[A] Take Palvel and Pompeo, those excellent dancing-masters when I was young: I would like to have seen them teaching us our steps just by watching them without budging from our seats, like those teachers who seek to give instruction to our understanding without making it dance – [C] or to have seen others teach us how to manage a horse, a pike or a lute, or to sing without practice, as these fellows do who want to teach us to judge well and to speak well but who never give us exercises in judging or speaking. [A] Yet for such an apprenticeship everything we see can serve as an excellent book: some cheating by a page, some stupidity on the part of a lackey, something said at table, all supply new material.
For this purpose mixing with people is wonderfully appropriate. So are visits to foreign lands: but not the way the French nobles do it (merely bringing back knowledge of how many yards long the Pantheon is, or of the rich embroidery on Signora Livia’s knickers); nor the way others do so (knowing how much longer and fatter Nero’s face is on some old ruin over there compared with his face on some comparable medallion) but mainly learning of the humours of those peoples and of their manners, and knocking off our corners by rubbing our brains against other people’s. I would like pupils to be taken abroad from their tenderest years, mainly (so as to kill two birds with one stone) to any neighbouring peoples whose languages, being least like our own, are ones which our tongue cannot get round unless you start bending it young. And, besides, it is a universally received opinion that it is not sensible to bring up a boy in the lap of his parents. Natural affection makes parents too soft, too indulgent – even the wisest of them. They are incapable of either punishing his faults or of bringing him up as roughly and as dangerously as he ought to be. They could not bear to see him riding back from his training all dirty and sweaty, [C] drinking this hot, drinking that cold, [A] nor to see him on a fractious horse, or up against a tough opponent foil in hand, nor with his first arquebus. But there is no other prescription: anyone who wants to be absolutely certain of making a real man of him must not spare his youth and must frequently flout the laws of medicine.
[B] vitamque sub dio et trepidis agat
In rebus.
[Let him camp in the open, amidst war’s alarms.]23
[C] Nor is it enough to toughen up his soul: you must also toughen up his muscles.24 The Soul is too hard-pressed if she is not seconded. She has too much to do herself to think of taking on the duties of both. I know how my own soul groans in her fellowship with a body so soft and sensitive to pain and which relies too heavily on her; and I have noticed in my reading that in their writings my moral guides pass off as examples of greatness of soul or strength of mind things which really belong to a tough skin or to strong bones. I have known men, women and children who are so constituted that a good beating means less to them than a pinch does to me, and who stir neither tongue nor eyebrow under the blows. When athletes play the philosopher in endurance it is strength of muscle rather than strength of mind. Now learning to endure toil is learning to endure pain: ‘labor callum obducit dolori’ [toil puts callouses on our minds, against pain].25 Pain and discomfort in training are needed to break him in for the pain and discomfort of dislocated joints, of the stone and of cauterizings – and of dungeons and tortures as well for, seeing the times we live in, those two may concern the good man as much as the bad. We are experiencing that now: whoever bears arms against Law threatens the best of men with the cat-o’-nine-tails and the rope.
[A] And then the authority of the tutor, which must be sovereign for the boy, is hampered and interrupted by the presence of his parents. Add to which the respect paid to the boy by his household and his awareness of the resources and dignity of his family are not in my opinion trivial disadvantages at that particular age.
Yet in the school of conversation among men I have often noticed a perversion: instead of learning about others we labour only to teach them about ourselves and are more concerned to sell our own wares than to purchase new ones. In our commerce with others, silence and modesty are most useful qualities. Train the lad to be sparing and reticent about his accomplishments (when he eventually has any) and he will not take umbrage when unlikely tales and daft things are related in his presence – for it is unmannerly and impolite to criticize everything which is not to our liking. [C] Let him be satisfied with correcting himself without being seen to reproach others for doing things he would not do himself and without flouting public morality: ‘Licet sapere sine pompa, sine invidia.’ [One should be wise without ostentation or ill-will.]26 Let him shun any semblance of impolitely laying down the law, as well as that puerile ambition to wish to appear clever by being different or to earn a name for criticizing or flaunting novelties. It is only appropriate for great poets freely to break the rules of poetry: similarly it is intolerable for any but great and illustrious souls to give themselves unaccustomed prerogatives: – ‘Si quid Socrates et Aristippus contra morem et consuetudinem fecerint, idem sibi ne arbitretur licere: magnis enim illi et divinis bonis hanc licentiam assequebantur.’ [Although Socrates and Aristippus sometimes flouted normal rules and customs, one should not feel free to do the same: they obtained that privilege by qualities great and sublime.]27
[A] The boy will be taught not to get into a discussion or a quarrel except when he finds a sparring-partner worth wrestling with – and even then not to employ all the holds which might help him but merely those which help him most. Teach him a certain refinement in sorting out and selecting his arguments, with an affection for relevance and so for brevity.
