Читать книгу Essays on Educational Reformers онлайн

76 страница из 91

§ 2. In the fifteen hundreds there were published several works on education, three of which, Elyot’s Governour, Ascham’s Scholemaster, and Mulcaster’s Positions, have been recently reprinted.[48] Others, such as Edward Coote’s English Schoolmaster, and Mulcaster’s Elementarie, are pretty sure to follow, without serious loss, let us hope, to their editors, though neither Coote nor Mulcaster are likely to become as well-known writers as Roger Ascham.

§ 3. Henry Barnard, whose knowledge of our educational literature no less than his labours in it, makes him the greatest living authority, says that Mulcaster’s Positions is “one of the earliest, and still one of the best treatises in the English language.” (English Pedagogy, 2nd series, p. 177.) Mulcaster was one of the most famous of English schoolmasters, and by his writings he proved that he was far in advance of the schoolmasters of his own time, and of the times which succeeded. But he paid the penalty of thinking of himself more highly than he should have thought; and whether or no the conjecture is right that Shakespeare had him in his mind when writing Love’s Labour’s Lost, there is an affectation in Mulcaster’s style which is very irritating, for it has caused even the master of Edmund Spenser to be forgotten. In a curious and interesting allegory on the progress of language (in the Elementarie, pp. 66, ff.), Mulcaster says that Art selects the best age of a language to draw rules from, such as the age of Demosthenes in Greece and of Tully in Rome; and he goes on: “Such a period in the English tongue I take to be in our days for both the pen and the speech.” And he suggests that the English language, having reached its zenith, is seen to advantage, not in the writings of Shakespeare or Spenser, but in those of Richard Mulcaster. After enumerating the excellencies of the language, he adds: “I need no example in any of these, whereof my own penning is a general pattern.” Here we feel tempted to exclaim with Armado in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Act 5, sc. 2): “I protest the schoolmaster is exceeding fantastical: too too vain, too too vain.” He speaks elsewhere of his “so careful, I will not say so curious writing” (Elementarie, p. 253), and says very truly: “Even some of reasonable study can hardly understand the couching of my sentence, and the depth of my conceit” (ib., 235). And this was the death-warrant of his literary renown.