classical interpretation to compare in sweetness and light with
Jowett's 'Dialogues of Plato' or Butcher's 'Some Aspects of the
Greek Genius' or Croiset's 'Histoire de la Litterature Grecque.'
You can't do it," he ended, with a note of triumph.

"Of course not," replied Hardman sharply. "I never claimed to know
anything about classical literature or scholarship. My point at
the beginning--you have cleverly led the discussion away from it,
like one of your old sophists--the point I made was that Greek and
Latin are dead languages, and therefore practically worthless in
the modern world. Let us go back to that and discuss it fairly and
leave the Germans out."

"But that, my dear fellow, is precisely what you cannot do. It
is partly because they have insisted on treating Latin and Greek
as dead that the Germans have become what they are--spectacled
barbarians, learned Huns, veneered Vandals. In older times it was
not so bad. They had some perception of the everlasting current
of life in the classics. When the Latin spirit touched them for a
while, they acquired a sense of form, they produced some literature
that was good--Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller. But it was a
brief illumination, and the darkness that followed it was deeper
than ever. Who are their foremost writers to-day? The Hauptmanns
and the Sudermanns, gropers in obscurity, violent sentimentalists,
'bigots to laxness,' Dr. Johnson would have called them. Their
world is a moral and artistic chaos agitated by spasms of hysteria.
Their work is a mass of decay touched with gleams of phosphorescence.
The Romans would have called it _immunditia_. What is your new
American word for that kind of thing, Richard? I heard you use it
the other day."