the distinctive mark of the Port-Royalists.
Saint-Cyran was before all things a theologian. In his early days
at Bayonne his studies had been shared by a friend who afterwards
was professor of theology at Louvain, and then Bishop of Ypres. This
friend was Jansenius. Their searches after truth had brought them to
opinions which in the England of the nineteenth century are known as
“Evangelical.” According to “Catholic” teaching all those who receive
the creed and the sacraments of the Church and do not commit “mortal”
sin are in a “state of salvation,” that is to say the great majority
of Christians are saved. This teaching is rejected by those of another
school of thought who hold that only a few “elect” are saved and that the
great body even of Christians are doomed to perdition.
§ 7. Such a belief as this would seem to be associated of necessity with
harshness and gloom; but from whatever cause, there has been found in
many, even in most, cases no such connexion. Those who have held that the
great mass of their fellow-creatures had no hope in a future world, have
thrown themselves lovingly into all attempts to improve their condition
in this world. Still, their main effort has always been to increase
the number of the converted and to preserve them from the wiles of the
enemy. This Saint-Cyran sought to do by selecting a few children and
bringing them up in their tender years like hot-house plants, in the hope
that they would be prepared when older and stronger, to resist the evil
influences of the world.
§ 8. His first plan was to choose out of all Paris six children and
to confide them to the care of a priest appointed to direct their
consciences, and a tutor of not more than twenty-five years old, to teach
them Latin. “I should think,” says he, “it was doing a good deal if I
did not advance them far in Latin before the age of twelve, and made
them pass their first years confined to one house or a monastery in the
country where they might be allowed all the pastimes suited to their age
and where they might see only the example of a good life set by those
about them.” (Letter quoted by Carré, p. 20.)
§ 9. His imprisonment put a stop to this plan, “but,” says Saint-Cyran,
“I do not lightly break off what I undertake for God;” so when intrusted
with the disposal of 2,000 francs by M. Bignon, he started the first
“Little School,” in which two small sons of M. Bignon’s were taken as
pupils. The name of “Little Schools,” was given partly perhaps because
according to their design the numbers in any school could never be large,
partly no doubt to deprecate any suspicion of rivalry with the schools of
the University. The children were to be taken at an early age, nine or
ten, before they could have any guilty knowledge of evil, and Saint-Cyran
made in all cases a stipulation that at any time a child might be
returned to his friends; but in cases where the master’s care seemed
successful, the pupils were to be kept under it till they were grown up.
§ 10. The Little Schools had a short and troubled career of hardly more
than fifteen years. They were not fully organized till 1646; they were
proscribed a few years later and in 1661 were finally broken up by Louis
XIV, who was under the influence of their enemies the Jesuits. But in
that time the Gentlemen of Port-Royal had introduced new ideas which have
been a force in French education and indeed in all literary education
ever since.
To Saint-Cyran then we trace the attempt at a particular kind of school,
and to his followers some new departures in the training of the intellect.
§ 11. Basing his system on the Fall of Man, Saint-Cyran came to a
conclusion which was also reached by Locke though by a different road.
To both of them it seemed that children require much more individual care
and watching than they can possibly get in a public school. Saint-Cyran
would have said what Locke said: “The difference is great between two or
three pupils in the same house and three or four score boys lodged up
and down: for let the master’s industry and skill be never so great, it
is impossible he should have fifty or one hundred scholars under his eye
any longer than they are in school together: Nor can it be expected that
he should instruct them successfully in anything but their books; the
forming of their minds and manners [preserving them from the danger of
the enemy, Saint-Cyran would have said] requiring a constant attention
and particular application to every single boy, which is impossible in a
numerous flock, and would be wholly in vain (could he have time to study
and correct everyone’s peculiar defects and wrong inclinations) when the
lad was to be left to himself or the prevailing infection of his fellows
the greater part of the four-and-twenty hours.” (_Thoughts c. Ed._ § 70.)
