material comforts and conveniences, to dispense for instance with automobiles and moving picture shows and typewriters and running hot water and newspapers;—these things we manage to get along without, when we go camping in the woods in the summer vacation—though the absence of matches and watches and tea and coffee and soap might prove rather embarrassing.
But would we be able to rough it so successfully in the realm of thought? Would we be able to divest ourselves of that complex "cast of thought" which such things as science and history, sociology and statistics and machinery, and a long series of philosophers and inventors and writers and radicals have woven for us? Could we lay aside this intellectual clothing as readily as we change from our city clothes to the easy and unconventional costume of the woods or shore? Could we go back to the simpler stock of ideas and to the more primitive psychology and ethics of a distant past?
The city dweller who for the first time tries life in the woods or upon the farm is forced to admit his inferiority in some respects to the guide and the native, and to learn lessons from them. So if we wish to study the past we must borrow the eyes and the ideas of the men of the past. The student of history must have a native guide. And he, too, will sometimes be forced to admit his inferiority in some respects to the men of the past and to learn lessons from them.
There has been put up recently from several quarters a most deplorable howl to this effect. Why do not writers of historical text-books and teachers of history confine and limit their instruction to those facts of the past which serve to explain the present? Why burden the memory of the young with the dead facts and fancies, with bygone pictures and ideas that do not directly bear upon our modern problems and conditions? In other words, why have boys and girls learn anything that they do not know already or will not learn in the course of daily life? Why have them read about anything that lies outside of their own experience, or that cannot at least be explained and, understood in terms of their own experience? Why broaden their sympathies and understanding by taking them outside this busy crowded city of modern civilization back to the glades and groves of past centuries and to times and places that they would never otherwise visit and to thoughts and fancies that could never otherwise come to them? Why increase their knowledge? Why add anything to their pleasure? Such is the deplorable contention of certain present day educators and historians—and it expresses an attitude, with which, as you have probably already gathered, I am by no means in complete accord.
In selecting Euripides for consideration, however, I am after all going a long way toward pleasing those people who wish to
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