It is the opening of a boy’s essay.  And from first to last this remarkable composition is at or below that level.  It is an entirely inconclusive paper, it is impossible to understand why it was written; it quotes nothing it says nothing about and was probably written in ignorance of “Kappa” or any other modern contributor to English ideas, and it occupied about six and a quarter of the large-type pages of this now vanished Independent Review.  “English Ideas on Education"!—­this very brevity is eloquent, the more so since the style is by no means succinct.  It must be read to be believed.  It is quite extraordinarily non-prehensile in quality and substance nothing is gripped and maintained and developed; it is like the passing of a lax hand over the surfaces of disarranged things.  It is difficult to read, because one’s mind slips over it and emerges too soon at the end, mildly puzzled though incurious still as to what it is all about.  One perceives Mr. Gilkes through a fog dimly thinking that Greek has something vital to do with “a knowledge of language and man,” that the classical master is in some mysterious way superior to the science man and more imaginative, and that science men ought not to be worried with the Greek that is too high for them; and he seems, too, to be under the odd illusion that “on all this” Englishmen “seem now to be nearly in agreement,” and also on the opinion that games are a little overdone and that civic duties and the use of the rifle ought to be taught.  Statements are made—­the sort of statements that are suffered in an atmosphere where there is no swift, fierce opposition to be feared; they frill out into vague qualifications and butt gently against other partially contradictory statements.  There is a classification of minds—­the sort of classification dear to the Y.M.C.A. essayists, made for the purposes of the essay and unknown to psychology.  There are, we are told, accurate unimaginative, ingenious minds capable of science and kindred vulgar things (such was Archimedes), and vague, imaginative minds, with the gift for language and for the treatment of passion and the higher indefinable things (such as Homer and Mr. Gilkes), and, somehow, this justifies those who are destined for “science” in dropping Greek.  Certain “considerations,” however, loom inconclusively upon this issue—­rather like interested spectators of a street fight in a fog.  For example, to learn a language is valuable “in proportion as the nation speaking it is great”—­a most empty assertion; and “no languages are so good,” for the purpose of improving style, “as the exact and beautiful languages of Rome and Greece.”

Is it not time at least that this last, this favourite but threadbare article of the schoolmaster’s creed was put away for good?  Everyone who has given any attention to this question must be aware that the intellectual gesture is entirely different in highly inflected languages such as Greek and Latin and in so uninflected a language as English, that learning Greek to improve one’s English style is like learning to swim in order to fence better, and that familiarity with Greek seems only too often to render a man incapable of clear, strong expression in English at all.  Yet Mr. Gilkes can permit this old assertion, so dear to country rectors and the classical scholar, to appear within a column’s distance of such style as this: