On the Approaches to the English Language [pp. 434-456]

454 ON THE APPROACHES TO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. [July,
Masupilli and one or two hundred verses from Beovulf, tracing
the phonetic changes to and fro, has learned more actual philology than if he had perused a library of works like those of
Max Muiller or Whitney on language. We say nothing in disparagement of them, they are excellent and timely works; the
reading public has been awakened by them to a consciousness
that there may be more things in heaven and earth than its
philosophy dreamed of; but, after all, it is only the practised
student who can read between the lines and really understand
them in the sense of assimilating their spirit and method. We
wish to guard against the mistake of confounding a knowledge
of the more prominent facts, the results of a science, with a
trained mastery of scientific processes.
A course in English philology, such as we have sketched,
might be established in any one of our older colleges. If pursued by only a limited number of students, say twenty, or even
ten, its effects would still be incalculable. They could not be
weighed or measured, they would not manifest themselves so
tangibly as brilliant performances in the classics, or in English
composition and oratory, or even in mathematics; but they
would be not less real, and perhaps more abiding. The presence of ten earnest, independent seekers after science-we lay
stress upon independent, because philology is not a thing to be
taught by ordinary recitations, but each student must be left in
a large measure to his own conscience of what is work and
what is not-ten young philologians, then, would make their
presence felt in every direction. They would deepen and
quicken the more practical study of the mother-tongue; they
would stimulate and assist collateral reading in the departments
of modern history and literature, and they would come to the
aid of the study of literature in its place of sorest need, by
suggesting to it thorough honesty of purpose and a more definite understanding of ways and means. The crying evil, we
may almost say the crying sin, of the English course in all the
American colleges is its tendency to run into "cheap rhetoric."
Students not only write to order, as it were, but they write for
effect. Instead of putting to themselves the question: How
can we make our essays or orations good? they seem to say:
How can we make them fine? Instead of regarding thought
and language as [things sacred —things to be approached in a