“I do not admit,” said the professor firmly, “that the Germans are great classical scholars. They are great students, that is all. The difference is immense. Far be it from me to deny the value of the patient and laborious researches of the Germans in the grammar and syntax of the ancient languages and in archaeology. They are painstaking to a painful degree. They gather facts as bees gather pollen, indefatigably. But when it comes to making honey they go dry. They cannot interpret, they can only instruct. They do not comprehend, they only classify. Name me one recent German book of 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.” “Punk,” responded Dick promptly. “Sometimes, if it's very sickening, we call it pink punk.” “All right,” interrupted Hardman impatiently. “Say what you like about Hauptmann and Sudermann. They are no friends of mine. Be as ferocious with them as you please. But you surely do not mean to claim that the right kind of study and understanding of the classics could have had any practical influence on the German character, or any value in saving the German Empire from its horrible blunders.” “Precisely that is what I do mean.” “But how?”