My
reason for saying so is not from the point of view of science at all,
but from the point of view of literature. I say the thing professes to
be literary education that is not a literary education at all. It was
not literature at all that was taught, but science in a very bad form.
It is quite obvious that grammar is science and not literature. The
analysis of a text by the help of the rules of grammar is just as much a
scientific operation as the analysis of a chemical compound by the help
of the rules of chemical analysis. There is nothing that appeals to the
aesthetic faculty in that operation; and I ask multitudes of men of
my own age, who went through this process, whether they ever had a
conception of art or literature until they obtained it for themselves
after leaving school? Then you may say, "If that is so, if the education
was scientific, why cannot you be satisfied with it?" I say, because
although it is a scientific training, it is of the most inadequate and
inappropriate kind. If there is any good at all in scientific education
it is that men should be trained, as I said before, to know things for
themselves at first hand, and that they should understand every step of
the reason of that which they do.
I desire to speak with the utmost respect of that science--philology--of
which grammar is a part and parcel; yet everybody knows that grammar, as
it is usually learned at school, affords no scientific training.
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