Classical education

At the age of twelve, however, a piece of great good fortune befell me. Bernard Berenson, to whom I shall always be grateful, advised my mother to let me receive a classical education and even supplied her with the name of the brilliant tutor with whom I worked for the next three years, Professor Solone Monti. It was with him that I spent the happiest hours of my girlhood—perhaps the happiest I have ever known.

My first impression as I entered his study was of a haze of smoke, so thick that I could hardly see across the little square room, lined with cheap deal bookshelves, to the desk behind which sat a dark, stocky little man, with dandruff on his collar, and with such thick lenses to his spectacles that they seemed more suited to a windscreen than a human eye.

“Mind those books, signorina,” was his greeting, as I stumbled over a pile near the door, “they are meant to be read, not trodden on.”

I would have liked to ask why, in that case, great piles of them covered the floor, except that, looking about me, it was plain that there was no other place for them to be, every inch of the walls and tables being already filled.

“Wait a minute, the lexicon can go on to the floor too. Now sit here and we will take a journey to Greece and Rome. You know no Latin? And of course no Greek?”
I shook my head.

“And you have not yet read Dante?”

“No.”

“And Carducci and Pascoli are just names to you?”

I muttered something about Valentino vestito di nuovo.

“Yes, yes, I dare say,” impatiently, “but it’s the other Pascoli I mean, the great classical scholar. Well, we shall have a long way to travel—and we’ll pick a great many flowers on the way.” Then suddenly, explosively, taking off his glasses and gazing straight into my round, startled face, “But you like poetry, in the languages you know? You have read Keats, Shelley, Milton—perhaps some Goethe—perhaps Corneille? You read poetry for pleasure?”

“Yes, oh yes!”

“Then we’ll begin. Listen now, signorina. All you need to do today is to listen.”

And he took up Pascoli’s Epos—his anthology of Latin epic verse, of which the preface and the notes are still so vividly evocative that (in the words of another great classical scholar, Valgimigli, who had been Pascoli’s pupil) ‘it was like a fluttering of wings’.
The passage that Monti had chosen was the famous one about the Trojan camp-fires on the plain.

“This is how Pascoli describes the scene—for people like you who cannot yet read Greek:

“Da una parte la pianura scintillante di fuochi, con un cielo sereno di stelle (i Troiani erano all’aperto, in faccia alla loro grande città, e mille fuochi ardevano, e a ogni fuoco erano cinquanta guerrieri, e i cavalli stavano presso i fuochi, stritolando fra i denti l’orzo bianco e la spelta, e attendevano l’aurora); dall’altra il mare, tutto rumori e bisbigli. Giunti alle capanne e alle navi dei Mirmidoni, giunti a quella capanna, udirono un canto. Era Achille, che accompagnandosi sulla cetra predata, cantava le glorie dei guerrieri.”1

Monti put the book down.

“No, you needn’t try to make an intelligent comment. I saw that you were listening. Now, this is what one of your English poets, Tennyson, made of it:

“So many a fire between the ships and stream
Of Xanthus blazed before the towers of Troy,
A thousand on the plain; and close by each
Sat fifty in the blaze of burning fire;
And eating hoary grain and pulse the steeds
Fixt by their cars, waited the golden dawn.”
He closed the book, took off his spectacles and wiped them.

“That is the world you will see if you learn Greek—even if you get no further than Homer. Do you want to go there? Yes?”—for I was speechless—“I see you do. Well, here is a Greek grammar. Learn the alphabet and the declensions for next time, so that we can start reading at once. You know German, don’t you? And what a declension is? Well, then, be off with you. Oh, and get a lexicon, too; a small one will do, Homer’s vocabulary is very limited—and a Latin dictionary. And here’s a Latin grammar; you’d better learn those declensions, too, when you can. We’ll start at the beginning on Thursday.”