§ 12. An English public schoolmaster told the Commission on Public
Schools, that he stood _in loco parentis_ to fifty boys. “Rather a large
family,” observed one of the Commissioners drily. The truth is that in
the bringing up of the young there is the place of the schoolmaster and
of the school-fellows, as well as that of the parents; and of these
several forces one cannot fulfil the functions of the others.
§ 13. According to the theory or at least the practice of English public
schools, boys are left in their leisure hours to organize their life for
themselves, and they form a community from which the masters are, partly
by their own over-work, partly by the traditions of the school, utterly
excluded. From this the intellectual education of the boys no doubt
suffers. “Engage them in conversation with men of parts and breeding,”
says Locke; and this was the old notion of training when boys of good
family grew up as pages in the household of some nobleman. But, except
in the holidays, the young aristocrats of the present day talk only with
other boys, and servants, and tradesmen. Hence the amount of thought and
conversation given to school topics, especially the games, is out of
all proportion to the importance of such things; and this does much to
increase what Matthew Arnold calls “the barbarians’” inaptitude for ideas.
§ 14. What are we to say about the effects of the system on the morals
of the boys? If we were to start like Saint-Cyran from the doctrine
of human depravity, we should entirely condemn the system and predict
from it the most disastrous results;[90] but from experience we come to
a very different conclusion. Bishop Dupanloup, indeed, spoke of the
public schools of France as “_ces gouffres_.” This is not what is said
or thought of the English schools, and they are filled with boys whose
fathers and grandfathers were brought up in them, and desire above all
things to maintain the old traditions.
§ 15. The Little Schools of Port-Royal aimed at training a few boys very
differently; each master had the charge of five or six only, and these
were never to be out of his presence day or night.[91]
§ 16. It may reasonably be objected that such schools would be
possible only for a few children of well-to-do parents, and that men
who would thus devote themselves could be found only at seasons of
great enthusiasm. Under ordinary circumstances small schools have most
of the drawbacks and few of the advantages which are to be found in
large schools. As I have already said, parents, schoolmasters, and
school-fellows have separate functions in education; and even in the
smallest school the master can never take the place of the parent, or the
school become the home. Children at home enter into the world of their
father and mother; the family friends are _their_ friends, the family
events affect them as a matter of course. But in the school, however
small, the children’s interests are unconnected with the master and the
master’s family. The boys may be on the most intimate, even affectionate
terms with the grown people who have charge of them; but the mental
horizon of the two parties is very different, and their common area of
vision but small. In such cases the young do not rise into the world of
the adults, and it is almost impossible for the adults to descend into
theirs. They are “no company” the one for the other, and to be constantly
in each other’s presence would subject both to very irksome restraint.
When left to themselves, boys in small numbers are far more likely to get
into harm than boys in large numbers. In large communities even of boys,
“the common sense of most” is a check on the badly disposed. So as it
seems to me if from any cause the young cannot live at home and attend
a day-school, they will be far better off in a large boarding school
than in one that would better fulfil the requirements of Erasmus,[92]
Saint-Cyran, and Locke.
§ 17. As Saint-Cyran attributed immense importance to the part of the
master in education, he was not easily satisfied with his qualifications.
“There is no occupation in the Church that is more worthy of a Christian;
next to giving up one’s life there is no greater charity.... The charge
of the soul of one of these little ones is a higher employment than the
government of all the world.” (Cadet, 2.) So thought Saint-Cyran, and he
was ready to go to the ends of the earth to find the sort of teacher he
wanted.
§ 18. He was so anxious that the children should see only that which was
good that the servants were chosen with peculiar care.
§ 19. For the masters his favourite rule was: “Speak little; put up
with much; pray still more.” Piety was not to be instilled so much by
precepts as by the atmosphere in which the children grew up. “Do not
spend so much time in speaking to them about God as to God about them:”
so formal instruction was never to be made wearisome. But there was to be
an incessant watch against evil influences and for good. “In guarding the
citadel,” says Lancelot, “we fail if we leave open a single gateway by
which the enemy might enter.”
