lower than the Christian child.” And the reason is that we are “the heirs
of all the ages.” Our education must enable every child to enter in some
measure on his inheritance; and not a few of our most precious heirlooms
will be found not only in scientific discoveries but also in those great
works of literature which the votaries of science are apt to despise as
“miserable books.” This truth was not duly appreciated by Comenius. As
Professor Laurie well says, “he accepted only in a half-hearted way the
products of the genius of past ages.” (Laurie’s _C._, p. 22.) In his day
there was a violent reaction from the Renascence passion for literature,
and Comenius would entirely banish from education the only literatures
which were then important, the “heathen” literatures of Greece and Rome.
“Our most learned men,” says he, “even among the theologians take from
Christ only the mask: the blood and life they draw from Aristotle and a
crowd of other heathens.” (See Paulsen’s _Gesch._, pp. 312, ff.) So for
Cicero and Virgil he would substitute, and his contemporaries at first
seemed willing to accept, the _Janua Linguarum_. But though there may be
much more “real” knowledge in the _Janua_, the classics have survived
it.[82] In these days there is a passion for the study of things which
in its intensity resembles the Renascence passion for literature. There
is a craving for knowledge, and we know only the truths we can verify; so
this craving must be satisfied, not by words, but things. And yet that
domain which the physicists contemptuously describe as the study of words
must not be lost sight of, indeed cannot be, either by young or old. As
Matthew Arnold has said, “those who are for giving to natural knowledge
the chief place in the education of the majority of mankind leave one
important thing out of their account—the constitution of human nature.”
“We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love,
And e’en as these are well and wisely fixed,
In dignity of being we ascend.”
So says Wordsworth, and if this assertion cannot be verified, no more
can it be disproved; that the words have become almost proverbial shows
that it commends itself to the general consciousness. Whatever knowledge
we may acquire, it will have little effect on our lives unless we can
“relate it” (again to use Matthew Arnold’s words), “to our sense of
conduct and our sense of beauty.” (_Discourses in America._ “Literature
and Science.”) So long as we retain our sense for these, “the humanities”
are safe. Like Milton we may have no inclination to study “modern
Januas,” but we shall not cease to value many of the works which the
Janua of Comenius was supposed to have supplanted.[83]
§ 51. “Analogies are good for illustration, not for proof.” If Comenius
had accepted this caution, he would have escaped much useless labour,
and might have had a better foundation for his rules than fanciful
applications of what he observed in the external world. “Comenius”
as August Vogel has said, “is unquestionably right in wishing to draw
his principles of education from Nature; but instead of examining the
proper constitution and nature of man, and taking that as the basis
of his theory, he watches the life of birds, the growth of trees, or
the quiet influence of the sun, and thus substitutes for the nature of
man nature _without_ man (_die objective Natur_). And yet by Nature he
understands that first and primordial state to which as to our original
[idea] we should be restored, and by the voice of Nature he understands
the universal Providence of God or the ceaseless influence of the
Divine Goodness working all in all, that is, leading every creature to
the state ordained for it. The vegetative and animal life in Nature is
according to Comenius himself not life at all in its highest sense, but
the only true life is the intellectual or spiritual life of Man. No doubt
in the two lower kinds of life certain analogies may be found for the
higher; but nothing can be less worthy of reliance and less scientific
than a method which draws its principles for the higher life from what
has been observed in the lower.” (A. Vogel’s _Gesch. d. Pädagogik als
Wissenschaft_, p. 94.)
§ 52. This seems to me judicious criticism; but whatever mistakes he may
have made, Comenius, like Froebel long after him, strove after a higher
unity which should embrace knowledge of every kind. The connexion of
knowledges (so constantly overlooked in the schoolroom) was always in his
thoughts. “We see that the branches of a tree cannot live unless they
all alike suck their juices from a common trunk with common roots. And
can we hope that the branches of Wisdom can be torn asunder with safety
to their life, that is to truth? Can one be a Natural Philosopher who
is not also a Metaphysician? or an Ethical Thinker who does not know
something of Physical Science? or a Logician who has no knowledge of real
matters? or a Theologian, a jurisconsult, or a Physician, who is not
first a Philosopher? or an Orator or Poet, who is not all these at once?
He deprives himself of light, of hand, and of regulation, who pushes away
from him any shred of the knowable.” (Quoted in Masson’s _L. of Milton_
vol. iij., p. 213 from the Delineatio, [i.e., _Pansophiæ Prodromus_].
