the limits of its own language. When our minds can receive and take
pleasure in the conceptions of a great writer, he may speak to us by an
interpreter. At the Renascence there were books in the world which might
have affected the minds of the young—Plutarch, Herodotus, and above all
Homer. But, as I have already said, it was not the conceptions, but the
literary form of the ancients, which seemed to the Renascence scholars
of such inestimable value, so they refused to give the conceptions in
any but the original words. “Studying the ancients in translations,”
says Melancthon, “is merely looking at the shadow.” He could not have
made a greater mistake. As far as the young are concerned the truth
is exactly the reverse. The translation would give the substance: the
original can give nothing but the shadow. Let us take the experience of
Mr. Kinglake, the author of “Eothen.” This distinguished Eton man, fired
by his remembrances of Homer, visited the Troad. He had, as he tells us,
“clasped the _Iliad_ line by line to his brain with reverence as well
as love.” Well done, Eton! we are tempted to exclaim when we read this
passage: here at least is proof that some _literature_ was taught in
those days of the dominion of the classics. But stop! It seems that this
clasping did not take place at Eton, but in happy days before Eton, when
Kinglake knew no Greek and read translations. “Heroic days are these,”
he writes, “but the Dark Ages of schoolboy life come closing over them.
I suppose it’s all right in the end: yet, by Jove! at first sight it
does seem a sad intellectual fall.... The dismal change is ordained and
thin meagre Latin (the same for everybody) with small shreds and patches
of Greek, is thrown like a pauper’s pall over all your early lore;
instead of sweet knowledge, vile monkish doggrel, grammars and graduses,
dictionaries and lexicons, horrible odds and ends of dead languages
are given you for your portion, and down you fall from Roman story to a
three-inch scrap of ‘Scriptores Romani’—from Greek poetry down, down, to
the cold rations of ‘Poetæ Græci,’ cut up by commentators and served out
by schoolmasters!” (“Eothen,” the Troad.)
We see from this how the Renascence ideal had the extraordinary effect
of banishing literature from the school-room. Literature has indeed not
ceased to influence the young; it still counts for much more in their
lives than in the lives of their seniors; but we all know who are the
writers who affected our own minds in childhood and youth, and who affect
the minds of our pupils now—not Eutropius or Xenophon, or Cæsar or
Cicero, but Defoe and Swift and Marryatt and Walter Scott. The ancient
writings which were literature to Melancthon and Erasmus, as they are
still to many in our universities and elsewhere, can never be literature
to the young. Most of the classical authors read in the schoolroom could
not be made literature to young people even by means of translations,
for they were men who wrote for men and women only. We see that it
would be absurd to make an ordinary boy of twelve or fourteen study
Burke or Pope. And if we do not make him read Burke, whose language he
understands, why do we make him read Cicero whose language he does not
understand? If he cannot appreciate Pope, why do we teach him Horace?
The Renascence gives us the explanation of this singular anomaly. The
scholars of that age were so delighted with the “composite harmony” of
the ancient classics that the study of these classics seemed to them the
one thing worth living for. The main, if not the only object they kept
in view in bringing up the young was to gain for them admission to the
treasure house; and though young people could not understand the ancient
writings as literature, they might at least study them as language
and thus be ready to enjoy them as literature in after-life. Thus the
subject of instruction in the schoolroom came to be, not the classics
but, the classical languages. The classics were used as school books,
but the only meaning thought of was the meaning of the detached word or
at best of the detached sentence. You ask a child learning to read if he
understands what he is reading about, and he says, “I can’t think of the
meaning because I am thinking of the words.” The same thing happened in
the schoolboy’s study of the classics, and so it has come to pass that to
this day the great writers of antiquity discharge a humble function which
they certainly never contemplated.
“Great Cæsar’s body dead and turned to clay
May stop a hole to keep the wind away.”
And great Cæsar’s mind has been turned to uses almost as paltry. He
has in fact written for the schoolroom not a commentary on the Wars
of Gaul—nothing of the kind—but simply a book of exercises in Latin
construing; and an excellent book it would be if he had only graduated
the difficulties better.
§ 16. IV. There is yet another weakness about the Renascence ideal—a
weakness from which most ideals are free.
Most ideals have this merit at least, that he who makes even a feeble and
abortive attempt to reach them is benefited in proportion to his advance,
however small that advance may be. If he fails to seize the coat of gold,
he carries away, as the proverb tells us, at least one of the sleeves;
or, to use George Herbert’s metaphor—
“ ... Who aimeth at the sky,
Shoots higher far than he who means a tree.”
But the learned ideal has not even this advantage. The first stage, the
study of the ancient languages, is so totally different from the study of
the ancient literatures to which it is the preliminary, that the student
who never goes beyond this first stage either gets no benefit at all, or
a benefit which is not of the kind intended. Suppose I am within a walk,
though a long one, of the British Museum, and hearing of some valuable
books in the library, which I can see nowhere else, I set off to consult
them. In this case it makes no difference to me how valuable the books
are if I do not get as far as the Museum.[6] My friends may comfort me
with the assurance that the walk must have done me good. Perhaps so;
but I left home to get a knowledge of certain books, not to exercise my
legs. Had exercise been my object I should probably have chosen another
direction.
Now schoolmasters, since the Renascence, have been in the habit of
leading all their pupils through the back slums of the Seven Dials and
Soho in the direction of the British Museum, with the avowed purpose of
taking them to the library, although they knew full well that not one
pupil in ten, not one in fifty, would ever reach the door. To produce
a few scholars able to appreciate the classics of Greece and Rome they
have sacrificed everybody else; and according to their own showing they
have condemned a large portion of the upper classes, nearly all the
middle classes, and quite all the poorer classes to remain “uneducated.”
And, according to the theory of the schoolroom, one-half of the human
race—the women—have not been supposed to need education. For them
“accomplishments” have been held sufficient.
§ 17. V. In conclusion I must point out one effect of the Renascence
ideal which seems to me no less mischievous than those I have already
mentioned. This ideal led the schoolmasters to attach little importance
to the education of _children_. Directly their pupils were old enough for
Latin Grammar the schoolmasters were quite at home; but till then the
children’s time seemed to them of small value, and they neither knew nor
cared to know how to employ it. If the little ones could learn by heart
forms of words which would afterwards “come in useful,” the schoolmasters
were ready to assist such learning by unsparing application of the rod,
but no other learning seemed worthy even of a caning. Absorbed in the
world of books they overlooked the world of nature. Galileo complains
that he could not induce them to look through his telescope, for they
held that truth could be arrived at only by comparison of MSS. No wonder
then that they had so little sympathy with children, and did not know how
to teach them. It is by slow degrees that we are breaking away from the
bad tradition then established, are getting to understand children, and
with such leaders as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, and Froebel, are investigating
the best education for them. We no longer think of them as immature men
and women, but see that each stage has its own completeness, and that
there is a perfection in childhood which must precede the perfection of
manhood just as truly as the flower goes before the fruit. “Childhood,”
says Rousseau, “has its own ways of seeing, feeling, thinking;” and it
is by studying these that we find out how children should be educated.
Our connexion with the world of nature seems much closer in our early
years than ever afterwards. The child’s mind seems drawn out to its
surroundings. He is intensely interested in the new world in which he
finds himself, and whilst so many of us grown people need a flapper,
like the sages of Laputa, to call our attention from our own thoughts to
anything that meets the eye or ear, the child sees and hears everything,
and everything seen or heard becomes associated in his mind not so much
with thought as with feeling. Hence it is that we most of us look back
wistfully to our early days, and confess sorrowfully that though years
may have brought “the philosophic mind,”
“ ... Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower.”
The material world then seems to supply just those objects, whether
birds, beasts, or flowers, by which the child is attracted, and on which
his faculties will therefore be most naturally and healthily employed.
