The Age of the Reformation Part 52

Montaigne, who was never roused to anger by anything, had the supreme art of reb.u.t.ting others' opinions without seeming to do so. It was doubtless Bodin's abominable _Demonology_ that called forth his celebrated essay on witchcraft, in which that subject is treated in the most modern spirit.

The old presumption in favor of the miraculous has fallen completely from him; his cool, quizzical regard was too much for Satan, who, with all his knowledge of the world, is easily embarra.s.sed, to endure. The delusion of witchcraft might be compared to a noxious bacillus. Scott tried to kill it by heat; he held it up to a fire of indignation, and fairly boiled it in his scorching flame of reason. Montaigne tried the opposite treatment: refrigeration. He attacked nothing; he only asked, with an icy smile, why anything should be believed. Certainly, as long as the mental pa.s.sions could be kept at his own low temperature, there was no danger that the milk of human kindness should turn sour, no matter what vicious culture of germs it originally held. He begins by saying that he had seen various miracles in his own day, but, one reads between the lines, he doesn't believe any of them. One error, he says, begets another, and everything is exaggerated in the hope of making converts to the talker's opinion. One miracle bruited all over France turned out to be a prank of young people counterfeiting ghosts. When one hears a marvel, he should always say, "perhaps." Better be apprentices at sixty then doctors at ten. Now witches, he continues, are the subject of the wildest and most foolish accusations. Bodin had proposed that they should be killed on mere suspicion, but Montaigne observes, "To kill human beings there is required a bright-shining {661} and clear light."

And what do the stories amount to?

How much more natural and more likely do I find it that two men should lie than that one in twelve hours should pa.s.s from east to west? How much more natural that our understanding may by the volubility of our loose-capring mind be transported from his place, than that one of us should by a strange spirit in flesh and bone be carried upon a broom through the tunnel of a chimney? . . . I deem it a matter pardonable not to believe a wonder, at least so far forth as one may explain away or break down the truth of the report in some way not miraculous. . . . Some years past I traveled through the country of a sovereign prince, who, in favor of me and to abate my incredulity, did me the grace in his own presence and in a particular place to make me see ten or twelve prisoners of that kind, and amongst others an old beldam witch, a true and perfect sorceress, both by her ugliness and deformity, and such a one as long before was most famous in that profession. I saw both proofs, witnesses, voluntary confessions, and some insensible marks about this miserable old woman; I enquired and talked with her a long time, with the greatest heed and attention I could, and I am not easily carried away by preconceived opinion. In the end and in my conscience I should rather have appointed them h.e.l.lebore than hemlock. It was rather a disease than a crime.

Montaigne goes on to argue that even when we cannot get an explanation--and any explanation is more probable than magic--it is safe to disbelieve: "Fear sometimes representeth strange apparitions to the vulgar sort, as ghosts . . . larves, hobgoblins, Robbin-good-fellows and such other bugbears and chimaeras." For Montaigne the evil spell upon the mind of the race had been broken; alas! that it took so long for other men to throw it off!

[1] Erikonig.

SECTION 3. EDUCATION

[Sidenote: Education]

From the most terrible superst.i.tion let us turn to the n.o.blest, most inspiring and most important work of {662} humanity. With each generation the process of handing on to posterity the full heritage of the race has become longer and more complex.

[Sidenote: Schools]

It was, therefore, upon a very definite and highly developed course of instruction that the contemporary of Erasmus entered. There were a few great endowed schools, like Eton and Winchester and Deventer, in which the small boy might begin to learn his "grammar"--Latin, of course.

