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.
