The Complete Essays (36 page)

If you want the boy to loathe disgrace and punishment do not harden him to them. Harden him to sweltering heat and to cold, to wind and sun
and to such dangers as he must learn to treat with contempt. Rid him of all softness and delicacy about dress and about sleeping, eating and drinking. Get him used to anything. Do not turn him into a pretty boy or a ladies’ boy but into a boy who is fresh and vigorous. [C] Boy, man and now old man, I have always thought this. But I have always disliked, among other things, the way our colleges are governed. Their failure would have been less harmful, perhaps, if they had leant towards indulgence. They are a veritable gaol for captive youth. By punishing boys for depravity before they are depraved, you make them so.

Go there during lesson time: you will hear nothing but the screaming of tortured children and of masters drunk with rage. What a way to awaken a taste for learning in those tender timorous souls, driving them to it with terrifying scowls and fists armed with canes! An iniquitous and pernicious system. And besides (as Quintilian justly remarked)
⁶²
such imperious authority can lead to dreadful consequences – especially given our form of flogging.

How much more appropriate to strew their classrooms with leaf and flower than with blood-stained birch-rods. I would have portraits of Happiness there and Joy, with Flora and the Graces, as Speucippus the philosopher did in his school.
⁶³

When they have something to gain, make it enjoyable. Health-giving foods should be sweetened for a child: harmful ones made to taste nasty.

It is amazing how concerned Plato is in his
Laws
with the amusements and pastimes of the youths of his City and how he dwells on their races, sports, singing, capering and dancing, the control and patronage of which has been entrusted, he said, in antiquity to the gods, to Apollo, the Muses and Minerva. His care extends to over a hundred precepts for his gymnasia, yet he spends little time over book-learning; the only thing he seems specifically to recommend poetry for is the music.
⁶⁴

[A] In our manners and behaviour any strangeness and oddness are to be avoided as enemies of easy mixing in society – [C] and as monstrosities. Who would not have been deeply disturbed by Alexander’s steward Demophon whose complexion made him sweat in the shade and shiver in the sun? [A] I have known men who fly from the smell of apples rather than from gunfire; others who are terrified of a mouse, who vomit at the
sight of cream or when a feather mattress is shaken up (like Germanicus who could not abide cocks or their crowing). Some occult property may be involved in this, but, if you ask me, if you set about it young enough you could stamp it out.

One victory my education has achieved over me (though not without some trouble, it is true) is that my appetite can be brought to accept without distinction any of the things people eat and drink except beer. While the body is still supple it should, for that very reason, be made pliant to all manners and customs. Provided that he can restrain his appetites and his will, you should not hesitate to make the young man suited to all peoples and companies, even, should the need arise, to immoderation and excess.

[C] His practice should conform to custom. [A] He should be able to do anything but want to do only what is good. (The very philosophers do not approve of Calesthenes for falling from grace with his master Alexander the Great, by declining to match drink for drink with him. He will laugh, fool about and be unruly with his Prince.) I would want him to outstrip his fellows in vigour and firmness even during the carousing and that he should refrain from wrongdoing not because he lacks strength or knowledge but because he does not want to do it. [C]
‘Multum interest utrum peccare aliquis nolit aut nesciat.’
[There is a great difference between not wanting to do evil and not knowing how to.]
⁶⁵

[A] My intention was to honour a nobleman who is as far removed from such excesses as any man in France when I asked him, in the presence of guests, how many times in his life he had had to get drunk while serving the King in Germany. He took it in the right spirit and said he had done it three times; and he told me about them. (I have known people who have run into real difficulties when frequenting that nation because they lacked this ability.)

I have often noted with great astonishment the extraordinary character of Alcibiades who, without impairing his health, could so readily adapt to diverse manners: at times he could outdo Persians in pomp and luxury; at others, Spartans in austerity and frugal living.
⁶⁶
He was a reformed man in Sparta, yet equally pleasure-seeking in Ionia:

Omnis Aristippum decuit color, et status, et res
.

[On Aristippus any colour, rank or condition was becoming.]

Thus would I fashion my pupil:

quem duplici panno patientia velat
Mirabor, vitæ via si conversa decebit,
Personámque feret non inconcinnus utramqué
.

[One who is patiently clad in rags yet could also adapt to the opposite extreme, playing both roles becomingly: him I will admire admire.]
⁶⁷

Such are my lessons.
⁶⁸
[C] For him who draws most profit from them, they are acts, not facts. To see his deeds is to hear his word: to hear his word is to see his deeds. ‘God forbid,’ says someone in Plato,
⁶⁹
‘that philosophy should mean learning a lot of things and then talking about the arts:
‘Hanc amplissimam omnium artium bene vivendi disciplinam vita magis quam literis persequuti sunt’
. [The fullest art of all – that of living good lives – they acquired more from life than from books.]
⁷⁰

Prince Leon of the Phliasians inquired of Heraclides of Pontus which art or science he professed. ‘I know none of them’, he replied; ‘I am a philosopher.’ Diogenes was reproached for being ignorant yet concerned with philosophy. ‘My concern is all the more appropriate,’ he replied. When Hegesias begged him to read a certain book he replied, ‘How amusing of you. You prefer real figs to painted ones, so why not true and natural deeds to written ones?’
⁷¹

My pupil will not say his lesson: he will do it. He will rehearse his lessons in his actions. You will then see whether he is wise in what he takes on, good and just in what he does, gracious and sound in what he says, resilient in illnesses, modest in his sports, temperate in his pleasures, [A] indifferent to the taste of his food, be it fish or flesh, wine or water; [C] orderly in domestic matters:
‘Qui disciplinam suam, non ostentationem scientiæ, sed legem vitæ putet, quique obtemperet ipse sibi, et decretis pareat’
[as a man who knows how to make his education into a rule of life not a means of showing off; who can control himself and obey
his own principles].
⁷²
The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives.