Some of the buildings at Winchester and Eton are the same now as they were then, the quite beautiful chapel and dormitories of red brick at Eton, for example. Each of these two English schools had, at this time, less than 150 pupils, and but two masters, but the great Dutch school, Deventer, under the renowned tuition of Hegius, boasted 2200 scholars, divided into eight forms. Many an old woodcut shows us the pupils gathered around the master as thick as flies, sitting cross-legged on the floor, some intent on their books and others playing pranks, while there seldom fails to be one undergoing the chastis.e.m.e.nt so highly recommended by Solomon. These great schools did not suffice for all would-be scholars. In many villages there was some poor priest or master who would teach the boys what he knew and prepare them thus for higher things. In some places there were tiny school-houses, much like those now seen in rural America. Such an one, renovated, may be still visited at Mansfeld, and its quaint inscription read over the door, to the effect that a good school is like the wooden horse of Troy. When the boys left home they lived more as they do now at college, being given a good deal of freedom out of hours. The poorer scholars used their free times to beg, for as many were supported in this way then as now are given scholarships and other charitable aids in our universities.

[Sidenote: Flogging]

Though there were a good many exceptions, most of {663} the teachers were brutes. The profession was despised as a menial one and indeed, even so, many a gentleman took more care in the selection of grooms and gamekeepers than he did in choosing the men with whom to entrust his children. Of many of the tutors the manners and morals were alike outrageous. They used filthy language to the boys, whipped them cruelly and habitually drank too much. They made the examinations, says one unfortunate pupil of such a master, like a trial for murder.

The monitor employed to spy on the boys was known by the significant name of "the wolf." Public opinion then approved of harsh methods.

Nicholas Udall, the talented head-master of Eton, was warmly commended for being "the best flogging teacher in England"--until he was removed for his immorality.

[Sidenote: Latin]

The princ.i.p.al study--after the rudiments of reading and writing the mother tongue were learned--was Latin. As, at the opening of the century, there were usually not enough books to go around, the pedagogue would dictate declensions and conjugations, with appropriate exercises, to his pupils. The books used were such as _Donatus on the Parts of Speech_, a poem called the _Facetus_ by John of Garland, intended to give moral, theological and grammatical information all in one, and selecting as the proper vehicle rhymed couplets. Other manuals were the _Floretus_, a sort of abstruse catechism, the _Cornutus_, a treatise on synonyms, and a dictionary in which the words were arranged not alphabetically but according to their supposed etymology--thus _hirundo_ (swallow) from _aer_ (air). One had to know the meaning of the word before one searched for it! The grammars were written in a barbarous Latin of inconceivably difficult style. Can any man now readily understand the following definition of "p.r.o.noun," taken from a book intended {664} for beginners, published in 1499? "p.r.o.nomen . . . significat substantiam seu ent.i.tatem sub modo conceptus intrinseco permanentis seu habitus et quietis sub determinatae apprehensionis formalitate."

That with all these handicaps boys learned Latin at all, and some boys learned it extremely well, must be attributed to the amount of time spent on the subject. For years it was practically all that was studied--for the medieval trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic reduced itself to this--and they not only read a great deal but wrote and spoke Latin. Finally, it became as easy and fluent to them as their own tongue. Many instances that sound like infant prodigies are known to us; boys who spoke Latin at seven and wrote eloquent orations in it at fourteen, were not uncommon. It is true that the average boy spoke then rather a translation of his own language into Latin than the best idiom of Rome. The following ludicrous specimens of conversation, throwing light on the manners as well as on the linguistic attainments of the students, were overheard in the University of Paris: "Capis me pro uno alio"; "Quando ego veni de ludendo, ego bibi unum magnum vitrum totum plenum de vino, sine deponendo nasum de vitro"; "In prandendo non facit nisi lichare suos digitos."

[Sidenote: Reformation]

Though there was no radical reform in education during the century between Erasmus and Shakespeare, two strong tendencies may be discerned at work, one looking towards a milder method, the other towards the extension of elementary instruction to large cla.s.ses. .h.i.therto left illiterate. The Reformation, which was rather poor in original thought, was at any rate a tremendous vulgarizer of the current culture. It was a popular movement in that it pa.s.sed around to the people the ideas that had hitherto been the possession of the few. Its first effect, indeed, together with that of {665} the tumults that accompanied it, was for the moment unfavorable to all sorts of learning. Not only wars and rebellions frightened the youth from school, but men arose, both in England and Germany, who taught that if G.o.d had vouchsafed his secrets to babes and sucklings, ignorance must be better than wisdom and that it was therefore folly to be learned.