But the Renascence schoolmasters had little notion of this. If you think
that the greatest scholar is the greatest man, you will, as a matter of
course, place at the other end of the scale those who are not scholars at
all. An English inspector, who seems to have thought children had been
created with due regard to the Revised Code of the Privy Council, spoke
of the infants who could not be classed by their performances in “the
three R’s” as “the fag end of the school;” and no doubt the Renascence
schoolmasters considered the children the fag end of humanity. The great
scholars were indeed far above the race of pedants; but the schoolmasters
who adopted their ideal were not. And what is a pedant? “A man who has
got rid of his brains to make room for his learning.”[7] The pedantic
schoolmasters of the Renascence wished the mind of the pupil to be
cleared of everything else, that it might have room for the languages
of Greece and Rome. But what if the mind failed to take in its destined
freight? In that case the schoolmasters had nothing else for it, and were
content that it should go empty.
II.
RENASCENCE TENDENCIES.
§ 1. In considering and comparing the two great epochs of intellectual
activity and change in modern times, viz., the sixteenth century and
the nineteenth, we cannot but be struck with one fundamental difference
between them.
§ 2. It will affect all our thoughts, as Sir Henry Maine has said,
whether we place the Golden Age in the Past or in the Future. In the
nineteenth century the “good time” is supposed to be “coming,” but in
the sixteenth century all thinkers looked backwards. The great Italian
scholars gazed with admiration and envy on the works of ancient Greece
and Rome, and longed to restore the old languages, and as much as
possible the old world, so that such works might be produced again. Many
were suspected, not altogether perhaps without reason, of wishing to
uproot Christianity itself,[8] that they might bring back the Golden Age
of Pericles.
§ 3. At the same time another movement was going on, principally in
Germany. Here too, men were endeavouring to throw off the immediate past
in order to revive the remote past. The religious reformers, like the
scholars, wished to restore a golden age, only a different age, not the
age of the Antigone, but the age of the Apostles’ Creed. Thus it happened
that the scholars and the reformers joined in attaching the very highest
importance to the ancient languages. Through these languages, and, as
they thought, through them alone, was it possible to get a glimpse into
the bygone world in which their soul delighted.
§ 4. But though all joined in extolling the ancient writings, we find at
the Renascence great differences in the way of regarding these writings
and in the objects for which they were employed. A consideration of these
differences will help us to understand the course of education when the
Renascence was a force no longer.
§ 5. Very powerful in education were the great scholars, of whom Erasmus
was perhaps the greatest, certainly the most celebrated. In devoting
their lives to the study of the ancients their object was not merely to
appreciate literary style, though this was a source of boundless delight
to them, but also to _understand_ the classical writings and the ancient
world through them. These men, whom we may call _par excellence_ the
Scholars, cared indeed before all things for literature; but with all
their delight in the form they never lost sight of the substance. They
knew the truth that Milton afterwards expressed in these memorable words:
“Though a linguist should pride himself to have all the tongues that
Babel cleft the world into, yet if he have not studied the solid things
in them as well as the words and lexicons, he were nothing so much to be
esteemed a learned man as any yeoman or tradesman competently wise in his
mother dialect only.” (Tractate to Hartlib, § 4).
So Erasmus and the scholars would have all the educated _understand_ the
classical authors. But to understand words you must know the things to
which the words refer. Thus the Scholars were led to advocate a partial
study of things a kind of realism. But we must carefully observe a
peculiarity of this scholastic realism which distinguished it from the
realism of a later date—the realism of Bacon. The study of things was
undertaken not for its own sake, but simply in order to understand books.
Perhaps some of us are conscious that this kind of literary realism
has not wholly passed away. We may have observed wild flowers, or the
changes in tree or cloud, because we find that the best way to understand
some favourite author, as Wordsworth or Tennyson. This will help us to
understand the realism of the sixteenth century. The writings of great
authors have been compared to the plaster globes (“celestial globes” as
we call them), which assist us in understanding the configuration of the
stars (_Guesses at Truth_, j. 47). Adopting this simile we may say that
the Scholars loved to study the globe for its own sake, and when they
looked at stars they did so with the object of understanding the globe.
Thus we read of doctors who recommended their pupils to look at actual
cases of disease as the best commentary on the works of Hippocrates and
Galen. This kind of realism was good as far as it went, but it did not go
far. Of course the end in view limited the study, and the Scholars took
no interest in things except those which were mentioned in the classics.
