DR. JOHN SENIOR The Restoration of Innocence

An Idea of a School

Contents

VI Quid Legendum?

Preface

This edition was transcribed from an original PDF of John Senior's book. I have been sure not to change a word of his or make any significant editorial decisions in the hope that his whole work remains for you to read and judge for yourself.

There are however a few things of note about this edition that are worth pointing out. First, since this is as of now an unpublished work and only being printed privately and not being sold there are no footnotes on quotes taken from books. John Senior did not have them in the original and the attribution is quite clear in the writing and so I did not take the time to create the footnotes. If it becomes possible to publish and sell this publicly then I will of course create proper footnotes for the quotes.

Secondly, I have collected his list of good books and put it at the back of the book in its section. I have also given you an outline of all the books broken up into their respective period of development of the child. Though there are more than the ten books he mentions in the text of this manuscript the ten he mentions receive pride of place. I leave it to parents to pour over the list of good books and their respective places in the development of their child. It seems a good rule that there be an essential ten books during each phase of life that you read to your child and that they read themselves. Use his lists as a guide and where you see fit substitute another from the list of good books. Additionally, there are some books like the Chronicles of Narnia or the Lord of the Rings which did not make it onto his

list. I plan on making select additions to the list but for now, until it is available to the public I am taking suggestions. I believe the list should still be fairly short and sweet but there are good additions that can be made.

Finally, I decided to add St. Don Bosco's talk on his educational system. No one gets everything right about one subject but a few get most things right. Both these men fall into this category. They got most things right, and a whole lot more right than we do currently in our general educational philosophies, and have both gifted us with a beautiful vision of how to educate the youth. As with anything don't read these writings as doctrine but be humble enough to know you don't know much about education (or maybe you do but not everything… be Socrates!) and allow these to inform and change your perspective on education.

— Michael Merimee

I

Interea

Interea is Latin for "meanwhile," the time we live in now, about which Saint Paul says,

See, brethren, how you walk circumspectly, not as unwise, but as wise: redeeming the time, because the days are evil.

1. The Four Stages of Society

P lato distinguishes four successive and recurrent stages of society:

• 1. Aristocratic rule by the first, that is the naturally best. When men face wilderness or chaos, someone has to take the lead. Braggarts jump to the fore but a people wither perishes or finds among its members some who really have the gift of knowing where they are and what to do, not what one wishes but what must be done.
  • 1. Timocratic rule by honor. Once the desert has been crossed, aristocratic genius is obsolete. It hasn't the knack for settling down and is restless with peace. A generation rises codifying what was done, imitating what had been spontaneous response to emergencies. Custom rules. Art, architecture, dress, speech, courtesy — all imitate in play what once was desperate work. The outfits worn in cattlecamps and battlefields become the gaudy costumes seen at rodeos and jousts. The test is not "what must be done" but "what one does."
  • 1. Oligarchic rule by the rich. As forms elaborate and peace makes timocrats effete, pugnacious vulgarity prevails. Practicing what they call "free enterprise," the

• greedy and belligerent break codes and push the honor bound around. Honor is one's bank account; banks guarantee "fidelity" and "trust."

• 1. Democratic rule by mob violence. The rich become so rich that, as a Texas billionaire said, "Money is just a way of keeping score." When they have more than anyone can want, entrepreneurs lose their raison d'etre women theirs, as well. When slaves and/or machines do everything, there isn't either men's or woman's work; each can do the other's; fathers simulate labor pains; women get in business, government, and even war; the family disappears and unrestrained teenagers rule by throwing tantrums, not to satisfy but stimulate their satiated senses with drugs, perversion, pseudo-mysticism, and both personal and social suicide.

Anarchy, the chaos that follows, isn't society and can't be called a "stage"; in it, the people either perish or survive as slaves of foreign powers— or aristocrats arise and start anew.

In each of the four legitimate stages (and in anarchy as well) there are "endless" institutions. "School" in Greek means "leisure" and, though every agent acts for an end, schools aren't agents and therefore don't act; their work is not to do but be, not to make boys into special kinds of men, but realize the rich potential of their age, which is to know and love the Maker and the thinks He made with all their mind, heart, strength and soul as boys. Aristocrats make schools in caves where hermits anticipate the Promised Land while still lost in the desert. Timocrats found monasteries, spare but comfortable communities of collective hermits living together on the model of their aristocratic fathers. Oligarchs imitate factories. Democratic mobs, scorning both business and leisure, in super excited indolence, level

1. THE FOUR STAGES OF SOCIETY

schools to killing fields; anarchy ensues, and the few who still care must teach in catacombs or tents.

Though at different speeds in different places, taking the drift as a whole, Western Civilization turned from a timocratic to an oligarchic society at the Renaissance. Since World War II, the democratic rebel, rejecting acquisition seeks destruction. Conservative parents, harking back to the play shops of their childhood where the three R's ruled, renovate abandoned monuments of greater days, constructing "traditionalist" theme parks where they hope to manufacture Christian businessmen from the raw material of their democratic children. But in between the crisis and catastrophe (this "meanwhile" that we occupy) success and good are contradictories. Those who hope to build a future out of happy memories should walk their streets some night. America is tribalized — halfway to Mogadishu.

As political animals, men normally live in class societies according to a necessary division of labor: Farm boys grow up with their work at home, and the blacksmith's apprentice learns at the forge. By the sweat of their brows, they learn to provide for themselves and the leisure classes whose sons go off to school. In normal times like ours, the social strata crack and those who want to learn at all, from suburb, farm, or slum alike, must spurn success as measured by the world and make a civilized retreat, Christian radicals who subvert the secular order not by terrorism but sacrifice, who never lie, but don't say what they think until they must, who walk, as Saint Paul said, circumspectly, redeeming the time. Meanwhile, we need a school.

2. Essence and Accident

B efore running the race (the curriculum), we must know the nature of the race to be run and, to understand any nature, distinguish essence and accident — what a thing is from the diapason of things it happens to have, ranging from the necessary to what we ordinarily mean by "accidental" as something indifferent to the essence, like having blue or browns eyes.

• 1. Proper Accidents or Properties: characteristics that necessarily follow from the essence and are always and everywhere present with it. The philosophers cite "risibility" in man, the ability to laugh, that is, to get the point of jokes and recognize absurdity.
• 1. Common Accidents: characteristics of the commonly, that is, almost always, has, by which you can readily identify it. Man is a featherless, tailless biped, for example. A rational animal doesn't have to be balanced on two legs dressed in his skin but he is.
• 1. Integral Accidents. "Integral" means "whole." A man has eyes. Deprived of them, he is abnormal, but a man.
• 1. Fitting Accidents "go with" the thing. They make it "decent" (decet in Latin means "it fits"). For example, it is fitting to keep good cheer — a grouch may be a man, but not a decent man.
• 1. Generic Accidents don't have to do with the thing itself but its place in a larger class. Man, for example, is not just any kind of

2. ESSENCE AND ACCIDENT

animal, but a mammal whose reproduction is accomplished by the distinction of sex. There are men and women, and a number of subsidiary proper, common, integral, and fitting accidents depend on the distinction such as bearing arms or children.

1. Accidental Accidents like the color of one's eyes or hair.

The essence of a school is a faculty. In a society like ours, whose older generation keeps some oligarchic memories, most think first of buildings, principals, students, and then of "staff" (teachers as the workforce). But schools (as in "school of thought) are groups of friends at leisure, apart from business, given over to the free exercise of their animal rationality, that is, a "faculty," an enabled organ free from any purpose but its own exercise.

An essential attribute of faculties is something almost as strong as a vow: Teachers must make a solemn promise never to go to bed upon a quarrel. If one persists beyond lights out, they must pray all night in the dark together at the altar until the sun, and perhaps the quarrel, returns. Human enterprises, and even divine ones depending on human instruments, most often fail because human relations are impossible. The only hope (as in marriage) is a cement stronger than the persons.

The first property of schools, that necessarily follows everywhere and always from the essence, is truth. A school for scandal or for lies deserves the name only by way of satiric metaphor. Properly speaking, a school is ordered toward things as they are (quid est), a college toward things as caused (quo est), the one reflecting and the other inferring Qui est, Who is and causes.

The chief common accident of a school is its pupils, which in the wide sense means boys at the learning stage between infancy and adulthood. Good diffuses itself. It is fecund; it reproduces. A faculty, studying the truth and conversing about it, are overheard by some who, though they

don't know what it is, see something good, therefore desirable and, as such, urgent. Pupils come to teachers, not the other way around. Teachers are not in the business of selling knowledge to consumers. Education is a privilege, not a right, and certainly not a commodity.

The most important integral accident of a school is its "quiet." A school is a place for leisure, not business, war, or politics, a sanctuary, a refuge, what is derisively called an ivory tower. It can function in the marketplace — Socrates sometimes taught there; but in the glare of publicity and the din of battle, it is difficult to see and hear the world God made rather than the one we did.

The most important fitting accidents of a school are its buildings, grounds, and customs — the dormitories, furniture, uniforms, food, hours, discipline, sports, in a word, the culture of the place. "Culture" is related to "cultivation" of crops; it means pulling up weeds, watering, nurturing, leveling, and shading from wind and sun.

The generic difference, of course, is that there are male and female schools suited to the different ways the sexes understand.

There are many accidental accidentals — north, south, refined, or rough.

3. The Seven Ages of Man

A rt is the habit of doing something well — for schools, the arts of teaching and learning subjects, modulated according to the age of learners.

There are seven ages, each with its school (or schools):

• 1)Infancy, birth through six, at home in the nursery.
• 1. Boyhood, seven through thirteen, at the gymnasium.
• 1. Adolescence in three stages:
  • the lad, fourteen through seventeen, at high school;
  • the student, eighteen through twenty-four, at college;
  • the scholar, twenty-five through twenty-seven, at the university.
• 1. Youth, twenty-eight through fifty-nine, in the school of suffering.
• 1. Old Age, seventy to an indefinite time, in the school of death.
• 1. Senility, second childhood, in the school of dreams.

Infans means "not able to speak." Though little children make their

wants known, they lack speech in the proper sense of rational discourse. An infant is a child before the age of reason who, in the nursery, explores his consciousness and gains control of his body.

Puer, the Latin word for "boy," derives from "pure" because concupiscence has not reared up as yet. "Pure" comes from pyros, purifying "fire" (boys burn with gem-like flames) which in turn derives from pu, an Indo-European root meaning "power," or potential force like the energy in atoms and the elements, the ABCs of language and things. The elementary school is a gymnasium (from gymnos, "naked") where lightly clad boys exercise, sharpening their five senses in immediate contact with nature in the raw.

"Adolescence" (from oleum, "oil") means to burn with a living, sometimes smoky and dangerous flame. It starts at puberty when sex flares up along with emotions, first among them pudor (modest shame) when nature itself suggests that boyish nakedness must now be covered. As Saint Isidore explains,

Puberes a pube, id est a pudenda corporis nuncupati quod haec loca tunc primum lanuginem ducunt. (Translate)

Physically, though not yet morally, capable of generation — virile, but virtual not yet actual, men — pubescent boys in high school exercise their newly discovered powers of emotion as they grow in strength and grace.

In the second phase of adolescence, the eighteen-year-old shaves his first growth beard and becomes a student at college where he trains his will by practicing the first two virtues, temperance and courage, in combat sports and drinking clubs (fraternities) and acquires, in the seven liberal arts, the instruments necessary to the right use of his intellect. Stadium means "zeal" and zelus means "jealous," not merely eager (boys are that) but willing to work for an arduous good. Strictly

3. THE SEVEN AGES OF MAN

speaking, elementary and high school boys are not students — they are essentially careless and, because their conscience has not been fully formed, in a sense they are pre-moral. They have habits, bad and good, but neither vice nor virtue; the law won't try them as adults nor, though they can sin, will God give them over to a reprobate sense. But Students at college are ready to practice temperance, or self-control, especially in drinking, fighting, and sex; and courage whose active power, audacity, is practiced in football and passive power, patience, in long-distance running — and both in tough subjects like logic, higher mathematics, mathematical astronomy, and Classical drama. High school boys have neither drinking clubs nor combat sports; before tempering an emotion you must have it; concupiscence and thirst, since they are human, must be learned — and, better than in the street or clinic, at school in stage plays, formal dances, drinking watered wine at dinner and on the field in soccer, hockey and track where they practice showing off properly in front of girls.

In the third phase, scholars learn the proper use of intellect in science, traditionally divided into the four schools — Architecture, Medicine, Law, and Theology — which constitute the university, defined as a place where "universal" knowledge is studied.

At the end of adolescence, the youth learns justice and the practical application of science under the direction of older authority in the school of experience ("to experiment," "to try"). Youth, from juvare, "to give aid" (related to juvencus, "a young bull) is the time when young men first perform the highest physical human act in lawful marriage and, providing for wives and the fruit of their union, live lives of dedicated service. The adult (literally, "burnt-out") learns how to govern others (the virtue of prudence) in the school of suffering. The senex, in the school of death, learns how to die. The senile, in second childhood beyond the age of reason and the gift of speech — well, they can't say what they learn but, whatever it is, it is done in dreams.

The nursery school is home. Daycare centers, kindergartens, and the first two grades of modern elementary school are products of the oligarchic, materialist mind that, denying the spiritual nature of children, thinks in terms of social engineering. But before the age of seven, reason and emotion are dormant and learning solitary. Though children seem to converse, as Piaget puts it, they engage in "collective monologues." One will say, "Now I am cutting out a paper man," and the other next to him, as if to him but really to himself, "I don't like Susie." Recorded infant dialogue sounds like a theater of the absurd. Infants are dreamy creatures, apt for Mother Goose and fairy tales. It is only after seven that, changing into boys, they become practical, social, and ready for the gymnasium, a little one-room, neighborhood schoolhouse where they learn to get along with words, numbers, and each other and take delight in games, defined as play with rules.

Adolescence, the first spring of the independent state of manhood, calls the lad (the old-fashioned word precisely for this time of life) away from home. High school learning is integral, which means that all its parts cohere; it is, therefore, best achieved at boarding school where the education and the life of the place are unified and boys, leaving mom for alma mater, can practice the male culture of barracks. Two severe deprivations occur as consequences of education and day schools: the sexes get confused and boys stay tied to apron strings.

4. Buildings and Grounds

W e begin with five free men — the faculty — who love one another as David did his friend:

I grieve for thee, my brother Jonathan: exceeding beautiful and amiable to me above the love of women. As the mother loveth her only son, so did I love thee.

Five good friends — four teachers and a chaplain — who have long since conversed on the meaning of life and the signs of the times who, "expecting" pupils as mothers do sons, find a quiet place with simple buildings and pleasant grounds, fitting, not changing, truth to the age and class of those who come to learn, prescribing hours, dress, food, recreation and a curriculum for them.

At the gates of the campus, where the outside world ends, the chapel stands as a fact and sign of our Faith. Its priest says, and passionately believes in saying — is zealous in saying — the normative (Tridintine), Latin Mass. Since the school at full capacity will house forty-eight boarders, it should be small, unassuming, and utilitarian, not built for conspicuous glory like the great cathedrals, nonetheless beautiful to us and God but not for witness or show, built of native stone, plain, Cistercian, with an altar at the east end, a confessional and benches without kneelers. A school is not a parish. It's charity is totally within.

No public Mass, guest house or rectory. The chaplain is a full-time teacher living in the senior dormitory, teaching and supervising the oldest boys who by turns are assigned as sergeants (house-brothers) to supervise the underclassmen. The seniors are his sons; he lives with them as Christ with his disciples and, for refuge, has Gesthemane, his garden. What a man must this one be! Not for conspicuous glory like the famous saints — more like Saint Joseph, unassuming and utilitarian, beautiful to us and God, not for witness or public show. If half the boys don't want to be like him (that is, be priests), the school has failed.

The freshmen arrive at age fourteen, ready to leave home, minimally corrupted one hopes by the public or nominally Catholic elementary schools, eager to spend four years in the summa quies of retreat. Each teacher has a class of twelve — the number of the Apostles and the best number to teach — in one of the four grades, housed in its own building where the boys sleep, study, and play. In view of costs, fire codes, energy, simplicity, and discipline, it is best to build from scratch. Old mansions are for sale, but there are reasons why. Renovation and upkeep cost too much; it is impossible to light, heat, and keep them clean; they are disease-ridden fire traps and, besides, commit you to a spirit that built them which, even when Catholic, aimed to impress rather than do the job. So it is best to build new classroom dorms. I have sketched a floor plan for a single room 30 x 70 feet having six beds on each side with three-foot spaces for footlocker and racks for coats and dress clothes. Between the beds there are five-foot wide sliding thermal-glass doors for light, ventilation, and safety — each boy has his own exit if he needs it in an emergency. In the middle of the long walls there are six-foot wide glass doors for regular entrances and exits, and, in the center of the room, an air-tight stove with a pipe up through the roof. At one end, the sergeant's bed commands a view of the boys with space for his foot-locker, rack, and sliding glass doors on either side; at the other, a six-foot wide blackboard above which

4. BUILDINGS AND GROUNDS

hangs a Crucifix with statues of Mary to the left and Joseph to the right and sliding glass doors as well. Two sets of three six-foot 2 x 12 planks and trestles can be placed end to end to make one long table or set up separately for play and study. Benches can be drawn up before the stove (or anywhere) and both tables and benches upended in a corner, leaving a large area free for games and mopping up.

The walls and floor are native stone to prove that efficiency, economy, and safety can be beautiful. Floors are swept daily and mopped three times a week. Tables, benches, beds on rubber casters, and footlockers ( (all the furniture there is) are easily moved. The footlocker beside each bed contains a boy's entire baggage — three sets of briefs and t-shirts, three sets of longjohns, two pairs of denim shorts, two pairs of denim jeans, three pairs of socks, a pair of boots or sandals (whichever he is not wearing at the time), three jerseys in school-colors, ice skates, soccer and track shoes and a keepsake box for the few personal things he may have. Above the footlocker is a metal rack for heavy blankets and a quilt; below the rack, a rod for hanging a parka, anarak (weatherproof jacket), blazer, and two pairs each of summer and winter dress shirts and pants. The footbar of the bed is used as a rack for two large bath towels; under the bed are a ten-gallon pail and basin (both of stainless steel) for showers and washing clothes.

The dormitory and classroom are a single building of glass and stone with nothing to combust, no electricity, plumbing, central heat or air conditioning, hot in summer, cold in winter, bright on bright days, dim on dim ones, black on black nights, no running water, no inside sinks, and toilets — all of which, according to the principle of fitting accidents, is part of the education.

Outside, parallel to the back long-side of each dorm, some forty feet away, is a smaller building (the latrine) similarly constructed but plumbed for a cold water faucet and a floor drain, containing a single rectangular room with a cement floor, stone walls, sliding thermal-

glass windows running along all four walls above head height, a stove in the center, several benches, some sink-high for washing, others low for sitting, and, along one end-wall, five or six metal stalls with stools not plumbed: the "whole earth" catalogues advertise self-composting, flush less, sewerless, odorless individual septic tanks whose product may be used for fertilizer. For showers one boy douses another and, after he soaps, douses him again for a rinse. Greater love hath none than he who gives and suffers this; next to battle itself there is no quicker way to comradeship than a mutual splash of icy water in a stone latrine on a winter afternoon. In nineteenth-century England, when the fags at a famous school requested hot running water, Thring, the master, grunted in contempt: "What? They will be wanting turkey carpets next!"

In the dorms, at the end of each row of six beds, the two tallest boys (the corporals) keep two lanterns trimmed, filled, and ready to be lit (whenever it gets too dark) and swung from hooks on the rafters. At taps, the corporals snuff them out, lighting them again in emergencies and regularly at reveille in winter when dawn comes late. There is no other light but the sun, moon, stars, and the fire-coal glow in winter. If you contemplate reality as created and revealed, darkness is the second greatest lesson. Education is impossible without this fearful fact that electric lights eclipse. What a wonderful thing to not how difficult it is to see the blackboard on a heavy afternoon, to feel the palpable dusk of dawns just before the angels start their colorful work, or evenings after they have done, and to strike against the wall of utter dark some moonless, starless night when you have to find the latrine all by yourself. No cheating with flashlights any more than we cheat time with clocks and watches trying to anticipate the bugle!

What a great adventure it is to navigate from your bed, over the floor, directly to the nearest door, out across forty feet of darkness to an invisible latrine on the imperative hazard of necessity some night. And

4. BUILDINGS AND GROUNDS

on some other night, what a shock of virtual glory there is in a sudden bugle blast, the lighting of the lanterns, dressing in the semi-dark, falling-in in formation on the parade ground, marching in platoon with the other classes, in double file following the corporals' lanterns to the chapel and perceiving at the altar flaming candelabra and a priest in vestments who proceeds, as the boys chant Salutaris Hostia, to administer Benediction. Such bugle calls are sprung at odd times, too, as a test of readiness which, in the meanwhile, is all.

House fathers may be needed in large schools boarding hundreds, but the kind of person wanting such a job isn't likely to be qualified. Older boys must learn responsibility by taking it and if the school has done its job, the seniors will be ready. Sergeants come on duty after dinner at seven each night, overseeing their assigned lower class until Lauds at seven the next morning, carrying not only the authority delegated to them but the natural one of older brothers. The master visits one evening per week, expounding a book or poem, conversing as occasions may suggest and making an inspection for himself, doublechecking the sergeant and assuring the boy of his care for them — and all the masters live on campus within call at any time.

When the boys are back at the dorm after supper, one reads aloud a classic book and they also learn by heart in choral recital poems from the English Anthology. Twelve years of formal instruction in reading and composition given in modern schools are ineffective substitutes for the habit of poetry and prose which can be acquired only by reading the best aloud night after night. Speech and writing express no more than what is taken in. The best instruction in writing is good reading and good talk.

When the bugle sounds first taps, the boys stand for inspection ready for bed in longjohns or briefs. Do their mama's want them in pajamas? They will be wanting satin sheets! Lighted by the corporals holding their lanterns, the sergeant makes the rounds, inspecting ears and nails

— if the nails are trimmed the chances are the rest are too.

When the campus is complete, with the chapel at the front, there will be four dormitories, two on each side of a quadrangle, each with its latrine behind it and, closing in the square, the mess hall and its latrine for washing pots built just like the dorms, 30x70, airy, light, with tables, benches, larders, ranges, but no plumbing, electricity or refrigerators, with an outdoor range on the back porch for cooking in hot weather. Meals are taken on plank tables in the mess hall; two victims from each class are assigned each day to help the cook and serve their mates. The food is tasty, wholesome, and Spartan — for breakfast, whole grain bread, porridge, and fresh milk; for lunch, soup, and sandwich; for supper, stews, pasta, vegetables from the garden and greenhouse in season, fruit, and, with stronger mix up through the classes, wine in water for a drink — as Plato proves, learning how to drink watered-down wine is a sensible foretaste of temperance. After meals, the diners wash their own mess gear and hang it to dry on hooks. The fitting accidents (the culture) of our school are teachable, lovable, and hard. We need a cook worth a teacher's salary to make goodtasting food from simple things and a good enough teacher himself to make boys love mean work.

5. The Curriculum

Forty-eight boys, in four companies of twelve, fall in each dawn on the front porches of their dorms, in shirts, shorts, and sandals when it's warm, in parkas with jeans over longjohns stuffed in boots when it's cold. In the earliest dusk, they march to the chapel, filling the benches class by class to sing Lauds of the Blessed Virgin's Office which, since it is short and repetitive, is easily learned by heart. They then assist at Mass whose homily sets the spiritual theme of the day to be picked up in all the classes, work, and play. The masters attend Mass and Lauds so all will be at one in spirit all day long. Thomas Arnold said of Rugby that its aim was not so much to teach religion as to make the place religious. It must be so with us.

L atin at eight. No English is spoken at all; explanations and definitions are taken from material already known, acted out, and pictured on the blackboard. This daily colloquy (ordinary talk) picks up phrases from Lauds and Mass and applies them to the things of everyday life — getting up and dressed, making beds, cleaning up the dorm, and events as they occur.

At nine the classes go outdoors for Nature Study, taught from manuals like the Audubon Society's of birds, rocks, reptiles, plants, and trees. No overloading brains with science, just the facts as the senses and emotions know them. This first contact with nature is indispensable for the right psychological growth in knowledge and

is the only basis for higher studies at college. The freshmen will learn by name every weed, bush, tree, and vegetable and see how they take nourishment and reproduce. Nature Study includes sketching and writing compositions about what is seen. There is no formal instruction in writing or drawing but plenty of both. Neither art nor composition is a subject in itself. You have to draw and write about something. Sophomores and juniors study the motion and force of things without formulas preventing thought. Seniors study astronomy — on dark nights watching the Bear, fixing what they see with the classic myths.

The public has seriously misunderstood the place of science in society. Far from being everything, it plays an odd, though necessary, part. Normal boys don't grow up scientists. Specializing in physics and chemistry in high school forces an unnatural learning none is ready for and, hopefully, will never be — granted some are geniuses and bent that way for whom there should be special institutes. For the great majority, like too much liquid pouring too fast into small cups, science spills out of brains and what is taken in actually retards understanding because it gives answers to questions not asked. What we need is, first, respect for the learner and second for things. Some will call this "anti-intellectual" as if the intellect were nothing more than one of its incidental acts (calculating quantities)! The first and highest act of intellect is naming things. In The Making and Unmaking of a Dullard, Thomas Shields describes a boy's discovery of physics while working with a shovel on his father's farm. He found out for himself the fact of fulcrums before any book or teacher closed his mind about them. And he went on to see all by himself — which is the only way you can see — that a wheel is an infinite series of levers and that pulleys are sets of hitched wheels!

Plants, trees, animals and rocks are named in Latin: Quid est? Est quercus, sciurus, argilla. This is to take the language seriously, to think in

5. THE CURRICULUM

it, not as a foreign thing, but as our own — like the difference between riding a horse in a ring and riding to get somewhere.

Calisthenics at ten outdoors, rain, shine, hot or cold, without machines and weights, not for muscle-bound Schwarzeneggers or effete ephebes but high-strung Kentucky colts ready to go. At eleven, a bit sweaty but men are men, it's on to Math, taught like everything else as a way of understanding, in this case measuring, counting, and figuring real things. Algebra is used for solving practical problems, geometry in surveying, and orienteering.

Lunch at twelve and an hour's siesta — it's a long, tough day, though some will be rowdy on the quad.

At one, Geography and History are taught together as a single subject in Latin using blackboard maps, stories, plays, and the memorization of events and their dates.

At two, the Latin words of Lauds and Vespers are learned along with the proper psalm tones, not just a pious exercise (though it is) nor entertainment (though it is that too). Each student discovers his voice the way he did his buoyancy swimming and his balance riding bikes. There is a popular misconception that some can sing and some can't. Granted some have greater gifts, anyone who hears and talks can sing. There is no such thing as "tone deaf" unless you are simply deaf. Music is a matter of hearing and imitating sound. Freshmen discover their voices by matching a pitch pipe, practicing intervals, and singing hymns and psalms. In the freshman year, sight reading Gregorian notes is began; sophomores perfect their skills and as their voices change juniors join the choir which the seniors lead.

With the colloquy at eight, Nature Study at nine History at one, Music at two, the mass and Office mornings and evenings, and conversing at meals, we log at least six hours of Latin per day. Latin is the language of the Church and Christian Civilization. Ours is a Catholic Latin school.

From three to five, soccer, hockey, and track in season and whatever farm work is suitable to the place — on the prairie, a cow-calf operation; by the sea, clamming, lobstering, fishing. Though crafts make quicker cash, eschew the artsy-craftsy; the school must not become a tourist attraction. Whatever the work, it must be something hard, spiritual, enjoyable, and serious, not in the spirit of business, like work and sport today, but play. According to the tone of the school, some military training is given as well, of the sort a rough colonial militia like Washington's had — hay foot, straw-foot, enough to move together and get chores done. If we were rich we could sport a stable and ride like troopers, or fit out a sailing ship and go two years before the mast!

