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Its author was a Celt, and his models were Greek; and he was rather a patient imitative artist than greatly original and creative; but he wrote for Rome, and with the Italian soil and weather for his inspiration; and their forces pouring through him made his didactics poetry, and poetry they remain after nineteen centuries. Nothing of the kind comes from Greece.
He instructs while smiling; and he is a savant while a light-hearted friend. Few English naturalists are as genial not even White of Selborne and few as wide in didactics. To know him is a profit indeed; but just as surely a pleasure. From 'Curiosities of Natural History'
Maupassant himself tells us of those severe initiations in the Rue Murillo, or in the tent at Croisset; he has recalled the implacable didactics of his old master, his tender brutality, the paternal advice of his generous and candid heart. For seven years Flaubert slashed, pulverized, the awkward attempts of his pupil whose success remained uncertain.
But from Sweden the answer that came was one ordering me to persevere in the proposal of first finishing the Didactics; backed by saws to this effect: 'One would rather the better, but the earlier must be done first, 'One doesn't go from the bigger to the smaller, but wicey warsey, and all the rest of it.
Mirabeau, like Jean Jacques himself, was so impressed by the marked tenor of contemporary feeling, its prudential didactics, its formulistic sociality, that his native insurgency only found vent in private life, while in public he played pedagogue to the human race.
What must have pleased Hartlib in this was the tone of respectful compliment to himself; what may have pleased him less was the slighting way in which Comenius is passed over. "To search what many modern JANUAS and DIDACTICS, more than ever I shall read, have projected, my inclination leads me not," says Milton, quoting in brief the titles of the two best-known works of Comenius.
They often give it an air of reality, and they always help to utilize the author's idea. If they do not avail his art, they avail his didactics. Where they are not good for the story, they are good for something.
Not only may he have had to do with the importation of Comenius's Janua Linguarum and the recommendation of that book to such pedagogues as Home and Anchoran; but he was instrumental in extracting from Comenius, while that book and certain appendices to it were in the flush of their first European popularity, a summary of his reserved and more general theories and intentions in the field of Didactics.
Nothing was left me but to obey, and plod on against my will in the clay of logomachies for eight whole years. Poor Comenius! For Hartlib himself, we find, also laid aside the Pansophics for a time, seeing no hope for them in London without the presidency of Comenius, but continued to interest himself in the Didactics. In fact, however, he was never without interests of some kind or another.
His voice is an argument, and the expression on his face and the fire in his eyes suggest the street corner. He would have greatly distressed a man like Matthew Arnold, for the only method against such didactics is to send for the boxing gloves.
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