Before I had shut the door behind me, he was immersed in his own book again.
•
I realise now that Professor Monti was making an experiment. Having acquired a pupil who was not tied by school programmes and exams, he decided to try out on me the Humanist education given in the fifteenth century in Mantua by Vittorino da Feltre to Cecilia Gonzaga and her brothers—one in which Greek and Latin were learned together, as living languages. ‘To begin with the best’— that was the precept on which the education of the Renaissance had been based, in the days when poetry was considered the fittest instrument to train the mind. According to Bruno d’Arezzo, who wrote the first treatise of the Renaissance on what a woman’s education should be, ‘anyone ignorant of, and indifferent to, so valuable an aid to knowledge and so ennobling a source of pleasure as poetry, can by no means be entitled to be called educated’.

Monti agreed with him. If we did not precisely invent the Greek language together, like Benjamin Constant and his tutor, we did start reading the Iliad at once, he naturally translating most of the words for me as we went along, and pointing out equivalents or derivatives in Latin or in any modern language I knew, with a complete lack of pedantry or condescension.

“Look, the English rendering here is more satisfactory than the Italian, don’t you think?—or do you prefer this German one?” And then we would read the passage over again in Greek, this time with me stumbling through the translation, as best I could, by myself.

“Say it in any language you like, only feel the poetry.”

“Now, Virgil,” he said, when half the first morning had passed. “We’ll start with something easy: Sicelides Musae. This is the poem of the Golden Age.”

That day we did not get very far. For as we reached, in the second line, humilesque myricae, he told me what a tamarisk bush looked like, and took down Pascoli’s Myricae from his shelf, reading aloud some of its verses.

Then, back to Virgil again. But when, a few lines later, we came to the Child of prophecy—‘Tuo modo nascenti puer’—Monti suddenly realised from my blank look that I had no idea of who that child had been supposed to be during the Middle Ages, nor why, among all the Latin poets, it was Virgil whom Dante had chosen as his guide through the infernal regions—Virgil, who mostrò ciò che potea la lingua nostra.2 And then Monti turned to the first Canto of the Inferno, and read aloud:

“Tu se’ lo mio maestro, e il mio autore;
Tu se’ solo colui, da cui io tolsi
Lo bello stile, che m’ha fatto onore.”3

So in a flash the morning passed, and then it was time to go home and work and work, in an attempt to master the rudiments which would enable me to understand him better next time.

Monti did not, of course, let me off learning any grammar or rules; he merely required me to wrestle with them alone, not wasting our time together on such matters, unless I had a question to ask, or some point came up which he wished to explain. For ignorance he always made every allowance; you did not know, so you asked and were told. But stupidity or laziness were inconceivable. Why, if you suffered from these complaints, had you come to his little room at all?

I cannot remember the detailed progress of our work. I only know that for nearly three years, between the ages of twelve and fifteen, I went to him, when in Florence, three times a week; that my imagination was entirely filled by the world he conjured up for me; and that, indeed, I owe to him, not only what he taught me then, but, in enthusiasm and method of approach, all that I have learned ever since. During those years, our relationship remained a curiously impersonal one. I do not remember him coming to my mother’s house, or ever speaking to him of anything unconnected with my studies: but in the time I spent with him, I was as entirely absorbed in his teaching, as convinced that this was absolute beauty and truth, as any young disciple at the feet of his guru.

Iris Origo
Images and Shadows


1. Pascoli: Introduction to Epos, pp. xvii–xviii.
On one side, the plain shimmering with fires, with a serene, starry sky (the Trojans were in the open, before the great city, and a thousand fires were blazing and by each fire sat fifty warriors, and their horses stood close to the fires, champing the white spelt and oats between their teeth, and waiting for the dawn); on the other side the sea, murmuring and sighing. And when they reached the hut and ships of the Myrmidons, they heard a song. It was Achilles, who as he strummed on the strings of his stolen harp, was extolling his warriors’ deeds.
2. Who ‘showed us what our tongue can do’.
3. ‘You are my master and creator; from you alone I drew the noble style which has brought me honour.’ Inferno, I, 85–88.