6. The Economic Base

H ow much will all this cost? By definition free, schools can't charge tuition or be bribed by contributions which usually come with strings. Teachers need a lifetime tenure protected from destitution in sickness and old age. The form of a school is the faculty; its first matter is an endowment. But if the income is derived from capitalist investment, its soul is eaten by three notorious worms: usury, theft, and pollution.

To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice.

In order to make this evident, we must observe that there are certain things the use of which consists in their consumption: thus we consume wine when we use it for drink, and we consume wheat when we use it for food. Wherefore in such like things the use of the thing must not be reckoned apart from the thing itself, and whoever is granted the use of the thing, is granted the thing itself; and for this reason, to lend things of this kind is to transfer ownership. According if a man wanted to sell wine separately from the use of the wine, he would be selling the same thing twice, or he would be selling what does not exist, wherefore he would evidently commit a sin of injustice. In like manner he commits an

injustice who lends wine or wheat, and asks for double payment, viz. one, the return of the thing in equal measure, the other, the price of the use, which is called usury…

Now money, according to the Philosopher (Ethic. v,5; Polit i,3) was invented chiefly for the purpose of exchange: and consequently the proper and principal use of money is its consumption or alienation whereby it is sunk in exchange. Hence it is by its very nature unlawful to take payment for the use of money lent, which payment is known as usury. (S. Th. II-II 78,1)

Profit is also taken by buying cheap and selling dear as in market speculation and buying "futures" that don't exist. Otherwise lawful profit is vitiated by pollution if the production ruins its source (like lumbering that doesn't harvest trees but destroys forests) or if the product harms the purchaser (like heroin or contraceptives).

Saint Benedict solved the problem. To live a life of prayer, monks work. Ora et labora. To live a life of learning, teachers, and boys must also work. Lude et labora. And work means labor with one's hands and brains on the fundamental source of all real wealth. The only honest endowment for a school is a self-sufficient farm, without machines, to feed a chaplain, four teachers, a cook and forty-eight boys who eat like hogs but also dig, hoe, chop, pitch hay, and shovel dung. On the high plains, a cattle ranch would be just right with calves for cash, a few milk cows, a pig, some fowl, gardens and greenhouses to supply the food, bring in some cash, teach boys how to work and, with long vacations and whole summers off, keep teachers grounded in the things they teach, while their wives, at home, do women's work together (a faculty of friends also) spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, canning, cooking and caring for husbands and children! Of course, this means hard work and what the world calls bitter poverty. Chaucer's Wife protests that it is "glad":

6. THE ECONOMIC BASE

Glad poverte is an honest thing, certeyn.

We are gridlocked in pseudo-riches. The world man made has crushed the one God made. Saint Benedict was right. Unless we earn our bread directly from the honest labor of our hands, leisure is an evil parasite and teachers hypocrites in living contradiction to their teaching.

I have sketched a campus of rough and ready buildings with nothing to maintain, of glass and native stone (or native anything not flammable — adobe, sod or rammed earth blocks) with a clean sweep of both grand old establishments and modern factory systems, Spartan, close to the light and dark, having open, airy spaces where the wind blows in from every point in summer, yet snug enough, each with its stove at the heart casting an orange eye of a winter's night.

No tuition. Nothing is charged for food and board. A school is nothing if not free. If teachers are not independent you are simply another business selling education to consumers. A school is a faculty. The first material act, therefore, is not a contribution or a fee but an endowment of land for lifetime tenure. buildings are not essential. Like Abelard, if you have to, you can teach up in a tree. If teachers cluster their homes within a stone's throw, for the first few years, at least, the boys can live in attics and learn in cellars. Most of the time is spent outdoors anyhow, in fields, around corrals and barns as teaching intermixes with the work. The main thing is our freedom. if parents have the money, they can contribute to the endowment, but no one buys teachers.

At the beginning of the century, John Dewey plausibly argued that education is essentially political. He saw America rising to its great place in history and wanted boys (and girls) to be good citizens, trained in disputation and current events. How out of date he is! It took Rome five hundred years to fall; we fell in less than a hundred and now armed teenage mobs prowl the corridors of schools and shopping malls. We

need survivors packed and ready to retreat. Will there be forty-eight to flee with us from Sodom? If not, the faculty, like Abraham and Lot, must go alone.

II

Ars Docendi

The Art of Teaching

1. The Five Modes of Knowledge

M odes from modus, "limit," like the colors of the spectrum or notes on a musical scale, are stages of a gradual act. As relative contraries, each is dependent on the other, all present to each, each to all. If someone says, "Sing fa," you have to ask for do. Fa is a relation; it can't exist alone. There are five modes, or notes, on the scale of knowledge:

• 1. Gymnastic, from gymnos ("naked") and eros ("erotic," that is, "sensitive" desire) means knowing by immediate sense-contact with things.
• 1. Music, from the root meaning silence, as in "mute," "myth," and "mystery," is knowledge by emotion, feeling like the object (in sympathy with it) as if it were ourself. In Latin, musical and scientific understanding are distinguished as scire, "to come to know," and congnoscere, "to know together with" — the difference between knowing fire is hot and knowing fire: The first is grasped by the external senses, the second felt internally because, as living creatures, we are fire; there is combustion in our blood.
• 1. The Liberal Arts are instrumental knowledge-forming habits of abstracting concepts and constructing syllogisms. Physical instruments are ways of knowing sense objects: We learn hardness by striking objects with hammers, and sweet sounds by playing violins. The liberal arts teach mental objects.
• 1. Science, from the particle sc that indicates growth or becoming, is intellectual knowledge by analysis and synthesis in which the mind becomes the thing known by making abstract models of it.
• 1. Practical Science is the application of these models to particulars, changing them to suit our purposes.

Though, as modes, all are present in each and each in all, there is a natural progression of dominance from sense, emotion instrument, and intellect to practice; and in the art of teaching, each is coupled with one of the five kinds of school: gymnastic to gymnasium (elementary school), music to high school, the liberal arts to college, science to graduate school, practical science to residency in the workplace.

2. The Eight Modes of Teaching

C hristians have built schools for the glory of God and, in doing so, expressed their place in history. Living in the nick of mercy, we have to set up ours in semi-permanent tents of stone and glass with nothing in them but the few things necessary for an itinerarium mortis. But wherever it is, a school is a faculty of friends who, since the good is self-diffusive, teach and teaching is an art.

Art, from articulum meaning "joint," is the joining together of things not joined in nature. It operates in four modes: Two are transitive, that is they result in something extrinsic to the artist — ars faciens, the making art, like the carpenter's and ars auxilians, the helping art, like the farmer's; and two are intransitive, intrinsic, remaining as habits in the artist — ars perficiens, the perfecting art, or skill, the habit of doing something well, like the violinist's and ars imitans, the imitating art in which the artist imitates his masters and the operation and objects of nature, becoming like them in love and knowledge. Each of these applies to teaching in a twofold way so there are eight in all: Ars faciens as erudition and formation; ars auxilians as information and education; ars perficiens as institution and instruction; ars imitans as imitation and exercise.

1. Erudire (ex + rudus) means to make the rude smooth, that is teach manners, "polish," make "polite," from polis, "city," not the modern metropolis but a right sized town proportioned to human life. The rude

are not necessarily ill-willed; they just don't know the time and place. Erudition is a kindly introduction, a pointing out of what and how things are done: "This is a knife and fork. We hold them thus to cut and eat efficiently." "This is a rattlesnake. Watch out." Manners are the right approach to things. Teachers too often jump to drilling information and instruction without this patient, indispensable antecedent and great good in itself.

1. Formare comes from forma, one of the five types of beauty. A civilized person is not only polite but desirable. With a mind and body mirroring his nature, he is human and humane. Formal beauty is a certain splendor, a shining forth of form indirectly visible in the matter. As erudition is a negative polishing away of ineptitude, formation is a conformation to the type or ideal standard of human nature and the social subtype in which it is expressed: well-formed farm boys look and act like farmers, cadets like soldiers, students like scholars.

Another kind of beauty, species, from spectare, "to see," means beautiful to look at. Related to the formal principle as a specific difference to genus, it means the pleasing aspect of formed matter, rather than the light of the form itself. A good student is good-looking. Allied with this, decor from decet, "it is fitting," means the beauty that results when accidents are recognized as "fit." Certain shapes and colors are "becoming." Formal and specific beauty can be botched by bad taste in otherwise beautiful persons. Grooming, dress, deportment, tone of voice — these must be taught because, without the habits and bearing of the artist, the art can't be learned. Another kind of beauty, pulchritudo, whose root means "power," is the force of persons and things. Yeats describes it in "Easter Rising" as "a terrible beauty" and Solomon in the striking phrase from the Song of Songs says of the Blessed Virgin, Pulchra es, amica mea… terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata (literally, "terrible as the cutting edge of an army drawn up for battle"). And, finally, amoenitas, "without walls," that is, a place you

2. THE EIGHT MODES OF TEACHING

needn't fence because there isn't any danger there, is usually translated as "pleasantness."

Formation means that teachers, having polished the boys' rough edges in erudition, must then, in formation, also make them beautiful in these five ways — not pretty, which comes from a root meaning "coy," "tricky," "deceitful," but beautiful of soul, handsome, decent, manly and pleasant.

And the teacher must be beautiful himself. Einstein at Princeton pioneered the ruin of formation in his dirty sweatshirt, flaunting sloppiness as the prerogative of genius. Remember, in contrast, Socrates whose homely beauty stunned his handsome student Alcibiades.

It is the teachers's part to polish subjects too. Latin, Nature Study, Calisthenics, Math, History and Music must first be grasped in erudition as orderly, then seen in formation as significant, the way an artist sees — and paints for us to see — a landscape.

1. Informare, "to inform," is to sow the imagistic and intelligible seeds of subjects in the bodies and minds of students, like a farmer seeding corn in his fields. In fact, both are called "drilling," which means piercing through." Formation is a mode of beauty signifying a form apparent in matter, information an intelligible principle recognized by imagination and intellect through a process analogous to generation, the "conceiving" of images and concepts. When teachers form students, they conform their behavior to personal and social types; when informing, they plant the signifying seeds of things by which the mind conceives sensible and intellectual replicas of them. Imagistic concepts are less clear, and in a sense less certain, than intellectual ones but in confronting mysteries they are chiefly what we have. At the elementary and high school level, to inform is to point, imagine, and name: "Look! Draw what you see. That's a horse!"

Must children be taught to see?

The eye — it cannot choose but see; We cannot bid the ear be still; Our bodies feel, where'er they be, Against or with our will.

True enough and so well said we are likely to miss the contradiction that follows in the last stanza of "Expostulation and Reply":

Enough of Science and of Art; Close up those barren leaves; Come forth, and bring with you a heart That watches and receives.

Contradiction because watching and receiving are arts! If you come forth without an informed heart, you don't know what to look for. The feral wolf boy without the seeds of information can't learn names and all the piling up of sticks and stones in the world won't get even a genius to discover that two and two make four unless Mother Goose plays "this little piggy" on his toes.

"Girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his square forefinger, "I don't know that girl. Who is that girl?"

"Sissy Jupe, sir," explaind number twenty, blushing, standing up and curtsying.

"Sissy is not a name," said Mr. gradgrind. "Don't call yourself Sissy. Call yourself Cecilia."

"It's father as calls me Sissy, sir," returned the young girl in a trembling voice, and with another curtsy.

"Then he has no business to do it," said Mr. Gradgrind. "Tell hi he mustn't. Cecilia Jupe. Let me see. What is your father?"

2. THE EIGHT MODES OF TEACHING

"He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please sire."

Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his hand.

"We don't want to know anything about that, here. You mustn't tell us about that, here. Your father breaks horses, don't he?"

"If you please sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses in the ring sir."

"You mustn't tell us about the ring, here. Very well, then. Describe your father as a horsebreaker. He doctors sick horses, I dare say?"

"Oh yes, sir."

"Very well, then. He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and horsebreaker. Give me your definition of a horse."

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

"Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!" said Mr. Gradgrind… "Girl number twenty possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals! Some boy's definition of a horse. Bitzer yours…"

"Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring: in marshy countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron. Also known by marks in mouth."

"Now girl number twenty," said Mr. Gradgrind, "You know what a horse is."¹

Well, of course, three cheers for Sissy Jupe, so erudite and beautifully formed — but one at least for Bitzer too, a brute, but well-informed!

1. Educare, from ex + ducere, "to draw out," draws from students things already known but not yet recognized. Plato says all knowledge

¹ Charles Dickens, "Hard Times" Chapter 1

is remembrance (re-cognition) — perhaps too great a claim, but much of teaching is simply (having informed him) to let the child alone.

1. Instituere. Institutes (as in Calvin's Institutes of Religion and Quintilian's Institutes of Education) Are sets of plans. A child who has been polished, formed, informed and educated needs a vademecum, a summary or synopsis of what he has learned to prompt and correct when knowledge is put to use. Donatus wrote the classic institutes of Latin. At college, the student I given (in the Ars Minor) paradigms that sum up what he knows and (in the Ars Major) the reason why the language works the way it does. But before the liberal arts at college, in the musical mode of high school, instituting is memorization of examples.

Salve, Marce, quomodo vales?
  Sal' bene. Quomodo et tu?

Having this in memory, Peter and James can easily vary it in real encounters:

Salve, Petre.
  Salve, Jacobe.

• 1. Instruere means putting an army at battle-ready. There is a confusion of terms here because the past participle, instructs, gives the common English word "instruct" which, in the vicissitudes of usage, has come to mean "inform"! Instruction in the Latin sense is the difference between having the faculty of sight and opening your eyes. In learning Latin, for example, a boy not only has to know his colloquy by heart; he has to have the habit of speaking. In high school, instruction is questioning to elicit memorized responses in new situations.
  • 1. Disciplinare, from discere, "to learn," is tandem knowledge, a hitch

2. THE EIGHT MODES OF TEACHING

of teacher and student working together to learn. It involves two acts: correction (the rod) and affection (the staff). Monks call their flagellum the disciplina and spiritual sons are "disciples." "Spare the rod and spoil the child" — thus Solomon whose emblem is the rod. "Feed my sheep" — thus Our Lord and Shepherd whose emblem is the staff. David sums up both:

Virga tua et baculus tuus ipsa me consolata sunt.

It may seem odd that discipline comes so late and so high in the order of learning — to some, perhaps, that it comes at all. Some spank obstreperous brats in elementary school which others call child abuse. On the one hand Latin and Math teachers think the purpose of their subjects is to correct the warps of original sin; on the other, progressivists think error is a right. Both exaggerate. Since there are infinite ways to miss a target and only one to hit it, error easily happens and uncorrected knowledge is worse than ignorance — better not to shoot at all than miss the target and hit something else. The Devil had the highest knowledge next to God and misdirected it. But discipline can't be applied before there is a fault; you can't correct what doesn't exist. Unless the child has first been brought from a rude unruly state, polished, formed to his natural but hitherto hidden beauty, informed, educated, and instituted, he has nothing to rebel against and, if he has not rebelled, he can't be justly punished. It isn't novices but those in advanced stages of intellectual and spiritual development who need the sting, as Saint Paul himself confessed:

And less the greatness of the revelations should exalt me, there was given me a sting of my flesh, an angel of Satan, to buffet me.

1. Exercere is the exercise, a putting into action, of the things already

learned. Philosophers distinguish between potency (capable of being something else), act (the state of actually being it), and exercise (functioning). For example, a tree in the woods is potentially firewood; chopped and split, it is firewood in act, and, in exercise, it burns. Since God is the only being purely in exercised act, when we achieve this state, we are His image (having minds) and His likeness (using them). The ultimate teacher is Christ, residing in the soul. Schoolmasters act in loco Christi and students imitating them are indirectly imitating Christ — as Saint Paul said,

Be ye followers (imitatores) of me, as I also am of Christ.

Since modes are musical, you can teach in the key of erudition, and, having established its signature, run up and down the scale or strike chords as the subject matter and the students prompt — both the notes of discipline at once, for example, affectionately touching a shoulder and twisting an ear! We are not in mechanical sequence as in staged rockets where the first burns out and is discarded as the second ignites, but singing Te Deum laudamus!

3. The Application

S uppose, then, as teachers in exercise ourselves we take our first freshmen in hand. Chances are they haven't been away from home before except for a week at Grandma's. As they watch the family car drive off, the tears may start. They fight them back and bluff because of peer opinion — they don't think much of ours! But we have charge of them in loco parentis (and Christi) on this perilous enterprise of learning how to serve God and neighbor through the love and knowledge of His works, especially His work in us, that is, our love of them. At school, everything and everyone teaches — the boys each other, the place, the cook; but we are the ones in charge, the ones responsible, who must temper the boys, the place, and the cook (which might prove difficult) so that the job gets done.

How do these principles apply?

The ars faciens proceeds first in the order of learning by erudition. Principles are absolute but applications a matter of prudence, and teachers will differ about how to proceed in particular situations. However, there is a modus operandi intervening between principle and act, between the universal and particular, as the typical or general rule of thumb — affectionate order.

Fourteen-year-olds are not army recruits of eighteen. The tough sergeant whose every second begins with "f" — a great purveyor of erudition to eighteen-year-old conscripts who don't know hay-foot

from straw — will bruise unruly but tender souls at puberty who need a military order tempered to their insecurity, each one, as Frost's applepicker says of apples,

… to touch, cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

They need the certainty of order provided by a set of definite rules and at the same time, a warm, assurance. Hazing and tagging lead to abuse. Freshmen must have a dorm of their own without suffering the arrogant patronage of upperclassmen. The sergeant, picked from the senior class, must really like his younger brothers and be big and strong enough not to have to beat anyone up to prove his superiority.

A modified military rule is the best way to file the rough edges off ill-mannered rubes and roughen suburbanite fops who are used to getting up, eating, playing, and going to bed pretty much as they want. Our boys jump out of bed at the blast of a horn at five-thirty in the morning, get their britches on in ten seconds, and dash to the latrine for a splash of icy water in the face. First erudition is gymnastic!

But with the rule of thumb. For example, in Latin, an overplus of childish fun. The class convenes. The teacher beams at his charges like a horseman looking at a corral full of splendid colts. Pointing to himself he says, Ego sum Magister Joannes and, touching the quickest lad's head as if it were a cherished apple, bends down and asks, Quid est nomen tuum? if he answers "Robert" the master smiles but shakes his head: In lingua Latina dic "Robertus.' Nomen tuum est Robertus. and so around the table: Quid est nomen tuum? Est-ne Thomas? Georgius? Gregorius? See how once the key of erudition has been struck, the melody proceeds to education ("drawing out"). Everybody knows what nomen means; all the teacher has to do is point and give examples. First Latin is best learned struggling as we did when infants, by the sting of censure and

3. THE APPLICATION

the balm of praise.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all That struck the earth, no matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth.

Spend a week on Quid est nomen tuum until the class gets bored with it; then tell a tale:

Olim python portavit rosam in ore quam obtulit Javi, qui respondit: "Numquam dona accipio a serpentibus."

When Aesop's truth shines in their eyes, even the most awkward adolescents are like lilacs flowering, and we have struck formare as the "re" next after the "do" of eruidire.

Domine, Dominus noster, quam admirabile est nomen tuum in universa terra! Ex ore infantium et lactentium perfecisti laudem…

In History draw a map on the board and (pointing) say,

M. Est Roma. Est Italia, Roma in Italia est. Ubi est Roma? Respondete, discipuli!

• D. Roma in Italia est.
• M. Ubi est Italia?
• D. Italia in Eruopa est.

In Calisthenics (in the mode of information), the physical seeds of rational control are planted in the muscles which along with a few week's pitching hay and shoveling dung (in the mode of education) will change the shape of their shirts. In Math, the master receives the graduate of elementary school not so much rudus from the sticks as suburbanus and spoiled; so he has to bring him several pegs down to handle numbers without calculators (or paper and pencil!), do multiplication, subtraction, division (short and long) and even fractions in his head.

In Nature Study, you have to make suburbanites conscious of the rational content of the earth beneath their feet. We can build on the easy Latin lessons moving from Quid est nomen tuum? to Quid est nomen hujus rei?

In Music, assurance is needed most. At fourteen voices lose their childish treble. It takes patience and fun to recover. Let the whole class bellow deep breaths of bass and feel the timbre in their teeth. Strike a tuning fork and pick a boy to match the note. Chances are he'll hit too low. Match him where he is and slide with him up to pitch. Then strike the fork again. Do this around the class in solo and chorus, ending with Mica, mica, parva stella, or a hymn from the Little Office.

During the first year's shakedown, before the freshmen arrive, the teachers must perfect their art and, even though still imperfect when classes start, never give in to the temptation of sketching out cheat sheets. Most young teachers (and some long since gone lazy) feel like guests at the Duchess's party, a bit secure with a drink (or notes) in hand. Most will grab at anything, at least in some subjects. Don't. To swim, you have to swim.

Calisthenics ("beautiful strength") is a set of exercises developing the body not for show but for health. A boy should have the muscles that a boy should have. Beauty is the right relation of magnitude, proportion, and splendor. A mean man or a muscle-bound hulk can't be beautiful.

3. THE APPLICATION

Proportion is a right relation of parts. If the biceps dwarf the hands, or the trunk dwarfs the head, you get a freak. Splendor is the shining of intelligence in eye, lip, limb, and skin as the statues of Greek athletes attest.

There is beauty in subjects too. Wonder is the beginning of knowledge — the reverent fear that beauty strikes in us. Each creature is a mirror of its Maker: Ecce! Look!

The ars auxilians proceeds first by information which the poets often criticize as stifling free thought. But in concert with the other notes it makes for harmony. There won't be future Christians unless each generation turns upon its catechetics, those little wheels of perfectly summed-up doctrine. The informationalist error is in its exclusivity. Without erudition and formation, nothing but rote learning indeed is death. However, leaving a polished mind that has been opened to beauty without the safety of exemplary knowledge gives us not so much happy savages as fops. Truth is beauty, beauty truth, but not all you need to know. Boys must be informed. And, having been informed, they are ready to discover what they know. Education in the Latin sense is the chance to learn in every subject what they did in swimming at seven or eight, that the water holds them up. Knowledge is not an act of the will as catechisms sometimes make us think. If "every good boy does fine" in memorizing rules, he tends to think he causes truth. But truth is there. It is not a matter of what we must, but what we do think.

Education is benevolent neglect — provided that right order has been established. Of course we don't pitch children in the sea to sink or swim. They have to touch the slippery lips of waves that slide up the beach, build sand castles, see sudden sweeps of sunlight over choppy water and how beautiful the lifeguards are at work and, imitating them, pretend to do the Australian crawl with one foot hopping on the bottom! This is the way of the ars faciens: polishing children smooth

as stones and forming them by the experience of beauty in the subject studied. Then with information in the ars auxilians give them the rules: Don't go in till half hour after meals. Scissor. Don't kick. Don't bend your knees. And then in education — let them be! Don't force the rules beyond their due. You can't swim for them. Swimming is the remembrance of amniotic bliss.

The ars perficiens applies to teaching first as institution — summing up, making a synthesis, rising to the height of seeing the lay of the land. Remember the three blind men and the elephant — the first, touching the trunk, convinced it was a snake; the second, touching the tusk, convinced it was a soldier with a spear; the third, touching the bulk of the body, convinced it was a wall. Only the man with sight comprehended the beast as a whole. Without rote learning of models, a student is condemned to grope piecemeal on his own.

The second application of the ars perficiens, instruction, proceeds to questioning — in Latin, putting dialogue already learned to use in different but similar situations; in English, proceeding from reading to questions on the meaning of a text; in Math, using memorized tables to work problems.

The ars imitans begins with discipline, laying on the rod. Perhaps the welfare state will not allow it but a boy who never felt the pain and shame of physical subsection will never know the pride and joy of mastery. Without the rod, there is no staff. Laid on those who aren't ready for it, and/or by tyrants, it leads to rebellion and despair or (worse) complacent slavishness — submission to power with neither knowledge nor love. But a disciple who doesn't feel the rod when he needs it has proof of his master's indifference. God is especially tough on those he loves most; the saints say the closer they get to Him the more he disciplines even to printing His wounds in their flesh.

The second phase is a love so personal it moves beyond the rules of art. "Peter, do you love me?" "Lord, you know I do." "Then feed my

3. THE APPLICATION

sheep." it is at this stage that disciples become teachers. The seniors, as sergeants, teach the lower classes, standing in loco magistri. The school has now become a part of them in actu exercitu on the journey they will have to make in exitu Aegypto.

III

Ars Discendi

The Art of Learning

Opening Remarks

A rtists work in a cooperative hierarchy of custodial, dispositive, constructive, and distributive ranks, making something out of nature but not changing the nature of the material they work with. If a carver makes a statue of wood, for example, it remains wood the forester cared for and the lumberman cured and still remains the selfsame wood when he passes it on to the art shop for distribution to customers. Masters of the musical arts in high school receive a child cared for by parents in the nursery and cured by teachers in the gymnasium whom they pass on for finishing in the liberal arts college and distribution in the graduate schools. And, as the carver must understand the nature and disposition of wood, the teacher must understand the psychology, body-types, and temperaments of boys.

1. The Five External Senses

T he art of learning begins with the five external senses. As in all these lists, order is just as important as definition. In the order of intimacy and infant growth, proceeding from things closest to ourselves at the most material level up to those fathest away and most spiritual, they are: tast, touch, smell, hearing and sight. Infants at the breast know only taste, learning touch as they differentiate themselves from their mothers. Taste and touch are allied in their materiality because, in both, the organs change physically in direct proportion to the stimulus — feeling fire, the hand becomes hot; tasting milk. the tongue gets wet. Smell and hearing, which develop next, are halfmaterial, half-spiritual — pungent air twinges the membranes of the nose; spirals of air tickle the inner ear; however, the sensation is not directly proportionate to the stimulus; there is a spiritual reading of the data. Sight stands by itself as purely spiritual, and the last the infant discovers, by which things are perceived at greater distances with no material concomitance — when eyes see red, they keep their native blue or brown.

In the order of learning we come at things in reverse. We first see moving objects on a distant slope. Are they cows or horses? If, as we approach, a whinny sweeps down the wind, we say "horses"; drawing nearer, we confirm the judgment of our eyes and ears by smell and, if we catch one, touch or even taste him — literally, if you want to kiss a

1. THE FIVE EXTERNAL SENSES

horse or metaphorically taking him into yourself by riding.

Teaching the five external senses in gymnastic should be the work of elementary schools, but they have been so badly mechanized their graduates are totally deprived or, at best, know "nature" pasteurized at summer camps,

Ecumenically super, prelapsarianly clean self-composting toilet paper UPS from L.L. Bean!

Much of our work, therefore, will be remedial.

Sight, the highest and most intellectual of the exterior senses, gives us beauty's definition — id quod visum placet. Thus the view from every window of our school will please in all of its five modes. Quiet beauty, nothing exotic or spectacular. Man is made for middle landscapes. Deserts, jungles, Himalayas are for gods and beasts, exciting horror, not the reverential fear of wonder, the beginning of knowledge. Since the principle mode of beauty is forma (the appearance of a nature in its sensible aspects) the landscape must have a nature comprehensible to us. Savage places, by definition vast and wild, are beyond sensible measure; and, at the opposite extreme, cities and suburbs are beneath it because they don't have natures; they are irrational monstrosities constructed against nature to substitute for it, unlike the classic, human city which complements and perfects its people and place — like the towers of Siena or Assisi long their hilltops lifting the landscape up into themselves and riding off with banners!

The campus, having species, must be well-proportioned, with pleasing shapes and colors; its decor, cascades of flowers and striped awnings with a lace of vine and cloud and under starry skies at night, away from the indecent glare of city lights; its pulchritudo, a pliant, tensile

strength (our building aren't pyramids but structures light with glass); its comfortable amoenitas something like the sight of home around a curve, through trees, with smoke rising from the chimneys.