Conf. J. H. Newman, _Idea of a University_, Disc. iij.)
§ 53. We see then that on the side of theory, Comenius was truly great.
But the practical man who has always been the tyrant of the schoolroom
cared nothing for theory and held, with a modern English minister
responsible for education, who proved his ignorance of theory by his “New
Code,” that there was, and could be no such thing. So the reputation of
Comenius became pretty much what our great authority Hallam has recorded,
that he was a person of some ingenuity and little judgment who invented
a new way of learning Latin. This estimate of him enables us to follow
some windings in the stream of thought about education. Comenius faced
the whole problem in its double bearing, theory and practice: he asked,
What is the educator’s task? How can he best accomplish it? But his
contemporaries had not yet recovered from the idolatry of Latin which
had been bequeathed to them by their fathers from the Renascence, and
they too saw in Comenius chiefly an inventor of a new way of learning
Latin. He sought to train up children for this world and the next; they
supposed, as Oxenstiern himself said, that the main thing to be remedied
was the clumsy way of teaching Latin. So Comenius was little understood.
His books were seized upon as affording at once an introduction to the
knowledge of _things_ and a short way of learning Latin. But in the
long run they were found more tiresome than the old classics: so they
went out of fashion, and their author was forgotten with them. Now that
schoolmasters are forming a more worthy conception of their office, they
are beginning to do justice to Comenius.
§ 54. As the Jesuits kept to Latin as the common language of the Church,
so Comenius thought to use it as a means of inter-communication for
the instructed of every nationality. But he was singularly free from
over-estimating the value of Latin, and he demanded that all nations
should be taught in their own language wherein they were born. On this
subject he expresses himself with great emphasis. “We desire and protest
that studies of wisdom be no longer committed to Latin alone, and kept
shut up in the schools, as has hitherto been done, to the greatest
contempt and injury of the people at large, and the popular tongues. Let
all things be delivered to each nation in its own speech.” (_Delineatio_
[_Prodromus_] in Masson _ut supra_.)
§ 55. Comenius was then neither a verbalist nor a classicist, and yet his
contemporaries were not entirely wrong in thinking of him as “a man who
had invented a new way of learning Latin.” His great principle was that
instruction in words and things should go together.[84] The young were to
learn about things, and _at the same time_ were to acquire both in the
vernacular and also in Latin, the international tongue, the words which
were connected with the things. Having settled on this plan of concurrent
instruction in words and things, Comenius determined to write a book
for carrying it out. Just then there fell into his hands a book which a
less open-minded man might have thrown aside on account of its origin,
for it was written by the bitter foes and persecutors of the Bohemian
Protestants, by the Jesuits. But Comenius says truly, “I care not whether
I teach or whether I learn,” and he gave a marvellous proof of this by
adopting the linguistic method of the Jesuits’ _Janua Linguarum_.[85]
This “Noah’s Ark for words,” treated in a series of proverbs of all kinds
of subjects, in such a way as to introduce in a natural connection every
common word in the Latin language. “The idea,” says Comenius, “was better
than the execution. Nevertheless, inasmuch as they (the Jesuits) were
the prime inventors, we thankfully acknowledge it, nor will we upbraid
them with those errors they have committed.” (Preface to Anchoran’s
trans. of _Janua_.)
§ 56. The plan commended itself to Comenius on various grounds. First, he
had a notion of giving an outline of all knowledge before anything was
taught in detail. Next, he could by such a book connect the teaching
about simple things with instruction in the Latin words which applied
to them. And thirdly, he hoped by this means to give such a complete
Latin vocabulary as to render the use of Latin easy for all requirements
of modern society. He accordingly wrote a short account of things in
general, which he put in the form of a dialogue, and this he published in
Latin and German at Leszna in 1531. The success of this work, as we have
already seen, was prodigious. No doubt the spirit which animated Bacon
was largely diffused among educated men in all countries, and they hailed
the appearance of a book which called the youth from the study of old
philosophical ideas to observe the facts around them.
