Devoted as they were to an austere profession, we may say of many among them, that they were not themselves romancers of a lively fancy or great poets; and so far agree with Voltaire, who made this very remark about his old Professor, Père Porée. Yet also, without inconsistency I believe, we may agree with the spirit of Père Porée's rejoiner, when the remark was reported to him, that "he was not one of the great poets." The Jesuit replied, "At least you may grant that I have been able to make some of them."
And, should results be gauged on a wider basis than mere poetry, not a few of the most prominent men in European history would seem to have been the outcome of this system, men, too, who represented every possible school and tendency, in their subsequent literary and public life. A few names show this. There are those of Descartes, Buffon, Justus Lipsius, Muratori, Calderon, Vico, the jurisconsult, founder of the philosophical school of history. There are Richelieu, Tilly, Malesherbes, Don John of Austria, Luxembourg, Esterhazy, Choiseul, with those of Saint Francis de Sales, founder of a religious Order, Lambertini, afterwards the most learned of Popes, under the name of Benedict XIV, and the present Pontiff, Leo XIII, also most erudite. These certainly represent many schools and tendencies, and they come, with many others, from the same schools.[140]
As authors of every kind, and in departments even far remote from the regular courses of the schools, Jesuit writers were, at the very least, so far related to Jesuit teachers, that, as we see in the bibliographical dictionary of the Society, all had been Professors, with scarcely an exception; and almost all had professed Humanities, Belles Lettres, Rhetoric.
When Father Nathaniel Southwell of Norfolk endeavored, in 1676, to compile a dictionary of these authors, he recorded those whose works had the qualification of a respectable bulk to recommend them. He entered the names and works of 2240 authors who answered this description. This was 136 years after the foundation of the Order. The enterprise was repeatedly taken in hand afterwards. The possibility of ever accomplishing it was much jeopardized by the Suppression. But at length the two Fathers De Backer published a series of seven quarto volumes, in the years 1853–1861; and this first step they followed up, in the years 1869–1876, with a new edition, in three immense folios, containing the names of 11,100 authors. This number does not include the supplements, with the names of writers in the present century, and of the anonymous and pseudonymous authors. Of this last category, Father Sommervogel's researches, up to 1884, enabled him to publish a catalogue, which fills a full octavo volume of 600 pages, with double columns. The writers of this century, whom the De Backers catalogued in their supplement, fill 647 columns, folio, very small print. Altogether, the three folios contain 7086 columns, compressed with every art of typographical condensation.
Suarez of course is to be seen there, and Cornelius à Lapide, Petau, and the Bollandists. A single name, like that of Zaccaria, has 117 works recorded under it, whereof the 116th is in 13 volumes quarto, and the 117th in 22 volumes octavo. The Catechism of Canisius fills nearly 11 columns with the notices of its principal editions, translations, abridgments; the commentaries upon it, and critiques. Rossignol has 66 works to his name. The list of productions about Edmund Campian, for or against him, chiefly in English, fills, in De Backers' folio, two and a half columns of minutest print. Bellarmine, in Father Sommervogel's new edition, fills 50 pages, double column.[141]
Under each work are recorded the editions, translations, sometimes made into every language, including Arabic, Chinese, Indian; also the critiques, and the works published in refutation—a controversial enterprise which largely built up the Protestant theological literature of the times, and, in Bellarmine's case alone, meant the theological Protestant literature for 40 or 50 years afterwards. Oxford founded an anti-Bellarmine chair. The editions of one of this great man's works are catalogued by Sommervogel under the distinct heads of 54 languages.[142]
In the methodical or synoptic table, at the end of the De Backers' work, not only are the subjects well-nigh innumerable, which have their catalogues of authors' names attached to them, but such subjects too are here as might not be expected. Thus "Military Art" has 32 authors' names under it; "Agriculture" 11; "Navy" 12; "Music" 45; "Medicine" 28.
To conclude then our History of this Educational Order, we have one synoptical view of it in these twelve or thirteen thousand authors, all of one family. We have much more. This one work "attesting," as De Backer says in his preface, "at one and the same time a prodigious activity and often an indisputable merit," whereof three and a half centuries have been the course in time, and the whole world the place and theatre, is a general record of religion, letters, science, and education, in every country, civilized or barbarous, where the Society of Jesus labored and travelled. And where has it not done so? In many parts of the world it was the first to occupy the field with literary men, who then sent communications to their superiors, or to learned societies, about the manners of different countries, the state of religion there, of letters, science, and education, including reports of their own observations in geography, meteorology, botany, astronomy, mineralogy, etc. Original sources, from which later history in North, South, and Central America is drawing materials, are seen described here as they appeared; so too with regard to Japan, China, Thibet, the Philippine Islands, Hindustan, Syria, as also to-day with respect to the native tongues of the North American Indians. Here the record of published literature, described and catalogued according to date, marks the stages of mathematical and physical science, from the end of the sixteenth century onwards, and of magnetic and electrical researches all through last century; as well as the relationship between the books of Jesuit authors and similar or kindred ones, by persons outside the Society, in different countries and of divers religions.
In short, works composed in most of the tongues of the world exhibit the chief periods in universal culture, and the developments elaborated in the civilization of mankind.[143]