Erasmus was born in 1466, Budé (Budaeus) in 1468, and Vives in 1492. These great men were regarded by their contemporaries as a triumvirate of leaders of the Renascence movement, at any rate outside of Italy. The name of Erasmus is now the most generally known of the three, but in one of his letters Erasmus stated his fear that he would be eclipsed by Vives. No doubt Erasmus was the greatest propagandist of Renascence ideas and the Renascence spirit. No doubt Budé, by his Commentarii Linguae Graecae (1529), established himself as the greatest Greek scholar of the age. Equally, without doubt, it would appear to those who have studied the educational writings of Erasmus, Budé, and Vives, the claim might reasonably be entered for J. L. Vives that his De Tradendis Disciplinis placed him first of the three as a writer on educational theory and practice. In 1539 Vives published at Paris the Linguae Latinae Exercitatio, i.e., the School Dialogues which are for the first time, in the present volume, presented to the English reader.
Juan Luis Vives was born, March 6, 1492 (the year of Columbus’s discovery of America), at Valencia, in Spain. His father was Luis Vives, of high-born ancestry, whose device was Siempre vivas. Similarly his mother, Blanca March, was of a good family, which had produced several poets. Vives himself has described his parents, their relation to each otherviii and to himself, in two passages in his De Institutione Feminae Christianae (1523). This work was translated into English (c. 1540) by Richard Hyrde. As the two passages contain all that is known of the parents, and give a short but picturesque idea of the household relations, I transcribe them from Hyrde’s translation: “My mother Blanca, when she had been fifteen years married unto my father, I could never see her strive with my father. There were two sayings that she had ever in her mouth as proverbs. When she would say she believed well anything, then she used to say, ‘It is even as though Luis Vives had spoken it.’ When she would say she would anything, she used to say, ‘It is even as though Luis Vives would it.’ I have heard my father say many times, but especially once, when one told him of a saying of Scipio African the younger, or else of Pomponius Atticus (I ween it were the saying of them both), that they never made agreement with their mothers. ‘Nor I with my wife,’ said he, ‘which is a greater thing.’ When others that heard this saying wondered upon it, and the concord of Vives and Blanca was taken up and used in a manner for a proverb, he was wont to answer like as Scipio was, who said he never made agreement with his mother, because he never made debate with her. But it is not to be much talked in a book (made for another purpose) of my most holy mother, whom I doubt not now to have in heaven the fruit and reward of her holy and pure living.”
Vives states that he had the intention of writing a “book of her acts and her life,” and no one who reads the foregoing passage will be otherwise than regretful that he failed to carry out this purpose. As it is, we must content ourselves with another passage.1
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“No mother loved her child better than mine did; nor any child did ever less perceive himself loved of his mother than I. She never lightly laughed upon me, she never cockered me; and yet when I had been three or four days out of her house, she wist not where, she was almost sore sick; and when I was come home, I could not perceive that ever she longed for me. Therefore there was nobody that I did more flee, or was more loath to come nigh, than my mother, when I was a child; but after I came to man’s estate, there was nobody whom I delighted more to have in sight; whose memory now I have in reverence, and as oft as she cometh to my remembrance I embrace her within my mind and thought, when I cannot with my body.”
Vives went to the town school of Valencia. The outlines of the history of this school have been sketched by Dr. Rudolf Heine.2 The foundation of the school dates back to the time of James I. of Aragon, when Pope Innocent IV. gave privileges to the newly founded school in 1245. The school, Dr. Heine says, was first a schola, then a studium, then a gymnasium, and in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was known as an academy, the name by which Vives describes schools in the Colloquies. In 1499 new statutes were drawn up for the Valencia Academy, ordaining the teaching of grammar, logic, natural and moral philosophy, metaphysics, canon and civil law, poetry, and “other subjects such as the city desires and requires.”
The spirit of scholasticism reigned supreme in the Valencian Academy when Vives was a pupil. The dominant subject of study was dialectic, and the all-controlling method of education was the disputation. Vives thus received a thorough drilling in dialectic and disputation. When Vives became a convert to the Renascence interest of literature and grammar, xhe was thus well prepared by his experience in the Valencian Academy for an effective onslaught on the old disputational methods. How deeply interwoven these methods were in the school instruction may be seen in Vives’ own words:—
“Even the youngest scholars (tyrones) are accustomed never to keep silence; they are always asserting vigorously whatever comes uppermost in their minds, lest they should seem to be giving up the dispute. Nor does one disputation or even two each day prove sufficient, as for instance at dinner. They wrangle at breakfast; they wrangle after breakfast; before supper they wrangle, and they wrangle after supper.... At home they dispute, out of doors they dispute. They wrangle over their food, in the bath, in the sweating-room, in the church, in the town, in the country, in public, in private; at all times they are wrangling.”
