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.”