Sounds must be beautiful too, in all five ways. Far from the madding crepitations of gas engines and the tickle of computer glitches, there is rest and peace in the sough of winds and the shouts of boys at play.

Industrial odors are so odious whole industries have been created to do away with them. For us there will be lilacs in spring, dahlias in fall, wood smoke in winter with animal manures, and human sweat all year long!

Americans are scared of touch and taste because, as decadent Puritans, we can't distinguish the erotic from the prurient; and, with the rise of so-called civil rights, our cities have turned into mobs of strangers where sense contact is dangerous. But schools are faculties of friends and their disciples. Teaching nasus, tweak Tom's nose and, when you get to puls and panis, eat, because when bodies change in proportion to things, we get an intimation of reality in its concreteness impossible with sight, hearing, and smell. Doubting Thomas touched the Blessed Wounds to know his Lord and God, an when we taste the Blessed Sacrament, this Lord and God becomes our flesh.

2. The Four Interior Senses

T here are four interior senses: 1) The sensus communis puts the separate data of the external senses into wholes. We don't sense red, sour, and juicy but this crab apple. Popular science, spreading the habit of analysis outside the laboratory, confounds the common sense. Boys have to start with the appearances of things — no telescopes, microscopes, and dissections, but whole things as they are to us in ordinary life.

1. The Sensus imaginativus forms images first passively, as imagination which stops and holds moving reality; second actively, as imagining which splices images together making dreams and poems.

Aristotle says intelligence is seen in one's ability to make metaphors — not fancying, not making up imaginary things, but seeing real similitudes; and poetry is the principal subject training this. Poems are instruments by which the art in the artist becomes art in the reader so that he sees as the poet did. Short of intellect, which by abstraction isolates the intelligible content of reality, imagination is a way of knowing universals in particulars, at once a prerequisite to intellection and a great, subsistent good in itself as the only way mysteries can be intimately known, not as abstracted universals but particular things

1. The sensus aestimativus, the estimative or cogitative sense (also called practical reason), is most like reason because it recognizes the intentions of things, that is, it senses them as amicable or hostile. It

is called "cogitative" because it "co-agitates" images, making a kind of sensible syllogism, concluding either to advance or flight. Beware of Charlotte's web whose spider was a girl's best friend; Miss Muffet had the sharper estimative sense!

Allied to this is estimative metaphor or wit, the Anglo-Saxon word for "know," by which you don't find likeness in unlike things, but unlikeness in things that are alike, exposing pretense and platitude.

1. The Sensus memorativus, in its passive voice, memory, discerns images as past or future; and in its active voice, reminiscence, calls them to the present either from the past (in recollection) or from the future (in prophecy).

All the senses, exterior and interior, are learned by practicing. You sharpen the senses against themselves like scissors — sight by seeing, memory by memorizing, wit by verbal wrestling.

3. The Four Emotions

T he emotions or affections are "affects" not "effects"; they happen by way of otherwise directed action. A Latin vestige of the Indo-European middle voice, deponent verbs, are described in grammars as having a passive form and an active meaning; they are actually a way of comprehending the special kind of reality grasped in emotion. There are things we do and things done to us but also things we at once do and have done to us — like dying, falling in love, wondering, fearing, speaking (the welling up of speech, giving utterance, not simply saying), delaying, following. When someone dies what does he do? Do you follow or, in following, are you led? The psalmist calls his utterance a belch!

Eructavit cor meum verbum bonum

Such verbs express emotion reality, a way of understanding otherwise incomprehensible experience.

There are four cardinal emotions (cardo means "hinge") on which the many others turn: joy, hope, sadness, and fear. Fear and sadness are irascible reactions to evil — fear as motion away to avoid it, sadness as resting in it when you can't flee. Hope and joy are concupiscible and have a similar relation to good — hope, a motion toward; joy, a resting in.

1. In the order of learning, fear comes first and there are two kinds: proper and reverential. Vereor is Latin for "I fear," in the proper sense

of the desire to flee; revereor, which also means "I fear," is the response, not to evil in the object, but the limitations in ourselves. It means respect for persons in piety (the emotion, not the virtue) and for things in wonder. There can be no advance in knowledge beyond the lower senses without this emotion because the first intelligible fact about any person or thing is that it is a creature created by God and governed through laws administered by angels. Whenever anything presents itself to a well-ordered man, he has an impulse not to interfere without a license. God issues interfering powers to promote the common good; but, before their exercise, that first emotion must be there of hesitation and respect.

This is obviously true of things above us, but, because of their angels, it is true of peers and inferiors as well; and it is also true of peers and inferiors because, according to the law of subsidiarity, each thing has its own inviolable worth. Children must be trained, but with a sense of awe before such marvelously constructed creatures given over to our charge. Interfere we must, but with a startled eye, a skip of the heart, a catch in the throat.

• 1. Sadness is the sensible response to unavoidable evil on earth, the fact of sad mortality, the lachrymae rerum, subject of much poetry; and, in Heaven, the complacent contemplation of the justly damned whom we (and God) still love.
• 1. Hope is an appetite for good, supernatural because God will not renege on His promises, natural because the ultimately created fact is that, just as existence is prior to and infinitely more powerful than non-existence, so good is to evil — is in fact its existential cause.
• 1. The highest emotion is joy, rest in the possession of good; concupiscible indeed, it is a wound from Cupid's arrow. Concupiscence in moral theology is sensible sin; in psychology, it is the highest sensible motive of all action, essential to learning and to everything else. Joy is fructus, the ripe fruit of green desire. Puritans, confusing the moral and

3. THE FOUR EMOTIONS

psychological, think the best way to control emotion is to exterminate it. But joy is the marriage of love and knowledge. Let Saints Thomas and Bonaventure graciously maintain each other's positions, forever in the Circle of the Sun about which is prior, love or knowledge — both are joy! Radix malorum cupiditas. Radix bonorum too. Cupid in himself is not evil; it is the abuse of him that kills — or his absence. In every love, in every friendship, underneath the major theme of selflessness and sacrifice, he plays his magic flute. In Willa Cather's Shadows on the Rock, the venerable Archbishop of Quebec, suspecting he has encountered Christ in the half-frozen street urchin one bitter Christmas Eve, takes him to his quarters for some food and sleep. Above the throbbing basses of his charity, you hear the soft erotic melody as the old man bathes him in the sudsy warmth of water and then gravely dries each little limb with a towel.

4. The Will

T he great bifurcation of the mind divides the senses which we share with animals from the intellect which we share with angels. Each is divided in turn — the senses into exterior and interior; the intellect into will and intellect properly speaking.

In the order of existence, intellect proceeds will — you can't choose what you don't know; in the order of learning, will precedes intellect — unless the will is rectified, intelligence can't operate. As Boethius says in a famous figure, the drunk man can't even find his own house.

Training the will is college work. The liberal art of grammar analyzes sentences and rhetoric, as the art of moral discourse, and drama, which, representing human acts, clarifies motives — of the characters and by means of them, as in a mirror, of ourselves.

Will operates in three acts. 1) Synderesis, the instinctive, natural, instructed intuition of first moral principles. Everyone knows the good must be done. If you opt for evil, then, like Satan, evil is your good, so it is still the good you seek! And everyone knows the will is free. If it were not, it wouldn't be what it is — the faculty of choice. If acts were determined they wouldn't be acts. In the political arena where powers of persuasion often triumph over truth, sophists invented "your truth — my truth," "your good — my good" and came up with tricky ways of making determinism plausible; but, in real life, anyone who ever made a choice, knows perfectly well he made it.

Synderesis is a natural instinct, and its principles are self-evident. However, as with principles of reason, they are not self-evident to everyone except in a general way. Anyone can see that something isn't nothing and that nothing can't make something. But only the gifted few in any generation, grasp the nature of causality. And of course, since we are fundamentally damaged by sin and weakened by bad custom and habit, the clarity of nature is obscured. This is why gymnastic (the training of the exterior senses) and music (the training of the interior senses) is necessarily dispositive to a right use of the will, and the will to intellect.

• 1. Conscience, is the act of will by which the first principles grasped in synderesis are applied in a general way to types of choice. The Ten Commandments are precepts of conscience. Synderesis is given in nature; conscience learned, first from custom (the habits of the nation) and then in law, correcting them in the light of reason and Revelation but conscience is neither formed nor compelled by science. Spinoza made up an ethical geometry purporting to compute decisions, and tyrannical prelates have acted as if they believed, contrary to Faith, that the will of others is determined by blind obedience to themselves, but conscience is an act — directed by precept and corrected by retribution according to the rule of custom as criticized and codified by Church and civil law but performed by the agent who alone with God can know the secrets o his heart.
• 1. Judgment, is the final act of the will by which we apply the commandments of conscience here and now. There are four cardinal virtues (permanent habits) directing its operations: In the order of learning, temperance, courage, justice, and prudence.

Virtue is the rule over the exterior and interior senses — not a crushing, but rational control. Reason rides emotion like an expert horseman on a spirited horse. In the gymnastic and musical modes, temperance is prefigured in stories, games, and the lessons

school life teaches in a general way about what is too little and too much. At college, temperance and courage are directly practiced in fraternities (drinking clubs) and on the football field. Schools don't have fraternities or combat sports; their games and dances don't teach virtuous control of emotions but rather awaken and refine them.

Beyond both school and college, when the youth enlists in social, economic, and military life, justice and prudence are learned by experience. For adolescents, justice is a code, and prudence trusts in the counsel of teachers.

Opposed to the cardinal virtues are the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice, gluttony, carnality. Boys can sin but haven't formed virtues or vices. Against bad habits, the school forms good ones in the daily routine, competitive (but not combative) games, emulation of fictional heroes, and the good example of teachers. In teaching literature at school, motives aren't analyzed; character is taken as it is: Macbeth was ambitious, granted; but the play is not a treatise on ambition. Leave that to college grammar. The moral of a tale is nothing to the richness of its being. The effect of premature moral abstraction is that boys either secretly reject virtue as impossible, scarcely having felt a real emotion to control, or stupidly submit in blind obedience to a negative concept of will as nothing but "shall not," thinking that by keeping out of Hell they can get to Heaven.

On n'est pas serieux, quand on a dix-sepi ans. — Un beau soir, foin des bocks et de la limonade, Des cafes tapageurs aux lustres eclatants! On va sous les tilleuls verts de la promenade…

Nuit de juin! Dix-sept ans! — On se laisse griser. La seve est du champagne et vous monte a la tete… On divague; on se sent aux levres un baiser

4. THE WILL

Qui palpite la comme une petite bete…

What is ambition to Seventeen — when the sap in the trees and his blood makes him drunk, and the print of an imagined kiss throbs on his lips like an insect?

Perhaps he has bitten the apple of sin, but vice hasn't clamped him in its cold, iron jaws nor virtue in its bracelets of gold.

5. The Intellect

I ntellectual conception is divided by its active and passive operations: Presented with an image, the agent intellect illuminates the intelligible content of it which the possible intellect conceives as an idea. In judgment — a reflex action back to the thing — idea and thing are joined or divided in positive or negative propositions ("This is a tree; it is not a dog") and reason composes and divides propositions into proofs ("Trees are living things; this is a tree; therefore this is a living thing"). Cognition, from co+nasci, "to be born together," is an implicit syllogistic knowledge whose middle term is one's self by which we know other persons and things because we share their nature — stones since we are made of minerals too, trees because we are alive.

Training the intellect is the work of the college and graduate school. High school boys not only lack sufficient control over their emotions to perfect abstraction and follow arguments, they haven't fully developed their emotions in the first place. Saint Thomas calls poetry scientia infima because it is lowest in the scale of abstraction, furthest from pure intellect, and therefore from angels and God. Per se it is infima but quoad nos, just as love is higher than knowledge, poetry is higher than science. Intellect is formed in schools only in the preliminary way and indirectly. Rational animals abstract universals from particulars at all ages, but boys can't handle strings of them without the concrete things

5. THE INTELLECT

in hand. An argument for them is common sense: What goes up comes down. What lives dies. The liberal arts and sciences overload their brains, short-circuit knowledge of particulars, and turn out smart brats who argue about everything in a vacuum. If you say let x be a horse, the budding sophist thinks a horse is x. The "Great Books" teachers of the last generation admitted children to college at twelve who became "Quiz Kids" on radio and television shows, ending up not only fools but misfits and suicides. Childhood has rights and needs. Forcing college courses down to schools is presumptive arrogance, an enemy of children and of science itself.

6. The Temperaments and Body Types

A ll this complex physical and psychological structure, if followed in order, constitute the art of learning, the matter of which teaching is the form. It is the work of learners to present themselves to teachers as sensitive, emotional, voluntary, intelligent persons according to the ars discendi and, according to the ars docendi, of teachers to polish, form, inform, educate, institute, instruct, discipline and give a good example.

However, these basic structures are modified by several other forces acting on the body and mind. I have already touched on age and sex. You don't teach the same things in the same way to infants at home, boys at school, and young men at college nor to girls. Another natural limit is temperament: phlegmatic, choleric, sanguine, or melancholy. As modes, the temperaments are not exclusive but correlative — each person has them all but bears the signature of one. You can't make a phlegmatic into a choleric boy without a nervous breakdown (his and yours). Phlegmatic is slow, choleric angry, sanguine companionable, melancholy reserved. Temperaments are natural dispositions, not moral habits; one is not better than another nor is anyone responsible for them. Each has its virtues and difficulties and each participates to some extent in all so that, while one may be predominately phlegmatic and find joy in systems (like Saint Thomas), he still is capable (like Saint Thomas) of righteous indignation, good cheer, and contemplative

6. THE TEMPERAMENTS AND BODY TYPES

prayer. A Temperament is something like a station in life; it is our job to realize the best in it and a disaster if we try to change.

The same is true of body types: mesomorphic, endomorphic, ectomorphic — muscular, fat, thin. You can't make ectomorphs into football linemen or get endomorphs to sprint. Mesomorphs can do just about anything physical but are less agile in imagination than ectomorphs and less convivial than endomorphs. Teachers must adjust to these limits of their art but not use them as excuses as if they were impediments or accusations as if they were faults. Every body type and temperament has been the stuff of sanctity — Saint Francis de Sales's sanguine imagery, Saint Thomas Aquinas's phlegmatic syllogisms, Saint Jerome's choleric blasts, Saint Bernard's melancholy elegiacs.

7. Poetic Theme

A subject is what you think; a theme, is the reason why you think it. There are four classes of themes deriving from the grades of knowledge: poetic, rhetorical, dialectical, and scientific. Note that poetry is knowledge. 1) Science in the classical sense is the grasp by the intellect of absolutely certain truths understood in their causes. Very little experience is subject to the rigorous analysis necessary for it. 2) Dialectic, less than absolute, can be wrong but offers proofs "beyond reasonable doubt"; it is the kind of knowledge tested in laboratories and law courts and is restricted to those cases where evidence can be weighed under objective conditions. 3) Rhetoric fills the wider space of politics and business where decisions are made on the basis of evidence not subject to strict verification, where, persuaded rather than convinced, we hold to one side of a dispute despite reasonable doubts because it seems like common sense. We think a candidate or policy is good, admitting that, because there are so many variables, we may be wrong. 4) Poetry is the knowledge of experience — a much-abused word. In this degree, we are convinced a course is right because we trust its advocate. Newman illustrates its power with an incident in British history. When Parliament had spent several hours of dialectical and rhetorical debate on policies of war, the Duke of Wellington strode in, said simply, "Do this and this" and immediately carried the day —

7. POETIC THEME

because, as Newman says, it was not just any opinion he gave, but his, the Duke of Wellington's.

To most of life's grave issues, science, dialectic, and rhetoric are blind; their reasons cannot penetrate to mysteries like love and war or why a sinner hopes for his redemption. Couples marry, religious take vows and penitents pray for reasons they know but can't see.

These words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed. If that thy bent of love be hon'rable, Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow By one that I'll procure to come to thee Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite, And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

Come after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. And immediately leaving their nets, they followed him.

Lord God of hosts, how long wilt though be angry against the prayers of thy servant? How long wilt thou feed us with the bread of tears?

At the risk of playing the Bourgeois Gentleman's professor, I believe the breaking up of families and nations is due in great part to the recession of poetic habit. If adolescent lovers spoke to one another like Romeo and Juliet, there would still be shameful social problems, to be sure; but, given such a voice, at least they would be significant, the light and dark in them revealed, if not repented and redeemed and not this cold, objective malice of their scientific prevention and extinction. Of course, the crisis in civilization is due to the loss of Faith, but poems are the food of faith. Since grace perfects nature,

Revelation presupposes poetry.

Orthodox apologists in the rhetorical order have put forth arguments of such persuasive clarity they surely must move men of goodwill to want the Faith of their fathers back. But good wills don't abound. Our journalists, like good lawyers, have made by far the better case; but where are twelve men tried and true? We have eloquence and proof to move mountains but are living in the Cities of the Plains. "We have given our hearts away" and no amount of reason moves a heartless man. Rhetoric, dialectic, and science, like the upper sections of a pyramid, depend upon the base. Without the rectitude of sense, emotion, and will, which poetry aligns, the higher mental faculties collapse. Science at the apex, if put to the service of a disordered self — as Satan proves — isolates and strengthens error.

Infernal world and thou profoundest Hell Receive thy new possessor: one who brings A mind not to be chang'd by place or time. The mind is its own place and in itself Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n

Knowledge is a habit of the mind. And habits must be practiced. First imperfectly on easy, everyday examples, proceeding with increasing difficulty up to the level of second nature. Forcing heavy weights on those whose mental muscles have not developed only strains whatever strength there is. The only way to restore the lost habit of poetry is to make small efforts on ordinary material, learning by continual use of the great anthology of English verse and the daily playfulness of whatever powers we have ourselves in writing our own Valentines and Christmas cards.

From something seen, you can infer unseens — in fact, unseeables, which is why poetic knowledge isn't admissible evidence in labora-

7. POETIC THEME

tories and lawcourts — "evidence" comes from videre, "to see" — but is a prerequisite to Heaven. Plays on words, plays on famous words (allusions), wit (playing the fool), half-wit (mixing heavy and light), even mere dexterity and cleverness are ways to catch in joy (because we know the happy ending) the dominant sadness of life. No matter what the subject or mood — sublime, contentious, serious, or silly in every poem there is a solemn moment where, at least implicitly, we are touched, as Milton says the world was on the "Morning of Christ's Nativity," by

Such Music (as tis said) Before was never made, But when of old the sons of morning sung. While the Creator great his constellations set, And the well-ballanc'd world on hinges hung. And east the dark foundations deep, And bid the welt'ring waves their oozy channel keep.

Oh, poetry is pretty stuff, they say, but in this desperate war, idle pleasure must be sacrificed for the survival of civilization and the Church. Well, soldiers without poetry are gangsters, hired guns, blind means with neither love nor knowledge of the end, who never will achieve the end because the End is Truth, not a concept but three Persons only known in beauty both on earth and as it is in Heaven.

The Order of Learning

The Senses

The 5 Exterior Senses

• 1.Sight
• 1. Hearing
• 3.Smell
• 1. Touch
• 1. Taste

The Emotions

• Irascible
  • Fear
    • Proper
      • prudential
      • servile
    • Reverential
      • pious
      • wondrous
  • Sadness
• Concupiscible
  • Hope
  • Joy

The 4 Interior Senses

• 1. Common
  • a.imagination
• 1. Imaginative
  • a.imagining
  • b. cognition
• 1. Estimative
  • a. wit
  • b. memory
• 1. Memorative
  • a. reminiscence

7. POETIC THEME

The Will

The Intellect

• intuition
  • agent intellect
• conception
  • o possible intellect
• reason
• judgment
• (intellectual)

IV

The Enclosed Garden

Hortus Conclusus

The Nursery Books

I nfant learning is accomplished at home in kitchens, yards, neighbors' yards and especially gardens — kindergarten is the German term for nursery school. Under the guidance of parents, uncles, aunts, older brothers and sisters, boys learn to tie their shoes, make their beds, do chores, count and read. From five or six on, they an be given the care of plants and animals from whom they learn the love of creatures.

Nursery learning is pre-knowledge; experimental and experiential, it is tentative, not integral (not a unity of parts) but amoebic, taking different shapes while remaining simply one. There are no subjects or fixed horarium except the household's — we get up in the morning, eat, work, play and go to bed at night. Little boys are handymen and dreamers; by day they carry water, empty slop, put out the cat, maintain fires, weed gardens, feed chickens, count the the egg, follow their fathers around at their work (if it is the kind that can be followed) and still spend most of the time living the best part of the boy's life in play and, in the evenings, listen to their elders read aloud the classic children's books, looking at the pictures and print until they start to read themselves. Games are learned in neighborhood gangs. For play, few toys are best — guns, lead soldiers, stuffed animals.

Since language is the distinguishing property of reason, the formal principle of the human species, learning to listen, talk, read and write

is the chief work of schools from the nursery through college Reading is the horse of culture, carrying the burden of "the best that has been thought and said" and that includes the classic children's books which must be read with all our senses, heart, and mind. Phonics, "look-see" and the like teach words as signals ("this" means "that") as if language were a set of counters for exchange. But letters are

…the viewless wings of Poesy, Though the dull brain perplexes and retards.

They are a song you have to guess the meaning of. Reading is like listening to the nightingale:

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs, But in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn, and the pastoral eglantine; Fast fading violets cover'd up in leaves; And mid-May's eldest child. The coming musk-rose, full of dewy wine, The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves.

The education crisis isn't about knowledge, method, time, and money but the fact that you can't give what you don't have. If you want children to be good, be good. If you want them to go to Heaven, get there first and pray them up. if you don't read, they won't — that is, if you don't read the classic grown-up literature, especially poetry, and obviously enjoy and take it seriously, your children won't read theirs. And, of course, as everybody says, throw out the television set. Bad

THE NURSERY BOOKS

culture drives out good. Throw out the hi-fi too. You can't have music in the home unless you make real music in the home. Mothers must play the piano even if they thump and fathers violins.

What, no Gieserking playing Scarlotti? Gieserking was a prodigy. From birth, he practiced scales until, by five, all his fingers struck the keys with equal strength. The rest of it, he said, was reading scores. A genius and a freak. Fingers don't strike equally. Let there be circuses and concert halls. Fallen men will have his card sharks, fortune tellers, acrobats, and musical virtuosi. Let gypsies steal some children out of every generation to make their number up — but not our boys.

Since reading is by far the greatest part of what resembles schooling, I have listed the few and only needful nursery books along with some observations on them, noting editions, and especially illustrators. These are the classic books; there are no others. English literature has been done and can't be done again, the best since Greece and Rome, full of beauty, good and truth — and protestant. Attempts to make up rival lists are like the marketing of California grape juice as if it were wine. Culture is a fact, not a new invention or a product. It will be said that this or that in the school I propose is not Catholic. The same was said of stars in the High Middle Ages when textbooks renamed the pagan planets and constellations — Jupiter to David, the sun to Solomon! Well, as the Children of Israel took Egyptian gold and silver vessels on the Exodus, so it is with us. Besides, the classic stars and classic English books, though pagan and Protestant, are doubly Catholic to a Catholic because he feels the pain of what they lack. Schoolboys will wonder how they could recover from the pranks of Tom and Huck without Confession and High School boys will weep at natty Bumpo's noble death where not a syllable was heard of the salvific Name.

1. Mother Goose

T he best American Mother Goose is the one complied from John Newberry's classic English Eighteenth-century edition by Munroe and Francis in 1833 in Boston with lively woodcuts by an anonymous artist who knew real country life. Mother Goose herself, in the famous "Praface," sets our sights correctly:

"My dear little Blossoms, there are now in this world, and always will be, a great many grannies beside myself, both in petticoats and pantaloons, some a deal younger, to be sure, but all monstrous wise and of my own family name.

These old women, who never had chick or child of their own, but who always know how to bring up other people's children, will tell you with long faces that my enchanting, quieting, soothing volume, my all-sufficient anodyne for cross, peevish, won't-becomforted little bairns, ought be laid aside for more learned books, such as they could select and publish.

Fudge! I tell you that all their batterings can't deface my beauties, nor their wise prattlings equal my wiser prattlings; and all imitators of my refreshing songs might as well write another Billy Shakespeare as another Mother Goose—we two great poets were born together, and shall go out of the world together.

No, no, my melodies will never die,

1. MOTHER GOOSE

While nurses sing, or babies cry.

Billy indeed! Nothing in Shakespeare matches her very first, famous song:

Little boy blue, come blow your horn, The sheep's in the meadow, the cow's in the corn, What! is this the way you mind your sheep, Under the haycock fast asleep?

Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, more complex, profound, and moral, are less superficial and therefore less reflective of the truth. In the woodcut, Little Boy Blue, a plump and somewhat scowling, farmer's lad sprawls beneath a haycock, without a sheep in sight, although there are complacent cows; and in the background, under kindly clouds, a church spire lifts its rural praise above the distant village.

On page two, just opposite from Boy Blue's beneficent laziness, riot runs.

There was a mad man, And he had a mad wife… And upon a made horse they all of them got.

In the woodcut you see the crazy couple flee from their burning house on a crazy horse about to smash an empty whiskey bottle under his charging hooves.

Without the habit of these rhymes in earliest childhood, Shakespeare's or anyone's poetry will always be a learned thing, known as if in translation. Most parents today are themselves without such roots. The hope is that the principle of life is ormant in the broken off branch and, given the right conditions, will sprout. Whatever positive

things we can do, one negative rule is sure: Stay away from the culture industry. The universities and literary journals have revised the classic English canon and made up new anthology of alien noise purporting to be poetry. Go back to "cold plum porridge":

The man in the moon came down too soon To inquire the way to Noridge; The man in the south, he burnt his mouth With eating cold plum-porridge.

They say one has an "ear" for "verse" but swallow the words as well as the stuff as you watch the picture above the lines — on the right, the vulgar man from the south sitting at his dish; on the left, a serious boy in Knickerbockers descending from a crescent moon through misty clouds.

You can't get verse from manuals that teach ta-tum, ta-tum but miss the lively measure. Note how the plump word "plum" demands a stress in the saying though the meter makes it slack.

With EATing COLD plum-PORRidge.

Or try the tune to which boys turned ropes for girls to jump:

ONE, TWO — BUCKle my SHOE; THREE, FOUR — OPen the DOOR.

A reason for the indefectibility of souls in heaven is their happiness so happy they can never sin. Tolstoy says of Natasha at her first walz,

She was at that highest pitch of happiness when one becomes completely good and kind, and disbelieves in the very possibility

1. MOTHER GOOSE

of evil, unhappiness, and sorrow.

And so it is while jumping rope or turning it or eating cold plumporridge. Or when you whirl about until the world whirls with you and you fall down drunk on the dizzy ground:

Round about, round about, Gooseberry pie, My father loves good ale, And so do I.

The best Mother Goose in format and binding is the Volland edition first published in 1915 and reissued by Rand McNally, the map company. The verses have been smoothed and sweetened just a bit but not too much and the illustrations by Frederick Richardson, if not quite in the earth like the ones in Munroe and Francis, are down to it and rhyme is nowhere better learned than in the opening song:

Old Mother Goose, when She wanted to wander, Would ride through the air On a very fine gander.

Anyone who has that soft sound "wander/gander" in his head will have the right receptors.

Leafing through the Volland Mother Goose, page after page, you see the founding character of English culture — Peter Pumpkin Eater, Little Bo Peep and the rest — in sharp snap-shots of their courtesy and cant:

On a misty, moisty morning.

When cloudy was the weather. I chanced to meet an old man Clothed all in leather.

He began to compliment, And I began to grin, How do you do, and how do you do? And how do you do again?

Though it may sound pretentious to say so, there is a mystery in all these cats, dogs, horses, cattle, pigs, trees, grass, crooked walls, jolly boys, nasty old men and saucy girls. Lyrics lift us up beyond our ken; defying gravity, they show us things sub specie aeternitatis.