The names of two of Vives’ schoolmasters are preserved, Jerome Amiguetus and Daniel Siso. Amiguetus was a thorough-going scholastic, teaching by the old mediæval methods, and a stalwart opponent of the Renascence. Spain generally resisted the Revival of Learning, and wished to have a ban placed even on the works of Erasmus. But in the person of Antonio Calà Harana Del Ojo, better known as Antonio de Lebrijà (or Antonius Nebrissensis), a doughty champion of classicism appeared and raised a Spanish storm. In 1492, the year of Vives’ birth, Antonio published a grammar and a dictionary, and had the hardihood to present his learning in the Spanish language. About 1506 it was proposed to introduce Antonio’s Introductiones Latinae into the Valencian Academy. This suggestion was strenuously opposed by Amiguetus. With the enthusiasm of a school-boy of fourteen years of age, Vives espoused the side of his teacher, and by declamation and by pen supported the old methods.xi But when he published his De Tradendis Disciplinis (1531) more than a quarter of a century afterwards, he paid Lebrijà the praise which as a school-boy he had withheld, recognising his varied and broad reading, his intimate knowledge of classical writers, his glorious scholarship, and his modesty in only claiming to be a grammarian.
Of Vives’ school-life little more can be gathered, except indeed what in his writings may be surmised to be the reminiscences of his own boy-life. We find glimpses of this kind in the Dialogues. For example, in the twenty-second Dialogue—which expounds the laws of school games—he describes his native town and early environment.
In 1509 Vives went to Paris to continue his studies. Amongst the teachers under whom he studied here was the Spanish John Dullard. Vives tells us that Dullard used to say: Quanto eris melior grammaticus, tanto pejus dialecticus et theologus!3 Nevertheless, Paris had awakened Vives to the unsatisfactory nature of a one-sided training in dialectic. In 1512 he proceeded to Bruges. He became tutor in a Spanish family, by name Valdaura. One of the daughters, Margaret, whom he taught, he afterwards (in 1524) married. He speaks of the mother of the family, Clara Cervant, in the highest terms, and regarded her—next to his own mother—as the highest example of womanly devotion to duty he had ever known, for she had nursed her husband, it is said, from their marriage day for many years through a severe and obstinate illness. Whilst at Bruges his thoughts gathered strength in the direction of the Renascence. In 1514 he suggests that Ferdinand of Spain would do well to get Erasmus as tutor in his family, for he says Erasmus is known to him personally, and is all that is dear and worthy. It is thus certain xiithat Vives was confirmed by Erasmus in the study of classical literature as transcending all the old mediæval educational disciplines.
From 1512 onwards, with breaks, Vives’ main quarters were in Flanders, at Bruges or Louvain, at the former of which was the residence of many of his Spanish compatriots. One of these breaks of residence was in 1514 at Paris, another at Lyons in 1516. In 1518 Vives was at Lyons, where he was entrusted with the education of William de Croy, Cardinal designate and Archbishop of Toledo. The course of instruction which he gave was founded on a thorough reading of the ancient authors and instruction in rhetoric and philosophy. At Lyons, too, Vives met Erasmus. “Here we have with us,” writes Erasmus in one of his letters, “Luis Vives, who has not passed his twenty-sixth year of age. Young as he is, there is no part of philosophy in which he does not possess a knowledge which far outstrips the mass of students. His power of expression in speech and writing is such as I do not know any one who can be declared his equal at the present time.” In 1519 Vives was at Paris, where he became personally acquainted with the great William Budé. Of him Vives, in one of his letters to Erasmus, writes, “What a man! One is astounded at him whether we consider his knowledge, his character, or his good fortune.” But more interesting to English readers, is a letter about this time (1519) of Sir Thomas More on seeing some of the published work of Vives himself. He says: “Certainly, my dear Erasmus, I am ashamed of myself and my friends, who take credit to ourselves for a few brochures of a quite insignificant kind, when I see a young man like Vives producing so many well-digested works, in a good style, giving proof of an exquisite erudition. How great is his knowledge of Greek and Latin; greater still is the way in which he is versed in branches of knowledgexiii of the first rank. Who in this respect is there who surpasses Vives in the quantity and depth of his knowledge? But what is most admirable of all is that he should have acquired all this knowledge so as to be able to communicate it to others by instruction. For who instructs more clearly, more agreeably, or more successfully than Vives?”