They had no desire to investigate the material universe and make
discoveries for themselves. This is why Galileo could not induce them to
look through his telescope; for the ancients had no telescopes, and the
Scholars wished to see nothing that had not been seen by their favourite
authors. First then we have the Scholars, headed by Erasmus.
§ 6. Next we find a party less numerous and for a time less influential,
who did care about things for the sake of the things themselves; but
carried away by the literary current of their age, they sought to learn
about them not directly, but only by reading. Here again we have a kind
of realism which is not yet extinct. Some years ago I was assured by a
Graduate of the University of London who had passed in chemistry, that,
as far as he knew, he had never seen a chemical in his life: he had got
all his knowledge from books. While such a thing is possible among us,
we need not wonder if those who in the sixteenth century prized the
knowledge of things, allowed books to come between the learner and the
object of his study, if they regarded Nature as a far-off country of
which we could know nothing but what great authors reported to us.
As this party, unlike the Scholars, did not delight in literature as
such, but simply as a means of acquiring knowledge, literary form was
not valued by them, and they preferred Euclid to Sophocles, Columella
to Virgil. Seeking to learn about things, not immediately, but through
words, they have received from Raumer a name they are likely to
keep—Verbal Realists. In the sixteenth century the greatest of the Verbal
Realists also gave a hint of Realism proper; for he was no less a man
than Rabelais.
§ 7. Lastly we come to those who, as it turned out, were to have more
influence in the schoolroom than the Scholars and the Verbal Realists
combined. I do not know that these have had any name given them, but for
distinction sake we may call them _Stylists_. In studying literature
the Scholars cared both for form and substance, the Verbal Realists for
substance only, and the Stylists for form only. The Stylists gave up
their lives, not, like the scholars, to gain a thorough understanding
of the ancient writings and of the old world, but to an attempted
reproduction of the ancient languages and of the classical literary form.
§ 8. In marking these tendencies at the Renascence, we must remember
that though distinguished by their tendencies, these Scholars, Verbal
Realists, and Stylists, were not divided into clearly defined parties.
Categories like these no doubt assist us in gaining precision of thought,
but we must not gain precision at the expense of accuracy. The tendencies
we have been considering did not act in precisely opposite directions,
and all were to some extent affected by them. But one tendency was
predominant in one man and another in another; and this justifies us in
calling Sturm a Stylist, Erasmus a Scholar, and Rabelais a Verbal Realist.
§ 9. In one respect they were all agreed. The world was to be regenerated
by means of books. Nothing pleased them more than to think of their age
as the Revival of Learning.
III.
STURMIUS.
1507-1589.
§ 1. The curriculum bequeathed by the Renascence and stereotyped in
the School Codes of Germany, in the _Ratio_ of the Jesuits, and in the
English public school system, was greatly influenced by the most famous
schoolmaster of the fifteen hundreds, John Sturm, who was for over forty
years Rector of the Strassburg Gymnasium.
§ 2. Sturm was a fine specimen of the successful man: he knew what
his contemporaries wanted, and that was just what he wanted. “He was
a blessed fellow,” as Prince Hal says of Poins, “to think as every
man thought,” and he not only “kept the roadway” himself, but he also
“personally conducted” great bands of pupils over it, at one time “200
noblemen, 24 counts and barons, and 3 princes.” What could schoolmaster
desire more?
§ 3. But I frankly own that Sturm is no favourite of mine, and that I
think that he did much harm to education. However, his influence in the
schoolroom was so great that I must not leave him unnoticed; and I give
some information, taken mainly from Raumer’s account of him, which is
translated in Henry Barnard’s “German Teachers and Educators.” I have
also looked at the exhaustive article by Dr. Bossier in K. A. Schmid’s
_Encyklopädie_ (_sub v._)
§ 4. John Sturm, born at Schleiden in the Eifel, not far from Cologne,
in 1507, was one of 15 children, and would not have had much teaching
had not his father been steward to a nobleman, with whose sons he was
brought up. He always spoke with reverence and affection of his early
teachers, and from them no doubt he acquired his thirst for learning.