2. Peter Rabbit

T he best thing about Beatrix Potter's books is the snug little houses the animals live in. Benjamin Bunny's, for example, has a comfortable sofa in the parlor and a kitchen outfitted with little pots, dishes, even little forks and spoons. Tenants in a foreign tenement for so long, we have forgotten what home is like until we read these books. The critics say a child can recognize himself better in "realistic" tales that deal with cars and rocketships. What does a six year old darling of the working mother know (they say) of rising dough or the yeasty smell of baking bread? Well, what is at stake here is nothing less than the definition of the human race as a species whose ladies are "makers of bread." For most of us today, the house we live in isn't home. To find their way back, children must have pictures in their minds of what to look for.

In Apple Dapply's Nursery Rhymes, Beatrix Potter hums:

In somebody's cupboard There's everything nice, Cake, cheese, ham, biscuits, — All charming for mice!

The picture shows the hearth and the biscuits spread with jam made from wild strawberries picked in summer meadows by children (and

mice) who licked the spoon when the fruit was sugared, boiled, and sealed in tightly lidded jars.

Play and fantasy seem alike but play is the combination of two or more things that could go together in real life and just don't happen to. Mice don't happen to eat with forks and spoons but eat they certainly do. Animals don't talk but have consciousness; they respond to tone of voice if not the rational content of words. A flying horse is play, a flying elephant fantasy. When horses run with manes and tails loose in the wind, they really seem to fly; an elephant with wings is an absurdity. Play is so real in the Peter Rabbit tales that even Mother Goose might be jealous; and feminists must fret because, instead of punishing the old woman who lived in a shoe for her indecent fecundity, as they do in the latest versions such as "Father Gander" (really!), Miss Potter shows a dancing-slipper house crammed with a family of happy mice. Mice really live together close like that and in slippers if they happen to find them — at least in homes still uncontrolled by extermination and family planning services. Nor is this home a nicey-nicey place. Peter Rabbit's father ended up in Mrs. McGregor's stew.

3. Kate Greenaway

A Apple Pie is the sweetest way to learn one's ABC's. The letters are crisply cut, and the verses are perfectly turned. The refined little fictional girls make real ones want to be less common and real boys more discerning of them. The only disappointment is the apple pie itself which looks like a sliced soccer ball.

The pretentious edition of Miss Greenaway's delightful variations on Mother Goose issued by the Metropolitan Museum is proof of how the estimative sense has been destroyed by half century of modern art. Her delicate colors are framed in horrid pinks they put on rock albums. Fortunately, Crown Books puts out a better buy, Kate Greenaway's Family Treasury which includes A Apple Pie, The Book of Games, Marigold Garden, and Under the Window. The larger format and truer colors compensate for the pasteboard binding and low-grade paper.

A Book of Games not only has the lovely pictures one expects, but a nice, neat prose explaining the rules for traditional games like Hop Scotch and Hide and Seek. In an age of mechanical toys and organized sports, one is grateful for this modest restoration of natural gymnastic. For example:

Skipping

Two children each hold one end of a rope, and stand so that

turning it just touches the ground in the middle. How fast they turn entirely depends on the skipper. Two can skip at the same time over the rope if it is a fairly long one. In skipping singly it is more graceful to watch if the rope is thrown backward over the head rather than forward under the feet.

She means the feet of modest girls in Kate Greenaway dresses and graceful it is, as the pictures prove. Feminists will fret again at "Follow My Leader" which begins,

An active and daring boy should be chosen as leader, the others follow him one behind the other.

How feminine she is! Except for tops and marbles, all the games included girls — from whom rough boys learn courtesy.

4. Caledcott

R andolph Caldecott is rough and ready, even rowdy, every line full of force. Not just the faces but the knees and elbows, the very pebbles and the grass all the way to the wisp of smoke on the horizon! The crackling wit of his inspired cartoons will strike sometimes into an unexpected loveliness, as in the winter scene from "Four and Twenty Blackbirds." Look at the greedy boy whose fat soul flows in every gesture, even into the threads of his ill-fitting overcoat. As he waits to spring the catch, the trees bend forward listening, the landscape holds its breath, the startled cows, even the haycock and the curious house, watch and wait with this confident, country Bitzer.

Fredrick Warne, the original publisher of the best British children's books, has sixteen little volumes of Caldecott's nursery rhymes, each a masterpiece. The larger, single-volume Crown edition permits an entry into the landscape the smaller ones forbid. Best to have them both. Best to have all the Caldecott there is.

5. A Child's Garden of Verses

R obert Louis Stevenson, like Miss Greenaway, is more refined than Mother Goose, less rowdy than Caldecott, standing on higher but less solid ground. The vigorous vulgarity is gone, but art is there to compensate. Like his great boys' books for ten to twelve-year-olds, the nursery songs are sophisticated literary expressions of play, catching the right relation of imagination to reality by which real things are taken to represent other real things through resemblance — for example, a staircase with a landing at the top becomes a pirate ship:

We build a ship upon the stairs All make of the back-bedroom chairs…

Or shadows in the living room become a jungle:

Now, with my little gun, I crawl All in the dark along the wall, And follow round the forest track Away behind the sofa back.

These are the hills, these are the woods, These are my starry solitudes;

5. A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES

And there the river by whose brink The roaring lions come to drink.

Even the best-bred English boy will scarcely say "my starry solitudes" — until he reads this poem! It might even be that up until his reading, not only had he never articulated the sensation, but he never had it, which is to say that poetry is not just a means of expression, but of finding out.

Perhaps the best of his play poems is "The Land of Counterpane." Sickness, like so much other traditional culture, has been destroyed by science, along with candles, bells, horse-drawn vehicles, chamber pots, sailing ships, and homemade soup. But Stevenson remembers passing things — which is why the poems are sad; so sad, in fact, that he himself finally sailed off in a ship (though not a pirate ship) to spend the rest of his short life dying of tuberculosis on a South Pacific isle. His sickness, his island, and his descent into childhood quixotically conspired to keep old things alive, at least in memory, against the industrial advance. The human race may survive these losses in the New World Order, but civilization won't survive horses, and ships and certainly not being sick.

When I was sick and lay a-bed, I had two pillows at my head, And all my toys beside me lay To keep me happy all the day.

And sometimes for an hour or so I watched my leaden soldiers go, With different uniforms and drills, Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;

And sometimes sent my ships in fleets All up and down among the sheets; Or brought my trees and houses out, And planted cities all about.

I was the giant great and still That sits upon the pillow-hill, And sees before him, dale and plain, The pleasant land of counterpane.

Stevenson never talks down to children. His verse is serious just like their play. Like Mother Goose's, his meters don't concede to inexperience or ineptitude. English is a stressed language; when we talk prose, the ictus falls where word-accent dictates.

We BUILT a SHIP upon the STAIRS ALL MADE of the BACK BEDroom CHAIRS.

Given a little shove off the landing, it tumbles down into verse —

We BUILD a SHIP uPON the STAIRS…

Then having got the ta-tum of it, we bend back somewhere in between, changing with mood and circumstance. Choral recitation tends to heavily metrical mispronunciation. Gangs of children beat on drums and sing-song verse that way. Reading silently, you rather feel than thump the stress.

A Child's Garden of Verses teaches play as well — as if by a more talented older brother, not in the way of counselors forcing anyone. Play, not fantasy. Fantasy is an abuse of imagination in which images, detached from their origin in external sensation are spliced together

5. A CHILD'S GARDEN OF VERSES

without regard to the real. In honest play lead soldiers charge up hills and ships regard their element — no magic or whimsy but work to be done.

Stevenson reaches towards, but never gets to the visionary experience of Hans Christian Anderson or Genneth Grahame. There is nothing of the mystic in him, no dark nights of sense or soul. But, just this side of them, he is a master of the eerie:

When the bright lamp is carried in, The sunless hours again begin; O'er all without, in field and lane, The haunted night returns again.

Now we behold the embers flee About the firelit hearth; and see Our faces painted as we pass, Like pictures, on the window glass.

Must we to bed indeed? Well then, Let us arise and go like men, And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed.

Though serious about this kind of thing, as Jekyl and Hyde attest, his best poems and books are rather extraordinary — because of the adventurous — experiences of the ordinary world. Though he wasn't a country boy, his best poems praise without extravagance the rural landscape at the end of each street in his small city childhood. Extravagant poets, like Dylan Thomas, "make" the countryside exciting, but Stevenson is natural and quiet.

The friendly cow all red and white, I love with all my heart; She gives me cream with all her might, To eat with apple tart.

A student of Howard Pyle's, Jesse Wilcox Smith, did the best illustrations. her picture of "My Shadow" is a minor masterpiece, the poem a major one.

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, And what can be the use of him is more than I can see… He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

6. Aesop

I llustrations are almost as important in children's books as texts because, just as lyrics lift us up, drawings "draw" us in. One needn't be religious or superstitious to observe things as signs. It is a commonplace of Medieval practice to read the whole Creation like a book — not by symbolism, assigning meanings to things, but what Scholastic philosophers call the intuition of being, the recognition that things exist (from ex+sistere, "to stand out from nothing.") Lustration in ancient Rome was the propitiatory cleansing of the commonwealth, a solemn ceremony taking place every five years after the census. Lustrare means to let light in. It has a thriving family of cognate words: "illustrious" (one whose light shines forth) or "illustration," not only of books but making arguments clearer by example, shedding light on them; the heights of bookmaking were reached in "illuminated" manuscripts and, in the golden age of printed illustration, nineteenthcentury children's books.

The best edition of Aesop's Fables is Thomas Bewick's (pronounced "Buick" like the car) published in 1818. The Dover reprint is prefaced with this just judgment:

All the engravers of the nineteenth century learned from his technique, but no subsequent illustrator of books in England has sustained a vision of comparable profundity.

Cadecott, Cruikshank, Leech, Phiz, Tenniel, Brooke, Crane? Such

sweeping and exclusive praise might seem extravagant, but even the phot0-reproduction, which loses some of the original bite, sustains it. If you compare Bewick's Stag gazing at his image in the pool of Caldecott's (otherwise the best), the difference is something like that between Herrick and Shakespeare. Both meet Dr. Johnson's test as having life, and both are merry. But one is — well, Shakespeare. Caldecott is full of wit and worldly wisdom, with a boisterous love of Merry England's countryside before the industrial blight. See his troop of hunters galloping behind their sniffing dogs of whom the narcissistic stag is quite oblivious! But Bewick, having all of that, has something else precisely named in "illustration." He cleanses the scene in a laver of light.

In the tailpiece to his "Dog in a Manger," two bony horses pull a heavy cart of dung through the mud. The Carter stands beside them looking back at us as we pass, catching the two kinds of "now" — the nunc fluens we watch as it flows by, and the nunc stans, the time we are in, which like the space of Zeno's arrow, we never get out of. Aesop, Bewick illustrates, reverses the relation — the Carter is inside the instant watching us flow by, as in Saint Teresa's vision when Christ on the way of the Cross looks back at her "with his lovely compassionate eyes."

All stories move swiftly, but Aesop has honed his to the instant. And as for persons, not to know the Bible is not to know Moses, David, the Witch of Endor, Saints Peter, Paul, and Eutychius, patron of dozing boys, who fell out of the second-story window in the middle of Saint Paul's all-night sermon; not to know Homer is not to know Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Penelope, Helen. Not to know Aesop is not to know the Dog in the Manger, the Stag in the Pool, the Sensible Ass, the Angler, the Little Fish, the And and the Grasshopper, the Bear and the Bee-Hives, the Belly and the Members, the Crow and the Pitcher, the Cock and the Fox. Bewick's edition, besides, is arranged alphabetically,

teaching the ABC's

7. Grimm's Household Tales

W hen Lysippus was commissioned to make statues of the Seven Sages, he added Aesop as an eighth; Themistocles recited the fable of the Fox and the Hedge-Hog to win a vote in the Athenian Assembly and Socrates spent the last hours before his execution turning a fable into verse. The Bible and Aesop were the first printed English books and remain the best-read ones today. Next comes Household Tales. The Bible is, of course, inspired and Aesop a legend; Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm were rather ponderous collectors who copied down old grannies' tales with high political intentions, deliberately setting out to educate what they hoped would be a new Germanic nation rising out of the old, dismembered Classical empires. They failed, but if civilization survives the present catastrophe at least in someone's memory, along with classical Aesop, it will have Germanic Grimm.

The Household Tales are one step up the scale of sophistication, less simple and profound than Aesop but still less self-consciously literary than Hans Christian Anderson. They are steeped in the mystical moist night air of northern forests beyond the practical scope of Mother Goose and Aesop or the parsimonious prose of a Scot like Stevenson. Even the moral comes with something like the twilight of the gods. When the Fisherman's Wife finally demands to sit on the throne of God Himself, the Flounder, who had granted all her wishes, disappears into

7. GRIMM'S HOUSEHOLD TALES

the deep, and the splendor falls amid the terrible music of disturbed nature.

Leslie Brooke does especially well illustrating the animals in Grimm. The cow, the cock, and the hen in his version of "The House in the Wood," for example, exercise the senses with vivid detail. By listening and watching night after night, a child will learn to see a cow or cock and hen, not cute as in the "wonder books" but as they are, and come to know, without any moralizing, that the nice little girl, unlike her sisters, puts the mild beasts' comforts ahead of her own:

Then the girl went to the stove where the animals were lying, and petted the cock and hen, and stroked their smooth feathers with her hand, and caressed the brindled cow between her horns, and when, in obedience to the old man's orders, she had made ready some good soup, and the bowl was placed upon the table, she said, "Am I to eat as much as I want, and the good animals to have nothing? Outside is food in plenty, I will look after them first." So she went and brought some barley and stewed it for the cock and hen, and a whole armful of sweet- smelling hay for the cow. "I hope you will like it, dear animals," said she, "and you shall have a refreshing draught in case you are thirsty." Then she fetched in a bucketful of water, and the cock and hen jumped on to the edge of it and dipped their beaks in, and then held up their heads as the birds do when they drink, and the brindled cow also took a hearty draught. When the animals were fed, the girl seated herself at the table by the old man, and ate what he had left. It was not long before the cock and the hen began to thrust their heads beneath their wings, and the eyes of the cow likewise began to blink. Then said the girl, "Ought we not to go to bed?"

Between sentimentality and sophistication is the fact that these dumb

animals who sip so solemnly and deserve our love. Kindness and selfishness are physical things that cause effects. The good little sister marries the prince while the nasty elders are "led into the wood to be servants to the charcoal burner." Or, to take the greatest surprise ending in literature, Rumpelstiltskin inadvertently meted out his own punishment when he seized

his left foot with both his hands in such a fury that he split in two, and there was an end of him.

8. Perrault

I n Perrault's Fairy Tales, things are not what they seem. A sophisticate at Louis XIV' Versailles, he happens to tell half a dozen of the indispensable stories as he winks in sly parentheses

All the fairies that could be found in the realm (they numbered seven in all) were invited to be godmothers to the little princess. This was done so that by means of the gifts which each in turn would bestow upon her (in accordance with the fairy custom of those days) the princess might be endowed with every imaginable perfection.

"Those days" implies an invidious distinction between us in the know and stupid old them. In "Tom Thumb" we are told that seven league boots are "fatiguing in the wearer," in "Donkey-Skin" that "Marriage, whatever may be said against it, is an excellent remedy for lovesickness." A parody of Renaissance scholarship is introduced in several tales with variant readings of the text. After all, Perrault says, fairy tales are "make-believe" and half the fun is poking fun at our own inventions.

What might be called the counter-household tale, with roots in Neo-Platonic philosophy runs from Perrault through Lewis Carrol's "Looking Glass" (and C.S. Lewis's) to Tolkien's systematic grotesque

imitated in science fiction. Just opposite — whatever metaphysical or psychological explanations you may have to account for it — the supernatural creatures in traditional tales are rel. When Grimm's old granny talks of witches, she bolts the door.

It is a commonplace of the philosophia perennis that anything, insofar as it exists, is beautiful and good — even Lucifer, Light-Bearer, insofar as he exists; whereas ugliness and sin are privations. Real fairy tales have ugly, evil creatures in them because there really are such creatures — ugly and evil because of what they lack yet beautiful and good because they are. But fantasists delight in the repugnant for itself. In "Sleeping Beauty," the prurient closet cannibaless tee-hees and winks — nothing like an honest Cyclops who simply wants his dinner.

It was whispered at the Court that the Queen had ogrish instincts, and that when little children were near her she had the greatest difficulty in the world to keep herself from pouncing on them.

Blue Beard is a sadist in "Donkey-Skin"

The King, still grieving deeply for his wife, became confused in his mind, and imagining that he was still a young man though his daughter was the maiden he had once wooed to be his wife.

But skip Perrault you can't, for two reasons: the stories are among the best there are, and children who know the transvestite wolf in "Little Red Riding Hood" won't get in his car.

9. Hans Christian Andersen

T he mind is like a doughnut with an outside outside and an inside outside. The hollow trees and cities at the bottom of the sea in Andersen's Fairy Tales occupy the transubjective inner space. "The Little Mermaid," for example, is at once strange and ordinary. Long, elaborate and detailed beyond Aesop and Grimm in literary celebration, a great amount of its force derives from the musical phrasing which elicits a perception of some other, not unreal, but preternatural, world.

the trees and flowers were polypi, half animals and half plants. They looked like serpents with a hundred heads, growing out of the ground. The branches were long, slimy arms, with fingers like flexible worms…human beings who had perished at sea and had sunk down into the deep waters; skeletons of land animals; and oars, rudders, and chests, of ships. There was even a little mermaid whom they had caught and strangled…Outside the castle there was a beautiful garden, in which grew bright-red and dark-blue flowers, and blossoms like flames of fire; the fruit glittered like gold, and the leaves and stems waved to and fro continually. The earth itself was the finest sand, but blue as the flame of burning sulphur. Over everything lay a peculiar blue radiance, as if the blue sky were everywhere, above and below, instead of the dark

depths of the sea. In calm weather the sun could be seen, looking like a reddish-purple flower with light streaming from the calyx.

From a literary point of view, perhaps the ending of the "Little Mermaid" is a failure — the significance runs ahead of the plot and dissolves rather than solves it. But nonetheless some filament has stretched to a reality we marvel at and children understand.

At the end of the "The Little Match Girl," the story and significance perfectly resolve.

But in the corner, at the dawn of day, sat the poor girl, leaning against the wall, with red cheeks and smiling mouth—frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. Stiff and cold she sat, with the matches, one bundle of which was burned.

"She wanted to warm herself, poor little thing," people said. No one imagined what sweet visions she had had, or how gloriously she had gone with her grandmother to enter upon the joys of a new year.

10. The Wind in the Willows

O n frosty nights when the wind whips down the chimney, rattling doors and windows, and we are snug in our wingback chairs sipping hot mulled wine and puffing our pipes, out on the moors and seas, all travelers envy us. Is this little life a momentary fireside in an endless winter night? So the godless say. We know the opposite is true, that here is not our home, because, as Revelation tells us, the home we have is a sign of what we seek. Like Mole and Rat lost in frozen woods we have to find a door.

In the side of what seemed to be a snow-bank stood a solid-looking little door, painted a dark green. An iron bell-pull hung by the side, and below it, on a small brass plate, neatly engraved in sure capital letters, they could read by the aid of moonlight — MR. BADGER

Wind in the Willows is a book of natural mysticism as Andersen's tales are preternatural. Andersen takes us up into the company of spirits, Grahame down inside the minds of animals. We don't just walk, row boats and dine with them but as them, as if we were one of them, and, having got desperately lost in the snow, find Mr. Badger's house.

The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burnt a

fire of logs, between two attractive chimney-corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draught. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodations for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of the Badger's plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and from the rafters overhead hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment.

Fascinated by machines as modern boys are, Toad learns the hard way, by experience, that adventure and technology are incompatible. Critics have suggested breaking Wind in the Willows into two different books, because, while the animals in their natural habitat conform to the norms of fairy tales, in trains and sports-cars they become satiric spoofs. But that is just the point. Toad is a fat, spoiled, sporty English boy who finds out what the modern world is like, is rescued, and gets home.

Nor is the mystical digression at the center of the book, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn," occult. If you have sat at Mr. Badger's table and listened to the Christmas waits at Mole's, you know the earthy ground from which the music of animal's god is heard. They call him Pan; we know he is their unnamed angel who might very well appear to them at the flowery margin of an island:

10. THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS

Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken, tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees—crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.

Grahame makes no concessions to ignorance. he uses words like "diffident" and "imperious" and writes real English prose.

A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodations for the sociably disposed…solemn expectancy…tumultuous water…

A child who reads Wind in the Willows by himself at seven is ready to go to school as the child who can't is not.

V

Gymnasium

The Schoolboy Years

t seven, the infant leaves his nurse's arms to become

A

the whining schoolboy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a snail unwillingly to school…

School is a neighborhood, one-room shack where reading is learned by being read to while following the pictures and print and then silently reading what you heard; writing by writing of real events; counting by counting real things; swimming by swimming in rivers, lakes, mud holes or surf; riding by riding with someplace to go; shooting by shooting at rabbits and squirrels. The elementary school is properly called a gymnasium (from gymnos, "naked") because, though they put on shirts and pants if told, whenever the place and season permit, Tom and Huck strip them off. In co-educational schools, especially with women teachers, girls win all the stars because boys spend half the time resisting itchy collars.

Boys need strong, young masters on the way to something else. Elementary teaching isn't a lifetime calling. A man of forty is too old for boys' gymnastic; with a pot belly and too much experience of shame, he needs all the clothes he can get. Fathers can't do it; mothers certainly can't. You need an outdoor type boys love because they see

him doing things they want to do. Intellectuals baffle and anger them; but if an adolescent on the cusp of youth, still something of a boy himself, shoots down a duck or takes them through a forest in the dead of night and tells a spooky story as they sit around the campfire with their hair on end, they will follow him as if he were a god. And, if he wants to be a high school or college teacher, a few years of chasing schoolboys is an indispensable apprenticeship.

"Element" from elementum, the origin of which, Webster says, is obscure, means the simplest, irreducible substance. The Romans used the term for the letters of the alphabet, from which "elementary school" derives its name as the place where children learn their ABCs. Physicists have always sought some primary substance out of which everything is made. Thales proposed water; Anaximander, earth; Anaxogoras, air; Heraclitus, fire. Empedocles took them all and his doctrine of the Four Elements has dominated the Western world's imagination right up to modern times and, in the sense that the sun rises and sets, it still holds true. Theories about the smallest irreducible bits of matter come and go but from the point of view of ordinary, human experience, Helen descending the stairs in her husband's palace at Mycenae (or Scarlet in Tara) is composed of fire, air, water, and earth, whatever sub-elemental particles they may be made of in turn.

The elements are learned in gymnastic, the teaching mode alerting and sharpening the five exterior senses by direct contact with letters, numbers, and simple things and in naked or semi-clad play.

"Infant" comes from fari, the deponent verb for "to speak"; a "fable," from the same root, is a tale in which animals talk; and, with the negative prefix "in," means "without, or prior to, speech." When infants learn to speak and not just mewl and puke (as the Melancholy Jaques puts it), they turn away from fair tales to things that count and, in a word become boys with new-found, masculine (presexual) powers. They want the facts about horses and ships, cut apron strings and, as

THE SCHOOLBOY YEARS

outlaws, go on long excursions to places parents don't know about where there are no girls. In boys' adventure books, if girls appear at all, they are extrinsic to the story, whereas in adolescent romance they are the origin, progress, and consummation of everything men do.

1. Robin Hood

obin Hood does not begin with "once upon a time" but with a place and date.

In merry England, in the time of old, when good King Henry the Second ruled the land, there lived within the green glades of Sherwood Forest, not far from Nottingham Town, a famous outlaw whose name was Robin Hood

And it ends with a date on a stone:

Here underneath this laitle stean Lys Robert Earl of Huntingtun Nea arcir ver as hie sae geud Sic utlaws as hi an is men Vil England nithir si agaen. Obiit 24 Kal. Dekembris 1247

Boys are outlaws. They seek out caves, build huts in the woods, and communicate by codes. They run away from home, the camomile tea and all that, to test themselves against some independent enterprise. As you know if you've had charge of them, they are essentially subversive, having passed from other-worldly solitude to the very

world companionship of experimental pals.

Though the fact is abused when taken as unalterable, there is a dialectical movement to life. Infants yearn for the Other World; schoolboys scorn anyplace but this one; adolescents recoup the loss in the higher synthesis of romance; youths, repudiating romance, opt for practical action; burnt-out adults give way to the new generation; the old relive their active days preparing for the most practical moment of their lives (their death); the senile dream.

In school books, schoolboys learn about lives they hope to lead with all the gear, tackle, and trim. Place takes precedence over character and plot. The hero gets into a scrape, finds a map, runs off to an island, gets lost in a cave, rafts down a river, sets off to sea, rides up the Chisholm Trail — whatever it is that puts him outside society — and off we go on serial adventure. Howard Pyle's Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is exemplary, both in the story and Pyle's own illustrations which give us thick slices of thirteenth-century Sherwood Forest Life. If you want to shoot a crossbow, this is the textbook. If you want to be an outlaw (and you do) this is the Boy Scout's Guide.

Schoolboys, of course, know their ABCs; but you have to keep stretching them on. If they hear Robin Hood at seven, they will read it again by themselves at eight, while you go on aloud with Smoky.

2. Smoky

M en are either riders or sailors. At the break in life when dreamers in the Other World wake up to this one, they discover horses and ships. Will James is a centaur. he writes and draws from the inside of a horse like no one else, not even Remmington or Russell; and, with the step-by-step see-how as Clint breaks in the Bronk, and all the talk of saddles, ropes, and latigo straps, you get the lore and lingo. You jingle your spurs as you run to school, neck-rein to the left and right, trot, go back to a walk then lope, shy at the tumbling piece of trash, and squint at distant hills. Smoky is a book you ride. teachers complain about "ain'ts" and parents discover their eight-year-olds rolling Bull Durham cigarettes behind the garage. it's true you take up dangerous games and don't learn classic prose, but what are these to breaking in a Mustang (who is you)?

"You sure got your eye on me, aint you, little horse?" Clint would say, "but that's the way I want you to be," he'd go on, "for the more you watch the more you'll see and the quicker you'll learn."

Smoky did watch and see and learn, and then one evening Clint untied the long picket rope from the log and started leading him towards the corral; the little horse was broke to lead by then and he followed easy enough. His heart was a thumping in wonder of what was due to happen as the cowboy led him thru the big pole

gate, he stepped high and careful and his eyes took in everything that looked suspicious,—a slicker hanging over one side of the corral made him snort and try to pull away. Clint talked to him, and kept on a leading him thru another gate into another smaller and round corral. A big snubbing post stuck up in the center of it and by that post was a big brown and shiny hunk of leather. It was Clint's saddle.

The prose may not be classic but it's perfect for the task. "Stepped high and careful" is exactly what the little horse did.

As the love of God is learned in the love of neighbor, the love of neighbor is learned in the love of animals. What we learn from this small book is loving horses who stand above all animals as philosophers to men — even above dogs and other domestic species. Teachers and librarians will tell you that, since horses are no longer economically viable, the book has lost its raison d'etre — if schools and colleges prepare for life, they have to train for jobs. In a natural society, that would be so. According to the division of labor, men are peasants, craftsmen, clerks, or soldiers. The first two learn as apprentices; the latter, as leisure classes, go to school, committing themselves to one of two possible careers: equestrian or naval — soldiers are either knights or seamen; clerks either regulars (bishops and priests who oversee a place) or missionaries (who go overseas). But in an unnatural society like ours, there are neither leisure classes nor commitments. Cowboys ride the range in helicopters and the Navy ships out girls.

In such a world, where success is evil, an honest school prepares its graduates for failure. our boys will grow up sailing-ship sailors or horse-riding cowboys because those are the only noble callings. If they end up in the poor house, noblesse oblige.