At this point may be stated the chief works which Vives so far had written:—
1507. The boyish Declamationes in Antonium Nebrissensem (not extant).
1509. Veritas Fucata, in which he designates the contents of the classics as “food for demons.”
1514. Jesu Christi Triumphus.
1518. De Initiis, Sectis et Laudibus Philosophiae, perhaps the first modern work on the history of philosophy.
1519. In Pseudo-dialecticos. This famous treatise pours its invective and indignation against the formalistic disputational dialectic of the schools of Paris, and marks Vives’ complete break with scholastic mediævalism, and his acceptance of the Renascence material of knowledge and methods of inquiry.
1519. Pompeius Fugiens.
1519. Praelectio in Quartum Rhetoricorum in Herennium.
1519. The Dialogue called Sapiens.
1519. Praelectio in Convivia Philelphi.
1519. Censura de Aristotelis Operibus.
1519. Edited Somnium Scipionis, the introduction to which was afterwards known as Somnium Vivis. Vives here regards Plato as the herald of Christianity.
1520. Sex Declamationes.
1520. Aedes Legum. In this book Vives made important suggestions founded on Roman law for the improvement of law in his own times.
At the beginning of 1521 Vives’ old pupil and patron, Cardinal de Croy, died. It was at this time he took in hand his great work, the commentary on St. Augustine’s Civitas Dei. Erasmus suggested the work to him, so that Vives might do for St. Augustine what Erasmus himself had done for the works of St. Jerome. Vives’ edition of St. Augustine’s Civitas Dei was dedicated to King Henry VIII. of England.xiv The writing of this commentary was a huge labour, and it marks two crises in Vives’ life—firstly, he fell ill with a tertian fever, and, secondly, he gave up his teaching of youths, work which he had hitherto strenuously pursued along with his literary labours. In 1522 he wrote a pleading letter to Erasmus, begging him forgive his slowness in despatching the Civitas Dei. In it he confesses that “school-keeping has become in the highest degree repulsive,” and that he would rather do anything else than any longer continue “inter has sordes et pueros.” It appears that at the time Vives was giving three lectures daily in the University of Louvain as well as teaching boys.
In the autumn of 1522 Vives came to England for a short visit, and in the following year he was offered the Readership in Humanity in the University of Oxford. Whilst at Oxford he lived in Corpus Christi College. He had for patron Queen Catharine of Aragon, to whom he dedicated his De Institutione Feminae Christianae, which was published in 1523. Vives was entrusted with the direction of the Princess Mary (afterwards Queen Mary I.), for whose use was written De Ratione Studii Puerilis ad Catharinam Reginam Angliae, 1523. In the same year Vives also wrote De Ratione Studii Puerilis ad Carolum Montjoium Guilielmi Filium. These two tractates present an excellent account of the best Renascence views on education, in Tudor times, of a girl and a boy respectively.
The De Institutione Feminae Christianae already mentioned is one of the earliest and most important Tudor documents on women’s education. It marks the transition from the old mediæval tradition of the cloistral life as the highest womanly ideal to that of training for domestic life, in which the mother should be distinguished by the deepest culture of piety and all the intellectual education conducive to religious developxvment. It may be described as typical of Catholic Puritanism in the education of women in the Tudor times.
From 1522 onwards, till after the divorce of Catharine of Aragon, Vives appears to have spent a portion of the year in England, and to have earned enough money to keep him for the rest of the year in Flanders or elsewhere, where he continued his literary career. Although he sometimes lectured in Oxford his time seems principally to have been spent at the court of Henry VIII. and his wife, Catharine. He had times of great weariness in England. He writes in one of his letters of his London life: “I have as sleeping place a narrow den, in which there is no chair, no table. Around it are the quarters of others, in which so constant and great noise prevails that it is impossible to settle one’s mind to anything, however much one may have the will or need. In addition, I live a distance from the royal palace, and in order not to lose the whole day by often going and coming back, from early morning till late evening I have no time at home. When I have taken my mid-day meal I cannot once turn round in my narrow and low room, but must waltz round and round as on a cheese. Study is out of the question in such circumstances. I have to take great care of my health, for if I became ill they would cast me like a mangy dog on a dung-hill. Whilst eating I read, but I eat little, for with so much sitting I cannot digest, as I should do if I walked about. For the rest, life here is such that I cannot hide my ennui. About the only thing I can do, is to do nothing.”