Above all let him be taught to throw down his arms and surrender to truth as soon as he perceives it, whether that truth is born at his rival’s doing or within himself from some change in his ideas. He will never be up in a pulpit reading out some prescribed text: he only has to defend a case when when it has his approbation. He is not going to take up the kind of profession in which freedom to think again, or to admit mistakes, has been traded for ready cash. [C] ‘Neque, ut omnia que præscripta et imperata sint defendat, necessitate ulla cogitur.’ [He is under no obligation to support all precepts and assertions.]28
If the tutor’s complexion is like mine he will so form the will of the boy that he will become a loyal subject of his monarch as well as a devoted and brave one, but he will throw cold water on any desire to be attached to him except through public service. Apart from several other disadvantages which cripple our freedom, when a man’s judgement is pledged and purchased by private obligations, either it is partial and less free or else he cart be taxed with unwisdom and ingratitude. A courtier can have neither the right to speak nor the desire to think other than favourably of a Master who from among so many thousands of his subjects has chosen to favour him with his own hand and to elevate him. Not unreasonably such favour and preferment will corrupt his freedom and dazzle him. That is why what that lot have to say on the topic is habitually at variance with all others in the State and little to be trusted.
[A] As for our pupil’s talk, let his virtue and his sense of right and wrong shine through it [C] and have no guide but reason. [A] Make him understand that confessing an error which he discovers in his own argument even when he alone has noticed it is an act of justice and integrity, which are the main qualities he pursues; [C] stubbornness and rancour are vulgar qualities, visible in common souls whereas to think again, to change one’s mind and to give up a bad case in the heat of the argument are rare qualities showing strength and wisdom.
[A] When in society the boy will be told to keep his eyes open: I find that the front seats are normally taken as a right by the less able men and that great inherited wealth is hardly ever associated with ability; while at the top end of the table the talk was about the beauty of a tapestry or the bouquet of the malmsey, I have known many witty remarks at the other end pass unnoticed. He will sound out the capacity of each person: of a herdsman, a mason, a wayfarer: he must use what he can get, take what a man has to sell and see that nothing goes wasted: even other people’s stup
idity and weakness serve to instruct him. By noting each man’s endowments and habits, there will be engendered in him a desire for the good ones and a contempt for the bad.
Put into his mind a decent, careful spirit of inquiry about everything: he will go and see anything nearby which is of singular quality: a building, a fountain, a man, the site of an old battle, a place which Caesar or Charlemagne passed through:
[C] Quœ tellus sit lenta gelu, quæ putris ab œstu,
Ventus in Italiam quis bene vela ferat.
[what land is benumbed with the cold, which dusty with heat, which favourable winds blow sails towards Italian coasts.]29
[A] He will inquire into the habits, means and alliances of various monarchs, things most pleasant to study and most useful to know. In his commerce with men I mean him to include – and that principally – those who live only in the memory of books. By means of history he will frequent those great souls of former years. If you want it to be so, history can be a waste of time: it can also be, if you want it to be so, a study bearing fruit beyond price – [C] the only study, Plato said, which the Spartans kept as their share.30 [A] Under this heading what profit will he not get out of reading the Lives of our favourite Plutarch! But let our tutor remember the object of his trust, which is less to stamp [C] the date of the fall of Carthage on the boy as the behaviour of Hannibal and Scipio; less to stamp [A] the name of the place where Marcellus died as how his death there showed him unworthy of his task. Let him not so much learn what happened as judge what happened. [C] That, if you ask me, is the subject to which our wits are applied in the most diverse of manners. I have read hundreds of things in Livy which another has not found there. Plutarch found in him hundreds of things which I did not see (and which perhaps the author never put there). For some Livy is purely a grammatical study; for others he is philosophy dissected, penetrating into the most abstruse parts of our nature. [A] There are in Plutarch developed treatises very worth knowing, for he is to my mind the master-craftsman at that job; but there are also hundreds of points which he simply touches on: he merely flicks his fingers towards the way we should go if we want to, or at times he contents himself with a quick shot at the liveliest part of the subject: those passages we must rip out and put out on display. [B] For example that one saying of his, ‘that the inhabitants of Asia were slaves of one tyrant because they were incapable of pronouncing one syllable: NO,’ may have furnished La Boëtie with the matter and moment of his book De la Servitude volontaire.31 [A] Seeing Plutarch select a minor action in the life of a man, or an apparently unimportant saying, is worth a treatise in itself. It is a pity that intelligent men are so fond of brevity: by it their reputation is certainly worth all the more, but we are worth all the less. Plutarch would rather we vaunted his judgement than his knowledge, and he would rather leave us craving for more than bloated. He realized that you could say too much even on a good subject, and that Alexandridas rightly criticized the orator whose address to the ephors was good but too long, saying, ‘Oh, Stranger, you say what you should, but not the way that you should!’32 [C] People whose bodies are too thin pad them out: those whose matter is too slender pad it out too, with words.