With the nobleman’s sons and under the guidance of a tutor he was sent
to Liège, and there he attended a school of the “Brethren of the Life in
Common,” _alias_ Hieronymites. Many of the arrangements of this school he
afterwards reproduced in the Strassburg Gymnasium, and in this way the
good Brethren gained an influence over classical education throughout the
world.
§ 5. Between the age of 15 and 20 Sturm was at Lyons, and before the end
of this period he was forced into teaching for a maintenance. He then,
like many other learned men of the time, turned printer. We next find
him at the University of Paris, where he thought of becoming a doctor
of medicine, but was finally carried away from natural science by the
Renascence devotion to literature, and he became a popular lecturer on
the classics. From Paris he was called to Strassburg (then, as now, in
Germany) in 1537. In 1538 he published his plan of a Gymnasium or Grammar
School, with the title, “The right way of opening schools of literature
(_De Literarum Ludis recte aperiendis_),” and some years afterwards
(1565) he published his Letters (_Classicæ Epistolæ_) to the different
form-masters in his school.
§ 6. The object of teaching is three-fold, says Sturm, “piety, knowledge,
and the art of expression.” The student should be distinguished by
reasonable and neat speech (_ratione et oratione_). To attain this the
boys in his school had to give seven years to the acquirement of a pure
Latin style; then two years more were devoted to elegance; then five
years of collegiate life were to be given to the art of Latin speech.
This course is for ten years carefully mapped out by Sturm in his Letters
to the masters. The foundation is to be laid in the tenth class, which
the child enters at seven years old, and in which he learns to read,
and is turned on to the declensions and conjugations. We have for all
classes the exact “pensum,” and also specimens of the questions put in
examination by the _top boy of the next class above_, a hint which was
not thrown away upon the Jesuits.
§ 7. Sturm cries over the superior advantages of the Roman children.
“Cicero was but twenty when he delivered his speeches in behalf of
Quintius and Roscius; but in these days where is there the man even of
eighty, who could make such speeches? Yet there are books enough and
intellect enough. What need we further? We need the Latin language and a
correct method of teaching. Both these we must have before we can arrive
at the summit of eloquence.”
§ 8. Sturm did not, like Rabelais, put Greek on a level with Latin or
above it. The reading of Greek words is begun in the sixth class. Hebrew,
Sturm did not himself learn till he was nearly sixty.
§ 9. With a thousand boys in his school, and carrying on correspondence
with the leading sovereigns of his age, Sturm was a model of the
successful man. But in the end “the religious difficulty” was too much
even for him, and he was dismissed from his post by his opponents “for
old age and other causes.” Surely the “other causes” need not have been
mentioned. Sturm was then eighty years old.
§ 10. The successful man in every age is the man who chooses a popular
and attainable object, and shows tremendous energy in pursuit of it.
Most people don’t know precisely what they want; and among the few who
do, nine-tenths or more fail through lack of energy. But Sturm was quite
clear in his aim, and having settled the means, he showed immense energy
and strength of will in going through with them. He wanted to restore
the language of Cicero and Ovid and to give his pupils great power of
elegant expression in that language. Like all schoolmasters he professed
that piety and knowledge (which in more modern phrase would be wisdom and
knowledge) should come first, but like most schoolmasters he troubled
himself mainly, if not exclusively, about the art of expression. As
an abstract proposition the schoolmaster admits that to have in your
head something worth saying is more important than to have the power
of expression ready in case anything worth saying should “come along.”
But the schoolmaster’s art always has taken, and I suppose, in the
main, always will take for its material the means of expression; and
by preference it chooses a tongue not vulgar or “understanded of the
people.” Thus the schoolmasters with Sturm at their head set themselves
to teach _words_—foreign words, and allowed their pupils to study nothing
else, not even the mother tongue. The satirist who wrote Hudibras has
stated for us the result—
“No sooner are the organs of the brain
Quick to receive and stedfast to retain
Best knowledges, but all’s laid out upon
Retrieving of the curse of Babylon.
...
And he that is but able to express
No sense in several languages
Will pass for learneder than he that’s known
To speak the strongest reason in his own.”[9]