Vives enjoyed allowances both from the king and from the queen, and he had other sources of earnings. In 1524 he was back in Flanders to marry his pupil Margaret Valdaura. Soon after his marriage, which appears to have been a very happy one—though with Vives’ frequent travellingxvi the two were often separated—he wrote one of his widest circulated works, the Introductio ad Sapientiam, which presents the grounds of the Christian religion and the right fashioning of life by intelligence and temperance.
Vives next turned his attention to great European military contests, and was a warm advocate of international peace between Christian powers together with combined warfare against the Turks. These views he elaborated in 1526 in his De Europae Dissidiis et Bello Turico. More remarkable still, in the same year, was his treatise, De Subventione Pauperum, in which he is the first advocate of national state provision for the poor. He would require those who are poor by their own fault to submit to compulsory labour, and even to help in the provision for other poor people.
In 1528 Vives wrote his De Officio Mariti, a companion volume to the De Institutione Feminae Christianae. In this year he had to leave England for good, since Henry VIII. was determined to divorce Catharine of Aragon. Vives was a strong supporter of Catharine. It is said that the queen wished to have Vives as her counsel before the judges on the case, but Henry cast Vives in prison for six weeks, and only freed him on the condition that he left the court and England. Vives retreated to Belgium.
In 1529 Vives wrote the De Concordia et Discordia in Humano Genero, another large-hearted discourse on the value of peace. In 1531 appeared his great pædagogical work, the De Disciplinis.4 In 1539 he wrote the De Anima et Vita, one of the first modern works on psychology, and the De Veritate Fidei Christianae. And in the same year appeared the Linguae Latinae Exercitatio or the School Dialogues. Vives died May 6, 1540.
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The De Disciplinis, with the two divisions De Causis Corruptarum Artium and the De Tradendis Disciplinis, and the Exercitatio are the great pædagogical works of Vives, the first a most comprehensive theoretical work of education, probably the greatest Renascence book on education. The Exercitatio is perhaps the most interesting school-text-book of the age.
xviii
The Poverty of the Vernacular Literature before the Tudor Period
It is difficult to realise the position of the student of literature in England in the first half of the sixteenth century. The whole wealth of the Elizabethan writers, and all their successors in the Ages of Milton, of Dryden and Pope, of Samuel Johnson, of Charles Lamb, of Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth, and the large range of Victorian literature, all this had to come. The modern man, therefore, must confess that it was not to English literature that the Tudor student could look for the material of education. Even if it be justifiable to claim that modern literature is a more fruitful study than ancient literature, for the ordinary man, the question remains: How was the ordinary educated man to be trained in the earlier Tudor Age, when the time of great modern literature was “not yet”?
Before we can understand the function served by a Latin text-book of boys’ dialogues like the work of Vives translated in this volume, we must, therefore, first realise the poverty of the vernacular literature of periods anterior to the sixteenth century, and the consequent delight of scholars in finding Latin and Greek literature ready to hand.
“There is every reason to believe that the English language, before the invention of printing, was held by learned or literary men in very little esteem. In the library of Glastonbury Abbey, which bids fair to have been one of thexix most extensive in the kingdom in 1248, there were but four books in English, and those upon religious subjects, all beside vetusta et inutilia. We have not a single historian in English prose before the reign of Richard II., when John Trevisa translated the Polychronicon of Randulph Higden. Boston of Bury, who seems to have consulted all the monasteries in England, does not mention one author who had written in English; and Bale, at a later period, has comparatively but an insignificant number; nor was Leland so fortunate as to find above two or three English books in the monastic and other libraries which he rummaged and explored under the King’s Commission.”5
The classical writers of Greece and Rome, however, have always drawn towards them a large proportion of the well-trained scholarly men of each generation. Before the vernacular literature existed, necessarily it was to the ancient classical languages that the literary scholar turned. In Greek, Plato and Aristotle had written; so, too, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, as dramatists, and the historians Thucydides, Herodotus, Xenophon, and the “divine poet” Homer. Amongst the Latin prose writers were Cicero, Terence, Livy; and amongst the poets, Horace and Vergil. On any showing, such classical writers hold their own high place even if brought into comparison with the greatest of the moderns. The intellectual discipline received by reading their works in the original Greek and Latin had its value. Hence the sixteenth-century English student was trained on those ancient Greek and Latin authors, all unconscious of the great awakening that was to be of modern English literature, into which the twentieth-century reader so lightly enters.