Meanwhile, morals presuppose manner and a well-trained horse has the best manner there are. The child who knows a good horse

working under him can see for himself that life depends on doing your job. Suppose a half-ton beast like that rebels? But look how lightly he response to every touch of heel and rein! You have a beast, my child, within, more beautiful and wild than he.

3. Log of a Cowboy

A cattle drive from Texas to Montana is a series of rivercrossings on the long string of a trail. At sixteen, Andy Adams signs on under Jim Flood the foremen with a group of jolly cowboys, young and old: Rod Wheat, Joe Stallings, Ash Borrowstone, Bob Blades, Bull Durham, Fox Quarterknight, Paul Priest, John Officer, Wyatt Roundtree, Quince Forrest, Moss Strayhorn, Billy Honeyman the wrangler and Barney McCann the cook. They start from Mexico with a hundred and forty-two saddle horses in the remuda, a thousand she-cattle, and three thousand beeves. By page twelve, because we're the youngest, stripped half-naked, we swim the Rio Grande,

Fox and I shed our saddles, boots, and surplus clothing and started to meet it. The water was chilly, but we struck it with a shout, and with the cheers of our outfit behind us, swam like smugglers, A swimming horse needs freedom, and we scarcely touched the reins, but with one hand buried in a manehold, and giving gentle slaps on the neck with the other, we guided our horses for the other shore,

And then;

On the morning of April 1882, our Circle Dot herd started on the long tramp to the Blackfoot Agency in Montana. With six men on each side, and the herd strung out for three quarters of a mile, it could only be compared to some mythical serpent or Chinese dragon, as it moved forward on its sinuous, snail-like course.

We cross the Nueces, Altacosa, Colorado, Brazos, Wichita, Pease, Red, Washita, Arkansas, Solomon, with miles of desert between them

Western Kansas was then classified, worthily too, as belonging to the Great American Desert, and most of the country for the last five hundred miles of our course was entitled to a similar description. Once the freshness of spring had passed, the plain took on her natural sunburnt color, and day after day, as far as the eye could reach, the monotony was unbroken, save by the variations of the mirages on every hand… If the monotony of the sea can be charged with dulling men's sensibilities until they become pirates, surely this desolate, arid plain might be equally charged with the wrongdoing of not a few of our craft.

We cross the Kansas and Pacific Railroad which had just been built and trail on north to the Republican and Platte whose North Fork is in flood. At the Forty Islands crossing, the crisis of the drive occurs:

When the last two or three hundred of the tail-enders were leaving the first island for the second, and the men working in the rear started to swim the channel, amid the general hilarity, I recognized a shout that was born of fear and terror. A hushed silence fell over the riotous

3. LOG OF A COWBOY

riders in the river, and I saw those on the sand bar nearest my side rush down the narrow island and plunge back into the middle of the channel. Then it dawned on my mind in a flash that some one had lost his seat, and that terrified cry was for help.

The chapter following on the finding of the body and the burial is unsentimental, romantic, and sad as a ballad. And then, since "we are not the one dead" (as Frost put it in a famous poem) we light out for the Cheyenne, Powder, Yellowstone, and Big Missouri to the wide-open ranges of Northern Montana.

4. Treasure Island

E very time I start this book again, like the animals in Wind in the Willows in the presence of their god, the old awe comes over me; and I think, "This is the best!" Hours of my boyhood days were spent, one leg tied up, hopping on a broomstick crutch, a patch over an eye, quaffing mugfuls of sarsaparilla we pretended was grog, meanwhile, unbeknownst to ourselves and our teachers, drinking in fine language.

A reason for reading is learning to write and Stevenson is a master craftsman. Take Billy Bones's sea chest. Every item in what at first seems a collection of miscellaneous junk reveals and veils a tale:

It was like any other seaman's chest on the outside, the initial "B" burned on the top of it with a hot iron, and the corners somewhat smashed and broken as by long, rough usage.

"Give me the key," said my mother; and though the lock was very stiff, she had turned it and thrown back the lid in a twinkling.

A strong smell of tobacco and tar rose from the interior, but nothing was to be seen on the top except a suit of very good clothes, carefully brushed and folded. They had never been worn, my mother said. Under that, the miscellany began—a quadrant, a tin canikin, several sticks of tobacco, two brace of very handsome pistols, a piece of bar silver, an old Spanish watch and some

4. TREASURE ISLAND

other trinkets of little value and mostly of foreign make, a pair of compasses mounted with brass, and five or six curious West Indian shells. I have often wondered since why he should have carried about these shells with him in his wandering, guilty, and hunted life.

How well we know Jim's mother from the way she estimates the contents. Were the unworn clothes a wedding suit? In those shells, we feel time's bitter mystery. Even Billy Bones was once in love; perhaps with a native girl and he had strolled along the beach some tropical evening on Mexique Bay.

Stevenson is on his way to Cooper, Scott, and Dickens but stops just short of romance — there are no girls in any of his books; and, though character and plot begin to strive for precedence, ships, islands, and the sea prevail.

The plateau being somewhat tilted towards the west, this spot on which we had paused commanded a wide prospect on either hand. Before us, over the tree-tops, we beheld the Cape of the Woods fringed with surf; behind, we not only looked down upon the anchorage and Skeleton Island, but saw—clear across the spit and the eastern lowlands—a great field of open sea upon the east. Sheer above us rose the Spyglass, here dotted with single pines, there black with precipices. There was no sound but that of the distant breakers, mounting from all round, and the chirp of countless insects in the brush. Not a man, not a sail, upon the sea; the very largeness of the view increased the sense of solitude.

The one-legged pirate with a patch on an eye and parrot on his shoulder is one of the half dozen great creations. Like Don Quixote or the Wyf of Bath, he is fixed in our brains forever. How much we would give

even now to find that map and go with him! Denying it, the grown-up boy just whets our appetite (and his):

Of Silver we have heard no more. That formidable seafaring man with one leg has at last gone clean out of my life; but I dare say he met his old Negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small.

The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: "Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!"

5. Kidnapped

K idnapped is a disappointment after Treasure Island; it isn't the best there is. Critics actually prefer it; it meets all sorts of academic standards; even some liberal thought can be extracted if you take the politics seriously. It has been said that if R.L.S. had lived, he might have written a major novel like Meredith or Henry James! The argument seems reasonable: Since boys are less than men, boys' books are less than men's. But sub specie aeternitatis perfection in a lesser sphere shines brighter than the less-than-perfect in a greater. Kidnapped rises to a higher class, perhaps, but fails to reach perfection in it. David Balfour is a sterling boy but not ourselves as Jim Hawkins is, and Alan Breck falls short of myth, a character but not a type. He excites our admiration and we'd love to wander with him in the Highlands but Long John haunts our dreams.

The beginning is vintage boy's book stuff - the precise date, the time of day, the time of life, the leaving of his father's house:

I will begin the story of my adventures with a certain morning early in the month of June, the year of grace 1751, when I took the key for the last time out of the door of my father's house. The sun began to shine upon the summit of the hills as I went down the road; and by the time I had come as far as the manse, the blackbirds were whistling in the garden lilacs, and the mist that

hung around the valley in the time of the dawn was beginning to arise and die away.

The neat economy puts more in front of you than you can see at first. What Stevenson says of the captain is true of himself,

It was plain he meant more by his words than showed upon the face of them.

The first snapshot of Alan Breck in action stands for everything we ever need to know of him:

But there was Alan, standing as before: only now his sword was running blood to the hilt, and himself so swelled with triumph and fallen into so fine an attitude, that he looked to be invincible.

A bonny good adventure, it transports a colonial American boy back to his ancestral highlands and the Scottish honor, poverty, audacity, hilarity, and spunk that still flows in his blood.

6. Tom Sawyer

T he hero of Mark Twain's two great boys' books is the river. It's hard to like Tom Sawyer, a cocky little bully of the kind that used to beat us up, not because he was bigger, stronger, quicker, or better but because he said so all the time and we believed it, a sass, a know-it-all, a "natural born leader" whose famous whitewashed fence has led America into the belief that lying is good business. As for Becky Thatcher, Twain's best defense is that his wife invented her. Yes, she is a girl and central to the plot but still, we haven't anything like romance because the plot isn't central to the story. Mixed of spunsugar candy and spite, Becky holds her own against the boys but the river belongs entirely to them. Boys that age are hard to take; though some redeem the race: Joe Harper is a friend and Huck a natural saint. Twain says they turned out prosperous and happy.

Well, Tom is Twain himself but Huck, I think, lies buried in an unmarked grave on the losing side of the Civil War.

We meet the river first in two short, perfect sentences:

It was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay like an ocean at rest.

And then, a music, without the mythological mischief, better even than the "Piper at the Gates of Dawn." If you want to teach writing, you

won't find a better page for ten-year-olds to practice on.

When Tom awoke in the morning, he wondered where he was. He sat up and rubbed his eyes and looked around. Then he comprehended. It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation. Beaded dewdrops stood upon the leaves and grasses. A white layer of ashes covered the fire, and a thin blue breath of smoke rose straight into the air. Joe and Huck still slept.

Now, far away in the woods a bird called; another answered; presently the hammering of a woodpecker was heard. Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy. A little green worm came crawling over a dewy leaf, lifting two-thirds of his body into the air from time to time and "sniffing around," then proceeding again—for he was measuring, Tom said; and when the worm approached him, of its own accord, he sat as still as a stone, with his hopes rising and falling, by turns, as the creature still came toward him or seemed inclined to go elsewhere; and when at last it considered a painful moment with its curved body in the air and then came decisively down upon Tom's leg and began a journey over him, his whole heart was glad—for that meant that he was going to have a new suit of clothes—without the shadow of a doubt a gaudy piratical uniform. Now a procession of ants appeared, from nowhere in particular, and went about their labors; one struggled manfully by with a dead spider five times as big as itself in its arms, and lugged it straight up a tree-trunk. A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade,

and Tom bent down close to it and said, "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it—which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once. A tumblebug came next, heaving sturdily at its ball, and Tom touched the creature, to see it shut its legs against its body and pretend to be dead. The birds were fairly rioting by this time. A catbird, the Northern mocker, lit in a tree over Tom's head, and trilled out her imitations of her neighbors in a rapture of enjoyment; then a shrill jay swept down, a flash of blue flame, and stopped on a twig almost within the boy's reach, cocked his head to one side and eyed the strangers with a consuming curiosity; a gray squirrel and a big fellow of the "fox" kind came skurrying along, sitting up at intervals to inspect and chatter at the boys, for the wild things had probably never seen a human being before and scarcely knew whether to be afraid or not. All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.

Tom stirred up the other pirates and they all clattered away with a shout, and in a minute or two were stripped and chasing after and tumbling over each other in the shallow limpid water of the white sandbar.

Jackson's Island! And stripped they stayed for days,

whooping and prancing out on the bar, and chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their legs

from under them from time to time and greatly increased the fun. And now and then they stooped in a group and splashed water in each other's faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other, with averted faces to avoid the strangling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the best man ducked his neighbor, and then they all went under in a tangle of white legs and arms and came up blowing, sputtering, laughing, and gasping for breath at one and the same time.

Ropes and lifeguards? None. Parents? None. Tom is an orphan anyhow, and Huck turns out to be. When Joe, because he is not so blest, begins to weaken, Tom jeers the ultimate jeer:

"We'll let the cry-baby go home to his mother…" Joe moved moodily away and began to dress himself.

7. Huckleberry Finn

M ark Twain is what gentlemen think of as Boobus Americanus and Huckleberry Finn is full of his ideology distilled like hootch from frontier liberal corn. But despite the (itself ridiculous) ridicule of Christian conscience, religion is strengthened by the truth of what he says about us hypocrites. Hypocrites alive! Miss Watson, Pap, the Duke and Dauphin, Colonel Grangerford and Buck! And all the while the river flows, teeming with natural and human life by day, past lonely village lights at night beneath a swarm of stars, As everybody says, despite the unsentimental realism down to the stink of dirty men, Mark Twain describes lost paradise. Huck is now about fourteen and Nigger Jim, with a wife and several children, perhaps eighteen or twenty; but both still keep their nakedness intact. Somehow, unlike the rest of us, they have survived the sins of puberty as savage innocents invincibly ignorant. They don't grow up like us and go to school. On the raft, there are no girls and therefore neither culture nor temptation nor the lachrymae rerum that only come to those who learn by suffering and sin. Such things in Huckleberry Finn are still boys' games, events but not experience. Yet Huck and Jim can see the depths more clearly from the surface than the rest of us who dive down.

We slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool

off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray.

The days are not just leisurely but lazy. Hiding from the law, Huck and Jim progressed by night and so by day they swam, fished, smoked, and talked.

Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things—we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us…We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened…Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out.

8. Call of the Wild

J ack London is a Social Darwinist; his famous book promotes the view that domesticated animals such as dogs and men are momentary flickers in an evolutionary night. Morality in men and loyalty in dogs are luxuries our precarious affluence permits. Strip a man or dog of his bungalow or kennel, and he reverts to the primordial beast in him — which seems to be the better thing.

If books were meant to moralize, you wouldn't want this one because its morality is silly if not harmful. But poetry confronts a truth deeper than its superficial rhetoric and The Call of the Wild is a great boys' book. When Buck is kidnapped from his easy California hacienda and sold to unscrupulous adventurers in the Yukon gold rush, he quickly learns that sufficient hunger is sufficient reason. He devours a slab of bacon and lets another dog get punished for it. (Note the Darwinian jargon.)

This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence. It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowship, to respect private

property and personal feelings; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool.

Of course, he means us.

When Buck meets Thomton, he discovers erotic love (mistakenly called passionate) exactly such as boys conceive for older boys and men.

Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at Judge Miller's down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. With the Judge's sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working partnership; with the Judge's grandsons, a sort of pompous guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse.

Though you might find reasons for such love, they don't add up to a cause. When Cupid shoots his arrow we are blind and only then can see a thing we never could have known which wrestles with the wild in dogs and us. Loyal in the service of his master, Buck can't help but taste and smell the wilderness. The contrapuntal music of the poem swells up.

Irresistible impulses seized him. He would be lying in camp, dozing lazily in the heat of the day, when suddenly his head would lift and his ears cock up, intent and listening, and he would spring to his feet and dash away, and on and on, for hours, through the forest aisles and across the open spaces where the niggerheads bunched. He loved to run down dry watercourses, and to creep

8. CALL OF THE WILD

and spy upon the bird life in the woods. For a day at a time he would lie in the underbrush where he could watch the partridges drumming and strutting up and down. But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called—called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.

When Thornton is killed, Buck follows the call of the wild and moralists must fear that boys who read the book will run away from home and join the pack. They could do worse and chew the rest of their lives on a plastic bone as teacher's pets and mama's boys. The fact of the matter is, the resolution of the conflict between the two calls is not the extermination but the perfection of one by the other. And anyhow, boys don't have to choose at twelve. To find the higher synthesis takes girls. In adolescence when they fall in love, like Romeo they find, beyond "the dim twilights of summer midnights," "the East and Juliet the sun." But girls can't love or tame a youth who isn't wild — in fact, it is the wild in him they love.

9. The Hound of the Baskervilles

Mr. Sherlock Holmes, who was usually very late in the mornings, save upon those not infrequent occasions when he was up all night, was seated at the breakfast table. I stood upon the hearth-rug and picked up the stick which our visitor had left behind him the night before. It was a fine, thick piece of wood, bulbous-headed, of the sort which is known as a "Penang lawyer." Just under the head was a broad silver band nearly an inch across. "To James Mortimer, M.R.C.S., from his friends of the C.C.H.," was engraved upon it, with the date "1884." It was just such a stick as the old-fashioned family practitioner used to carry—dignified, solid, and reassuring.

"Well, Watson, what do you make of it?"

Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.

"How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head."

"I have, at least, a well-polished, silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me," said he. "But, tell me, Watson, what do you make of our visitor's stick?

Y ou can't tell a book by its cover, but the whole thing is there on the very first page. The Sherlock Holmes mysteries are not boys' books but books for grown-up boys with all the elementary ingredients: the date, the facts, the archetypical, flat, indelible characters, the close detail of a workaday world, the checkerboard plot of black versus red and the checker-player genius for solving problems. As in all boys' books, there is neither reflective thought nor emotion, nothing but figuring things out as if every effect had a mechanical cause and raw sensation, especially of getting scared.

The greatest thing, of course, is Sherlock Holmes, instantly there with his woolen ear-flap cap, hooked pipe, and magnifying glass a pure intelligence divorced from everything except itself, not quite omniscient, almost omnipotent, and certainly bound to win. We all desire some secret strength bullies can't see that at the right instant flashes out and beats them. Like the Invisible Man or Superman but real — those are comic-strip fantasies — Holmes outwits them all And boys can learn to do it too. How wonderful when at the breakfast table, sitting before the well-polished, silver-plated coffee pot, you astound your brothers and sisters. "He must have eyes in the back of his head!" they say; and You say, "Elementary."

Hints of female victims over the edge of school-age experience, but no romantic rubbish; no fear, but prickly hairs on the back of the neck when the phosphorescent hound leaps through the fog to tear at people's throats. No passionate attachments of adolescent friendship. Holmes and Watson, like boys before the fires of love have started (and married couples after they are banked), are pals.

"And now, my dear Watson, we have had some weeks of severe work, and for one evening, I think, we may turn our thoughts into more pleasant channels. I have a box for Les Huguenots*. Have you heard the De Reszkes? Might I trouble you then to be ready*

in half an hour, and we can stop at Marcini's for a little dinner on the way?"

10. Robinson Crusoe

R obinson Crusoe is a book for the cusp of adolescence, still for boys because there are no girls. Robinson leaves all safe dependence for the far side of Treasure or Jackson's Island. The moral of the tale is clear from the start in the touching scene when he leaves his father's house.

My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel against what he foresaw was my design…He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road…that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found, by long experience, was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind…that the middle station of life was calculated for all kind of virtue and all kind of enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending

the middle station of life; that this way men went silently and smoothly through the world, and comfortably out of it.

The truth of this is all but self-evident and certainly proved by the general history of the race. But Robinson is still an experimenting boy. No one can reach to man's estate without his own shipwreck. On the outer edge of self-reliance is the first discovery of fear that proves how everything depends on God and fellow men.

How self-reliant Robson turns out to be is an obvious marvel of the book giving us hope that we could be like that — mechanical, inventive, all alone against the naked world of things. Then sickness comes and helplessness — not quite love (the giving up of self) but love's most famous footprint. ,

It happened one day, about noon, going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand.

A print implies a man, as things that move imply an unmoved mover. Each effect must have its cause. Knowing that, a boy is ready to go up to high school.

VI

Quid Legendum?

What Should I Read?

1. Song and Story

A story is an imitation of a human action having a beginning, middle, and end and is composed of twelve elements: occasion, setting, agent, motive, counter-agent, conflict, crisis, realization, digression, let-down, close, and moral.

Triggered by an occasion, the chief character as agent of the action, with a motive acting for an end, in a time and place, is thwarted by a counter-agent, the conflict between them leading to a crisis, or reversal, in which the agent either wins (comedy) or loses (tragedy) and by the experience is emotionally moved to a realization exemplifying a universal theme expressed in a lyrical digression, usually just before or after the crisis, with a consequential relaxation, an ending of the action and an implicit or explicit moral.

To get the action started, an occasion (literally, an object that falls in front of us) diverts us from our own intentions to those of the story not what might have occasioned the author to write it (money, fame, ideology), nor even what he intended, but the intention of the art. Since an action is a motion, and nothing is self-moved, something prior to the action must move it. Every story is a "when" "then" relation. When such and such happened, then so-and-so did such. Macbeth is triggered by witches; Hamlet by a ghost; then they have the motive and the cue — Macbeth to be king; Hamlet to avenge.

Of course, if the agent immediately achieved his purpose there

wouldn't be a story. Conflict with the counteragent (Macduff, Claudius) leads to a crisis when one or the other wins. Conflict can be elaborated and subplotted to the length of novels or, in lyrics, expressed by implication in a phrase. Digressions, off the subject of the struggle, but on the theme, take us out of the time and place sub specie aeternitatis. In opera these are arias; in plays, soliloquies, and songs; in narratives, themes are often suggested by descriptions of nature in heightened language.

The crisis is a reversal of the action: In comedy, the agent working for an end detrimental to himself achieves catastrophe to find, through tricks of fate, mistaken identity, and the like, that what he wanted was bad and what he gets is good. In tragedy, the agent works for an evil end and wins, discovering that his gain is loss. When the wave breaks, the let-down follows ("Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!") and the action brought to a close ("Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this becomes the field, but here shows much amiss"). And then, beyond the end of the action, there is a statement or implication of universal import, the moral of the tale, Chaucer calls it the "sentence" ("Capulet! Montague! See what a scourge is laid upon your hate that Heav'n finds means to kill your joys with love.")

"Theme" comes from a Greek verb meaning "to place" — not in the sense of setting where the action happens, but lifting it up to its spiritual space. In music, theme is the melody, the "place" within which the variations of the piece are constructed. There are seven themes: love (courtship, complaint, epithalamion), death (elegy), war (the misery, glory, or necessity), return (nostalgia), time (carpe diem), art (its nature or difficulty) and religion (hymns, meditations, canticles). There are also several genres — you see them in bookstore displays: love, western, sea, adventure, detective, fantasy, history, "adult," religious, occult etc.

And, finally, stories are told in five different modes'

1. "Fable" comes from fari "to speak" because animals talk in them,

1. SONG AND STORY

an event so amazing the word "fabulous" derives from it too. The setting is the Other World, a preternatural place, no less real than this one, inhabited by creatures intermediate between the natural and supernatural, such as fairies, elves, sprites, flying horses, and unicorns.

• 1. Narratives recount adventures in this world, dealing with the details of real workaday experiences. The relation of agent and counteragent is usually reversed, that is, the heroes are outlaws, or extra-social types like shipwrecked sailors or cowboys; character and crisis count for little; the setting and the genre bear the burden of the tale.
• 1. In romance, rounded characters, many-sided and interior, are sent on impossible quests, confronting the uncontrollable reality that only women can mediate.
• 1. In drama, which means "change," the plot, or myth, takes precedence. More philosophical than the other modes, it turns on the mystery of free will and fate — the relation of character and destiny.
  • 1. Lyric is pure theme,

Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shads,

High school adolescents inhabit the province of romance whose immediate purpose is not just to know but be Natty Bumpo, Ivanhoe, David Copperfield and Hamlet because they are ways of becoming oneself In the proximate experience of reading aloud together, boys learn how each other feels; they acquire terms of reference for emotions words alone can't handle. The remote purpose is learning to read and write well— the final, to fall in love.

2. Sonnet 106

S

uppose it is a winter night around the fire, Let a boy read Sonnet 106,

When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rime, In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights…

Sergeant: What is the poem about? War, love, time? (No need to mention theme, though, once a number of instances have exemplified a term, there's no harm using the term.)

Boy: Time. Carpe diem. He's talking about wasted time.

Another: It's a love poem. He's talking about a girl

Sergeant (not deciding): What's a chronicle?

Boy: A newspaper.

Another: A history book.

The Sergeant nods: Both. A journal is a diary day by day; a chronicle

a history year by year. What's the word from?

Silence.

Sergeant: Who was Chronos? -

Boy: God of time,

Sergeant: So a chronicle is a book that deals with time. What does

"wasted" mean?

Boy: Something you throw away like waste paper.

Another: Wear out. Sick people waste away.

Smart Boy: You waste opportunities.

Sergeant: It means all three. Poetry plays with meanings. "Wasted" here means something thrown away, a failure to use opportunity, and something dead and gone. What are "wights"?

Boy: There is an Isle of Wight.

Sergeant: Yes, and an Isle of Man. Has "man" anything to do with "wight"?

Boy: "Ah what avails thee wretched wight alone and palely loitering?" It's a knight.

Sergeant: Actually a youth. W and V get mixed up in language…

Smart Boy: Wagner is pronounced Vagner…

Sergeant: …s0 "wig" is the same as "vig" as in "vigorous." It means a man in the vigor of life. It's a medieval word; both Keats and Shakespeare use it because they're talking about the Middle Ages — "lovely knights,"

Boy: Oooh! Oooh!

Sergeant (scolding): What does "calisthenics" mean?

Boys: "Beautiful strength."

Sergeant: Precisely. So don't tease lovely knights; they do their calisthenics and are strong, Now, what does their beauty do?

Boy: It makes beautiful old rhyme.

Sergeant: Paraphrase the first quatrain.

Boy: "When I read about the people in medieval history books, and see how descriptions of their beauty make the poetry beautiful… Well, when I do that, then…" But we have to read the rest to find out the "then."

Sergeant: Proceed.

Lector:

Then in the blason of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have expressed Ev'n such a beauty as you master now.

Boy: That isn't easy.

Sergeant; It's not supposed to be. If you kicked a ball from goal to goal with nothing in between it would be easy but it wouldn't be soccer. Poets run simple ideas over complicated sentences to make a game of it. What's a "blason"?

Boy: Maybe it's a blaze, a fire.

Sergeant: Not bad. It means the words and the design painted on a coat of arms and so here "the blason of sweet beauty's best" means that the medieval chroniclers described not only the best beauty there was in those days but the ideal, the best there ever can be. Did they succeed?

Silence.

Sergeant: Well, when I read the chronicles, then I see their antique pen would have expressed such a beauty as you master now. Who is "you" "now"?

Boy: His girl.

Laughter. -

Another: The old beauty in the chronicles was just a forerunner of her's.

Sergeant: Where is beauty most expressed?

Boy: In the poem?

Sergeant: In real life?

Boy: In stars,

Another: In girls.

Laughter.

Sergeant: What parts of girls?

2. SONNET 106

Nervous laughter.

Sergeant: If you want to see somebody's soul where do you look?

Boy: The eyes.

Sergeant: What does the poet say?

Boy: Hand, foot, lip, eye, and brow.

Silence. Not because they are stupid or lascivious but because they are thinking,

Sergeant. The old masters knew how much the life of a portrait depends on a hand, for example. A gesture. Or just the way it lies on the arm of a chair. In French a blason is a poem praising beauty by listing such details. Why does he say "you prefiguring" instead of "prefiguring you"?

All: Poetic inversion!

Baked apples she sold and cranberry pies, And she's the old woman that never told lies.

Sergeant: Cheers for Mother Goose! Proceed.

Lector:

So all their praises are but prophecies, Of this our time, all you prefiguring; And for they look'd but with divining eyes They had not skill enough your worth to sing…

Sergeant: Take it phrase by phrase as if it was Latin,

Boy: When the old chroniclers praised the beautiful people in their

day they… (He falters.) Sergeant: Prefiguring?

Boy: You figure something out beforehand.

Sergeant: What is a "figure"?

Boy: Girls figure-skate,

Another: A girl has a figure.

Laughter.

Sergeant: Are there figures in the Bible?

Boy: Joseph in the Old Testament is a figure of Joseph in the New Testament.

Sergeant: But why say figure? How does it tie in with the other meaning?

Boy: The first Joseph was a picture or an outline of the one to come, Sergeant: Exactly. And the poet says that the beautiful ladies and knights of the past were prefigurations of "you." Proceed.

And for they look'd but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing…

Sergeant: Divining eyes?

Boy: Eyes that see the future.

Sergeant: Why hadn't they the skill to see the future if they had divining eyes?

Silence.

Sergeant: What is divining?

Boy: Seeing the future.

Sergeant: Is it seeing the way I see you right now or in the mind's eye?

Boy: In the mind's eye.

Smart Boy: In a figure like a stick figure but not the real thing,

Sergeant: And "for they look'd." What does "for" mean?

Boy: "Because." Because the chroniclers looked with nothing but their minds they couldn't see the living girl In our time.

Lector:

2. SONNET 106

For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder but lack tongues to praise.

Boy: The chroniclers had the skill to write prophecies but not see the real thing; we see the real thing but don't have their skill for writing about it.

Sergeant: Who is "we"?

Boy: Us. In present times.

Sergeant: What about the author of Sonnet 106?

Laughter.