§ 20. Though anxious, like the Jesuits, to make their boys’ studies
“not only endurable, but even delightful,” the Gentlemen of Port-Royal
banished every form of rivalry. Each pupil was to think of one whom
he should try to catch up, but this was not a school-fellow, but his
own higher self, his ideal. Here Pascal admits that the exclusion
of competition had its drawbacks and that the boys sometimes became
indifferent—“tombent dans la nonchalance,” as he says.
§ 21. As for the instruction it was founded on this principle: the object
of schools being piety rather than knowledge there was to be no pressure
in studying, but the children were to be taught what was sound and
enduring.
§ 22. In all occupations there is of necessity a tradition. In the higher
callings the tradition may be of several kinds. First there may be a
tradition of noble thoughts and high ideals, which will be conveyed in
the words of the greatest men who have been engaged in that calling,
or have thought out the theory of it. Next there will be the tradition
of the very best workers in it. And lastly there is the tradition of
the common man who learns and passes on just the ordinary views of his
class and the ordinary expedients for getting through ordinary work. Of
these different kinds of tradition, the school-room has always shown
a tendency to keep to this last, and the common man is supreme. Young
teachers are mostly required to fulfil their daily tasks without the
smallest preparation for them; so they have to get through as best they
can, and have no time to think of any high ideal, or of any way of doing
their work except that which gives them least trouble. “Practice makes
perfect,” says the proverb, but it would be truer to say that practice in
doing work badly soon makes perfect in contentment with bad workmanship.
Thus it is that the tradition of the school-room settles down for the
most part into a deadly routine, and teachers who have long been engaged
in carrying it on seem to lose their powers of vision like horses who
turn mills in the dark.
The Gentlemen of Port-Royal worked free from school-room tradition.
“If the want of emulation was a drawback,” says Sainte-Beuve, “it was a
clear gain to escape from all routine, from all pedantry. _La crasse et
la morgue des régents n’en approchaient pas._” (_P.R._ vol. iij, p. 414)
Piety as we have seen was their main object. Next to it they wished to
“carry the intellects of their pupils to the highest point they could
attain to.”
§ 23. In doing this they profited by their freedom from routine to try
experiments. They used their own judgments and sought to train the
judgment of their pupils. Themselves knowing the delights of literature,
they resolved that their pupils should know them also. They would banish
all useless difficulties and do what they could to “help the young and
make study even more pleasant to them than play and pastime.” (Preface to
Cic.’s _Billets_, quoted by Sainte-Beuve, vol. iij, p. 423.)
§ 24. One of their innovations, though startling to their contemporaries,
does not seem to us very surprising. It was the custom to begin reading
with a three or four years’ course of reading Latin, because in that
language all the letters were pronounced. The connexion between sound
and sense is in our days not always thought of, but even among teachers
no advocates would now be found for the old method which kept young
people for the first three or four years uttering sounds they could by no
possibility understand. The French language might have some disadvantage
from its silent letters, but this was small compared with the
disadvantage felt in Latin from its silent sense. So the Port-Royalists
began reading with French.
§ 25. Further than this, they objected to reading through spelling,
and pointed out that as consonants cannot be pronounced by themselves
they should be taken only in connexion with the adjacent vowel. Pascal
applied himself to the subject and invented the method described in the
6th chap. of the General Grammar (Carré, p. xxiij) and introduced by his
sister Jacqueline at Port-Royal des Champs.
§ 26. When the child could read French, the Gentlemen of Port-Royal
sought for him books within the range of his intelligence. There was
nothing suitable in French, so they set to work to produce translations
in good French of the most readable Latin books, “altering them just a
little—_en y changeant fort peu de chose_,” as said the chief translator
De Saci, for the sake of purity. In this way they gallicised the
Fables of Phædrus, three Comedies of Terence, and the Familiar Letters
(_Billets_) of Cicero.
§ 27. In this we see an important innovation. As I have tried to explain
(_supra_ pp. 14 ff.) the effect of the Renascence was to banish both the
mother-tongue and literature proper from the school-room; for no language
was tolerated but Latin, and no literature was thought possible except
in Latin or Greek. Before any literature could be known, or indeed,
instruction in any subject could be given, the pupils had to learn Latin.