[Sidenote: Luther]

Luther not only turned the tide, but started it flowing in that great wave that has finally given civilized lands free and compulsory education for all. In a _Letter to the Aldermen and Cities of Germany on the Erection and Maintenance of Christian Schools_ [Sidenote: 1524]

he urged strongly the advantages of learning. "Good schools [he maintained] are the tree from which grow all good conduct in life, and if they decay great blindness must follow in religion and in all useful arts. . . . Therefore, all wise rulers have thought schools a great light in civil life." Even the heathen had seen that their children should be instructed in all liberal arts and sciences both to fit them for war and government and to give them personal culture. Luther several times suggested that "the civil authorities ought to compel people to send their children to school. If the government can compel men to bear spear and arquebus, to man ramparts and perform other martial duties, how much more has it the right to compel them to send their children to school?" Repeatedly he urged upon the many princes and burgomasters with whom he corresponded the duty of providing schools in every town and village. A portion of the ecclesiastical revenues confiscated by the German states was in fact applied to this end. Many other new schools were founded by princes and were known as "Furstenschulen" or gymnasia.

[Sidenote: England]

The same course was run in England. Colet's foundation of St. Paul's School in London, [Sidenote: 1510] for 153 boys, has perhaps won an undue fame, for it was {666} backward in method and not important in any special way, but it is a sign that people at that time were turning their thoughts to the education of the young. When Edward VI mounted the throne the dissolution of the chantries had a very bad effect, for their funds had commonly supported scholars. A few years previously Henry VIII had ordered "every of you that be parsons, vicars, curates and also chantry priests and stipendiaries to . . . teach and bring up in learning the best you can all such children of your parishioners as shall come to you, or at least teach them to read English." Edward VI revived this law in ordering chantry priests to "exercise themselves in teaching youth to read and write," and he also urged people to contribute to the maintenance of primary schools in each parish. He also endowed certain grammar schools with the revenues of the chantries.

In Scotland the _Book of Discipline_ advocated compulsory education, children of the well-to-do at their parents' expense, poor children at that of the church.

[Sidenote: Jesuit colleges]

In Catholic countries, too, there was a pa.s.sion for founding new schools. Especially to be mentioned are the Jesuit "colleges," "of which," Bacon confesses, "I must say, _Talis c.u.m sis utinam noster esses_." How well frequented they were is shown by the following figures. The Jesuit school at Vienna had, in 1558, 500 pupils, in Cologne, about the same time, 517, in Treves 500, in Mayence 400, in Spires 453, in Munich 300. The method of the Jesuits became famous for its combined gentleness and art. They developed consummate skill in allowing their pupils as much of history, science and philosophy as they could imbibe without jeoparding their faith. From this point of view their instruction was an inoculation against free thought. But it must be allowed that their teaching of the {667} cla.s.sics was excellent. They followed the humanists' methods, but they adapted them to the purpose of the church.

[Sidenote: The cla.s.sics]

All this flood of new scholars had little that was new to study.

Neither Reformers nor humanists had any searching or thorough revision to propose; all that they asked was that the old be taught better: the humanities more humanely. Erasmus wrote much on education, and, following him Vives and Bude and Melanchthon and Sir Thomas Elyot and Roger Ascham; their programs, covering the whole period from the cradle to the highest degree, seem thorough, but what does it all amount to, in the end, but Latin and Greek? Possibly a little arithmetic and geometry and even astronomy were admitted, but all was supposed to be imbibed as a by-product of literature, history from Livy, for example, and natural science from Pliny. Indeed, it often seems as if the knowledge of things was valued chiefly for the sake of literary comprehension and allusion.