Boy: Even Shakespeare wasn't good enough to express the beauty of this girl

When the lector has read the sonnet through again, he recites the first two lines without the book, which the class repeats in chorus. He then proceeds, two verses by two, until they have it all by heart. To us who haven't the habit, this will seem too much for a single night, but at their age, after a few months of practice, the memory gets exercised and it's no hard trick. The next night they will stumble through it, having forgotten some. In two or three days they will be perfect.

Do you think the Sergeant knows too much for a senior classman? But he has been taught by sergeants before him and heard the masters comment on poems. And he has learned to read.

When every boy can easily recite it all, the sergeant questions further.

Sergeant: What is the poem about? When I asked that question the other night, some said time, some love.

Smart Boy: It could be art because he ends with "we lack tongues to praise."

Sergeant: Where does the story turn?

Boy: On "so." When… then… so all their praises are but prophecies. It's about a girl. A love poem

Another: It turns on "for." For we lack tongues to praise. It's an art

poem.

The sergeant doesn't judge. Perhaps the master when he visits will explain that themes are different ways of saying the same thing, as colors are refractions making visible the pure, white light. You can read a poem in several modes. "When in the chronicle" is a love song to a girl, if you are in love with a girl; it can be read as praise to your best friend —Shakespeare wrote it for Master

W.H.; it can bear the burden of wasted time and the impossible task of art. In a few weeks, forgetting much of this, the boys will tease each other as "lovely knights" and call each other "wights." "Oh here comes the blazon of beauty's best!" And when they see a girl, they will appreciate perfection in a hand, foot, lip, eye or brow.

3. The Last of the Mohicans

A fter twenty or thirty minutes on a poem, another lector stands at the head of the table, or before the others at the fire, with one of the twenty novels in a fine edition, leather-bound, smelling of leather, with clear print on good paper and illustrations from the golden age. He takes the volume up and reads slowly, and clearly, enunciating each word, closing syllables, modulating his voice to express emotion and significance, phrasing according to the sense. If he mispronounces a word or loses the thread, the sergeant corrects him but for the most part waits for a good stopping place where, in the mode of instruction, he questions to bring out what might be missed.

Lector:

The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, Chapter One:

"Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared: The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold: — Say, is my kingdom lost?" Shakespeare,

Sergeant: This is the epigraph. What does "graph" mean?

Smart Boy (who remembers things said by the masters): It's Greek. Graphos means "hand"; things done by hand, especially writing or drawing. Paragraph, telegraph.

Bad Boy: Pornograph.

Nervous laughter,

Bad Boy: What does "porn" mean, Sarge?

Sergeant: Ask the master. (Masters have studied Greek in graduate school and will know.)

What about "epi"?

Smart Boy: Epidermis, epicycle, episode.

Sergeant: What is "Epiphany"?

Boy: The twelfth day of Christmas, the Feast of the Epiphany. Sergeant: What happened on the twelfth day of Christmas?

Boy: The Wise Men brought their gifts,

Sergeant: Have you thought about words with "phany" in the them?

Silence:

Sergeant: How about "phantasy"?

Smart Boy: That's spelled with an "f"

Sergeant: Either way. What does it mean?

Boy: To imagine.

Sergeant: It means "to show." "Epi" plus "phany" means "to show before" or "to show forth." The Wise Men saw the star that showed forth the coming of Christ.

Smart Boy: They had divining eyes.

Laughter.

Sergeant: An epigraph is a quotation put before or above the chapter.

Smart Boy: To prefigure it!

Sergeant: Exactly. In this case a speech from Shakespeare. Who is speaking?

Boy: A king. He says "my kingdom.

Sergeant: What king would lose a kingdom in a book called The Last of the Mohicans?

Boy: The King of England because the American colonies revolt.

Sergeant: We'll see. What about "the worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold"?

3. THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

Smart Boy: Poetic inversion. It means "the worst you can unfold is worldly loss."

Sergeant: What worldly loss?

Boy: The loss of his kingdom which isn't as bad as losing his soul.

Sergeant: Proceed.

Lector:

It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the tails and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently impervious boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England.

Boy: It's the French and Indian Wars, It isn't England losing the colonies but France logging Canada.

Sergeant: Yes. Cooper says "It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet." In your own words…

Boy: Before they could fight the enemy they had to fight the wilderness,

Sergeant; What is a "host"?

Boy: Someone who invites you to a party.

Laughter,

Sergeant: Cooper says "the adverse hosts."

Silence.

Sergeant: What is hostis in Latin?

Boy: Hostes venerunt super Alpes cum elephantis. It means "the enemies."

Boy: Like "hostile."

Smart Boy: What about a youth hostile? That's more like a host.

Sergeant: A hospis is a friend and a hostis an enemy. P and T sound alike and in the history of language get mixed up. "Host" comes from hospis and "hostile" from hostis. What about "heavenly host"?

Boy: That's an army of angels. Adverse hosts are devils.

Boy: The adverse hosts here are the English and French armies.

Sergeant: What about "adverse"?

Boy: Ad + vertere something turned to you.

Another Boy: Like an enemy with a sword.

Another Boy: An adversary.

Sergeant: Cooper says, "A wide and apparently impervious boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. "Impervious"?

Silence.

Sergeant: Marcus et Quintus ambulant per viam.

Boy: They're walking on a road. Per means "on," via, "road." _

Sergeant: How about, Eques errant per silvam?

Boy: Knights are wandering through a forest. Per means "through."

Sergeant: "Im" is a negative. So "impervious" means something that can't be gone through.

Boy: Rubber is impervious to water, The water can't get through,

Another Boy: Impervious to insult means thick-skinned.

Sergeant: Literally, the quality of not having roads through it. Continue.

Lector:

The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, or in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict, But emulating the patience and self-denial of the practiced native warriors, they learned to overcome every

3. THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

difficulty; and it would seem that in time, there was no recess of woods 60 dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that might claim exemption from the inroads of those who had pledged their blood to satiate their vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe,

Sergeant: What does "emulate" mean?

Boy: Imitate.

Sergeant: Have you had aemulus or the deponent verb aemulari? "Imitate" is close enough but it means to be jealous; to imitate somebody in the sense of vying with him. (Some day in Latin, Cooper will be recalled to explain aemulari.) In this case emulating whom?

Silence.

Sergeant: "Emulating the patience and self-denial of the practised native warrior…" So whom?

Boy: The English soldiers imitated the Americans.

Another Boy: He says, "The hearty colonist and the trained European." Both the English and Americans imitated the Indians,

Sergeant: Notice that Cooper now says "There was no recess of the woods so dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that it might claim exemption from the inroads of those who…" Do you remember "impervious"?

Smart Boy: He's contradicting himself

Sergeant to Lector: Read the second sentence again,

Lector:

A wide and apparently impervious boundary…

Smart Boy: Oh! I see. He said "apparently" not actually,

Sergeant: Cooper says the soldiers "pledged their blood to satiate their vengeance…" What does "satiate" mean?

Silence.

Sergeant: Marcus vult bibere. Caupo fundit vinum in poculum ejus. Marcus dixit: Satis est.

Boy: Satis means "enough." "Satiate" means to do something enough. Sergeant: With a sense of more than enough. To glut. Proceed. Lector:

Perhaps no district throughout the wide extent of the intermediate frontiers can furnish a livelier picture of the cruelty and fierceness of the savage warfare of those periods than the country which lies between the head waters of the Hudson and the adjacent lakes.

Sergeant: Let's draw a map on the blackboard. Can anyone place the Saint Lawrence, the Hudson, and the lakes between? (In Geography the boys have studied the continents, major river systems, mountains, and cities.) Continue.

…When, therefore, intelligence was received at the fort which covered the southern termination of the portage between the Hudson and the lakes, that Montcalm had been seen moving up the Champlain, with an army 'numerous as the leaves on the trees', its truth was admitted with more of the craven reluctance of fear than with the stern joy that a warrior should feel, in finding an enemy within reach of his blow…

Sergeant: Note "stern joy." Remember in the sonnet how "lovely knights" united beauty and strength; here you get severity and happiness. What is "craven"?

Boy: Fear,

Sergeant: But a certain kind of fear. When you fear God, that's reverence. When you fear danger it's servile fear. But "craven" mesns

3. THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

"cowardly"; it's related to the French verb "crever," "to break." A craven man is a broken man.

Lector:

…After the first surprise of the intelligence had a little abated, a rumor was spread through the intrenched camp which stretched along the margin of the Hudson, forming a chain of out works to the body of the fort itself, that a chosen detachment of fifteen hundred men was to depart, with the dawn, for William Henry, the post at the northern extremity of the portage. That which at first was only rumor, soon became certainty, as orders passed from the quarters of the commander-in-chief to the several corps he had selected for this service, to prepare for their speedy departure… The novice in the military art flew from point to point, retarding his own preparations by the excess of his violent and somewhat distempered zeal; while the more practised veteran made his arrangements with a deliberation that scorned every appearance of haste; though his sober lineaments and anxious eye sufficiently betrayed that he had no very strong professional relish for the, as yet, untried and dreaded warfare of the wilderness. At length the sun set in a flood of glory, behind the distant western hills, and as darkness drew its veil around the secluded spot the sounds of preparation diminished; the last light finally disappeared from the log cabin of some officer; the trees cast their deeper shadows over the mounds and the rippling stream, and a silence soon pervaded the camp, as deep as that which reigned in the fast forest by which it was environed.

The boys are being drawn, out of sensitive fear, up to emotional fear, Unlike Kidnapped or The Call of the Wild, The Last of the Mohicans is not about children or dogs. Adolescents, without knowing what it is,

begin to feel the way soldiers do in real battles that can't be arranged to come out all right as they do in schoolboy adventure stories. Fear is a knowledge of strange forces we can't control, not just being scared to jump off the high diving board. Far from self-reliance, it calls for hope, the certainty that, in these unknown powers, some are benign and will help.

Sergeant: Cooper says, "distempered zeal" Today we say "intermperate." "Tempered" means "moderated," done at the right speed, with the right amount of force, "Distempered" is misregulated force,

Boy: Dogs get it.

Laughter.

Sergeant: Note the more experienced soldiers with "sober lineaments and anxious eyes." What are "lineaments"?

Boy: Lines in their faces.

Sergeant: Good guess. It comes from "line" but means the outline of a man's features. Note that these soldiers, both the young recruits and the veterans, both the colonists and the English, were army men trained for regular military combat with battle lines drawn up according to rules. They had never seen the wilderness before or fought against savages who didn't know the rules, And the next morning fifteen hundred out of five thousand would be picked to travel deeper into the forest to an even smaller fort where the French and Indians were just about to attack. There was nothing around for hundreds of miles but forests, lakes, mountains, and savages. Notice how the sun goes down in those primeval forests, something like the way it does here, in our little woods, far enough, as we are too, from cities and home,

Suddenly, the plaintive bugle sounds taps.

Sergeant: It's time for us to get to bed too. Read that last sentence again; we'll continue from there tomorrow.

Lector:

3. THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS

At length the sun set in a flood of glory, behind the distant western hills, and as darkness drew its veil around the secluded spot the sounds of preparation diminished, the last light finally disappeared from the log cabin of some officer; the trees cast the deeper shadows over the mounds and the rippling stream, and a silence soon pervaded the camp, as deep as that which reigned in the vast forest by which it was environed.

After a quick inspection, the boys kneel for an examination of conscience and sing the Salve Regina. The corporals blow out the lamps, and except for the glow of the stove, which watches with its yellow eye, they are left to darkness. Through the windows, they can see the lights of the other barracks snuffing out, until at last the campus is asleep, save for one or two of those who, lying in their Spartan beds, imagine hostile Indians moving with the wind among the branches of the trees still vaguely visible against the starlit sky.

Story

A natomies like these (in the mode of institution), because they are convenient for teachers and easy to teach, have driven out the other modes — to the just exasperation of romantics like Wordsworth and Dickens. However, excluding them in revenge, denies the structure of created things,

Their proper use is summing up what has been learned.

VII

Quid Loquendum?

What should we discourse?

1. Subject

here are four modes of subject divided formally and

T materially, eight in all; 1) The personal whose formal principle is the teacher polishing, forming, informing, instituting, instructing, disciplining, and exercising the matter of the student. They often say derisively, "He teaches himself instead of the subject." But he is the subject. If there is reason for derision it isn't such teaching but the failure (usually the vanity) of the teacher. Every teacher teaches himself. And every student studies himself. Leonardo da Vinci said Narcissus contemplating the reflection of his own beauty in the mirror of a pool was the perfect artist — the perfect student, too, who sees in the mirror of language and nature a reflection of himself, discovering himself through what he thinks and feels. The anesthetic boy reflecting what the teacher says,

1. The intellectual whose form is the science or art by which the physical or moral matter is grasped. For schools, music is the formal light in which we see the seven material subjects: language, nature, corporal beauty, measure, the deeds of men, song, and story,

rather than his own sensitive, emotional, volitional, and intellectual experience, is as vain as the actor-teacher putting on an empty show.

1. The political whose form is government and matter a communion of men with common ancestors, ie. a nation, from nascor, "I am born." Man is political by nature because, though he might survive as an

animal he can't perfect himself alone. Even families are imperfect societies because of the necessary division of labor in human affairs. While some dig, others make their shovels, still others fend off enemies and a few have the leisure for schools. Every man is bound to his nation by blood and economic necessity. Since experience is tempered by size, shape, color, strength, agility, hairiness, sex drive, sensitivity, dexterity, and the like, and, since such attributes result from the genetic pool, one's sense of what is beautiful true, and good is a participation in the national consciousness, modified by habits transferred through the generations by custom and law. Now justice is giving each his due; it prevails when everyone gets what he wants and, since what he wants is proportioned to physical nature and moral habits, only works among people more or less alike and who therefore want the same things. Foreigners with different natures and habits shock the common consciousness and, when they become teachers and students, upset the physical constitution and demoralize the affective life of the school Since we are an immigrant country, this has always been a problem. In colleges and universities, whose operations are abstract, foreigners more or less fit in - science has no nation; but in the musical mode of schools, we sing our songs, see our stars. For Hardy's drummer boy killed in the Boer War, the stars are strange:

They threw in Drummer Hodge, to rest Uncoffined, just as found; His landmark is a kopje-crest That breaks the veldt around:

And foreign constellations west Each night above his mound.

1. The religious whose form is theology and matter Revelation.

1. SUBJECT

Theology as an abstract science is, of course, not taught in school. But every subject is observed from a theological point of view. The earliest American schools were sectarian and then, with the British establishment, timocratic and more conventionally Protestant. After the Civil War, with the triumph of the Northern robber barons, all institutions (Church, state, family, media, and school) promoted the ideology of success; and now, moving towards democracy in Plato's sense (rule by mob violence), their god is teenage appetite. The Catholic schools have followed suit and, despite the name, are scarcely different in doctrine and behavior from the new world dissonance. Ours must keep the substance and all but the accidental accidents of the Faith as part of the Catholic Resistance.

2. Against Method

E xcept for Calisthenics, Math, and English Literature, everything is studied "latinly." In other words, Latin, Nature Study, History, and Music constitute a single subject divided by topics: the dormitory (dressing, mopping up, tending the fire), the mess hall (eating, cooking, washing dishes), the lavatory (showering, laundering), the campus (plants, animals, birds, insects, rocks, crops, stars), times and places (geography and history), the liturgy (the Little Office and Mass).

Why Latin? Because it is the architectonic language of Christian Civilization. In different places at different speeds, but largely in the Fourteenth Century, nations broke the unity of Europe and local dialects took precedence. Dante wrote the first great poem in a vernacular, Chaucer, whose friend John Gower still chose Latin for his major work, the second. But as late as the Seventeenth Century Newton wrote the Principia Mathematica in Latin and Latin dominated university learning until the middle of the Nineteenth Century: Matthew Arnold, for example, held the first chair in English Literature at Oxford in the 1850's.

Dialects have been spoken since the destruction of Babel but each of the five civilizations has its governing language — Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Mandarin, Arabic. The survival of Christendom depends on the everyday use of its language somewhere. In the Fourteenth

2. AGAINST METHOD

Century, Latin lost its roots in common talk and, fixed by grammar, was artificially preserved in schools. When it was alive, the people spoke it badly and the clerical classes fairly well.

At the Renaissance, the whole thing overturned — the low usurped authority, liturgy and doctrine were accommodated to change and learning was mechanized. Not just among the Protestants. The humanists of the Counter-Reformation took up Descartes and Bacon much as over-zealous reformists today attempt to justify the Faith with Marx. Schools ceased to be faculties of leisure among whom children live until they can get on by themselves. They became workplaces, factories for mental programmation, as if knowledge were a cartridge. Latin, as the chief instrument of learning, was a first catastrophe. Inject amo-amas-amat and it ticks out every verb of the first conjugation. Easy, quick, effective — and immoral because the programmed brain and not the boy conjugates without conception.

Hodie Marcus ad scholam ambulat. Heri Marcus ad scholam… Cras Marcus ad scholam…

Automatons repeat and metaphrase on machine-gradable tests, but asked real questions (Roberte, amabo te, quare cuccurristi ad capellam? Num surrexisti tarde?) can't reply with careless unreflection (Non, magister. Cultellum e sacculo meo elapsit et non poteram eum invenire).

There is nothing wrong with paradigms. Donatus codified them so successfully grammar is synonymous with his name. But habits are second nature, formed by repeated experience of first nature. You can't begin with habits, hoping nature will follow. Donatus's grammar was written for native-speaking Latins at college. It takes at least four years' daily, all-dey usage to learn a language. To repeat it seventy times seven: The only way to swim is to let the water hold you up. You

don't facilitate gravity by abstracting kicks and strokes on dry land. Perhaps they make Olympic champions that way but never Toms and Hucks. Look, see, do, name, and then, if convenient, tag, but don't explain what nouns and verbs are, and proceed to illustrate with Latin examples as if grammar were the subject! Nor cut the course into grammatical segments according to some putative difficulty standard. Of course, you begin with simple stuff. Just as, in teaching infants, mothers lisp, allowing the language to grow up with the child, so Latin teachers first speak childishly. Freshmen must regress to learning how to tie their shoes in Latin and memorize Pater Noster qui es in caelis sanctificetur nomen tuum long before they know (if ever) what a passive subjunctive is. For reading, children's books come first (Fabulae AEsopi, Petrus Cuniculus) and, by the second semester, Medieval texts (Gesta Romanorum, Legenda Aurea) and books of the Vulgate Bible not covered in History (Ruth, Tobias, Job) while, right from the start, the Rosary, the Common of the Mass and the prayers, psalms and canticles of Lauds and Vespers will be memorized with all their grammar on our heads.

All textbooks, including those advertising natural and nature methods, teach grammar. None Latin. Although the so-called "natural method" (a contradiction in terms) uses conversation, it does so for the purpose of learning grammar and is ordered according to the fiction of grammatical difficulty, a step up from nothing but tables of nouns and verbs, but still backwards-learning, A commercial operator teaches intensive Latin thirty floors up in the Empire State Building programming linguistic patterns to get students from scratch to decoding Virgil in six weeks! Boys can be forced that way if you want zombies.

3. Donkey-Latin

H aving had from early childhood an urge for good times lost, I satisfied it first with poetry and then with cowboy stories (especially Will James's because they were real) and at thirteen ran away from home and the encroaching city which by the 1930's had metastasized suburban cells in our rural fields. But by that time fenced farms had pretty much destroyed the open range (Will James Lied!) so it was something of a miracle that as late as 1936 I found a ranch in the Dakota Badlands where cowboys still rode horses on roundups. After World War II they were gone — both the horses and the men. There was a terrible moment in my life in the late 1940's when I saw the famous Lipizzaners perform at the Madison Square Garden Horse Show — proud beast, "the glory of his nostrils is terror" — dancing a Viennese ballet! When real horsemen ride they have somewhere to go:

Highway, since you my chief Parnassus be: And that my Muse, 10 some ears not unsweet, Tempers her words to trampling horses' feet More oft than to a chamber melody, Now blesséd you bear onward blesséd me To her, where I my heart, safe left, shall meet; My Muse and I must you of duty greet

With thanks and wishes, wishing thankfully — Be you still fair, honor'd by public heed; Nor blam'd for blood, nor sham'd for sinful deed; And that you know I envy you no lot Of highest wish, I wish you so much bliss, — Hundreds of years you Stella's feet may kiss.

Not having highways (God grant us Stella) we shall settle for donkeys in what Socrates describes as the healthy state:

First of all, then, let us consider what will be the manner of life of men thus provided. Will they not make bread and wine and garments and shoes? And they will build themselves houses and carry on their work in summer for the most part unclad and unshod and in winter clothed and shod sufficiently. And for their nourishment they will provide meal from their barley and flour from their wheat, and kneading and cooking these they will serve noble cakes and loaves on some arrangement of reeds or clean leaves, and, reclined on rustic beds strewn with bryony and myrtle, they will feast with their children, drinking of their wine thereto, garlanded and singing hymns to the gods in pleasant fellowship… Here Glaucon broke in: "No relishes apparently," he said, "If you were founding a city of pigs, Socrates, what other fodder than this would you provide?"

To Glaucon, a suburban sophomore, rural Life is fit for pigs. But Ruskin still could say in 1871,

If all the money of all the capitalists in the whole world were destroyed, the notes and bills burnt, the gold irrecoverably buried, and all the machines and apparatus of manufactures crushed, by

3. DONKEY-LATIN

a mistake in signals, in one catastrophe; and nothing remained but the land, with its animals and vegetables, and buildings for shelter, — the poorer population would be very little worse off than they are at this instant; and their labor, instead of being "limited" by the destruction, would be greatly stimulated. They would feed themselves from the animals and growing crops; heap here and there a few tons of ironstone together, build rough walls round them to get a blast, and in a fortnight they would have iron tools again, and be ploughing and fighting just as usual.

Which still is true for us. Reality is there beneath the gaudy rubble even of Los Angeles. The mess is recent and temporary.

William Allen White, a small-town newspaper editor famous in my father's time, recalls his boyhood days in Kansas:

I was ten years old… El Dorado was only a year older, but it had grown by that time to be a town of nearly a thousand people. It was a self-sufficient community. We had shoemakers who made my father's shoes, although my mother's came from St. Louis where he traded in his merchant days. The town tailor made Pa's Sunday clothes; my mother made his everyday clothes, She, or other women whom she hired, knitted our socks. The food of the town was mostly raised on the townsite or near it on the farm. A small packing house put up hams and bacon and cured beef. A wagon shop back of our lot made carriages, and one of the town's most distinguished artists was a wagon painter who striped buggy wheels and painted the elaborate designs — cornucopia or the seal of Kansas — on the sides of wagons. The town had two or three blacksmith shops, which were busy all day. Ringing anvils woke me in the morning and tolled like bells when 1 went into the house at dusk. Busy places were those blacksmith shops, which mended

and made a score of gadgets for house and farm. We had three harness shops, where I loved to play and listen to the stories of the soldiers who sometimes gathered there, for one harness maker was a noted soldier. A little tannery was established, and a small furniture factory made the chairs, tables, and beds of the pioneers. Native lumber — walnut and oak — stood behind these factories curing, and we boys used 10 play on the lumber piles and hide between them in our games.

Then the railroad came and everything was changed. I did not know that the smell of coal smoke, which first greeted my nostrils with the railroad engine, was to be the sign and signal of the decay of a town and indeed of pioneer times, when men made things where they used them — all the things necessary to a rather competent civilization.

In the boy's world, it meant that homemade sleds and little homemade wagons would pass, that the bows and arrows which boys made by seasoning hickory behind the stove and scraping and polishing them with glass, would as an art disappear forever out of the life of American boys. The railroad meant that on the far horizon, great engines were gathering to wreck the barns, and that the town herd, which I drove for a time, would vanish before the onslaughts of the milk bottles in another fifty years.

Well, in Kansas now even the few farms left are really agribusinesses run by computers and worked with machines. There aren't any "poor" in Ruskin's sense. El Dorado is no more,

A time there was, ere England's grief began, When every rood of ground maintain'd its man…

"Rood" is a deeply rooted word. The dictionary gives as its first

3. DONKEY-LATIN

meaning "a cross or crucifix"— "The Dream of the Rood" is a famous Anglo-Saxon lyric about the Crucifixion. The second meaning is "a linear measure varying locally between six and eight yards" and the third (Goldsmith's), is "a land measure equivalent to one-fourth an acre or forty square rods."

Great lords, under whose suzerainty a multitude of vassals worked collective roods, had horses. But & rood of ground in what Socrates called the healthy state, and Plato's brother Glaucon a city of pigs, can't maintain its horse. In fact, a rood maintains its man only if the ground is fertile and worked carefully with a spade and hoe. And even then, without a commons to pasture his cow and a free forest to harvest fuel, the farmer had to survive on goat's milk for drink and faggots for the fire. In the palmy days of agricultural supremacy, the horse was a knight of animals, but for us, pride of place goes to the donkey who lives on husks and weeds. Peasants on the offshore islands of western Ireland still load their tough little beasts with sea kelp to spread in the spade ditches where they grow potatoes and with spade-cut turf for their pungent hearths, On Sundays many a modest matron sits sideways on her donkey's back riding from cottage to church.

What has this to do with Latin? To say by an extended metaphor that we must learn by Donkey-Latin, asking the way to the latrine in vulgate speech not as a school charade but for real: Magister, praecor, necessitas magnopere urget!

4. Latin

T he temptation is always there for us to have a good hour by performing well ourselves. A certain amount of posturing is fine. There is fun for the boys as well as us in showing off how much we know but the better part is putting them to talk among themselves about the things they really do and see.

Learning follows nature, not method or the convenience and vanity of teachers. It's easy to name only those things whose nouns are in the first declension as if the room was a grammatical convenience: Mensa, sella, creta, tabula nigra, fenestra, janua — it almost seems to work! But what of pavimenrum and tectum? What are windows, walls, and doors without a floor and roof? No. Just let the language flow. Talk of real things that are there.

The Freshmen will pick up phrases from the Mass and slang from their older comrades. Lavabo inter innocentes manus meas will occur in the latrine. Blasphemy? Sed contra. Latrines will thus be blessed and the Mass made part of daily life. Since schoolboys are curious, grammatical questions will be asked. Treat them like questions about sex — sufficient truth to the case thereof

Discipulus: Fraxi orem cruris. Magister: Eras. Fraxisti os cruris.

Discipulus: Fraxi 0s? (Touching his ear) Non tango auris sed aurem.

Cur non fraxi orem?

Magister: Optime, carissime mi! Intelligens puer es. Sed "os" sicut "animal" vel "corpus" non mutat. Est animal; video animal. Corpus est; habeo corpus. Est os; frango os.

Discjpulus: Qua ratione? Magister: Romani dicunt,

You may well say, Namore of this! Why not put the declensions on the board and get it over with! Get what over with? The exasperation betrays the bias. Repetemus septies septem: The purpose of conversation is not to teach grammar but conversation. By grammatizing you don't speed up, clarify or facilitate thinking and speaking, you prevent it because the os in my foot and the os in the front of my face are things, not nouns.

Learning begins in gymnastic, proceeds to music, and only then to the liberal arts and science. You start with muscle, blood, and bone. As you read these words right now, sitting in your chair — lean back; rub your shoulders into it, feel its arms: Sedes est. If someone else is in the room, ask him: Quid est? If he doesn't know, tell him: Sedes est. Memory is in the lips, tongue, nasal passages, head bones, and throat in the whole physical, emotional, volitional, and intellectual experience right here now of this chair. And there's the table: Quid est? Mensa est. If you memorize word lists from English to Latin and Latin to English or practice little made-up sentences without the muscle, blood, and bone, you can parrot and monkey but never learn. This is why you have to have a teacher — talking, questioning, emphasizing, gesturing, drawing pictures about ordinary things actually encountered every day: your nose as you scratch it, your shoes as you tie them, birds as you hear their song. And so with actions — sitting, standing, walking, sleeping. And so with narrative and making plans — what you did and will do.