The whole of the well-educated, scholarly, learned men of the sixteenth century, in England and on the continent of xxEurope, all entered into the same classical heritage. They all honoured the same great names of Greek and Latin authors. Latin was the learned language, as the language of Latin literature, as well as the starting-point for the study of Greek. Latin, too, was spoken in every country amongst the learned, and even amongst many who were not regarded as learned. Latin was, it is to be clearly understood, not only a dead language, but a current, live language. It is said that beggars begged in Latin; shopkeepers and innkeepers, and indeed all who had to deal with the general public of travellers, are credited with a knowledge of some colloquial Latin. Church services, of course, were all in Latin, and youths were taught for the most part in the chantries of the churches, and even elementary education provided sufficient knowledge of Latin to enable the pupil to help the priest to say mass, i.e., a minimum of Latin and of music.
Latin, therefore, at least occupied the place in the Mediæval Ages which French holds to-day as an international language. When Laurentius Valla, about 1440, wrote his epoch-making Elegantiae Latinae Linguae, his aim was not to induce people to speak Latin—all well-conducted persons, of course, did so—but to give them the facilities for speaking correct and well-chosen Latin phrases, such as Cicero or Terence would have used. The complaint of the writers of the Renascence times was not that students and the ordinary educated people did not speak Latin, but that they spoke it so inaccurately that the Latin was spoken differently, not only in pronunciation but also in construction, in different countries, and even in different parts of the same country. Text-book after text-book was written to expose and correct the barbarisms in Latin which had become current. For this reason, in our own country, Dean Colet enjoined the reading of good literature in Latin and Greek. Colet requires “that filthiness andxxi all such abusion which the later blind world brought in, which much rather may be called blotterature than literature,” shall be absent from the famous school of St. Paul’s, which he founded.
The Renascence influence, then, attempted on the educational side to bring the pupils of the schools away from the jargon and barbarism of current Latin to the classical Latin of Terence and Cicero. The Renascence leaders had the courage to hope to bring this reform even into the ordinary conversation of educated men and women in their speaking of Latin.
Into this aim Vives entered with the keenest enthusiasm. This will become evident by reference to the Dedication of the Dialogues which I give in full.
“Vives to Philip, son and heir to the august Emperor Charles, with all good will.
“Very great are the uses of the Latin language both for speaking and thinking rightly. For that language is as it were the treasure-house of all erudition, since men of great and outstanding minds have written on every branch of knowledge in the Latin speech. Nor can any one attain to the knowledge of these subjects except by first learning Latin. For which reason I shall not grudge, though engaged in the pursuit of higher researches, to set myself to help forward to some degree the elementary studies of youth. I have, in these Dialogues, written a first book of practice in speaking the Latin language as suitable as possible, I trust, to boys. It has seemed well to dedicate it to thee, Boy-Prince, both because of thy father’s goodwill to me, in the highest degree,xxii and also because I shall deserve well of my country, that is, Spain, if I should help in the forming of sound morals in thy mind. For our country’s health is centred in thy soundness and wisdom. But thou wilt hear more fully and often enough on these matters from John Martinius Siliceus, thy teacher.”
It will be noted that the expressed aim of Vives is to help boys who are learning to speak the Latin language. For this purpose, Vives realised that the method must be conversational, that the style of speech must be clear, correct, and as far as possible based on classical models, and that the subject-matter must consist of topics interesting to children and connected with their daily life. The Prince Philip, to whom the Dialogues are dedicated, it should be noted, was afterwards Philip II., the consort of the English Queen Mary I., daughter of Catharine of Aragon.
