Reference Works for Light Reading

I am a reader of reference works.  That is different from being a mere user of reference works, as surely all readers must be.  I actually enjoy reading at random in reference volumes.  If you are into the quick refreshment of a brief read, you cannot do better than any two random pages of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.  Were you to read one entry from the Dictionary of National Biography each day, you would soon have made the acquaintance of a prize assortment of characters and learned a fair amount of British topography and genealogy without even trying.  Dictionaries are always good; but what animates today’s post is the page-turner quality of the third edition of Gildersleeve’s Latin Grammar.

                                                          Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (1831-1924)

When I set out at a relatively late stage of my education to become a professional medievalist, I found myself at a considerable disadvantage.  A form of Latin considerably evolved from that of the classical period was the universal European language for a thousand years in medieval Europe.  Having never enjoyed an hour of formal instruction in classical Latin, I had to sink or swim in a huge lagoon of mainly monastic literature often quite different in its grammar, syntax, and vocabulary from Cicero, Ovid, and Virgil.  At the same time the language of the classical writers had been, remotely, at the center of medieval monastic education.  So I had to study classical authors on my own,  in the manner of a monoglot religious novice of the eleventh or twelfth century.  Thus the basis of my Latin is very imperfect, very unfashionable, but very medieval!  Such success as I have had I owe chiefly to Basil Gildersleeve and Gonzalez Lodge.

Among the outcomes of the “French and Indian War,” as the North American phase of the Seven’s Year War is usually known, was one of numerous episodes of ethnic cleansing that characterized American colonial history: the forced removal of the Francophone Acadians around 1755.  By modern standards the numbers were not large, for the population of Maritime Canada and the New England frontier, both indigenous and colonial, was sparse; but there were significant cultural results.  One of them was Longfellow’s Evangeline, a great poem now disgracefully neglected; another is Cajun food (Acadien > “Cajun”), which has fared better.  For me the most important was Prof. Gildersleeve, the grandchild of expelled Acadians.  I am not alone in regarding him as “the father of American classical studies.”

He was born in 1831 in Charleston.  After acquiring an astonishing juvenile erudition, he went to Princeton, where he took his degree at the age of 18 in 1849.  He always regarded himself primarily as a scholar of Greek.  He was among a pioneering group of American humanists who traveled to Germany (Göttingen) to do doctoral work and who were thus destined to foster the precise and scientific spirit of early classical philology in this country, a spirit that long distinguished American classicists from many of the great British scholars of the eighteenth century.  Gildersleeve was a Confederate patriot who carried a Yankee bullet in his leg for most of his life and maintained an unfashionable notion of vanished southern “honor” as it related to the Roman Republic.  It has often been said that the Cavalier class of the Old South had been corrupted by reading too much Walter Scott, but for the more learned among them I think the corrupter was Livy.  Recall that the assassin John Wilkes Booth cried out the Virginia state motto (Sic semper tyrannis, “Thus always with tyrants”) as he leapt to the stage of Ford’s Theater, taking too seriously perhaps  the advice playfully given to actors: break a leg!  And on what might be called the “generic” Confederate monument at Arlington is the much-quoted line from Lucan’s Pharsalia: “The cause of the victors was pleasing to the gods, but the cause of the vanquished to Cato.”

  Gonzalez Lodge (1863-1942)

 

Gildersleeve was not Cato, but he was one hell of a philologist.  He first published a Latin grammar in 1867, but it was in retrospect a mere type or shadow of the great revision of 1894 undertaken with the collaboration of his Johns Hopkins doctoral student, Gonzalez Lodge (1863-1942).  This has to be one of the greatest teacher-pupil teams of all time.  Between them these men established the American Journal of Philology, The Classical World, the Classical Weekly (!), and other scholarly initiatives too numerous to mention.  Lodge—unlike his Hellenic mentor who had directed his dissertation on Euripides-- even on occasion called himself a Latinist; and he had essentially memorized all of Livy, most of Cicero, and vast chunks of the poets.  Both men had astonishing powers of clarity and concision, and a passion for minute accuracy that only a fool could confuse with pedantry.  One of Gildersleeve’s few “theoretical” papers bears the title “The Spiritual Rights of Minute Research”.

Gildersleeve’s Grammar presents its materials with a nearly perfect clarity, coherence, and economy.  That doesn’t make it easy—far from it at times—but the student can never doubt there is a there there.  The rhetorical aim of much current “literary criticism” would actually seem to be mystification and indeterminacy, as though precision of signification were intellectual failure.   All citations from the original Latin sources, thousands of them,  are given in bold type, investing them, if possible, with even more awesome dignity.   So we come at random to section 333 (1): “Neuter Pronouns and Adjectives are often used to define or modify the substantive notion that lies in the verb.”  You may not immediately grasp what that means, but you just know it’s true.  After adding that “With transitive verbs an Accusative of the person can be employed besides”, Prof. Lodge, as always, gives you a telling example or so from an approved author--in this instance it is his fellow grammarian Quntillian:  Discipulos id unum moneo ut praeceptores suos non minus quam ipsa studia ament.—immediately and precisely translated as I give pupils this one piece of advice, that they love their teachers no less than their studies themselves.  Learn this and you can more or less forget the neuter pronouns and adjectives!

In that same section one gets the bonus of seeing American English in transition. “The usage is best felt,” write the grammarians, “by comparing the familiar English it after intransitive verbs, ‘to walk it, to foot it’, etc.,  where ‘it’ represents the substantive that lies in ‘walk, foot,’ etc.”  When was the last time you heard somebody speaking of “footing it?”  About the last time you heard “Cheese it—the cops!”.  Hoofing it, maybe.