The Professor’s Deadly Vengeance

THE PROFESSOR'S DEADLY VENGEANCE WILLIAM HARDY ALEXANDER U NDERGRADUATES in our colleges and universities affect in public to make light of professorial opinion. The experiences of a life spent in academic work have left me convinced that they are actually impressed by it much more than they ought to be. Not necessarily for the best either; there are long successions of classes which pass out from different institutions into the world deep-bitten with some professorial prejudice in literature, history, or economics. T~e professor has a rare chance, and not seldom he sets himself to use it; his students, for the most part,- seem to think that when he speaks ex cathedra, it is heresy to _ disbelieve. The amount of actual injustice for which such academic antipathies are responsible defies even imaginative computation, but individual instances are sufficiently disturbing to -'anyone who has not become imbued with the idea that the professor, like the king, can do no wrong. The neld of classical letters supplies at least one such instance in the deadly vengeance taken by the Roman professor of belles-Ietlres, Quintilian, on the philosopher, statesman, and man of the world, Lucius Annaeus Seneca. It is a wonderfully informing example of the capacity for mischief inherent in the odium academicum. The modern undergraduate, even though he may be following a course in classical honours~ is not likely to know anything of the real Seneca (for the later books of the Annals of Tacitus are more often passed over than read). With Quintilian, on the other hand, he will almost certainly be acquainted, and will likely have 239 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY leart~ed to accept, with that pious resignation which classical students have to cultivate, his rather prosy dullness as sound evidence of his rank as a classic. This state of affairs is a direct result of the professor's deadly vengeance; Quintilian actively disliked Seneca, and he had an opportunity to pass on his dislike from the professorial chair, with the result of forcing his bete noire off the stage of Roman ~letters, at least for instructional purposes. Seneca, in his works, had laughed publicly at academic aims and academic ineffectiveness, and had even omitted to remain stylistically a pure Ciceronian in doing so; for him there has been no forgiveness possible among professors devoted to iCpure scholarship," either ancient or modern, and Quintilian's vindictiveness against a man who refused to take professors too seriously has been amply sustained by the upholders of academic dignity both then and now. There was a long period, to be sure, roughly that between the official adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire and the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the case 'stood otherwise. In that long stretch of time when Christian theology was dominant or influential in education, literary material was v~lued largely for its didactic worth, and Seneca was much used in consequence, even when the rabid Ciceronians had done their best after the Classical Renaissance to exile him from college programmes. Their ground for doing so was, it should be noted, merely the matter of style; it had become in the eyes of many, as it still remains in the minds of not a few, the aim of a "sound classical education" to enable students to produce what is called Ciceronian Latin prose, and for this purpose one may admit that the study of Seneca is not an advantage. But it is surely open to dispute 240 THE PROFESSOR'S DEADLY VENGEANCE whether the writing of Ciceronian Latin prose is any more an aim to be cultivated to-day than it was in the time of Quintilian. As a matter of fact, the setting up of the Ciceronian ideal in Latin is in its way just as disastrous as that rigid standardization in the teaching of English prose composition which prevails in our colleges and universities. Certainly in the latter case the result is that the colleges are not notably the source of creative work in English, while meticulous Ciceronianism in Latin studies is narrowing in the extreme and may defeat the best values of a classical education. But...