Eugene spent the next four years of his life in Leonard’s school. Against the bleak horror of Dixieland, against the dark road of pain and death down which the great limbs of Gant had already begun to slope, against all the loneliness and imprisonment of his own life which had gnawed him like hunger, these years at Leonard’s bloomed like golden apples.
From Leonard he got little—a dry campaign over an arid waste of Latin prose: first, a harsh, stiff, unintelligent skirmishing among the rules of grammar, which frightened and bewildered him needlessly, and gave him for years an unhealthy dislike of syntax, and an absurd prejudice against the laws on which the language was built. Then, a year’s study of the lean, clear precision of Cæsar, the magnificent structure of the style—the concision, the skeleton certainty, deadened by the disjointed daily partition, the dull parsing, the lumbering cliché of pedantic translation:
“Having done all things that were necessary, and the season now being propitious for carrying on war, Cæsar began to arrange his legions in battle array.”
All the dark pageantry of war in Gaul, the thrust of the Roman spear through the shield of hide, the barbaric parleys in the forests, and the proud clangor of triumph—all that might have been supplied in the story of the great realist, by one touch of the transforming passion with which a great teacher projects his work, was lacking.
Instead, glibly, the wheels ground on into the hard rut of method and memory. March 12, last year—three days late. Cogitata. Neut. pl. of participle used as substantive. Quo used instead of ut to express purpose when comparative follows. Eighty lines for to-morrow.
They spent a weary age, two years, on that dull dog, Cicero. De Senectute. De Amicitia. They skirted Virgil because John Dorsey Leonard was a bad sailor—he was not at all sure of Virgilian navigation. He hated exploration. He distrusted voyages. Next