[A] Frequent commerce with the world can be an astonishing source of light for a man’s judgement. We are all cramped and confined inside ourselves: we can see no further than the end of our noses. When they asked Socrates where he came from he did not say ‘From Athens’, but ‘From the world’.33 He, whose thoughts were fuller and wider, embraced the universal world as his City, scattered his acquaintances, his fellowship and his affections throughout the whole human race, not as we do who only look at what lies right in front of us. When frost attacks the vines in my village my parish priest talks of God being angry against the human race: in his judgement the Cannibals are already dying of the croup! At the sight of our civil wars, who fails to exclaim that the world is turned upside down and that the Day of Judgement has got us by the throat, forgetting that many worse events have been known in the past and that, in thousands of parts of the world, they are still having a fine old time! [B] Personally I am surprised that our wars turn out to be so mild and gentle, given their unpunished licentiousness. [A] When the hail beats down on your head the entire hemisphere seems stormy and tempestuous. Like that peasant of Savoy who said that if only that silly King of France had known how to use his luck properly he could have become the Duke’s chief steward eventually! His mind could not conceive of any degree of grandeur above that of his Duke. [C] We are all caught in that same error without realizing it: a harmful error of great consequence. [A] Only a man who can picture in his mind the mighty idea of Mother Nature in her total majesty; who can read in her countenance a variety so general and so unchanging and then pick out therein not merely himself but an entire kingdom as a tiny, feint point: only he can reckon things at their real size. This great world of ours (which for some is only one species within a generic group) is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant. To sum up then, I want it to be the book which our pupil studies. Such a variety of humours, schools of thought, opinions, laws and customs teach us to judge sanely of our own and teach our judgement to acknowledge its shortcomings and natural weakness. And that is no light apprenticeship. So many revolutions, so many changes in the fortune of a state, teach us to realize that our own fortune is no great miracle. So many names, so many victories and conquests lying buried in oblivion, make it ridiculous to hope that we shall immortalize our names by rounding up ten armed brigands or by storming some hen-house or other known only by its capture. The proud arrogance of so many other nations’ pomp and the high-flown majesty of the grandeur of so many courts strengthen our gaze to look firmly and assuredly, without blinking, at the brilliance of our own. So many millions upon millions of men dead and buried before us encourage us not to be afraid of going to join such a goodly company in the world to come.
And so on.
[C] Our life, said Pythagoras,34 is like the vast throng assembled for the Olympic Games: some use their bodies there to win fame from the contests; others come to trade, to make a profit; still others – and they are by no means the worst – seek no other gain than to be spectators, seeing how everything is done and why; they watch how other men live so that they can judge and regulate their own lives. [A] All the most profitable treatises of philosophy (which ought to be the touchstone and measure of men’s actions) can be properly reduced to examples. Teach the boy this:
[B] quid fas optare, quid asper
Utile nummus habet; patriæ charisque propinquis
Quantum elargiri deceat: quem te Deus esse
Jussit, et humana qua parte locatus es in re;
Quid sumus, aut quidnam victuri gignimur;
[what he may justly wish for; that money is hard to earn and should be used properly; the extent of our duty to our country and to our dear ones; what God orders you to be, and what place He has assigned to you in the scheme of things; what we are and what we shall win when we have overcome;]35
teach him [A] what knowing and not knowing means (which ought to be the aim of study); what valour is, and justice and temperance; what difference there is between ordinate and inordinate aspirations; slavery and due subordination; licence and liberty; what are the signs of true and solid happiness; how far we should fear death, pain and shame:
[B] Et quo quemque modo fugiatque feratque laborem;
[How we can flee from hardships and how we can endure them;]36
[A] what principles govern our emotions and the physiology of so many and diverse stirrings within us. For it seems to me that the first lessons with which we should irrigate his mind should be those which teach him to know himself, and to know how to die… and to live. [C] Among the liberal arts, start with the art which produces liberal men. All of them are of some service in the regulation and practice of our lives, just as everything else is; but let us select the one which leads there directly and professes to do so.
If we knew how to restrict our life’s appurtenances to their right and natural limits, we would discover that the greater part of the arts and sciences as now practised are of no practical use to us, and that, even in those which are useful, there are useless wastes and chasms which we would do better to leave where they are; following what Socrates taught, we should set limits to our study of subjects which lack utility.
[A] sapere aude,
Incipe: vivendi qui recte prorogat horam,
Rusticus expectat dum defluat amnis; at ille
Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum.
[Dare to be wise. Start now. To put off the moment when you will start to live justly is to act like the bumpkin who would cross but who waits for the stream to dry up; time flows and will flow for ever, as an ever-rolling stream.]37
There is great folly in teaching our children
[B] quid moveant Pisces, animosaque signa Leonis,
Lotus et Hesperia quid Capricomus aqua,
[what influences stem from Pisces and the lively constellation of Leo or from Capricorn which plunges into the Hesperian Sea,]38
about the heavenly bodies [A] and the motions of the Eighth Sphere before they know about their own properties.
[What do the Pleiades or the Herdsman matter to me!]39
[C] Writing to Anaximenes, Pythagoras asked: ‘What mind am I supposed to bring to the secrets of the heavens, having death and slavery ever present before my eyes?’ (At that time the kings of Persia were preparing for war against his country.)40 We could all ask the same: ‘Assaulted as I am by ambition, covetousness, rashness and superstition, and having such enemies to life as that within me, should I start wondering about the motions of the Universe?’
The Complete Essays Page 26