Janua met with marvellous success. “Had Comenius written no other book than this he would have rendered himself immortal. The work was reprinted countless times, and was translated into I know not how many languages. There are several polyglot editions. I do not doubt that Comenius speaks sincerely when he admits that the success of the work surpassed anything that he anticipated, for who would not be surprised that such a book should have been translated into twelve European languages.”[1]
The approval bestowed on the Janua was not quite universal. Some critics refused to believe that the new method of teaching Latin was a whit superior to the old, or, quite overlooking the educational value of the matter, directed their remarks against the style, which they said was bad, and the Latinity, which they considered faulty.
Milton in his Tractate on Education dismisses the book with a contemptuous remark,[2] and Adelung, writing a hundred years later, quotes with approval the criticism, “In vain will the beginner look for the result that its author claims from the use of the Janua.”[3] Adelung himself goes so far as to assert that its universal use would have been the surest way of restoring the barbarous Latin of the Middle Ages (die Barbarey der mittleren Zeiten).[4]
In truth, these criticisms of Comenius’ Latinity are beside the point. Granted that he was no great scholar (in comparison with men like the Scaligers and Casaubon he was none at all), his claim on the historian of education lies in the fact that he rescued the boys of his generation from the sterile study of words and introduced them to the world of mechanics, politics, and morality.
- ↑ Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique, Rott. 1697, i. 882.
- ↑ “To tell you therefore what I have benefited herein among old renowned Authors, I shall spare; and to search what many modern Janua’s and Didactics more than ever I shall read, have projected, my inclination leads me not.”
- ↑ Adelung’s Geschichte der menschlichen Narrheit, Leipzig, 1785; p. 205.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 222.
