Colonel Dobbin's Proficiency in Latin: A Few Thoughts

At one point in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair Georgy Osborne remarks to his mother that Lieutenant Colonel William Dobbin "reads Latin like it's English."

I suspect these few words of the rather "leisurely paced" nine hundred page piece of Victoriana I quote are missed by most of even the very few who actually bother to read such things. However, they have their interest as a testament to the remarkable erudition of the very intelligent and intellectual Dobbin (perhaps the only character in the whole book that we can unreservedly admire). By extension it is also testament to just how much the then rather mature "Dob" had honed his mind generally and his competence in the Latin language particularly to a degree far, far beyond what was typical for a graduate of the English "public school" such as he and so many other of the characters were (and one would imagine, far, far beyond what was typical for Osborne's own teachers as well). That the description does that is also of interest as an indicator of just how much facility in the Classical languages even those comparative few who had the "benefit of a Classical education" had two centuries ago at a time when the Classics pretty much were the curriculum. Simply put, undergoing such schooling a student was apt to get some training in reading, and not much more--not enough to, if Coleridge is anyone to go by, to reasonably be expected to think in the language--even if there are those who would have us believe otherwise.

That is something to remember today given just how much snobbery about the Classical languages endures, as seen in how a certain "public intellectual" famous mainly because his wrapping up of the banalities of epistemological nihilism in imagery beguiling to the mediocre middlebrow mind has made him a "rock star" with certain powerful interests publicly shot his mouth off about how no one should ever read anything written about the Enlightenment by someone unschooled in the Classical languages. It was the most brazenly extreme form of gatekeeping, the more obviously so as not only is it the case that very few of even the educated will have had any genuine training those languages in this day and age, but the far from innocent political implications of that statement. Reactionaries such as the individual in question have for centuries preferred to not just cut the hoi polloi out of the discourse, but also to take refuge from the Moderns in the Ancients (Didn't read every last Classic in the original? Then you can't say a word about what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote the Constitution!)--all while, of course, making this statement was an assertion of his pretension to intellectual superman status, and all that means for his (and his fans') belief in the obligation of the whole world to bow before his opinions.

So far as I can tell no one remarked his public display of extreme stupidity and its very, very long train of logical fallacies (the genetic fallacy, the appeal to authority, etc., etc.), let alone the obvious problem that for knowledge of the Classics in their originals to really contribute to a scholar's work one has to not just be able to read Greek and Latin but read them at that very high level at which one can actually get more out of the original than they would a well-wrought translation in the (native) language they know best. They might not have to read those languages so well as Dob, but it does mean that very few of even that already very small number of Greek and Latin readers are likely to so benefit--scholars so specialized in their study that many of them may not be writing much about the Enlightenment or anything else, let alone know all those provinces of knowledge that are in fact quite relevant to so vast a subject as the Enlightenment, many of those knowledgeable about which will bring to the conversation much without having any Greek or Latin. After all, in spite of the stupid exaggeration of elite erudition by pop cultural crap the polyglot who can use a sixth language as well as his first is at best an extreme rarity, with the result that even the genuinely erudite scholar who actually can and does read languages other than their own usefully still likely to turn to translations of even those languages they know a good deal of the time for the sake of efficiency, precision, certainty, not that they are apt to trumpet the dependence. After all, frank humility is not always to be found in this quarter, any more than it is to be found anywhere else, as even those who are not Stupid Persons feel themselves under pressure to live up to the Stupid Person's expectations of a Smart Person in a world where what the stupid think is "conventional wisdom."