Word: authority
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Dates: during 1873-1873
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THERE seems to me to be room for a difference of opinion in regard to the subject discussed by the author of "Literary Ruskinism" in the last Magenta. He objects to the manner of conducting recitations now followed at Harvard, and thinks the object should be to point out to us "the beauties of idea and expression." He likens the present system to that Mr. Ruskin prescribes for the cultivation of the artistic taste, and objects to this, both because it upsets our faith in our old ideas of art, and because, if I understand, it is a system...
This, too, is the system that should be followed in teaching the classics. If the students in these days, as our author says they used to do, came to college, after four or five years of careful preparation, with a sufficient knowledge of the grammatical principles, the drill he objects to would be perhaps superfluous. But do they come so prepared? Most enter college with a knowledge of only the easiest works of all classical literature, such as Caesar, Virgil, Xenophon, and are here saddled with Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Horace. They have all they can do, with the help...
...author, by the by, says, "This easy and familiar old pronunciation is done away with, in favor of a new and foreign-sounding style." Is it not well to change the wrong for the right? And does not it seem natural that the language of foreigners long dead should sound foreign...
...simple and unartificial. A good instance of it is the description of Colonel Newcome's death. In this there is no introduction of surroundings for the sake of dramatic effect; the account reads like that of one whose grief was too sincere for elaboration. It seems as if the author were lost in the friend...
...this week much that is interesting and instructive. Its article upon the Edenic Intellect, equally brilliant and entertaining, begins with the startling announcement, "Human language hath personal as well as ethnic and cosmical relations." Let us ponder upon this, and when we have duly pondered, go on with the author, glowing like him with real pride at the thought, "To have placed itself at the historic headship of the race that cut off all pre-historic races, and crushed out of being all synchronic races, is certainly proof of no mean power, worthy almost scientific recognition." May we be pardoned...