Shaw and Greek

From Shaw's introduction to Major Barbara:

Captain Kidd would have marooned a modern Trust magnate for conduct unworthy of a gentleman of fortune. 

And now for a few quotes from the play itself about the profession:

LADY BRITOMART: Oh, Adolphus Cusins will make a very good husband. After all, nobody can say a word against Greek: it stamps a man at once as an educated gentleman... (p.52)

LOMAX: Well, you must admit that this is a bit thick. LADY BRITOMART: Adolphus: you are a professor of Greek. Can you translate Charles Lomax's remarks into reputable English for us? CUSINS: If I may say so, Lady Brit, I think Charles has rather happily expressed what we all feel. Homer, speaking of Autolycus, uses the same phrase. πυκινὸν δόμον ἐλθεῖν means a bit thick. (p.62-3)

CUSINS: Let me advise you to study Greek, Mr. Undershaft. Greek scholars are privileged men. Few of them know Greek; and none of them know anything else; but their position is unchallengeable. Other languages are the qualifications of waiters and commercial travellers: Greek is to a man of position what the hallmark is to silver. (p.67)

CUSINS: ...the poor professor of Greek, the most artificial and self-suppressed of human creatures,... (p.96)

UNDERSHAFT: ...Can a sane man translate Euripides? (p.99)

 STEPHEN: You must not mind Cusins, father. He is a very amiable good fellow; but he is a Greek scholar and naturally a little eccentric.

Adolphus Cusins is, for those yet unacquainted with the play or Shaw's circle of friends, modeled on Regius Professor of Greek Gilbert Murray.

Not that this is the first reason to study Latin...

From The Office of Assertion: An Art of Rhetoric for the Academic Essay:

...the best writers are always philologists...I would make three other suggestions for improving your diction over time. First, study Latin, a language whose roots constitute a surprisingly large percentage of our own language's words. Second, read widely. (p.80)

 I shall let you buy the book to find out the third...

Benedict on the importance of Classics

From Milestones: Memoirs 1927-1977:

Latin, as the foundation of one's whole education, was then still taught with old-fashioned rigor and thoroughness, something I have remained grateful for all my life...In retrospect it seems to me that an education in Greek and Latin antiquity created a mental attitude that resisted sedition by a totalitarian ideology. (p.23)

Goodbye, Mr. Chips

From Goodbye, Mr. Chips:

We haven't got the confidence we once had, now that we know about those bombs. It is a hard time to try to write fiction. (After the Soviets acquired the bomb, from the preface)

"Colley, you are a splendid example of inherited traditions. I remember your grandfather, he could never grasp the Ablative Absolute. A stupid fellow, your grandfather. ANd your father, too I remember him, he used to sit at that far desk by the wall–he wasn't much better, either. But I do believe–my dear Colley–that you are the biggest fool of the lot!"

Sometimes he took down Vergil or Xenophon and read for a few moments, but he was soon back and again with Doctor Thorndyke or Inspector French. He was not, despite his long years of assiduous teaching, a very profound classical scholar; indeed, he thought of Latin and Greek far more as dead languages from which English gentlemen ought to know a few quotations than as living tongues that had ever been spoken by living people. He liked those short leading articles in the Times that introduced a few tags that he recognized. To be among the dwindling number of people who understood such things was to him a kind of secret and valued freemasonry; it represented, he felt, one of the chief benefits to be derived from a classical education.

And suddenly, in a torrent of thoughts too pressing to be put into words, Chips made answer to himself. These examinations and certificates and so on–what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness–what did that matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory–a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account. 

Lighter Christian Essays

From Idylls and Rambles: Lighter Christian Essays by James V. Schall, S.J.:

His [Hilaire Belloc's] reading now consisted entirely of The Diary of a Nobody, his own works, and the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, which he would read with the satisfied intentness of an old priest poring over his brievary. (p.24)

Sacred music, most proper to churches, should never be applauded, in my view, preferably not even in formal concerts... (p.153)

Women don't have rights. They have, rather, graces, and sacrifices, and tolerances, and patiences, and commitments that make the word "rights" sound ridiculous as a term adequate to cover what it is they confront and accomplish in life. I know very few women whom life has treated "justly". (p.158)

(On Fixed Prayer) Neither eloquence nor a pleasing personality ought to be downplayed. They too are gifts, but what is said or repeated ought not to be things that a talented Christian clergyman or layman simply makes up and "shares"–awful word–with whoever happens to be standing by. The ex tempore, valuable as it can be, in my experience, is almost always more narrow and less freeing than the precise, "rigid", more accurate forms of prayer that embody the simplicity, eloquence, and authority of the ages of the Church. (p.190) 