The educational reformers differed little from one another save in such details as the best authors to read. Colet preferred Christian authors, such as Lactantius, Prudentius and Baptista Mantuan. Erasmus thought it well to begin with the verses of Dionysius Cato, and to proceed through the standard authors of Greece and Rome. For the sake of making instruction easy and pleasant he wrote his _Colloquies_--in many respects his _chef d' oeuvre_ if not the best Latin produced by anyone during the century. In this justly famous work, which was adopted and used by all parties immediately, he conveyed a considerable amount of liberal religious and moral instruction with enough wit to make it palatable. Luther, on Melanchthon's advice, notwithstanding his hatred for the author, urged the use of the {668} _Colloquies_ in Protestant schools, [Sidenote: 1548] and they were likewise among the books permitted by the Imperial mandate issued at Louvain.

The method of learning language was for the instructor to interpret a pa.s.sage to the cla.s.s which they were expected to be able to translate the next day. Ascham recommended that, when the child had written a translation he should, after a suitable interval, be required to retranslate his own English into Latin. Writing, particularly of letters, was taught. The real advance over the medieval curriculum was in the teaching of Greek--to which the exceptionally ambitious school at Geneva added, after 1538, Hebrew. Save for this and the banishment of scholastic barbarism, there was no attempt to bring in the new sciences and arts. For nearly four hundred years the curriculum of Erasmus has remained the foundation of our education. Only in our own times are Latin and Greek giving way, as the staples of mental training, to modern languages and science. In those days modern languages were picked up, as Milton was later to recommend that they should be, not as part of the regular course, but "in some leisure hour," like music or dancing. Notwithstanding such exceptions as Edward VI and Elizabeth, who spoke French and Italian, there were comparatively few scholars who knew any living tongue save their own.

[Sidenote: University life]

When the youth went to the university he found little change in either his manner of life or in his studies. A number of boys matriculated at the age of thirteen or fourteen; on the other hand there was a sprinkling of mature students. The extreme youth of many scholars made it natural that they should be under somewhat stricter discipline than is now the case. Even in the early history of Harvard it is recorded that the president once "flogged four bachelors" for {669} being out too late at night. At colleges like Montaigu, if one may believe Erasmus, the path of learning was indeed th.o.r.n.y. What between the wretched diet, the filth, the cold, the crowding, "the short-winged hawks" that the students combed from their hair or shook from their shirts, it is no wonder that many of them fell ill. Gaming, fighting, drinking and wenching were common.

[Sidenote: Mode of government]

Nominally, the university was then under the entire control of the faculty, who elected one of themselves "rector" (president) for a single year, who appointed their own members and who had complete charge of studies and discipline, save that the students occasionally a.s.serted their ancient rights. In fact, the corporation was pretty well under the thumb of the government, which compelled elections and dismissals when it saw fit, and occasionally appointed commissions to visit and reform the faculties.

[Sidenote: of instruction]

Instruction was still carried on by the old method of lectures and debates. These latter were sometimes on important questions of the day, theological or political, but were often, also, nothing but displays of ingenuity. There was a great lack of laboratories, a need that just began to be felt at the end of the century when Bacon wrote: "Unto the deep, fruitful and operative study of many sciences, specially natural philosophy and physics, books be not only the instrumentals." Bacon's further complaint that, "among so many great foundations of colleges in Europe, I find it strange that they are all dedicated to professions, and none left free to arts and sciences at large," is an early hint of the need of the endowment of research. The degrees in liberal arts, B.A. and M.A., were then more strictly than now licences either to teach or to pursue higher professional studies in divinity, law, or medicine. Fees for graduation {670} were heavy; in France a B.A. cost $24, an M.D. $690 and a D.D. $780.