[A] To a man who asked him why the Spartans never drew up written rules of bravery and gave them to their children, Zeuxidamus replied that they wished to accustom them to deeds not [C] words. [A] After
⁷³
fifteen or sixteen years compare with that one of our college latinizers who has spent precisely as long simply learning to talk!

The world is nothing but chatter: I have never met a man who does not say more than he should rather than less. Yet half of our life is spent on that; they keep us four or five years learning the meanings of words and stringing them into sentences; four or five more in learning how to arrange them into a long composition, divided into four parts or five; then as many again in plaiting and weaving them into verbal subtleties.

Let us leave all that to those who make it their express profession.

When I was travelling to Orleans one day, on the plain this side of Cléry I met two college tutors who were coming from Bordeaux; there was about fifty yards between them; I could also make out some troops further away still, led by their officer (who was the Count de la Rochefoucault). One of my men asked the first of these tutors who was ‘that gentleman coming behind him’? The tutor had not noticed the party following behind them and thought they were talking about his companion: ‘He is not a gentleman,’ he amusingly replied, ‘but a grammarian. And I am a logician.’ Now we who, on the contrary, are trying to form a gentleman not a grammarian or a logician should let them waste their own time: we have business to do elsewhere. Provided that our student be well furnished with
things
, words will follow only too easily: if they do not come easily, then he can drag them out slowly.

I sometimes hear people who apologize for not being able to say what they mean, maintaining that their heads are so full of fine things that they cannot deliver them for want of eloquence. That is moonshine. Do you know what I think? It is a matter of shadowy notions coming to them from some unformed concepts which they are unable to untangle and to clarify in their minds: consequently they cannot deliver them externally. They themselves do not yet know what they mean. Just watch them giving a little stammer as they are about to deliver their brain-child: you can tell that they have labouring-pains not at childbirth [C] but during
conception! [A] They are merely licking an imperfect lump into shape.
⁷⁴
For my part I maintain – [C] and Socrates is decisive – [A] that whoever has one clear living thought in his mind will deliver it even in Bergamask.
⁷⁵
Or if he is dumb he will do so by signs.

Verbaque prævisam rem non invita sequentur
.

[Once you have mastered the things the words will come freely.]
⁷⁶

And as another said just as poetically though in prose:
‘Cum res animum occupavere, verba ambiunt.’
[When things have taken hold of the mind, the words come crowding forth.]
⁷⁷
[C] And another one:
‘Ipsae res verba rapiunt.’
[The things themselves ravish the words.]
⁷⁸

[A] ‘But he does not know what an ablative is, a conjunctive, a substantive: he knows no grammar!’ Neither does his footman or a Petit-Pont fishwife
⁷⁹
yet they will talk you to death if you let them and will probably no more stumble over the rules of their own dialect than the finest Master of Arts in France.

‘But he knows no rhetoric nor how to compose an opening
captatio benevolentiae
for his gentle reader!’
⁸⁰
He does not need to know that. All those fine ‘colours of rhetoric’ are in fact easily eclipsed by the light of pure and naïve truth. Those elegant techniques (as Afer shows in Tacitus) merely serve to entertain the masses who are unable to [C] take [A] heavier solid meat.
⁸¹

Ambassadors from Samos came to King Cleomenes of Sparta with a long prepared speech to persuade him to go to war against Polycrates the Tyrant. He let them have their say and then replied: ‘As for your preamble
and preface, I no longer remember it; nor of course your middle bit. As for your conclusion, I will do none of it.’
⁸²
An excellent answer, it seems to me, with a blow on the nose of those speechifiers.

[B] And what about this other case. The Athenians had to choose between two architects to take charge of a large building project. The first one was the more fly and presented himself with a fine prepared speech about the job to be done; he won the favour of the common people. The other architect merely spoke two or three words: ‘Gentlemen of Athens: what he said, I will do.’
⁸³

[A] At the height of his eloquence Cicero moved many into ecstasies of astonishment. But Cato merely laughed:‘Quite an amusing consul we have,’ he said.
⁸⁴

Now a useful saying or a pithy remark is always welcome wherever it is put. [C] If it is not good in the context of what comes before it or after it, it is good in itself. [A] I am not one of those who hold that good scansion makes a good poem: let the poet lengthen a short syllable if he wants to. That simply does not count. If the invention of his subject-matter is happy and if his wit and judgement have done their jobs, then I shall say: ‘Good poet: but bad versifier.’

Emunctæ naris, durus componere versus
.

[He has the flair, though his verses are harsh.]

Take his work (says Horace) and pull its measured verse apart at the seams –

[B]
Tempora certa modosque, et quod prius ordine verbum est,
Posterius facias, præponens ultima primis,
Invenias etiam disjecti membra poetæ

[Take away rhythm and measure; change the order of the words putting the first last and the last first: you will still find the poet in those scattered remains] –

[A] he will still not belie himself for all that: even bits of it will be beautiful.
⁸⁵