§ 57. The countrymen of Bacon were not backward in adopting the new
work, as the following, from the title-page of a volume in the British
Museum, will show: “The Gate of Tongues Unlocked and Opened; or else,
a Seminary or Seed-plot of all Tongues and Sciences. That is, a short
way of teaching and thoroughly learning, within a yeare and a half at
the furthest, the Latine, English, French and any other tongue, with
the ground and foundation of arts and sciences, comprised under a
hundred titles and 1058 periods. In Latin first, and now, as a token of
thankfulness, brought to light in Latine, English and French, in the
behalfe of the most illustrious Prince Charles, and of British, French,
and Irish youth. The 4th edition, much enlarged, by the labour and
industry of John Anchoran, Licentiate in Divinity, London. Printed by
Edward Griffin for Michael Sparke, dwelling at the Blew Bible in Green
Arbor, 1639.” The first edition must have been some years earlier, and
the work contains a letter to Anchoran from Comenius dated “Lessivæ
polonorum (Leszna) 11th Oct, 1632.” So we see that, however the connexion
arose, it was Anchoran not Hartlib who first made Comenius known in
England.
§ 58. In the preface to the volume (signed by Anchoran and Comenius) we
read of the complaints of “Ascam, Vives, Erasmus, Sturmius, Frisclinus,
Dornavius and others.” The Scaligers and Lipsius did climb but left no
track. “Hence it is that the greater number of schools (howsoever some
boast the happinesse of the age and the splendour of learning) have not
as yet shaked off their ataxies. The youth was held off, nay distracted,
and is yet in many places delayed with grammar precepts infinitely
tedious, perplexed, obscure, and (for the most part) unprofitable, and
that for many years.” The names of things were taught to those who were
in total ignorance of the things themselves.
§ 59. From this barren region the pupil was to escape to become
acquainted with things. “Come on,” says the teacher in the opening
dialogue, “let us go forth into the open air. There you shall view
whatsoever God produced from the beginning, and doth yet effect by
nature. Afterwards we will go into towns, shops, schools, where you shall
see how men do both apply those Divine works to their uses, and also
instruct themselves in arts, manners, tongues. Then we will enter into
houses, courts, and palaces of princes, to see in what manner communities
of men are governed. At last we will visit temples, where you shall
observe how diversely mortals seek to worship their Creator and to be
spiritually united unto Him, and how He by His Almightiness disposeth all
things.” (This is from the 1656 edition, by “W.D.”)
The book is still amusing, but only from the quaint manner in which the
mode of life two hundred years ago is described in it.[86]
§ 60. But though parts of the book may on first reading have gratified
the youth of the seventeenth century, a great deal of it gave scanty
information about difficult subjects, such as physiology, geometry,
logic, rhetoric, and that too in the driest and dullest way. Moreover,
in his first version (much modified at Saros-Patak) Comenius following
the Jesuit boasts that no important word occurs twice; so that the book,
to attain the end of giving a perfect stock of Latin words, would have
to be read and re-read till it was almost known by heart; and however
amusing boys might find an account of their toys written in Latin the
first time of reading, the interest would somewhat wear away by the
fifth or sixth time. We cannot then feel much surprised on reading this
“general verdict,” written some years later, touching those earlier works
of Comenius: “They are of singular use, and very advantageous to those
of more discretion (especially to such as have already got a smattering
in Latin), to help their memories to retain what they have scatteringly
gotten here and there, and to furnish them with many words which perhaps
they had not formerly read or so well observed; but to young children
(whom we have chiefly to instruct, as those that are ignorant altogether
of most things and words), they prove rather a mere toil and burden than
a delight and furtherance.” (Chas. Hoole’s preface to his trans. of
_Orbis Pictus_, dated “From my school in _Lothbury_, London, Jan. 25,
1658.”)
§ 61. The “_Janua_” would, therefore, have had but a short-lived
popularity with teachers, and a still shorter with learners, if Comenius
had not carried out his principle of appealing to the senses, and adopted
a plan which had been suggested, nearly 50 years earlier, by a Protestant
divine, Lubinus,[87] of Rostock. The artist was called in, and with
Endter at Nürnberg in 1657 was published the first edition of a book
which long outlived the _Janua_. This was the famous _Orbis Sensualium
Pictus_, which was used for a century at least in many a schoolroom,
and lives in imitations to the present day. Comenius wrote this book on
the same lines as the _Janua_, but he goes into less detail, and every
subject is illustrated by a small engraving. The text is mostly on the
opposite page to the picture, and is connected with it by a series of
corresponding numbers. Everything named in the text is numbered as
in the picture. The artist employed must have been a bold man, as he
sticks at nothing; but in skill he was not the equal of many of his
contemporaries; witness the pictures in the Schaffhausen _Janua_ (Editio
secunda, SchaffhusI, 1658), in Daniel’s edition of the _Janua_, 1562,
and the very small but beautiful illustrations in the _Vestibulum_ of
“Jacob Redinger and J. S.” (Amsterdam, 1673). However, the _Orbis Pictus_
gives such a quaint delineation of life 200 years ago that copies with
the original engravings keep rising in value, and an American publisher
(Bardeen of Syracuse, New York), has lately reproduced the old book with
the help of photography.
