Articles From The Classical Teacher

The Greatest Single Defect of My Own Latin Education
by Dorothy Sayers

Part IV: The case for Christian Latin
    But, putting the question of pronunciation aside, and supposing that my own experience in this matter had been less unfortunate, where did my Latin education, starting so well as it did, go wrong?  Looking back upon it, I feel sure that the trouble was simply that the whole process was far too slow.  Why did the French, which I began by hating, haul up so fast upon the Latin, which I began by loving?  For two reasons: I was encouraged-not to say compelled-to speak it every day and for a great part of the day.  And, more important still, as soon as I had got a hold of the grammar, it presented me with works of literature which were not only in themselves such as to hold a child's attention, but which were easy enough to be read fluently and quickly, by pages instead of paragraphs at a time, and were written in the same language which I was learning to speak.

     All this was, of course, made easy for me by the fact that I was brought up at home with a French governess.  The problem of learning any language conversationally in school, with little time and large classes, is a baffling one.  You cannot possibly hope to get the same results as by individual teaching.  You can give French lessons in French to the more avanced forms; and you can encourage the acting of French plays.  You can, no doubt, do as much for Latin, if the number of periods in the week allotted to this study allows it, and if everybody's energies are not taken up by preparing set books for examinations.  You cannot, unhappily, send pupils abroad to Latin-speaking countries to brush up their spoken Latin in the holidays.  I do not know whether there is much hope of ever establishing conversational Latin even on the same scale as conversational French.  I suspect that much depends on the type of school and on the sex and social background of the scholars.  So I will not dwell on this aspect of the matter, except to say that I think it would have helped me very much if I had ever been got into the habit of speaking Latin, if only to say "Please" and "Thank you" and "Pass the mustard".  Even without conversation, reading might have stimulated the enthusiasm which leads to ease and fluency.  But here was the trouble-I could not get on fast enough.  And it is my belief that the classical texts of the Augustan Age are simply far too difficult.

     They were difficult even in their own day, in the sense that they were elaborate, literary, and highly artificial.  The language of Cicero was not spoken in the streets, nor even, I fancy, in the drawing-rooms, of ancient Rome.  The legions did not tramp their way to victory chanting the Hellenic, quantitative measures which delighted the ears of the  cognoscenti assembled at poetry-readings or exchanging culture in the baths.  The ordinary educated Roman could appreciate Virgil and Horace or Cicero because he came to them through his own daily speech, as we come through our own modern speech to the elaborations of Joyce and Eliot.  And as time went on and the language changed, they could still go back through their own speech to the writings of the Golden Age, as we, through our speech, go back to the Metaphysicals and to Euphues-if we ever do go back to Euphues, which is perhaps a little doubtful.  But teachers do not, as a rule, ask foreign children to plunge immediately into the study of English by way of Donne and Euphues without any help at all from the current English, whose syntax and vocabulary are so much nearer to their own.  Doubtless, when the time comes, they are put on to Shakespeare; but they are not, from the start, confined exclusively to the highly compressed and elliptical language of the later Shakespeare, on the grounds that this represents the Golden Age of English from which every later development is a debasement and a degeneration of the language.  Yet this is the way in which, for the last four hundred years or so, we have started English boys on the learning of Latin.  It can, of course, be done.  It was done-in a more leisured age, and for one sex only of a privileged professional class, and in schools which concentrated on the teaching of classical languages and on uncommonly little else.  But I doubt if it is the right way of going about it today.  And it is not the way in which it was done for the first fifteen centuries of our era.

     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 for ever 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.

     Tempora mutantur, but certain tendencies seem to be ingrained in the human race, and are preserved in philology as flies are preserved in amber.  Yet chief long remained current side-by-side with tête, as the once-vulgar "donkey" still holds its place beside the reverent and biblical "ass".  Perhaps time will eventually ennoble "mug" and "moke" also.

     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 mediaeval 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 Introduction to the Study of 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.

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.