Gymnastic first, last, in between, and always, even (especially) as imagination and emotion come into play: Read aloud a fable with good

big illustrations, some tale the boys already know from childhood so the meaning will be there before they have to think about it. There is no need to translate foreign words. Neither Latin nor English comes to mind — nothing but the story. If they don't get it, let them guess. If the story makes no sense at all, take simpler stuff. If Petrus Cuniculus is too hard, try Tres Parvi Porci. If they happen to have their sandals on, tweak a toe: Hic parvus porcus venit in forum!

In the teacher's armchair, by the fire at Christmas time, with the boys gazing at the gaudy tree and the dormitory cat purring in you lap, read them Saint Matthew's Gospel:

Cum ergo natus esset Jesus in Bethlehem in Juda in diebus Herodis regis, ecce Magi ab oriente venerunt Jerosolymam dicentes: Ubi est qui natus est rex Judaeorum? Vidimus enim stellam ejus in oriente et venimus adorare eum.

Notice, distinguish, name — passionately. Indoors, take up objects in the room, including ourselves, our clothes, and actions: Quid est nomen tuum? Nomen meum est Henricus. Quid est? Mensa est. Lectum est. Caminus est. Quid facio? Ambulas. Stas. Scribis, Outdoors: Caelum, nubes, sol, terra, arbor, gramen, flos, dormitorium, capella, culina, lavatorium, via, semita, paries. Avis volat. Cuniculus saltat. Two or three times per semester take them on camping trips. Tell tales around the campfire. Talk, talk, talk: Affer mihi queso caffeum. Eheu fervens est! Never speak English even (especially) if you have to make up Pig-Latin. Four years of rowdy play like this will work them up to something like barbaric English boys in the time of King Alfred the Great.

Life is a spontaneous text. If it rains, talk about rain. If someone gets sick, sickness. The only way to learn or teach is to jump in, sink, and swim — get water up your nose, make mistakes, and teach mistakes.

But look! Ecce! The freshmen have arrived. The first day, eight

o'clock. Magister: Salvete discipuli. (He points to himself) Magister sum. (Waving at them) Vos estis discipuli. He talks clearly and distinctly but not unnaturally, in standard American, not so-called "Italian" or "Classical," Latin. We can't change the shape of our cranial caverns; leave gargling r's to foreigners. No matter if the boys don't follow every word; with gesture and intonation they get the drift. Motioning them to do likewise, the master faces the statue of Our Blessed Mother and kneels: Flectamus genua. Oremus. Ave Maria gratia plena. Since they know the Hail Mary by heart, they will understand the meaning if not precisely how each English word fits each Latin one.

Having prayed, the master gestures toward the table: Considite discipuli. Incipiamus studium. He stands before them, pausing for attention: Salvete discipuli. He bows. Silent a moment, he repeats the words and gestures — then, sitting on the boys' bench and changing his voice to childish treble, replies as if he were one of them: Salve magister. Having repeated both parts several times, he stands before the class again as master: Salvete, discipuli. And they will say in unison, Salve, Magister!

Pointing to himself: Magister sum. Waving at them: Pas estis discipuli. Touching the crown of the first boy's head: Discipulus es. And so with the next boy and the next. Ego magister, tu discipulus. Then, stepping back, waving at all: Discipuli. Holding up one finger: Unus discipulus. Holding up two fingers: Duo discipuli. Back to the first boy: Quid est nomen tuum? No answer. Est-ne nomen tuum Henricus? Est-ne Robertus? Paulus? One of them will get it. Perhaps he will give his name in English. If so, the master says, Verum est sed non correctum. In Lingua Latina nomen tuum est Robertus. In most cases, the names will be anglicized Latin, to begin with, or easily Latinized. Call Kevin Rufus or Albinus.

The last ten minutes are spent memorizing the Ave Maria as the first step toward getting the Rosary, Lauds, and Vespers of the Little Office, the Ordinary of the Mass, Cathechismus Romanus pro Pueris, and

several Scripture passages by heart. Boys are fast, voracious, retentive memorizers. Modem school learning lasts until the nearest test, this kind for life. If their priests pronounce the Latin as they should, old boys at sixty will follow the Mass without a book.

The first days slide along on novelty. When eagerness begins to flag, hook them with a tale. After four years of Church Latin from Tres Parvi Porci to the Fathers of the Church, and speaking in the vulgar tongue all day, graduates who go on to college will still find Caesar, Cicero, and Virgil hard (the Romans did) but they will read with understanding and delight while students from the modern schools painfully decode. Our boys will have the habit of Latin where their running, swimming, and wrestling are — in the nimbleness and strength of joints and muscles.

5. Nature Study

N otate bene, discipuli. The master puts on his anorak. Aquascutum (anaracum!) induo. Waving them on to do likewise: Vos omnes — induite aquascuta vestra! There will be a boy whose psychic skin is flayed by this. He has quite rightly all his life believed that words and things are one and the same substance. When you say aquascutum he will not just be puzzled but feel as if his scalp were coming off and, when he gets the meaning from the gesture, will prevent the Latin by translating: "Oh, he means put on our anoraks." Forbid this absolutely. Of course, considering the psychological difficulty, keep it humorous. But however you handle a particular case, the practice is forbidden.

Rain, snow, sleet, or shine, the master goes to the door, waving them to follow: Venite! Pulling each one after him: Veni, Henrice! Veni Roberte! Waving to all: Venite! Eamus foras. He goes outdoors; they follow. Doing this day in and day out, they learn singular, plural, imperative, subjunctive et alia by tone of voice, gesture, and action, without a hint of formal grammar or translation.

The second hour is spent outdoors. An hour more or less; having bells and bugles, not clocks and watches, we are not in mechanical time. The immediate purpose is no longer Latin per se but using it to learn about nature. Of course, we learn more Latin too. Wave at the sky: Quid est? Caelum est. Point to the sun: Est sol Stomp the

earth: Terra est. Walk up to a tree: Quid est? Arbor est. Then repeat the questions getting the boys one by one and as a group to answer. Name a dozen things: caelum, sol, nubes, arbor, gramen, flos, dormitorium, capella, refectorium, lavatorium, murus, semita. Pick a boy to question his peers. Then another. When the bell (or bugle) sounds, cupping your ear, call out; Ecce! Tintinabulum sonat! (Cornu vocat!)

Everything said about the relation of grammar to language is true of science to nature. Scientific systems are arbitrary, hypothetical, and political. When I was a child, the fifth-grade teacher taught us that atoms were miniature solar systems — electrons like planets orbiting a nucleus like the sun. We drew atomic maps and memorized charts of weights, not having a single rock in front of us. We were taught to believe that atoms were real and rocks illusions. Brought up on mathematical models, we took them for reality. And when, according to the vicissitudes of hypothetical figures, the models were changed, we lost our hold on truth. I said "political" because theories change with political and economic systems — Ptolemaic astronomy in the days of absolute kings, capitalist competition of antagonistic forces verging today on classless chaos theory as oligarchy moves into democracy. But rocks are rocks; trees, trees; birds, birds. The stone that broke Goliath's skull is the substance at my feet; the tree they made into the Cross is that one there that may yet be a gibbet for myself: that mockingbird up on the roof still sings

Perhaps the selfsame song that found a path Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home, She stood in tears amid the alien corn.

In Nature Study, as in Latin, begin with obvious things. There is the sky: Caelum est. Observe it with them. Note how high a dome it is, its blue or gray — don't tell them, let them see for themselves its limit must

5. NATURE STUDY

be heaven. Squint at the sun: Sol candidus est! Stand in the shade. Trace the shadow: Umbra est. Haec arbor umbrosa est. Note trees, naming the common species right there on the campus: Est quercus, juniperus, salix, ulmus. Identify by shape at a distance.

Close work follows. The Audubon Society Field Guides give the Latin names. Don't tell the boys too much. Let them be surprised by differences. And don't intrude religion. Just let the world be there. Let God teach as he intends in the language of nature which He Himself invented for the purpose. A child can't honestly admire the Maker until he first honestly admires the things He made. It's an insult to ignore the artist's work while praising him on hearsay, as if "by the invisible things of God we come to know the visible things of earth"! Vae fideismus! Taste and see. This thing is good; it couldn't make itself, therefore we know He Who made it is good. Metaphysically speaking, things are good because the good God made them. But we are not metaphysical creatures; we don't think like angels; everything we know is known in things. If you jump from rocks to God without a long, sensible, emotional, willful, thoughtful intercourse with them, your understanding and love of His goodness and greatness will be proportioned to the meager experience. Let the child and the thing become acquainted in their own way. Don't rub them together like marriage brokers with a pair of hot prospects. Perhaps a boy will ask a question — which can be tolerated but not encouraged. We don't want young inquisitors, Some will end up scientists because they have inquiring minds as some will end up spies. The nation needs a few. But honest men don't seek to be the type. Wrestling in the dirt under a clean sky in the flat light of an October sun, licked by the fiery tongues of maple leaves as they roll in them, the cool, indifferent pines observing — well, you don't have to say God made all this; it's in the excitation of their blood.

When the bugle calls to Calisthenics, English can be spoken. The

mind, like a muscle, needs recuperative rest — by means of sweat and strain. Calisthenics isn't sport or workouts with machines or weights, but pull-ups, push-ups, squats, lunges, and jumping jacks for an hour every day. Strong hearts, good lungs, lithe, lean limbs. The fourth hour in Math is taught in too. In Math, measure, count, and heft. Arithmetic, geometry, and physics form a single compound matter. Feeling the relative ease of lifting when you shift the position of your hands on a pitchfork handle teaches what a fulcrum is. Surveying and orienteering are first-rate exercises in geometry.

At lunchtime, with the masters presiding at the tables, the whole school eats in Latin. Quid est? Est culter, fuscilinum, coclear, patina, patella, lanx, poculum, calix, olla, panis, lac, cibus, caro (bubula, pulla, porcina, agnina, ovilla), lardum, perna, puls. Not all at once. A school is a locus of leisure.

6. History

A fter lunch, an hour's rest or romp. History at one in Latin Since History needs Geography, draw a map of the Mediterranean rim: Quid est? Italia est. Pointing to Rome: Ubi est? And, without telling anyone what it is, answer in the ablative: In Italia. Cases and tenses come when they will.

History begins at the beginning. Read aloud from the Vulgate as the boys follow the text. Help them out with gestures, emphasizing cognates, drawing pictures, and asking questions.

In principio creavit Deus caelum et terra. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua, et tenebrae erant super faciem abyssi, et spiritus Dei ferebatur super aquas…. Et creavit Deus hominem ad imagnem suam; ad imaginem Dei creavit illum: masculum et feminam eos.

In principio. Notate bene, discipuli. Put a point on the blackboard, holding the chalk in place: Punctum est. Punctum principium lineae est. Then, as you draw the line: Principium… finis.

In principio deus creavit caelum et terram. Don't worry; they will follow. Et creavit Deus hominem. Nonne intelligitis discipuli? Homo quid significant? Contrarium est femina. Draw two figures on the board, one in pants, the other in a dress. Hic est homo, illa femina. Biblia Sacra dicit: Deus creavit hominem ad imaginem suum. Quid significat imaginem?

Stress the cognate. Imago significat pictura vel representatio mentalis. Quid fecit Deus? Creavit, Quid creavit? Hominem. Ad quod? Ad imaginem suam. Est similitudo inter homines et Deum. Homo est similis Deo quia habet intellectum et est imago Dei quia Deus dedit ei vitam suam — id est gratiam sanctificantem.

If you keep the Latin close to English they will think about the meaning rather than the language, stretching from the known to the unknown without reverting to English at all. And never leave gymnastic: When you get to Adam's rib, tickle them.

At the call of Abraham, pagan history begins with Ninus founding Nineveh. Remember Pyramus and Thisbe whose fatal tryst at Ninus's tomb was the source of Bottom's play! Orosius, a student of both Saints Jerome and Augustine, wrote a history of the world from the Creation to the Sack of Rome. Otto of Freising's universal history brings the story down to 1137. Their Latin is too hard for freshmen but can be simplified. The Excidium Troice is easy enough for the second semester. Several boys wrapped in red paper can act out burning Troy crying Ignis sum; uro te! as they run around waving their arms and sliding their palms on persons and things like tongues of flame — Possumus te consumere! — leaping and grappling.

History, as Herodotus says, is the praise of great men of the past. Our past. America is Christian and, though not very English, British ("Brutish") named after Brutus, Aeneas's grandson who founded the race, so we are also Trojan. (Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannorum is the capital text). Others come into our story because of intercourse with us, not as if there were "World History" of which we are only a part. Both Catholic and secular schools today teach politicized systems that change with the politics. Catholic ideology is better in itself than feminism, which tops the secular charts right now, but the imposition of systems is not school teaching. Of course, we must distinguish ideology from point of view. We all stand somewhere.

"Objective viewpoint," like Newton's vacuum, is a fiction. For Catholics, the Crucifixion is the crux of history; for liberals, the guillotine; while modernists posit a hypothetical future space-time event called Omega Point. But, as in Nature Study, let the boys find out the Maker in the made. Tell stories of the great men of the past but don't theologize. The mode is poetry (story), not rhetoric (propaganda). Freshmen learn the twenty-five decisive dates from the Fall to World War I. Sophomores circle back and learn all twenty-five again, splicing in twenty-five more — and so on up with each successive class until the seniors have a hundred, known and remembered forever, a permanent learning of permanent things. How much history have you studied in your life? How much do you remember? Most of it was economic and social causes, evolutionary-progressive schemes, research techniques like how to use the library, bibliographical method, even database retrieval, and tons of propagandistic information and misinformation. Fortunately, angels of the memory protect us and little of it sticks. The muses are daughters of memory and memory thinks in stories. Alas, men now in their forties, taught nothing but scientific history, have nothing in their hearts but what they got outside school from the muses of the Beetles and Rolling Stones whose collected works they still remember — while none can tell you what the Seven, Thirty or Hundred Years Wars were about or name the English Kings.

7. Music

M usic at two is in Latin because the words we sing are the prayers, hymns, vesicles, and psalms of the Mass and Office — memorized as the melodies are. Flee method here as well. Children have to find their voices for themselves. No one who can hear at all is tone-deaf. Strike a tuning fork, hum to match it, and get the boys in unison to hum it with you. Cacophony! Gesture upward: Sursum voces! They are seldom too high. If they are: Deorsum! If on pitch: Perfecte! After trying the note several times in chorus, get each boy to match it by himself Some will be shy. At fourteen voices change. A boy should have found his voice at eight but, since he didn't, must find it now at a difficult time. Let the music hold him up. When he sinks, let him sputter. Physics will prevail and he will float. Some are slow, some quick, but everyone can do it, And what a moment in one's life it is! A breath inside the soul (each boy's peculiar muse) suddenly is there, and he can sing a note on pitch! — and finds it fun to climb adjacent intervals or jump to thirds and sixths, In a few days they can sing the psalm tones; in two years all the hymns and psalms of Lauds and Vespers of the Little Office; in three, sight-read Gregorian notes and join the choir for Mass.

Jubilate Deo, omnis terra: servite Domino in laetitia!

VIII Quid Orandum?

What should we pray for?

1. Poverty

T he material cause of schools is poverty. In fact as well as spirit, not a false interpretation of detachment. I remember a genial Jesuit puffing a Cuban cigar explaining as he blew a perfect ring, "I don't own the smoke; I just have the use of it!"

Electricity, central heating, and hot showers enervate the senses, luxuriate, and paralyze the will. Hannibal lost Rome because he couldn't bear to leave the thermal baths. Poor aging general, his joints, inflamed by twenty years of battle, perhaps for him it was a fair exchange; but boys need ice-cold showers. Poverty is not a condition; it is a constitutive cause of schools. It means a physical plant, austere, Cistercian, without what we call decoration or amenities; plain food; uniforms of rough-cut, drip-dry cloth and a curriculum without textbooks and lesson plans.

Beyond the day-to-day physical encounters with nature in study, and each other in sports, the boys must go for a couple of weeks each year on a wilderness survival trek such as Outward Bound or the National Outdoor Leadership School once led before coeds broke up the male society. Boys have to face real hardship and danger, even the chance of injury and death. If they don't learn how to cry and pray for help sometime in adolescence, they fail their rites of passage and remain emotionally prepubescent for the rest of their lives. This is a harsh, hard school. One hopes the accidents will not be too severe — of

course, that they won't be fatal; but what can't happen can't be faced; they have to swim out beyond the ropes or there isn't any test.

Gymnastic is the poverty of learning, first of all in physical confrontation unfettered with clothes, without the carapace of gear. If a boy has never felt the tightening of his scrotum diving bare into a cold, translucent mountain lake or wrestled in the sand without a prophylactic harness, learning where it hurts the etymology of "testament"and why even in a rage you don't do to others what you don't want done to you, he'll never know the thrill of taking chances or the Limits of aggression. If he hasn't felt a hollow in his stomach when a stronger enemy attacked, turned pale surrendering, and then revived in the certainty that no real harm can ever come to those who fight a good fight fair, or never flushed with gratitude to God, his teammates, and a worthy enemy at victories, his intellect and will inevitably miss their targets like arrows from a crooked bow.

2. Music

T he formal cause of schools is music. The liberal arts (grammar, logic, rhetoric, advanced arithmetic and geometry, theory of music and mathematical astronomy) are college subjects that asphyxiate the arts themselves as well as boys if they are introduced too soon without the musical air they breathe. Laboratories, textbooks and computers drown school subjects in a white noise, while music, from a root meaning silence, as in "mute," "myth" and "mystery," is the song of things whose voices articulate the silent work of angels.

The immediate (practical) purpose of drinking a cup of coffee is to wash the biscuit down. Its proximate (ethical) purpose is the intimate communion of say, cowboys (they do exist; Will James was right!) standing around the sullen campfire in a drenching rain, water curling off Stetsons, over slickers, splashing on the rowels of spurs, as they draw the bitter liquid down their several throats into the single moral belly of their comradeship. The remote (political) purpose of coffee at the campfire, is the making of Americans — born on the frontier, free, frank, friendly, touchy about honor, despisers of fences, lovers of horses, worshipers of eagles and women. Nations have their drinks: the English tea, the Irish whiskey, the Germans beer — Americans drink coffee from a can. The ultimate purpose is spiritual. For a boy to drink a can of coffee with cowboys in the rain is, as Odysseus said of Alcinous's banquet, something like perfection.

Note that purpose in all four modes means either working for extrinsic ends (the purpose of the eye is seeing girls) or resting in itself as good ("How beautiful art thou! Thy eyes are doves' eves"). Like coffee at the campfire, each subject at school achieves all four purposes (practical, ethical, political and spiritual) intrinsically, not for use or self-indulgence, but for the beauty of the psalm sung to the psalter which the commentators say is the ten-stringed instrument of Law.

Music demands a faculty of equal friends who act collegially, making decisions by consensus — all for one and one for all. Societies of work, as agents acting for extrinsic ends, are hierarchically ordered, like armies of officers and men. Modern schools, as businesses selling education, have their principals, department heads and teachers under contract to produce a certified product. In an oligarchic world, rapidly collapsing to democracy, they are agents of the media. You see the difference in the books we read and how we read them. Modem schools use textbooks to inculcate political and moral (immoral) doctrine and, even when they do teach classics, force prefabricated interpretations on them, taking Macbeth, for example, as nothing but "ambitious man," while a boy who loves him, and becomes him, sees deeper than the moralizing, knowing, as Macbeth himself does at the end, the horror of the evil in his bones.

3. Learning

T he agent cause is learning. Not teaching. A school is a faculty of friends learning together. Other free societies are formed for drinking, hunting, sailing, and the like, where "for" means "taking joy because of" — to quench one's thirst for what it is that quenches it, and, since there is no necessity of taking others in, they are exclusive clubs; but schools, because learning is a self diffusive good, pour down love and knowledge on their pupils like a voluntary rain.

Ever since the Fall, men have worked in the sweat of their brows, and women labored in pain. But schools (Puritans be damned!) are fun. Learning for its own sake calls them forth. The yachtsman hears the wind and waves, the hunter the horn and hounds; zealous teachers and eager boys follow the buzz, as of bees in the brain, of sensitive, affective, and intellectual delight. A can of coffee bonds men into a band of cowboys, typifies the nation, signifying angels at God's work. But since man is a rational animal, beyond the coffee or the yacht or hunt is finding out the names of things and getting to know their habits — the way oaks stand, as maples don't, or how words fit together when you say a simple or a complex thing. And so our agent cause, acting on poverty in music's air, is the definitive, useless human act, to know — plus its cause and consequence, to love.

4. Love

T he final cause of schools is feeling in the knowledge of things the throb and thrill of them. Love operates in four distinct but concomitant modes: sensitive, affective, intellectual, and voluntary (eros, amor, dilectio, caritas).

Erotic love has been reduced by moralists to preparatory, direct, and subsidiary procreative acts that outside marriage are illicit. But sensation is a very large gift of nature without which nothing in emotion, intellect, or will can breathe. If you don't feel Cupid's arrow at the sight of passing beauty you can't forever see God's beauty face to face. Beatitude insofar as it is known and expressed in this life is sensational — witness the Song of Songs.

As children of New England Puritans and European Jansenists, we are embarrassed by this subject. Swimming in the raw? In view of certain problems, bucket showers? Well, perhaps Dodge City got too rowdy and Carrie Nation rightly hatcheted a few saloons, but Prohibition made more drunks than it prevented. Repression causes the excess it tries to cure. Fagging in the British public schools is nature's revenge on a cold and touchless race. An American education organization recently resolved that, since there is abuse, teachers must not touch a child at all, But coaches hugging teams, because they won or lost a game, is surely not an illness or a sin. Teachers should be married men or in religious orders and boys known inside out so

that if abuse occurs among them the culprits can be disciplined to the degree the common experiments of adolescence call for or expelled if there are real proclivities. Let the two percent find help outside the competence of schools — for the ninety-eight, the proper use of nature starts with nature as it is.

Americans have an inordinate fear of eros. I remember watching a French peasant family at a village railroad station putting their gawky son off to his first job far from home. The mother, then the father, then the brothers, sisters, cousins, uncles, aunts, sweethearts, comrades, neighbors, and possibly strangers hugged and kissed him smack on the mouth until his lips puffed up like plums. He wasn't much to look at; who knows how far he'll get in a naughty world; but this much is certain: more than the foundation, he has the very earth of human life to build on. And I thought of how, when my daughter first went off to boarding school, she shied when I tried to kiss her goodbye because we hadn't the habit, suffering what Conrad Baars calls deprivation and a consequent fear of love. Like Lear on the blasted heath, "I've ta'en too little care of this."

At the opposite extreme, a student of mine visiting relatives in Greece, on the very first night, after a delightful evening in the whitewashed kitchen (the family so easy with each other as his own had never been), climbed up to a neat straw-mattress bed in the loft with a cousin about his age who, the minute they got under the covers, began an amorous assault. When the astonished American instinctively repulsed him, he responded with a hurt, reproachful pout, "I thought that we were friends!" A few days of mixing with the other village boys soon proved such play as indiscriminate and ordinary among them as ice cream is with us. They were not the genetically predisposed two percent but boisterous neighborhood kids practicing the "normal" adolescence of an ancient, over-easy nation. The whole visit proved difficult to say the least because, racing through pungént orange groves

between snowcapped peaks and the wine-dark sea, swimming out to islands where the gods still haunt the rocks, and climbing cliffs to secret caverns where they ate their bread and cheese among the scolding birds, the boys indeed became fast friends — by day; by night, priapic struggles on the straw, repeated, repulsed and repeated with increasingly violent insistence!

And in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another… And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient.

In the glut of a decaying oligarchic state, decadent Americans are sliding to the reprobate sense without the Grecian charm while the Puritans still left among them, repressing the natural urge of eros, make themselves and especially their children, all the more vulnerable to the disease. Between the two extremes, there is a Catholic mean, something like the peasant French.

He siad to him: Come near me, and give me a kiss, my son.

He came near, and kissed him. And immediately as he smelled the fragrant smell of his garments, blessing him, he said: Behold the smell of my son is as the smell of a plentiful field, which the Lord hath blessed.

I remember how once returning up the hill from Vespers too soon after surgery for such a climb when my heart was not quite sure the next beat would come, a member of the choir, with an arm about my shoulders, walked me safely to the top. How my heart leapt up to feel the strength of that young arm and, like Isaac, smell the fragrance of his garments as of a plentiful field!

Eros is the final cause of gymnastic as the art of right sensation a virtuous energy that, moving atoms and stars, sings in the blood of healthy men, exciting them to amor, affectionate friendship, the "affect" of a word or touch — born in fear of giving offense, sad at absence or indifference, hoping, because friends are good and good is generous, that their affection will be shared, rejoicing to find the separate atoms of themselves unite into a "thing," as boys working together at a good, hard task and taking some dangerous chance, become a "class."

Dilectio is love of choice — this one, not that. It is exclusive, jealous, shutting others out, as when you say, "He's my best friend." Though religious orders forbid singular (by which they mean perverse) friendships, they don't prevent love of particular persons. Saint Paul, about to die, says much in little to his beloved Timothy in repeating "hurry" twice: Not festina lente, as the Roman proverb goes, but festina ad me venire cito — "make haste to come to me quickly." And at Saint Benedict's command, young Saint Maur runs out on the river to pull his drowning brother Placid out by the hair.

Mankind is a coupled species, generically in marriage, particularly in the relation primitive men (and boys like Tom and Joe) ritualize, by drinking a drop of each other's blood. On bivouac, a soldier carries half his tent which buttons up at night with his buddy's. The two halves match. In combat, buddies die to save each others' lives. Man, says Aristophanes, is a severed four-legged beast whose parts work desperately to reunite. Eros, amor, and, with a click, dilectio when they fit like lock and key. Dilectio, like "dialogue" or "dialectic," means a reunited split. Adolescents pair off in their own way as in later life married couples do. And the fidelity of the latter depends on how well such bonds were fixed in the former because dilectio is false if not till death. Men who haven't got best friends, though their wives sometimes resent them, never measure up to having wives. How wonderful when

grown-up boys recall good times together! Memories flood and old emotions rise; they sing school songs, run up to the bar for one last drink and, though they keep it secret even from each other, have an urge to seal their friendship with the imprint Love created lips to make — and don't because, as Puritans, they keep it secret from themselves.

Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity;

Like the precious ointment on the head, that ran down upon the beard, the beard of Aaron.

"Fortis ut mors dilectio." But stronger than death, is caritas, from carus, "dear" — loving something precious for its sake, not ours. Not a choice we make for us but a sacrifice for someone else. Saint Leo says of Saint Lawrence Martyr.

The flames could not conquer the charity of Christ: and weaker was the fire that burned without, than the one that kindled within.

Teachers in this age must even face the tyranny of democratic students as Saint Cassianus did

who, with his hands tied behind his back, was given over to the boys he was teaching (erudiebat) to be stabbed and flayed by their schoolboy pens.

Crudelissismo supplicio affectus est — the root word of "affection." And note erudiebat; he was teaching them to be less rude! A teacher must not only be ready to die for his boys but to be killed by them because he loves them more than they do themselves. Most students eventually hurt their teachers, striking out in anger as the only way to break away from what, at a certain age, seems the oppressive burden of such caring. For better or worse they have to be themselves. In later years, if they have pupils of their own, they pay the price of being hurt by them.

5. Girls

L ove grows in five cumulative (not disjunctive) stages, each defined by its object: parents, animals, boys, girls, and God. Boys love boys in natural sequence — eros, amor, dilectio, caritas. When boys love girls it is reversed. When Romeo first sees Juliet, he calls her "dear"(carus):

O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright! It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night Like a rich jewel! in an Ethiop's ear — Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!

And the imagery of their first wit-combat is charity:

If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this; My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

At the end of the most famous scene in literature the two descend into dilectio and become a couple:

Rom. 0, wilt thou leave me so unsatisfied?