§ 62. And yet as instruments of teaching, these books, _i.e._ the
_Vestibulum_ and the _Janua_ and even the _Orbis Pictus_ which in a great
measure superseded both, proved a failure. How shall we account for this?
Comenius immensely over-estimated the importance of knowledge and
the power of the human mind to acquire knowledge. He took it for the
heavenly idea that _man should know all things_. This notion started him
on the wrong road for forming a scheme of instruction, and it needed
many years and much experience to show him his error. When he wrote the
_Orbis Pictus_ he said of it: “It is _a little book_, as you see, of
no great bulk, yet a brief of the whole world and a whole language;”
(Hoole’s trans. Preface); and he afterwards speaks of “this our _little
encyclopædia_ of things subject to the senses.” But in his old age he saw
that his text-books were too condensed and attempted too much (Laurie,
p. 59); and he admitted that after all Seneca was right: “Melius est
scire pauca et iis recté uti quam scire multa, quorum ignores usum. It is
better to know a few things and have the right use of them than to know
many things which you cannot use at all.”
§ 63. The attempt to give “information” has been the ruin of a vast
number of professing educators since Comenius. Masters “of the old
school” whom some of us can still remember made boys learn Latin and
Greek Grammar and _nothing else_. Their successors seem to think that
boys should not learn Latin and Greek Grammar but _everything else_: and
the last error I take to be much worse than the first. As Ruskin has
neatly said, education is not teaching people to know what they do not
know, but to behave as they do not behave. It is to be judged not by the
knowledge acquired, but the habits, powers, interests: knowledge must be
thought of “last and least.”
§ 64. So the attempt to teach about everything was unwise. The means
adopted were unwise also. It is a great mistake to suppose that
a “general view” should come first; this is not the right way to
give knowledge in any subject. “A child begins by seeing bits of
everything—here a little and there a little; it makes up its wholes out
of its own littles, and is long in reaching the fulness of a whole; and
in this we are children all our lives in much.” (Dr. John Brown in _Horæ
Subsecivæ_, p. 5.) So nothing could have been much more unfortunate than
an attempt to give the young “a brief of the whole world.” _Compendia,
dispendia._
§ 65. Corresponding to “a brief of the whole world,” Comenius offers “a
brief of a whole language.” The two mistakes were well matched. In “the
whole world” there are a vast number of things of which we must, and
a good number of which we very advantageously _may_ be ignorant. In a
language there are many words which we cannot know and many more which we
do not want to know. The language lives for us in a small vocabulary of
essential words, and our hold upon the language depends upon the power
we have in receiving and expressing thought by means of those words. But
the Jesuit Bath, and after him Comenius, made the tremendous mistake of
treating all Latin words as of equal value, and took credit for using
each word once and once only! Moreover, Comenius wrote not simply to
teach the Latin language, but also to stretch the Latin language till it
covered the whole area of modern life. He aimed at two things and missed
them both.
§ 66. We see then that Comenius was not what Hallam calls him, “a man who
invented a new way of learning Latin.” He did not do this, but he did
much more than this. He saw that every human creature should be trained
up to become a reasonable being, and that the training should be such
as to draw out God-given faculties. Thus he struck the key-note of the
science of education.
The quantity and the diffuseness of the writings of Comenius
are truly bewildering. In these days eminent men, Carlyle,
_e.g._, sometimes find it difficult to get into print; but
printing-presses all over Europe seemed to be at the service
of Comenius. An account of the various editions of the _Janua_
would be an interesting piece of bibliography, but the task of
making it would not be a light one. The earliest copy of which
I can find a trace is entered in the catalogue of the Bodleian:
“Comenius J. A. _Janua Linguarum_, 8vo, Lips (Leipzig) 1632.” I
also find there another copy entered “per Anchoranum, cum clave
per W. Saltonstall, London, 1633.”
The fame of Comenius is increasing and many interesting works
have now been written about him. I have already mentioned
the English books of Benham and Laurie. In German I have the
following books, but not the time to read them all:—
Daniel, H. A. _Zerstreute Blätter._ Halle, 1866.
Free, H. _Pädagogik d. Comenius._ Bernburg, 1884.