[Sidenote: New universities]

Germany then held the primacy that she has ever since had in Europe both in the number of her universities and in the aggregate of her students. The new universities founded by the Protestants were: Marburg 1527, Konigsberg 1544, Jena 1548 and again 1558, Helmstadt 1575, Altdorf 1578, Paderborn 1584. In addition to these the Catholics founded four or five new universities, though not important ones. They concentrated their efforts on the endeavor to found new "colleges" at the old inst.i.tutions.

[Sidenote: Numbers]

In general the universities lost during the first years of the Reformation, but more than made up their numbers by the middle of the century. Wittenberg had 245 matriculations in 1521; in 1526 the matriculations had fallen to 175, but by 1550, notwithstanding the recent Schmalkaldic War, the total numbers had risen to 2000, and this number was well maintained throughout the century.

Erfurt, remaining Catholic in a Protestant region, declined more rapidly and permanently. In the year 1520-21 there were 311 matriculations, in the following year 120, in the next year 72, and five years later only 14. Between 1521 to 1530 the number of students fell at Rostock from 123 to 33, at Frankfort-on-the-Oder from 73 to 32.

Rostock, however, recovered after a reorganization in 1532. The number of students at Greifswald declined so that no lectures were given during the period 1527-39, after which it again began to pick up.

Konigsberg, starting with 314 students later fell off. Cologne declined in numbers, and so did Mayence until the Jesuits founded their college in 1561, which, by 1568, had 500 pupils recognized as members of the university. Vienna, also, having sunk to the number of 12 students in 1532, kept at a {671} very low ebb until 1554, when the effects of the Jesuit revival were felt. Whereas, during the fifteen years 1508-22 there were 6485 matriculations at Leipzig, during the next fifteen years there were only 1935. By the end of the century, however, Leipzig had again become, under Protestant leadership, a large inst.i.tution.

[Sidenote: British universities]

Two new universities were founded in the British Isles during the century, Edinburgh in 1582 and Trinity College, Dublin, in 1591. In England a number of colleges were added to those already existing at Oxford and Cambridge, namely Christ Church (first known, after its founder, Wolsey, as Cardinal's College, then as King's College), Brasenose, and Corpus Christi at Oxford and St. John's, Magdalen, and Trinity at Cambridge. Notwithstanding these new foundations the number of students sank. During the years 1542-8, only 191 degrees of B.A.

were given at Cambridge and only 172 at Oxford. Ascham is authority for the statement that things were still worse under Mary, when "the wild boar of the wood" either "cut up by the root or trod down to the ground" the inst.i.tutions of learning. The revenues of the universities reached their low-water mark about 1547, when the total income of Oxford from land was reckoned at L5 and that of Cambridge at L50, per annum. Under Elizabeth, the universities rose in numbers, while better Latin and Greek were taught. It was at this time that a college education became fashionable for young gentlemen instead of being exclusively patronized by "learned clerks." The foundation of the College of Physicians in London deserves to be mentioned. [Sidenote: 1528]

A university was founded at Zurich under the influence of Zwingli.

Geneva's University opened in 1559 with Beza as rector. Connected with it was a preparatory school of seven forms, with a rigidly prescribed {672} course in the cla.s.sics. When the boy was admitted to the university proper by examination, he took what he chose; there was not even a division into cla.s.ses. The courses offered to him included Greek, Hebrew, theology, dialectic, rhetoric, physics and mathematics.

[Sidenote: French universities]

The foundation of the College de France by Francis I represented an attempt to bring new life and vigor into learning by a free a.s.sociation of learned men. It was planned to emanc.i.p.ate science from the tutelage of theology. Erasmus was invited but, on his refusal to accept, Bude was given the leading position. Chairs of Greek, Hebrew, mathematics and Latin were founded by the king in 1530. Other inst.i.tutions of learning founded in France were Rheims 1547, Douai 1562, Besancon[1]

1564, none of them now in existence. Paris continued to be the largest university in the world, with an average number of students of about 6000.