This neglect of the mother-tongue was one of the traditional mistakes
pointed out and abandoned by the Port-Royalists. “People of quality
complain,” says De Saci, “and complain with reason, that in giving their
children Latin we take away French, and to turn them into citizens of
ancient Rome we make them strangers in their native land. After learning
Latin and Greek for 10 or 12 years, we are often obliged at the age of 30
to learn French.” (Cadet, 10.) So Port-Royal proposed breaking through
this bondage to Latin, and laid down the principle, new in France, though
not in the country of Mulcaster or of Ratke, that everything should be
taught through the mother-tongue.
Next, the Port-Royalists sought to give their pupils an early and a
pleasing introduction to literature. The best literature in those days
was the classical; and suitable works from that literature might be made
intelligible _by means of translations_. In this way the Port-Royalists
led their pupils to look upon some of the classical authors not as
inventors of examples in syntax, but as writers of books that _meant_
something. And thus both the mother-tongue and literature were brought
into the school-room.
§ 28. When the boys had by this means got some feeling for literature
and some acquaintance with the world of the ancients, they began the
study of Latin. Here again all needless difficulties were taken out of
their way. No attempt indeed was made to teach language without grammar,
the rationale of language, but the science of grammar was reduced to
first principles (set forth in the _Grammaire Générale et Raisonnée_ of
Arnauld and Lancelot), and the special grammar of the Latin language was
no longer taught by means of the work established in the University,
the _Latin_ Latin Grammar of Despautère, but by a “New Method” written
in French which gave essentials only and had for its motto: “Mihi inter
virtutes grammatici habebitur aliqua nescire—To me it will be among the
grammarian’s good points not to know everything.” (Quintil.)[93]
§ 29. With this minimum of the essentials of the grammar and with
a previous acquaintance with the sense of the book the pupils were
introduced to the Latin language and were taught to translate a Latin
author into French. This was a departure from the ordinary route, which
after a course of learning grammar-rules in Latin went to the “theme,”
_i.e._, to composition in Latin.
The art of translating into the mother-tongue was made much of. School
“construes,” which consist in substituting a word for a word, were
entirely forbidden, and the pupils had to produce the old writer’s
thoughts _in French_.[94]
§30. From this we see that the training was literary. But in the study of
form the Port-Royalists did not neglect the inward for the outward. Their
great work, which still stands the attacks of time, is the Port-Royal
_Logic, or the Art of Thinking_ (see Trans, by T. Spencer Baynes, 1850).
This was substantially the work of Arnauld; and it was Arnauld who led
the Port-Royalists in their rupture with the philosophy of the Middle
Age, and who openly followed Descartes. In the _Logic_ we find the claims
of reason asserted as if in defiance of the Jesuits. “It is a heavy
bondage to think oneself forced to agree in everything with Aristotle and
to take him as the standard of truth in philosophy.... The world cannot
long continue in this restraint, and is recovering by degrees its natural
and reasonable liberty, which consists in accepting that which we judge
to be true and rejecting that which we judge to be false.” (Quoted by
Cadet, p. 31.)[95]
§ 31. To mark the change, the Port-Royalists called their book not “the
Art of Reasoning,” but “the Art of Thinking,” and it was in this art
of thinking that they endeavoured to train their scholars. They paid
great attention to geometry, and Arnauld wrote a book (“New Elements of
Geometry”) which so well satisfied Pascal that after reading the MS. he
burnt a similar work of his own.
§ 32. The Port-Royalists then sought to introduce into the school-room a
“sweet reasonableness.” They were not touched, as Comenius was, by the
spirit of Bacon, and knew nothing of a key for opening the secrets of
Nature. They loved literature and resolved that their pupils should love
it also; and with this end they would give the first notions of it in the
mother-tongue; but the love of literature still bound them to the past,
and they aimed simply at making the best of the Old Education without any
thought of a New.
