This system of prelection, which in addition to the perfection of its technique, required erudition from every branch of learning,[304] made of the Professor anything but a technical pedagogue. Voltaire noticed it, speaking of his own Professor. "Nothing will efface from my heart," he wrote to Père de la Tour, Rector of the Collège Louis-le-Grand, "the memory of Father Porée, who is equally dear to all that studied under him. Never did man make study and virtue more amiable. The hours of his lessons were delicious hours to us. And I should have wished that it was the custom at Paris, as it used to be at Athens, that one, at any age, could listen to such lectures. I should often go to hear them. I have had the good fortune to be formed by more than one Jesuit of the character of Père Porée, and I know that he has successors worthy of him."[305]
The productions of such Professors replenished the literature of the classics, as we may see in the great editions, or bibliothecæ classicæ, published during the present century. Father De la Cerda of Toledo, in his three folio volumes on Virgil, in 1617, gave to literature an encyclopædia of political and moral observations, including geography, history, and the natural sciences.[306] His technical work was not inferior; for his "Grammatical Institutions" became in 1613, by an exclusive privilege, the standard of all the public schools in Spain. Father Nicholas Abram, whose "Epitome of Greek Precepts in Latin Verse" went through fifty editions in twenty-two years, published in 1632, while Professor at the College of Pont-à-Mousson, two volumes octavo on Virgil, which were then republished constantly at Rouen, Paris, Toulouse, Poitiers, Lyons, etc.[307] Undertaking the same labor, in behalf of Cicero, he issued two volumes folio, "by which John George Grævius profited in his edition of Cicero, Amsterdam, 1699; as well as the editor of Cambridge, whose work appeared in 1699, 1710, and 1717."[308] Father De la Rue's (Carolus Ruæus) Delphin Virgil is a familiar work in France, Holland, England; so, too, De Merouville's Delphin edition of Cicero, which was often reproduced at Cambridge, London, Dublin, etc. The same we see with regard to Sanadon on Horace, Brumoy's great work on the Greek Drama, René Rapin's various critical and poetical works; and so of the rest. Of Père Rapin's thirty-five works, there are few which were not translated into various European languages; and Oxford, London, Cambridge, have been among the most active centres of republication, or translation into English.[309]
4. This chapter, which has extended beyond the usual limits, cannot close better than with a word on books, a matter intimately connected with its subject. The Fathers of 1586 set down some principles with regard to the proper supply and use of books, as well as the expurgation of the classical standard works;[310] and accordingly the Ratio of 1599 ordains that "the students are neither to be without useful books, nor to abound in useless ones."[311] A multitude is considered useless, because "it oppresses the mind, and interferes with the convenient preparation of the lesson. Of books by more recent authors few are to be allowed, and those very carefully selected." Yet, "a variety of authors gives a richer vein to the boys, and makes imitation easier."[312] Here the Fathers proceed to give directions for the composition of an entirely new kind of work, which would be of great use in the colleges. It is exactly the species so well known in our days under the various titles of "Precepts of Rhetoric," "Art of Composition," etc. As the development of pedagogical literature, which we took note of in a former chapter,[313] had already made some progress, the critics say: "Some one most versed in all these matters should be deputed to gather whatever is best in this line, and to compile in one treatise, written in an elegant style, all that he has selected, about the art of writing epigrams, elegies, odes, eclogues, sylvæ (that is, materials, "objects"), comedies, tragedies, epopœiæ, a brief method of chronology; explaining also what is the historical (or narrative) style, the poetic, the epistolary, the different kinds of speaking, and other such matters, all to be illustrated by examples."[314] Elsewhere they call for a similar work of a higher order, on the Art of Oratory. The sources which they designate for such a compilation are "the numerous publications of our Professors of Rhetoric, as well on the art itself, as on classical orations."[315] These compendia, or text-books, were a new idea in education.
[CHAPTER XVI.]
THE CLASSICAL LITERATURES. SCHOOL MANAGEMENT AND CONTROL.
The subject of Literary Exercises and School Management is treated in such a manner by the critics of 1586, that justice could be done to it, only by transcribing, word for word, the several chapters of the preliminary Ratio. As that is impossible, within the limits of space remaining, I shall endeavor to trace the outline.