The German historian of Latin School-Dialogues, Dr. Bömer, speaks of the characteristic power of Vives in introducing, in relatively short space, the ordinary daily life of boys, and tracking it into the smallest corners. “If a boy is putting on his clothes, we learn every single article of clothing, and all the topics of toilettes and the names of each object (Dialogues I. and XI.). When two school-boys pay a visit to a stranger’s house, we have shown to us its whole inner arrangement by an expert guide (XII.). Interesting observations are made on the different parts of the human body by a painter, Albert Dürer (XXIII.). With a banquet as the occasion, we are introduced to the equipment of a dining-room (XVI.), with ordinary kinds of foods and drinks (XVII.), and if we like we can betake ourselves to the cook in the kitchen and watch the direction of operations (XV.).xxiii We are told in another Dialogue (XVIII.) of a man’s fear to go home to his wife after too liberal a banquet, and how she would entertain him with longer homilies than those of St. Chrysostom. When a company of scholars wish to make a distant excursion, all kinds of horses and carriages, with their trappings, are presented to the notice of the reader (IX.).”6 Then, to show us life under the most favourable of circumstances, Vives gives a dialogue on the King’s Palace (XIX.).
Whilst the general environments of boys’ lives are thus pourtrayed in considerable detail, Vives is particularly careful to show boys the general features and significance of home and school life, and regards it as part of his duty to expound, in the last two dialogues, some general guiding principles of education for the boys, their teachers, and readers of the book to ponder over.
The first dialogue treats of getting up in the morning. The girl Beatrice tries to rouse the two boys Emanuel and Eusebius, the latter of whom makes the excuse, “I seem to have my eyes full of sand,” to which Beatrice replies, “That is always your morning song.” Then the boys dress. Beatrice enjoins them, “Kneel down before this image of our Saviour and say the Lord’s Prayer, etc. Take care, my Emanuel, that you think of nothing else while you are praying.” The interchange of wit between the boys and the maid is an interesting picture of child-life. In the second dialogue, after family morning greetings, which include playing with the little dog Ruscio, the father teaches his xxivlittle boy the difference between the little dog and a little boy. “What have you,” he asks his child, “in you why you should become a man and not he?” He suggests to him that the difference really is contained in the magic word “school.” The boy says: “I will go, father, with all the pleasure in the world.” Whereupon the boy’s elder sister gets him his little satchel and puts him up his breakfast (i.e., lunch) in it. The father takes the boy to the school, and (in III.) discusses with a neighbour the comparative merits of the schoolmasters Varro and Philoponus. The father is told that Philoponus has the smaller number of boys, and at once decides: “I should prefer him!” Then as Philoponus comes into view, he turns to his boy, saying: “Son, this is as it were the laboratory for the formation of men, and Philoponus is the artist-educator. Christ be with you, Master! Uncover your head, my boy, and bow your right knee.... Now stand up!”
Philoponus. May your coming to us be a blessing to all! What may be your business?
Father. I bring you this boy of mine for you to make of him a man from the beast.
Philoponus. This shall be my earnest endeavour. He shall become a man from the beast, a fruitful and good creature out of a useless one. Of that have no doubt.
Father. What is the charge for the instruction you give?
Philoponus. If the boy makes good progress it will be little; if not, a good deal.
Father. That is acutely and wisely said, as is all you say. We share the responsibility then; you to instruct zealously, I to recompense your labour richly.
It will thus be seen that the idea of co-operation and consultation of parents and teachers is no new one.7 But the enthusiasm of the parent, depicted by Vives, to recompense xxvthe teacher “richly” can hardly be said to have continued, if it existed in the Tudor age, outside of Vives’ generous heart.
The next dialogue (IV.) shows how boys loitered on the way to school, their difference in powers, and in the practice of observations and the self-training of the senses and wits in the streets, such as made R. L. Stevenson wonder if the truant from school did not gain more by his self-chosen though casual wanderings than if he had gone orderly to school.
An account of actual school-work in the subjects of reading (V.) and writing (X.) is given, and the raison d’être of school instruction in these subjects suggested. The boys go home (VI.) and a most pleasing picture is given of home-life, with the mother, the boys, the girls, and the serving maiden, introducing children’s games and the interference of meals with games.
Dialogue VII. deals with school-meals, and we plunge at once right into the heart of school interests and life. The sort of foods and drinks, the different kinds of banquets and feastings, mentioned in older writers, the preparation of the table, moderation in eating and drinking, the necessity of cleanliness in all the stages of a meal, including washing up, become topics of the dialogue as it proceeds. Then comes the fitting device of introducing a guest to the boys’ table, of another boy, a Fleming from Bruges. He is asked if he has brought his knife. He has not. “This is a wonder!” exclaims an interlocutor. “A Fleming without a knife, and he too a Brugensian, where the best knives are made!” The conversation proceeds in Latin, since boys were required to speak in and out of school in Latin, at least in all self-respecting establishments.
