milton or Dr. Johnson; but to write like Conan Doyle or Eleanor Farjeon is better than never learning to write at all: a plain, homely prose and a tripping verse have their uses. And the Medieval Latin at its worst is seldom ignoble; at its best, it is noble indeed.