§ 33. In one respect they seem less wise than Rabelais and Mulcaster,
less wise perhaps than their foes the Jesuits. They gave little heed to
training the body, and thought of the soul and the mind only; or if they
thought of the body they were concerned merely that it should do no harm.
“Not only must we form the minds of our pupils to virtue,” says Nicole,
“we must also bend their bodies to it, that is, we must endeavour that
the body do not prove a hindrance to their leading a well-regulated life
or draw them by its weight to any disorder. For we should know that as
men are made up of mind and body, a wrong turn given to the body in youth
is often in after life a great hindrance to piety.” (_Vues p. bien élever
un prince_, quoted by Cadet, p. 206.)
§ 34. But let us not underrate the good effect produced by this united
effort of Christian toil and Christian thought. “Nothing should be
more highly esteemed than good sense,” (Preface to the _Logique_), and
Port-Royal did a great work in bringing good sense and reason to bear on
the practice of the school-room. When the Little Schools were dispersed
the Gentlemen still continued to teach, but the lessons they gave were
now in the “art of thinking” and in the art of teaching; and all the
world might learn of them, for they taught in the only way left open to
them; they published books.
§ 35. Of these writers on pedagogy the most distinguished was “the great
Arnauld,” _i.e._, Antoine Arnauld, (1612-1694) brother of the Mère
Angélique. His “_Règlement des Études_” shows us how literary instruction
was given at Port-Royal. In these directions we have not so much the
rules observed in the Little Schools as the experience of the Little
Schools rendered available for the schools of the University. On this
account Sainte-Beuve speaks of the _Règlement_ of Arnauld as forming a
preface to the _Treatise on Studies_ (_Traité des Études_) of Rollin.
In the _Règlement_ we see Arnauld yielding to what seems a practical
necessity and admitting competition and prizes. Some excellent advice is
given, especially on practice in the use of the mother-tongue. The young
people are to question and answer each other about the substance of what
they have read, about the more remarkable thoughts in their author or the
more beautiful expressions. Each day two of the boys are to narrate a
story which they themselves have selected from a classical author.[96]
§ 36. With the notable exception of Pascal, Arnauld was the most
distinguished writer among the Gentlemen of Port-Royal. A writer less
devoted to controversy than Arnauld, less attached to the thought of
Saint-Cyran and of Descartes, but of wider popularity, was Nicole, who
had Made. de Sévigné for an admirer, and Locke for one of his translators.
Nicole has given us a valuable contribution to pedagogy in his essay on
the right bringing-up of a prince. (_Vues générales pour bien élever un
prince._) In this essay he shows us with what thought and care he had
applied himself to the art of instruction, and he gives us hints that all
teachers may profit by. Take the following:—
§ 37. “Properly speaking it is not the masters, it is no instruction
from without, that makes things understood; at the best the masters do
nothing but expose the things to the interior light of the mind, by which
alone they can be understood. It follows that where this light is wanting
instruction is as useless as trying to shew pictures in the dark. The
very greatest minds are nothing but lights in confinement, and they have
always sombre and shady spots; but in children the mind is nearly full
of shade and emits but little rays of light. So everything depends on
making the most of these rays, on increasing them and exposing to them
what one wishes to have understood. For this reason it is hard to give
general rules for instructing anyone, because the instruction must be
adapted to the mixture of light and darkness, which differs widely in
different minds, especially with children. We must look where the day
is breaking and bring to it what we wish them to understand; and to do
this we must try a variety of ways for getting at their minds and must
persevere with such as we find have most success.
“But generally speaking we may say that, as in children the light depends
greatly on their senses, we should as far as possible attach to the
senses the instruction we give them, and make it enter not only by the
ear but also by the sight, as there is no sense which makes so lively an
impression on the mind and forms such sharp and clear ideas.”
This is excellent. There is a wise proverb that warns us that “however
soon we get up in the morning the sunrise comes never the earlier.” A
vast amount of instruction is thrown away because the instructors will
not wait for the day-break.