Decline and rise again

Verb says to noun, ‘Would you like to conjugate?’ Noun replies, ‘No, I decline.’ A nice witticism for Latin-lovers brought up on L.A. Wilding’s Latin Course for Schools; but do today’s prep-school Latin pupils have any idea what a conjugation or a declension is?

Some do and some don’t, is the answer, and it all depends on which textbook your teacher uses and how much he or she believes in the importance of grammar over the importance of enjoying a story. The story of Latin teaching in this country over the last 130 years has been one of reaction and counter-reaction; and there are signs of a counter-counter-reaction on the way.

First, there was Kennedy’s Latin Primer (1888). Benjamin Hall Kennedy, clergyman and headmaster of Shrewsbury, was the man who decided that noun cases should be in ‘nom, voc, acc, gen, dat, abl’ order. His Latin Primer (still in print in a revised edition — revised in 1930) is almost all lists and tables. It’s a terrifying book for anyone who loathes rules; and it brought into being the non-sequitur poem which I remember finding scribbled in the margin of my dog-eared textbook: ‘Latin is a dead language, as dead as dead can be. First it killed the Romans, and now it’s killing me.’ (The more I think about it, the more hopeless that poem is.) It also made clever schoolboys very, very good at Latin.

Then came L.A. Wilding, Latin master at the Dragon School in Oxford, who wrote his Latin Course for Schools in 1949. ‘In the beginning, God created “amo, amas, amat”’ is its basic message; ‘and on the second day He created “mensa, mensa, mensam”.’ The language is explained in flawlessly logical order. In his introduction, Wilding has a shot at explaining to reluctant schoolchildren why learning Latin is important.