Jul. What satisfaction cans't thou have tonight? Rom. Th' exchange of thy love's faithful vow for mine…

and only then dare let emotion sink into the depths of amor:

Jul. My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep: the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.

Caritas is castitas. They don't become one "till Holy Church incorporate two in one" and greet the dawn together in the world's loveliest aubade:

Jul. It was the nightingale, and not the lark, That pierc'd the fearful hollow of thine ear. Nightly she sings on yon Pomegranate tree, Believe me, love, it was the nightingale. Rom. it was the lark, the herald of the morn; No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks Do lace the severing clouds in yonder East.

Erotic love among friends has natural limits, broken only by the unnatural two percent; but if first experiments begin between the sexes, the torch is put to an uncontrollable fire whose consequence is social disaster and personal sin. However, once boys have climbed love's ladder to the top in friendship and really know what it is, they are ready for the formal descent, beginning in high school with the general love of beauty in girls, discovered in sports and plays, culminating at the Senior Waltz, with a prefiguration of the love of choice, in having their first "date" and, walking home by moonlight, the first stir of emotion — while erotic love between them has to wait for courtship, which begins in college and is consummated in marriage. In all of this,

the necessary cooperation of girls' and boys' schools is best expressed in sports — soccer, ice hockey, and track (which boys play and girls watch); field hockey, figure skating, and lacrosse (which girls play and boys watch) ~ and in the production of plays (in which girls from the sister school take women's parts); and two formal dances, the Junior Prom and Senior Waltz.

Woman was created for man, she is his helpmate, made from his rib, and finds her happiness only in serving him; and man is a beast until he fully becomes himself in loving her. But for her to serve, there first must be a him. The silly but destructive cult of so-called "feminism" has caught up even healthy girls because not just a good, but any man is hard to find. The first condition of the right relation of the sexes is that boys be heroes suffering for girls who watch and blush. Soccer is a high school joust. Down on the field, the team in their colorful Jerseys, as handsome as can be, move in changing patterns as the goal is reached or missed, while on the sidelines the excited girls, in sweaters for the brisk fall days, chant fight songs, or in winter, watching hockey on the frozen lake with their knitted caps and long wool scarves, red cheeks flaming in the freezing air, stamp and cheer for their favorites; and in Spring, prim in modest blouse and skirt, they see the boys in their physical perfection running, jumping and wrestling when

…May hadde peynted with his softe shoures This gardyn ful of leves and of floures…

And the boys, in turn, from their sidelines, watch with bated breath the leap and lunge of a lacrosse or hockey stick, not knowing the rules nor caring which team wins, but drinking in the grace of eager movement.

Sports excite the general love of charity — a group of spectators watching a group of players. Perhaps this girl will pick that boy as he dashes down the track but she doesn't know his name and scarcely sees the color of his hair, certainly not his eyes. Perhaps this boy, enraptured by the color and light, will think he is in love with that ethereal figure cutting figures in the ice.

Schools traditionally make the pretty boys take women's parts in plays — an invitation to the Greek disease. If you choose the right text (Shakespeare is best), keep rehearsals strictly chaperoned and the company on stage so no two get alone, with the whole thing moving in the formal figures of the art, the love that stirs is charity. A Midsummer Night's Dream is a music to "awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth" and the glory of adolescent theater.

At the Junior Prom, the opposite sexes line up on opposite sides of the hall and the boys ask girls to dance, chaperons seeing that all get chosen. At the Senior Waltz, as general charity moves toward particular choice, young men invite their ladies, while the wise duennas make sure they change partners several times.

Back in the dorms between these great events, the boys will think and talk of nothing else, confessing to friends their passion for a skater on the ice, or a player at lacrosse, as a type of the divine. They comb their hair long hours before the mirror, speculating whether such perfection as her's could stoop to notice their unworthiness; some get lovesick, mope, let their socks fall down, and dream away whole classes in geometry, fearful, in the painful intimations of their own death- in-love, that Romeo and Juliet is the story of themselves.

O speak again, bright angel! for thou art As glorious to this night, being o'er my head, As is a winged messenger of heaven Unto the white-upturnéd wond'ring eyes Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds And sails upon the bosom of the air.

Without this adolescent love, there cannot be marriage or religious vows and without marriage or religious vows, there cannot be love of God. Men's perfections are mediated to themselves by women, as God's love is by Mary.

6. The Melting Pot

T o understand the social consequences of learning we must make a detour through the classes distinguished according to the division of labor in hierarchical order like a pyramid with the broad base of farmers, the lesser, but still large number of craftsmen, then the smaller number of clerks and last, at the top, the smallest class of soldiers — sixty percent farmers; twenty, craftsmen; ten, clerks; five, soldiers; and five, the "zero" status (not a class) of outlaws (beggars, criminals, cripples and clowns).

Farmers and craftsmen have no school; they learn by doing as apprentices. Schools are for clerks, who go on to one of the six professions (architecture, medicine, law, theology, or letters), and for soldiers who, as squires, go off to war.

In a word, schools form clerical and military elites. It is not at all self-evident that men are equal. In a just society, farmers hold their land in tenure, craftsmen are protected by guilds, clerks by clerical privilege, soldiers are judged only by their peers and the zero class is "patronized." Farmers can't be drafted to fight wars, evicted if crops fail or taxed beyond the tithe; a craftsman's goods are quality-stamped and sold at fixed prices; clerks live on endowed stipends and charge no fees — it is a sin of simony to profit from public works, disease, injustice, the Sacraments or, in the case of teachers, ignorance; soldiers requisition food and lodging for themselves and their horses. In all

walks of life, women (especially if pregnant), children, the indigent, and the ill are treated with special affection and concern. Gypsies cheat with impunity; actors, poets, and outlaws get the special treatment they deserve. A mechanical justice system is contrary to justice and grace.

Belloc said a farmer's son can easily become an intellectual but that it takes three generations for an intellectual to become a farmer's son. He was half right. It takes three generations to be anything. Schools are based on class society. To force the farmer's and the craftsman's sons into a company of clerks, frustrates them — until they find that codes of honor and refinement are vulnerable to their shrewd know-how; then clerical and military sensibility dissolves into fawning admiration of their brute strength and craft turns into craftiness exploiting it, converting schools to workshops and the leisure class to sissies.

Today we must be fools if not cynical. The times are not just out of joint but utterly disjointed. Unless we get the sixty percent majority back on family farms, the craftsmen, clerks, and soldiers must eventually steal or starve. But societies are not arrangements of atoms; once disarranged they can't reconstitute by contract or by force. Governments presuppose nations and the question for Americans today is who we are — or were.

Since nations are agents acting for the glory of God, power comes from God to kings or presidents who distribute it to the people according to their class. Democracy presumes the opposite, that people invest their rulers with delegated power. Contrary to Catholic doctrine, Modernists have tried to reconcile classlessness with a vague dream of Christian communism, According to their formula, divide et coagula, nations, having nominal existence only, are temporary coagulations of persons needed for a time but now are obsolete impediments to larger coagulations, finally, to the reign of One True Man whom Christians used to call by his real name, Anti-Christ.

Catholic social doctrine is, of course, opposed to this, insisting on the real distinction of those baptized and those not, of nations (each having its own ancestors), of the economic classes, of male and female, people and animals, animals and plants, living things and minerals, everything and God. A nation is not a cultural, linguistic, or any kind of accidental union. America "in the beginning," and "in principle," despite the unfortunate political separation, is British and, as Britain herself despite the unfortunate schism, Catholic.

The Colonists imported and vastly improved the lot of African slaves who, by de facto segregation, remained a subordinate nation until the 1960's. Though the attempt at instant integration is a major cause of the present chaos, if we had a hundred years of patient, Catholic social change among both blacks and whites, a reciprocal assimilation might occur. Over the years since the Founding, successive waves of European immigrants (British or from close affinity groups) blended in with the colonial stock. Orientals were limited by quota and segregated by anti-miscegenation laws, even when citizens, were kept as separate nations; Jews, as Europeans, though easily assimilated on the surface, maintained their national identity as descendants of Abraham as they must until conversion. Despite its heresy and all the strains of massive immigration, and, though severe, nonetheless accidental injustices, America was essentially a Christian commonwealth from Plymouth Rock to Pearl Harbor. Since World War II, the public thing (res publica) has been destroyed. Beyond recovery. The heat of sudden millions from disaffinity groups melted the melting pot. It may be in the present economic crisis, a revolutionary situation will occur (riots in the cities, bandits in the hills) and an American Franco assuming dictatorial powers will restore the ordinary restraints against foreign occupation (sealing borders, reviving quotas) but political supremacy with a majority of disenfranchised aliens will never be the greatest modem nation of my childhood even if it survives anarchy or invasion.

If as think, America is down and out — there is certainly a failure of nerve — any political action is vain, And so, interea, the times demand this sweet anabasis, our school. And if our democratic pupils stab and flay us with their pens, we shall die a happy death and rise again: Hilarem datorem diligit Deus.

The Good Books

The "Great Books" movement of the last generation has not failed so much as fizzled, not because of any defect in the books—"the best that has been thought and said," in Matthew Arnold's phrase—but like good champagne in plastic bottles they went flat. To change the figure, the seeds are good but the cultural soil has been depleted; the seminal ideas of Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, only properly grow in an imaginative ground saturated with fables, fairy tales, stories, rhymes, adventures, which have developed into the thousand books of Grimm, Andersen, Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Dumas and the rest. Western tradition, taking all that was best of the Greco-Roman world into herself has given us the thousand good books as a preparation for the great ones and for all the studies in the arts and sciences, without which such studies are inhumane. The brutal athlete and the foppish aesthete suffer vices opposed to the virtue of what Newman called "the gentleman." Anyone working in any art or science at college, whether in the so-called "pure" or the practical arts and sciences will discover he has a made a quantum leap when he gets even a small amount of cultural ground under him—he will grow up like an undernourished plant suddenly fertilized and watered.

Of course the distinction between "great" and "good" is not absolute. "Great" implies a certain magnitude; one might say War and Peace or Les Miserables are great because of their length, or The Critique of Pure Reason its difficulty. Great books call for philosophical reflection; whereas good books are popular, appealing especially to the imagination. But obviously some writers are both and their works may be read more than once from the different points of view – this is true of Shakespeare and Cervantes, for example.

It is commonly agreed also that both "great" and "good" can only be judged from a certain distance. Contemporary works can be appreciated and enjoyed but not very properly judged, and just as a principle must stand outside what follows from it (as a point to a line), so a cultural standard must be established from some time at least as distant as our grandparents'. For us today the cut-off point is World War I before which cars and the electric light had not yet come to dominate our lives and the experience of nature had not been distorted by speed and the destruction of shadows. There is a serious question—with arguments on both sides surely—as to whether there can be any culture at all in a mechanized society. Whichever side one takes in that dispute, it is certainly true that we cannot understand the point at issue without an imaginative grasp of the world we have lost.

What follows is not a complete list: almost all the authors have written many books, some as good as the ones given; and there are undoubtedly authors of some importance inadvertently left out— but this is a sufficient worksheet. Everyone will find more than enough that he hasn't read, and everything on this list is by common consent part of the ordinary cultural matter essential for an English-speaking person to grow in.

Remember that the point of view throughout a course of studies such as this is that of the amateur—the ordinary person who loves and enjoys what he loves—not of the expert in critical, historical or textual technology.

The books have been divided (sometimes dubiously because some stand midway between the categories) into the stages of life corresponding to the classical "ages" of man and in general agreement with the divisions of modern child psychology as explained by Freud

or Piaget. And because sight is the first of the senses and especially powerful in early years, it is very important to secure books illustrated by artists working in the cultural tradition we are studying both as an introduction to art and as part of the imaginative experience of the book. This is not to disparage contemporary artists any more than the tradition itself disparages contemporary experiment quite the contrary, one of the fruits of such a course should be the encouragement of good writing and drawing. A standard must never be taken as a restrictive straitjacket but rather as a teacher and model for achievement. Book illustration reached its perfection in the nineteenth century in the work of Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, Walter Crane, Gustave Dore, George Cruikshank, "Phiz", Gordon Browne, Beatrix Potter, Sir John Tenniel, Arthur Rackham, Howard Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, and many others.

The rule of thumb is to find a nineteenth-century edition or one of the facsimiles which (though not as sharp in the printing) are currently available at moderate prices. What follows is an incomplete work sheet of unedited notes which may serve as a rough guide.

The Nursery Books

We must start somewhere and the ten books laid out by John Senior in this text are a good place to start. These have been put down first and what follows them is a list of other books to fill your nursery bookshelf as your means and space permit.

• 1. Mother Goose (Dover facsimiles illustrated by Rackham; Viking Press).
• 1. Greenaway, Kate. A Apple Pie, Book of Games, Marigold Garden, and Under the Window. (Frederick Warne).
• 1. Caldecott, Randolph. Picture Books, 16 little volumes (published by Frederick Warne).
• 1. Stevenson, Robert Louis. A Child's Garden of Verses (Scribners).
• 1. Potter, Beatrix: Peter Rabbit and 23 little volumes; some available in French, Spanish and Latin. All illustrated by Potter (an important feature of these books is their small size, designed for a young child. Buy the individual books, not all of them collected in one big volume).
• 1. Aesop. Aesop's Fables (The translation by Robert L'Estrange is the classic).
• 1. Grimm. Household Stories. Illustrated by Walter Crane (Dover facsimiles).
• 1. Perrault, Charles. Fairy Tales. Illustrated by Dore (Dover).
• 1. Andersen, Hans Christian. Fairy Tales. Arabian Nights. There are two classic translations, one expurgated for children by Andrew

Lang, the other complete by Richard Burton.

1. Grahame, Kenneth. Wind in the Willows (illustrated by Ernest Shepherd).

Further titles worth having on the shelf:

• Belloc, Hilaire. The Bad Child's Book of Beasts; Cautionary Tales.
• Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland; Through the Looking Glass. Illustrated by Tenniel.
• Collodi, Carlo. Pinocchio.
• de la Mare, Walter. Come Hither; Songs of Childhood.
• Edgeworth, Maria. The Parent's Assistant; Moral Tales.
• Ewing, Juliana. Jackanapes. Gesta Romanorum. Translated by Swann (scholarly facsimiles).
• Harris, Joel Chandler. Uncle Remus.
• Kingsley, Charles. Water Babies.
• Kipling, Rudyard. Just So Stories; Jungle Book.
• Lamb, Charles. Beauty and the Beast; Tales from Shakespeare.
• Lang, Andrew. Blue Book of Fairies and other colors; five volumes; best illustrated by H.J. Ford (Dover facsimile).
• Lear, Edward. Nonsense Omnibus; The Owl and the Pussycat. Illustrated by Lear (Warne).
• Lofting, Hugh. Dr. Doolittle's Circus and others in the series.
• Milne, A.A.. Winnie the Pooh and others in the series.

The Schoolboy Books

As with the nursery books the schoolboy books have been laid out highlighting the first ten he recommends for their age. If they read nothing else on this list let them at least be read and read on their own these ten.

• 1. Pyle, Howard. Robin Hood and others. Illustrated by Pyle.
• 1. James, Will. Smoky; Lone Cowboy; Book of Cowboys Illustrated by James.
• 1. Adams, Andy. Log of a Cowboy. Illustrated by N.C. Wyeth.
• 1. Stevenson, Robert Louis. *Treasure Island (*Illustrated by N.C. Wyeth)
• 1. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Kidnapped.
• 1. Twain, Mark. Tom Sawyer.
• 1. Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn.
• 1. London, Jack. Call of the Wild.
• 1. Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles
• 1. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe.
  • Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women; Little Men; others.
  • Aldrich, Thomas Bailey. Story of a Bad Boy.
  • Burroughs, Edgar Rice. Tarzan series.
  • Browning, Robert. The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Illustrated by Kate

• Greenaway (Warne).

• Burnett, Francis Hodgson. The Secret Garden; Little Lord Fauntleroy.

• Collins, William. John Gilpin's Ride. Illustrated by Caldecott (Warne).

• Cooper, James Fenimore. Deerslayer and many others.

• Dana, Richard Henry. Two Years Before the Mast.

• Dickens, Charles. Christmas Carol; Cricket on the Hearth; David Copperfield; Oliver Twist (These last may be reserved for adolescents or re-read.)

• Dodge, Mary Mapes. Hans Brinker.

• Garland, Hamlin. Son of the Middle Border and others.

• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Tanglewood Tales.

• Henty, George William. A hundred "Boys Books"

• Irving, Washington. Sketch Book.

• Kingsley, Charles. Westward Ho, others

• Kipling, Rudyard. Captains Courageous; Stalky and Co. Illustrated by Millar.

• Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Hiawatha; Evangeline.

• Marryat, Frederick, Midshipman Easy; Masterman Ready, and others.

• Masefield, John. Jim Davis.

• Porter, Gene Stratton. Freckles and others.

• Sewell, Anna. Black Beauty.

• Shakespeare. Comedy of Errors.

• Spyri, Johanna. Heidi.

• Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin.

• Tarkington, Booth. Penrod and others in the series Til Eulenspiegel translated by Mackenzie.

• Twain, Mark. The Prince and the Pauper but not Connecticut Yankee and later novels.

• Verne, Jules. Around the World in Eighty Days; and many others.

THE SCHOOLBOY BOOKS

• Wilder, Laura Ingalls. Little House on the Prairie; and others.
• Wyss, Johann. Swiss Family Robinson.

The High School Books

Few books are best. There is an avarice in learning as in money. These are the essential high school books presupposing love and knowledge of the ones for the nursery and gymnasium. If those were missed, they must be read now, silly as they may seem to older boys who can (to hide their embarrassment) read them aloud to their younger brothers while on vacation — an excellent practice even for those who already know them, because advance up through the seven ages of man is not disjunctive (like rockets that eject their burnt out stages) but cumulative (like trees that keep their roots, trunk, and branch.) Just as with the younger children's books, make sure to get editions with old (preferably original) illustrations; modernistic and sentimental distortions change the meaning and spoil the love of art.

Freshmen

Sir Walter Scott

• Ivanhoe
• Rob Roy
• Guy Mannering
• Kenilworth
• Quentin Durwood

Sophomores

James Fenimore Cooper

THE HIGH SCHOOL BOOKS

• The Deerslayer
• The Last of the Mohicans
• The Pathfinder
• The Pioneers
• The Prairie

Juniors

Charles Dickens

• A Tale of Two Cities
• David Copperfield
• Oliver Twist
• Barnaby Rudge
• Great Expectations

Seniors

William Shakespeare

• Julius Caesar
• Macbeth
• The Merchant of Venice
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Romeo and Juliet

These other books can liter the bookshelves either at school or at home for a child to pick up and read on their own. We live in the digital age where we all decide our children will not be near screens and we will throw our cell phones out and yet they remain. We must start somewhere and habits of reading can be formed. In bed, after your prayers have been said is a wonderful place to start.

• Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights.
• Collins, Wilkie. Moonstone and others.
• Dampier, William. A Voyage Round the World.
• Daudet, Alphonse. Tartarin, Fromont Jeune.
• Dickens, Charles. Barnaby Rudge; Nicholas Nickleby; Old Curiosity Shop.
• Doyle, Arthur Conan. Sherlock Holmes series; White Company.
• Du Maurier, George. Trilby.
• Dumas, Alexander. Three Musketeers; others.
• Eggleston, Edward. The Hoosier Schoolmaster.
• Eliot, George. Romola; Adam Bede; Mill on the Floss.
• Fabre, Henri. Selections from Souvenirs entymologique.
• Hughes, Thomas. Tom Brown's School Days; Tom Brown at Oxford.
• Hugo, Victor. Quatre-vingt-treize; Les Miserables; Hunchback of Notre-Dame.
• Ibanez, Blasco*. Blood and Sand; Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.*
• Le Sage, Alain. Gil Blas.
• Park, Mungo. Travels in Africa.
• Parkman, Francis. Oregon Trail.
• Poe, Edgar Allen. Tales; and poems.
• Polo, Marco. Travels.
• Reade, Charles. The Cloister and the Hearth.
• Rhodes, Eugene. Best Novels and Stories (edited by Dobie).
• Scott, Walter. Ivanhoe; Rob Roy; many others.
• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.
• Shakespeare. Midsummer Night's Dream; Romeo and Juliet; Merchant of Venice.
• Sienkiewicz, Henryk. Quo Vadis; With Fire and Sword.
• Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels.
• Wallace, Edgar. Four Just Men; Sanders of the River; others.
• Wells, H.G.. The Time Machine; The Invisible Man; others.

THE HIGH SCHOOL BOOKS

• Wister, Owen. The Virginian.

Youth and On

Before we get to the Great Books, it is important that we read at least ten from each of the periods of growth. Luckily we have children which can be a lovely reason to read the nursery and schoolboy books for the first time or over again. Here are some further books to read after high school and in the youth of ones life.

• Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice; and others.
• Balzac, Honore. Pere Goriot; and many others.
• Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward.
• Bernanos, Georges. Diary of a Country Priest.
• Blackmore, Richard. Lorna Doone; and others.
• Borrow, George. Romany Rye; and others.
• Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre.
• Buchanan, John. The Thirty Nine Steps; and many others.
• Butler, Samuel. The Way of all Flesh; Erewhon.
• Cabell, James Branch. Jurgen; and others.
• Cable, George Washington. Old Creole Days; and others.
• Cather, Willa. My Antonia; Death Comes for the Archbishop; and others.
• Chekhov, Anton. Stories; and plays.
• Chesterton, G.K.. Father Brown series; Everlasting Man; A Man Called Thursday
• Columbus, Christopher. Four Voyages to the New World.
• Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim; and many others

YOUTH AND ON

• Cook, James. Captain Cook's Explorations.
• De Maupassant, Guy. Stories.
• Dickens, Charles. Bleak House; Our Mutual Friend; Martin Chuzzlewit.
• Dostoyevsky, Feodor. Crime and Punishment; Brothers Karamazov.
• Doughty, Charles. Travels in Arabia Desert.
• Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones; Jonathan Wilde
• Hakluyt, Richard. Voyages to the New World.
• Hawkins, Anthony Hope. The Prisoner of Zenda.
• Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Scarlet Letter; and others.
• Irving, Washington. Life of Columbus; Conquest of Granada; Life of George Washington Jackson,
• Helen Hunt. Ramona.
• Lagerof, Selma. Jerusalem; Gosta Berling; and others.
• Loti, Pierre. Iceland Fisherman; and others.
• Manzoni., Alessandro. The Betrothed.
• Melville, Herman. Moby Dick; Billy Budd; and others.
• Moore, Tom. Lalla Rookh.
• Morris, William. News from Nowhere.
• Scott, Robert. Scott's Last Expedition
• Shakespeare. Macbeth; Hamlet; Taming of the Shrew; As You Like It.
• Stendahl. The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma.
• Stanley, Henry Morton. How I Found Livingstone.
• Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair; Henry Esmond; and others.
• Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace; and others.
• Trollope, Anthony. Barchester series
• Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons; A Nest of Gentlefolk; and others.
• Undset, Sigrid. Kristin Lavransdatter; and others.
• Verga, Giovanni. The House by the Medlar Tree; and others (translated by D.H. Lawrence)

• Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery.

One Hundred Decisive Dates

The dates are decisive but scholars by no means decisive about the dates. Some are legendary. Let the boys learn them and face the disputes in graduate school, if they get there.

Freshmen

B.C.

• 1. The Fall
• 1. The Flood
• 1. The Call of Abraham 1921
• 1. Ninus founds Nineveh 1909
• 1. The Exodus 1461
• 1. The Fall of Troy 1129
• 1. Romulus Founds Rome 753
• 1. The Battle of Marathon 490
• 1. The Death of Socrates 399
• 1. . The Death of Alexander the Great 323
• 1. The Assassination of Caesar 44

AD.

• 1. The Crucifixion 33
• 1. The Vision at Milvian Bridge 312
• 1. . Alaric Sacks Rome 410
• 1. Saint Benedict founds Monte Cassino 525
• 1. Charlemagne Crowned 800
• 1. The Battle of Hastings 1066
• 1. Columbus discovers America in 1492
• 1. . Defeat of the Spanish Armada 1588
• 1. The Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock in 1620
• 1. The Declaration of Independence 1776
• 1. The Fall of the Bastille 1789
• 1. Lee surrenders at Appotomatox 1865
• 1. The Battle of the Marne 1918
• 1. D Day 1544

Sophomores

B.C.

• 1. The Destruction of the Tower of Babel 2204
• 1. The Burning of Sodom 1897
• 1. The Blessing of Jacob 1759
• 1. David kills Goliath 1062
• 1. The Expulsion of Tarquinius 509
• 1. The Battle of Allia 387
• 1. The Battle of Beneventum 272
• 1. The Destruction of Carthage 146
• 1. The Death of Simon Machabaeus 134
• 1. The Death of Marius 114
• 1. The Death of Sulla 78
• 1. Caesar invades Britain 55

AD.

• 1. The Battle of Actium 31
• 1. The Council of Nicaea 325
• 1. The Crowning of Clovis 497
• 1. The Hejira 622
• 1. The Battle of Roncesvalles 788
• 1. The Death of Alfred the Great 899
• 1. Jerusalem taken in the First Crusade 1099
• 1. The Battle of Crécy 1346
• 1. The Battle of Agincourt 1415
• 1. The Battle of Naseby 1645
• 1. The Peace of Westphalia 1448
• 1. The Battle of Blenheim 1704
• 1. The Battle of Waterloo 1815

Juniors

B.C.

• 1. The Assumption of Henoch 3017
• 1. The Death of Samson 1137
• 1. The Assumption of Elias 896
• 1. Sardonapalus overthrown 822
• 1. Solon gives laws to Athens 594
• 1. Darius spares Croesus 560
• 1. Cyrus takes Babylon 538
• 1. Cincinnatus Dictator 459
• 1. The Twelve Tables of the Law given 451
• 1. The Death of Pericles 429
• 1. The Battle of Cannae 216

A.D.

• 1. Nero burns Rome 69
• 1. Saint Peter martyred 67
• 1. Genseric sacks Carthage 439
• 1. Justinian's Code 529
• 1. The Great Schism 1054
• 1. The Battle of Acre 1191
• 1. Saint Joan of Arc martyred 1431
• 1. The Avignon Pope returns to Rome 1377
• 1. The Gutenberg Bible 1457
• 1. Martin Luther's Theses 1517
• 1. The Council of Trent closes 1563
• 1. The Battle of the Plains of Abraham 1759
• 1. The Battle of New Orleans 1814
• 1. The Defeat at the Alamo 1836

Seniors

B.C.

• 1. Joseph sold into Egypt 1723
• 1. Josue crosses the Jordan Egypt 1451
• 1. Solomon dedicates the Temple 1003
• 1. The Destruction of Sennacherib 710
• 1. Judith severs the head of Holofernes 658
• 1. The Destruction of the Temple 590
• 1. Esther and the Purim Massacre 508
• 1. The Battle of Syracuse 413

AD.

• 1. The Final Destruction of the Temple 70
• 1. Saint Augustine goes to Canterbury 597
• 1. Saint Thomas Beckett martyred 1170
• 1. Constantinople falls to the Turks 1453
• 1. The Battle of Bosworth Field 1485
• 1. Cortez lands in Mexico 1519
• 1. Sant Thomas More martyred 1535
• 1. The Battle of Lepanto 1571
• 1. The Revolution of 1688
• 1. The Battle of Patavia 1709
• 1. The Peace of Aix 1748
• 1. The Battle of Rossbach 1757
• 1. Custer's Last Stand 1876
• 1. The Russian Revolution 1917
• 1. The Balfour Declaration 1917
• 1. Hiroshima 1945
• 1. Vietnam Defeat 1975

About the Author

John Senior (1923-1999), a graduate of Columbia, served as a professor of the humanities at Cornell University and the University of Kansas. As a professor during the 1960s, Dr. Senior sought to help his students in their search for meaning through an education in the great books. Dr. Senior's scholarship has served to restore the poetic mode which has greatly influenced all of the Western World.