The Brugensian boy has been under John Theodore Nervius, and this becomes the occasion for a compliment to that schoolmaster. Bruges, too, we have seen, was thexxvi town in which Vives himself spent a considerable portion of his adult life. He does not hesitate to introduce himself, humorously, into this dialogue on school-boys’ meals.
Master. But what is our Vives doing?
Nepotulus. They say he is in training as an athlete, but not by athletics.
Master. What is the meaning of that?
Nepotulus. He is always wrestling, but not bravely enough.
Master. With whom?
Nepotulus. With his gout.
Master. O mournful wrestler, which first of all attacks the feet.
Usher. Nay, rather cruel victor, which fetters the whole body!
In this dialogue of school-boy meals, Vives has given samples of conversational topics, and their due treatment, in the presence of masters and in regular daily routine. In the next dialogue (VIII.), called “Pupils’ Chatter,” boys are out of doors, and a series of nineteen “stories” or topics of conversation get started. The subjects are of interest in showing the type of incidents which boys were supposed to introduce into conversation, and though didactic in tendency, certainly do not favour the supposition that school-boys were supposed to be absorbed in the study of recondite classical subtleties, or even in purely Ciceronian subjects.
Dialogue IX., “Journey on Horseback,” contains the record of what modern educationalists call “the school journey.” The idea of studying geography and history by taking journeys, in which instruction shall arise naturally out of the places of interest seen in the course of the journey, is not a new one, as is often supposed. Vittorino da Feltre, for instance, used to take his school in the summer months for excursions from Mantua to Goito. Vives represents his Parisian pupil as journeying from Paris to Boulogne. The occasion of holiday for the pupils is that Pandulphus, their teacher, has “incepted” in the university, and having thus become a “Master of Arts” (with the right to teach schoolxxvii on his own account), according to university custom he is performing his duty of giving a great feast to the other masters in honour of his laurels, and as a matter of fact, as these boys recognise, is making them drunk. This dialogue of the “Journey on Horseback” contains a full account of different kinds of locomotion. It is especially distinguished by the love that is shown for natural objects of the country, the river, the sweet scent of the fields, the nightingale, and the goldfinch.
In Dialogue XIII. the school is described. Each type and grade of scholar is discussed. Vives’ conception of a school was afterwards followed by Milton. It was an academy, in which the pupil remained from early years up to and including the university stage. In this dialogue is the account of a disputation, with description of the propugnator of a thesis, and several types of oppugnators.
Dialogue XIV. describes a scholar burning the midnight oil. Vives describes the extensive preparations of the scholar for his work of reading authors. The account is almost a supplement to Erasmus’s famous picture of the Ciceronian scholar setting himself to his composition. The dialogue ends with the scholar going to bed whilst one of his attendants sings to the accompaniment of the lyre the lines of Ovid beginning: Somne, quies rerum, placidissime somne deorum.
It has already been stated that Vives devoted a dialogue to an account of the King’s Palace. Similarly, in speaking now of Vives’ treatment of school life, careful notice should be taken of the fact that one dialogue (XX.) is concerned with the education of the boy-prince. This dialogue is of especial interest, since the boy-prince is Philip himself, the son of the Emperor Charles V., the child to whom Vives dedicates the Dialogues. Philip was born at Valladolid, May 21, 1527,xxviii and was therefore eleven years of age when Vives completed the writing of the Dialogues and was twelve years old when they appeared. It will be remembered that in 1554 Philip came to England to claim as his bride the English Queen Mary I., the “bloody” Mary, daughter of Catharine of Aragon, the first queen-consort of Henry VIII., whose coming to England was probably to some degree the ground of its attraction to Vives when he paid his first visit to England, in the autumn of 1522. It is interesting to note that Vives wrote, in 1523, a short treatise on the education of the Princess Mary, probably at the request of Queen Catharine of Aragon, and at any rate dedicated to that ill-fated queen. Vives, thus, is in the remarkable position of having prescribed, as consultant-educationalist, for the Spanish Philip in one of his dialogues (in 1538) and for the English Mary in 1523.8
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