Posted on 11/16/2019 11:10:59 AM PST by thecodont
The hero of Thomas Hardy’s tragic novel Jude the Obscure (1895) is a poor stonemason living in a Victorian village who is desperate to study Latin and Greek at university. He gazes, from the top of a ladder leaning against a rural barn, on the spires of the University of Christminster (a fictional substitute for Oxford). The spires, vanes and domes ‘like the topaz gleamed’ in the distance. The lustrous topaz shares its golden colour with the stone used to build Oxbridge colleges, but it is also one of the hardest minerals in nature. Jude’s fragile psyche and health inevitably collapse when he discovers just how unbreakable are the social barriers that exclude him from elite culture and perpetuate his class position, however lovely the buildings seem that concretely represent them, shimmering on the horizon.
By Hardy’s time, the trope of the exclusion of the working class from the classical cultural realm, especially from access to the ancient languages, had become a standard feature of British fiction. Charles Dickens probes the class system with a tragicomic scalpel in David Copperfield (1850). The envious Uriah sees David as a privileged young snob, but he refuses to accept the offer of Latin lessons because he is ‘far too umble. There are people enough to tread upon me in my lowly state, without my doing outrage to their feelings by possessing learning.’
It is with good reason that education in Classics was and still is associated in the British mind with the upper classes.
(Excerpt) Read more at aeon.co ...
Thank you for posting...I read what others today probably consider weird
I stick with the classics, by and large. Will look into this one. Thanks.
Although I have read some of the classics and am working through (slowly) the Great Books edited by Hutchins, I am taking Elementary Latin 101 on line. It is slow going but not only am I learning Latin, I have a better understanding of English grammar.
That's great. Could you please provide a link? Thank you.
Or Dostoevsky.
This is really a very deep subject.
In the late 1600s, in France, there was a literary “quarrel” between two groups referred to as The Ancients and The Moderns. Figures like Perrault, LaFontaine, Rabelais, Racine and others took various sides. The essential topic revolved around how much regard one should hold for Classical sources? Could modern writers achieve the same level of sophistication? Some said Yes, and some said No.
A bit later, this debate moved into the English world with Jonathan Swift and others choosing sides early in the 18th century.
The debate has continued ever since but I think the Progressives won the war early in the 20th century. Greek and Latin stopped being essential subjects in school. Dead White Men are out of fashion. Whatever is new and modern and diverse must simply be better than anything which has ever come before. One of the slogans of Modernism (which started in the 19th century) was “Make it new!”
In my opinion, we need to see Conservatism rise up and replace Progressivism and we need to get back to a place of respect for the Classics. Victor Davis Hanson, of course, is a champion of such thinking.
Good point! Brothers Karamozov!
Go to:
open.ac.uk
The link is for The Open University which is an on-line distance learning school in the UK that has legitimate diplomas that can be earned in many fields of study available for students around the world. They also have free courses, like Latin and Greek, that you can register for and audit at no cost.
Thank you!
Bookmark
Our founding fathers were students of the Classics. It is obvious how much influence Plato, and particularly Aristotle’s criticism of Plato and his writings on politics, government systems, and his history of the Athenian constitutions had on the creation of our Constitution.
Thanks!
L
Interesting.
Just read Twain.
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