Hiller, R. _Latein Methode d. J. A. Comenius._ Zschopau, 1883.
(v. g. and terse; only 46 pp.)
Müller, Walter. _Comenius ein Systematiker in d. Päd._ Dresden,
1887.
Pappenheim, E. _Amos Comenius._ Berlin, 1871.
Seyffarth, L. W. _J. A. Comenius._ Leipzig, 2nd edition, 1871.
(A careful and, as far as I can judge in haste, an excellent
piece of work.)
Zoubek, Fr. J. _J. A. Comenius._ _Eine quellenmässige
Lebensskizze_, (Prefixed to trans. of _Didac. M._ in Richter’s
_Päd. Bibliothek_.)
For a Port-Royalist’s criticism of the _Janua_, see infra. (p.
185 _note_.)
XI.
THE GENTLEMEN OF PORT-ROYAL.[88]
§ 1. In the sixteen-hundreds by far the most successful schoolmasters
were the Jesuits. In spite of their exclusion from the University, they
had in the Province of Paris some 14,000 pupils, and in Paris itself at
the Collège de Clermont, 1,800. Might they not have neglected “the Little
Schools,” which were organized by the friends and disciples of the Abbé
de Saint-Cyran, schools in which the numbers were always small, about
twenty or twenty-five, and only once increasing to fifty? And yet the
Jesuits left no stone unturned, no weapon unemployed, in their attack on
“the Little Schools.” The conflict seems to us like an engagement between
a man-of-war and a fishing-boat. That the poor fishing-boat would soon
be beneath the waves, was clear enough from the beginning, and she did
indeed speedily disappear; but the victors have never recovered from
their victory and never will. Whenever we think of Jesuitism we are not
more forcibly reminded of Loyola than of Pascal. All educated Frenchmen,
most educated people everywhere, get their best remembered impressions of
the Society of Loyola from the Provincial Letters.[89]
§ 2. The Society had a long standing rivalry with the University of
Paris, and the University not only refused to admit the Jesuits, but
several times petitioned the Parliament to chase them out of France. On
one of these occasions the advocate who was retained by the University
was Antoine Arnauld, a man of renowned eloquence; and he threw himself
into the attack with all his heart. From that time the Jesuits had a
standing feud with the house of Arnauld.
§ 3. But it was no mere personal dislike that separated the
Port-Royalists and the Jesuits. Port-Royal with which the Arnauld
family was so closely united, became the stronghold of a theology which
was unlike that of the Jesuits, and was denounced by them as heresy.
The daughter of Antoine Arnauld was made, at the age of eleven years,
Abbess of Port-Royal, a Cistercian convent not far from Versailles.
This position was obtained for her by a fraud of Marion, Henry IV’s
advocate-general, who thought only of providing comfortably for one of
the twenty children to whom his daughter, Made. Arnauld, had made him
grandfather. Never was a nomination more scandalously obtained or used to
better purpose. The Mère Angélique is one of the saints of the universal
church, and she soon became the restorer of the religious life first in
her own and then by her influence and example in other convents of her
Order.
§ 4. In these reforms she had nothing to fear from her hereditary foes
the Jesuits; but she soon came under the influence of a man whose theory
of life was as much opposed to the Jesuits’ theory as to that of the
world which found in the Jesuits the most accommodating father confessors.
Duvergier de Hauranne (1581-1643) better known by the name of his
“abbaye,” Saint-Cyran, was one of those commanding spirits who seem born
to direct others and form a distinct society. In vain Richelieu offered
him the posts most likely to tempt him. The prize that Saint-Cyran had
set his heart upon was not of this world, and Richelieu could assist him
in one way only—by persecution. This assistance the Cardinal readily
granted, and by his orders Saint-Cyran was imprisoned at Vincennes, and
not set at liberty till Richelieu was himself summoned before a higher
tribunal.
§ 5. Driven by prevailing sickness from Port-Royal des Champs, the Mère
Angélique transported her community (in 1626) to a house purchased for
them in Paris by her mother who in her widowhood became one of the
Sisters. In Paris Angélique sought for herself and her convent the
spiritual direction of Saint-Cyran (not yet a prisoner), and from that
time Saint-Cyran added the Abbess and Sisters of Port-Royal to the number
of those who looked up to him as their pattern and guide in all things.
Port-Royal des Champs was in course of time occupied by a band of
solitaries who at the bidding of Saint-Cyran renounced the world and
devoted themselves to prayer and study. To them we owe the works of “the
Gentlemen of Port-Royal.”