 

 

Dorothy Sayers on the Trivium

From The Lost Tools of Learning:

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed, in a day when armor was never so necessary. By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy of the printed word. By the invention of the film and the radio, we have made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them from the incessant battery of words, words, words. They do not know what the words mean; they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge or fling them back; they are a prey to words in their emotions instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

And:

Is the Trivium, then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe that it should be. At the end of the Dialectic, the children will probably seem to be far behind their coevals brought up on old-fashioned "modern" methods, so far as detailed knowledge of specific subjects is concerned. But after the age of 14 they should be able to overhaul the others hand over fist. Indeed, I am not at all sure that a pupil thoroughly proficient in the Trivium would not be fit to proceed immediately to the university at the age of 16 ...

Pausanias and Athens

Only the Athenians met all their obligations. They stood against the Persians, twice against the Macedonians, and against the Gauls, and, he says, they were also the leaders in the last three crises–which is correct for the battles against Philip and Antipater (I.25.3), but not for the repulsion of the Gauls. The Athenians did fight against them, and they fought bravely, but the Aetolians were the leaders. Nevertheless, as Pausanias sees it, the Athenians were the only Greeks who never failed Greece. (Christian Habicht Pausanias' Gude to Ancient Greece, p.108)

p.s. An interesting quote from the correspondence between Frazer and Housman can be found in an Appendix on the scholarly reception of Pausanias:

"He [Wilamowitz] has always seemed to me a sophist with an infallible instinct for getting hold of a stick by the wrong end. I do not forget how, with the stick (wrong end up, as usual), he belaboured my poor old friend Pausanias and no doubt many a better man." (letter from Sir J.G. Frazer to A.E. Housman, October 1927, quoted in Christian Habicht Pausanias' Gude to Ancient Greece, p.174)

Waugh and Cardinal Heenan on Vatican II

From A Bitter Trial: Evelyn Waugh and John Carmel Cardinal Heenan on the Liturgical Changes:

Dear Sir, –The pundits explain the continuing process of change in the liturgy by saying that it helps the laity to 'participate' in the Mass.

Can they, please, explain how this desirable object is furthered by today's peremptory prohibition of kneeling at the incarnatus in the creed?

Your obedient servant, Evelyn Waugh. (Letter to the Editor of the Tablet, 24 April 1965)

Why are we constantly asked to give money to schools if the children learn so little there that Corpus Christi, Pater Noster, Domine, non sum dignus are unintelligible to them? (Waugh, Letter to the Editor of the Tablet, 17 July 1965)

Certainly many cannot follow the Latin liturgy any more than an infant can understand the words which are spoken at his baptism. The flow of Grace is not impeded by vocabulary. (Waugh, Letter to the Editor of the Tablet, 7 August 1965)

...another large part is fasting through vanity, to the extent of paying up to  £50 a week to starve in clinics...If, as they claim, the liturgists wish to emulate the Church of the earliest centuries, would they not do well to fast rigorously? (Waugh, Letter to the Editor of the Tablet, 21 August 1965)

 

 

 

Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves

As with the title of this book, so the format of the blog.  Here are some quotes from Goodbye to All That:

The colonel in one battalion I served with got rid of four new Anglican chaplains in four months; finally he applied for a Roman Catholic, alleging a change of faith in the men under his command. For the Roman Catholic chaplains were not only permitted to visit posts of danger, but definitely enjoined to be wherever fighting was, so that they could give extreme unction to the dying. And we had never heard of one who failed to do all that was expected of him and more. Jovial Father Gleeson of the Munsters, when all the officers were killed or wounded at the first battle of Ypres, had stripped off his black badges and, taking command of the survivors, held the line. (p.190)

So I stayed and tried to compose Latin epigrams, which was, in those days, my way of killing time... (p.200)

The returned soldiers did not feel tempted to rag about, break windows, get drunk, or have tussles with the police and race with the Proctor's 'bulldogs', as in the old days...G.N. Clarke, a history don at Oriel, who had got his degree just before the War and meanwhile been an infantryman in France and a prisoner in Germany, told me: 'I can't make out my pupils at all. They are all "Yes, Sire" and "No, Sir". They seem positively to thirst for knowledge and scribble away in their note-books like lunatics. I can't remember a single instance of such stern endeavour in pre-War days.' (p.291-2)