1. There is one fundamental point, however, which should be touched on, to meet a latent query in the mind. It refers to the kind of education projected throughout. It is evidently not a special training which is contemplated; not the training of specialists, or technical students. All through the system, the field of pedagogical activity is that of a general culture; and, therefore, properly an education. The result aimed at is a general one, that of developing in the young mind all fundamental qualities; of adjusting it, by the early development of all natural fitnesses, to any special work of thought and labor in the mature life of the future. It would lay a solid substructure, in the whole mind and character, for any superstructure of science, professional and special; also for the entire building up of moral life, civil and religious. That such a general culture should go before the special seems to be obvious. To supplant it by the special, or even to abridge the process, is not only to sacrifice the general culture; it has a more serious effect than that. By a false economy, it cramps, curtails, and reduces to the smallest proportions whatever possibilities existed of general and special qualifications in the youthful mind. Without a broad, radical formation below, the amplitude of organic growth above must necessarily fall short; the roots underneath not having shot out, the development above is wanting in vigor, to ramify according to its environment, and use its opportunities. In a boy's mind, there is needed a suppleness of general powers, as only the young mind can be made supple, while at the same time it is preëminently apt to be general. It is what Seneca calls curiosum ingenium, "an inquisitive genius," open to everything, and prying to open everything. Memory is then at its flourishing stage, ready to be cultivated throughout the extent of a potential vastness, which will never again be experienced in life. If cultivated richly in its season, it will be capable afterwards of every kind of ready yield, according to its acquired tenacity, and according to the richness of the seed deposited in it. The imagination, too, is at the stage of impressionable and vital expansion, and is keenly sensitive to the lights and shades of objective life. These are either brought under its observation, or, better still, are pictured for it in beautiful literature; since the fine fancy of great minds paints nature, as nature herself is not found dressed at every one's door. The opening judgment also is receptive of the thoughts and wisdom, which other minds have thought out and handed down, encasing it, as they did so, in a style worthy of their own vigor, and presenting it as the heritage of the past to the present, of the wise old age of the world to its youth, which may be wiser still. And thus in each individual youth, the judgment being tenderly nursed, and learning ripening with age, what was before in the memory passes gradually into the whole character and competency of the man.
In the system which we are considering, the instrument employed for working these effects is a literature in the hands of a competent teacher; it is a great literature, and a double one. The great literatures of Rome and Greece have always been considered adequate instruments of universal culture. Under a literary aspect, the eloquence and poetry of Greece had been the mistress of Roman excellence. Under a philological aspect, the Latin tongue has been the principal basis of our modern languages, as formed in the history of Christendom. In both of them, the varied elements of richest thought are brought into contact with the undeveloped, but developing nature of the youth; glimpses of human life, individual, social, and political, favor his inquiring eyes, and lead him to feel the finest springs of human sentiment. Better still, he feels these springs as touched by the greatest masters of expression; and he conceives thought as rendered in a style worthy of the greatest thinkers; and that, in languages, one of them the most delicately organized, the other perhaps the most systematically elaborated, of all tongues living or extinct. And, besides, these two literatures come down to us, bearing in their own right what no other tongues can convey. Not as translations, which, in their best form, exhibit only a respectable degree of mendicancy, and represent other men's living thoughts in a decent misfit, these two literatures come down to us bearing in their own right all the historic memories of antiquity, as well sacred as profane; all the masterpieces of eloquence and poetry, belonging to no less than two out of the very few great epochs, those of Pericles and Augustus; all human philosophy, from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, down to St. Thomas Aquinas, and, further down, to Leibnitz and Newton, both of them men of classical letters; in fine, all the traditions, the Faith, and Divinity of Christendom.
To these considerations we may add one more characteristic of the classical literatures, as instruments in the class-room, and we shall have seen enough on our present topic, to understand the theory which underlies the Ratio Studiorum. These tongues are dead. They are not the language of common life. They are not picked up by instinct, and without reflection. Everything has to be learned by system, rule, and formula. The relations of grammar and logic must be attended to with deliberation. Thought and judgment are constantly exercised in assigning the exact equivalents of the mother tongue for every phrase of the original. The coincidence of construction is too little, the community of idiomatic thought too remote, for the boy's mind to catch at the idea, by force of that preëstablished harmony which exists among most modern tongues. Only the law of thought and logic guides him, with the assistance of a teacher to lead the way, and reassure his struggling conception.