Most of the strangers seem to have left Dessau with a favourable impression of the Philanthropin. They were especially struck with the brightness and animation of the children.
§ 17. How far did the Philanthropinum really deserve their good opinion? The conclusion to which we are driven by Fred’s narrative is, that Basedow carried to excess his principle—“Treat children as children, that they may remain the longer uncorrupted;” and that the Philanthropinum was, in fact, nothing but a good infant-school. Surely none of the thirteen children who were the subjects of Basedow’s experiments could have been more than ten years old. But if we consider Basedow’s system to have been intended forchildren, say between the ages of six and ten, we must allow that it possessed great merits. At the very beginning of a boy’s learning, it has always been too much the custom to make him hate the sight of a book, and escape at every opportunity from school-work, by giving him difficult tasks, and neglecting his acutest faculties. “Children love motion and noise,” says Basedow: “here is a hint from nature.” Yet the youngest children in most schools are expected to keep quiet and to sit at their books for as many hours as the youths of seventeen or eighteen. Their vivacity is repressed with the cane. Their delight in exercising their hands and eyes and ears is taken no notice of; and they are required to keep their attention fixed on subjects often beyond their comprehension, and almost always beyond the range of their interests. Everyone whohas had experience in teaching boys knows how hard it is to get them to throw themselves heartily into any task whatever; and probably this difficulty arises in many cases, from the habits of inattention and of shirking school-work, which the boys have acquired almost necessarily from the dreariness of their earliest lessons.[150]Basedow determined to change all this; and in the Philanthropin no doubt he succeeded. We have already seen some of the expedients by which he sought to render school-work pleasurable. He appealed, wherever it was possible, to the children’s senses; and these, especially the sight, were trained with great care by exercises, such as drawing, shooting at a mark, &c. One of these exercises, intended to give quick perception, bears a curious likeness to what has since been practised in a very different educational system. A picture, with a somewhat varied subject, was exhibited for a short time and removed. The boys had then, either verbally or on paper, to give an account of it, naming the different objects in proper order. Houdin, if I rightly remember, tells us that the young thieves of Paris are required by their masters to make a mental inventory of the contents of a shop window, which they see only as they walk rapidly by. Other exercises of the Philanthropinum connected the pupils with more honourable callings. They became acquainted with bothskilled and unskilled manual labour. Every boy was taught a handicraft, such as carpentering and turning, and was put to such tasks as threshing corn. Basedow’s division of the twenty-four hours was the following: Eight hours for sleep, eight for food and amusement, and, for the children of the rich, six hours of school-work, and two of manual labour. In the case of the children of the poor, he would have the division of the last eight hours inverted, and would give for school-work two, and for manual labour six. The development of the body was specially cared for in the Philanthropinum. Gymnastics were now first introduced into modern schools; and the boys were taken long expeditions on foot—the commencement, I believe, of a practice now common throughout Germany.
§ 18. As I have already said, Basedow proved a very unfit person to be at the head of the model Institution. Many of his friends agreed with Herder, that he was not fit to have calves entrusted to him, much less children. He soon resigned his post; and was succeeded by Campe, who had been one of the visitors at the public examination. Campe did not remain long at the Philanthropinum; but left it to set up a school, on like principles, at Hamburg. His fame now rests on his writings for the young; one of which—“Robinson Crusoe the Younger”—is still a general favourite.
Other distinguished men became connected with the Philanthropin—among them Salzmann, and Matthison the poet—and the number of pupils rose to over fifty; gathered we are told, from all parts of Europe between Riga and Lisbon. But this number is by no means a fair measure of the interest, nay, enthusiasm, which the experiment excited. We find Pastor Oberlin raising money on his wife’s earringsto send a donation. We find the philosopher Kant prophesying that quite another race of men would grow up, now that education according to Nature had been introduced.
§ 19. These hopes were disappointed. Kant confesses as much in the following passage in his treatise “On Pædagogy”:—
“One fancies, indeed, that experiments in education would not be necessary; and that we might judge by the understanding whether any plan would turn out well or ill. But this is a great mistake. Experience shows that often in our experiments we get quite opposite results from what we had anticipated. We see, too, that since experiments are necessary, it is not in the power of one generation to form a complete plan of education. The only experimental school which, to some extent, made a beginning in clearing the road, was the Institute at Dessau. This praise at least must be allowed it, notwithstanding the many faults which could be brought up against it—faults which are sure to show themselves when we come to the results of our experiments, and which merely prove that fresh experiments are necessary. It was the only School in which the teachers had liberty to work according to their own methods and schemes, and where they were in free communication both among themselves and with all learned men throughout Germany.”
§ 20. We observe here, that Kant speaks of the Philanthropinum as a thing of the past. It was finally closed in 1793. But even from Kant we learn that the experiment had been by no means a useless one. The conservatives, of course, did not neglect to point out that young Philanthropinists, when they left school, were not in all respects the superiors of their fellow-creatures. But, although no one could pretend that the Philanthropinum had effected atithe of what Basedow promised, and the “friends of humanity” throughout Europe expected, it had introduced many new ideas, which in time had their influence, even in the schools of the opposite party. Moreover, teachers who had been connected with the Philanthropinum founded schools on similar principles in different parts of Germany and Switzerland, as Bahrd’s at Heidesheim, and Salzmann’s celebrated school at Schnepfenthal, which is, I believe, still thriving. Their doctrines, too, made converts among other masters, the most celebrated of whom was Meierotto of Berlin.
§ 21. Little remains to be said of Basedow. He lived chiefly at Dessau, earning his subsistence by private tuition, but giving offence by his irregularities. In 1790, when visiting Magdeburg, he died, after a short illness, in his sixty-seventh year. His last words were, “I wish my body to be dissected for the good of my fellow-creatures.”
Basedow has a posthumous connexion with this country as the great-grandfather of Professor Max Müller. Basedow’s son became “Regierungs Präsident,” in Dessau. The President’s daughter, born in 1800, became the wife of the poet Wilhelm Müller, and the mother of Max Müller. Max Müller has contributed a life of his great-grandfather to theAllgemeine Deutsche Biographie.Those who read German and care about either Basedow or Comenius should getDie Didaktik Basedows im Vergleiche zur Didaktik des Comenius vonDr. Petru Garbovicianu (Bucarest, C. Gobl), 1887. This is a very good piece of work; it is printed in roman type, and the price is only 1s.6d.Since the above was in type I have got an important book,L’Education en Allemagne au Dix-huitième Siècle: Basedow et le Philanthropinisme, by A. Pinloche (Paris, A. Colin, 1889.)
Basedow has a posthumous connexion with this country as the great-grandfather of Professor Max Müller. Basedow’s son became “Regierungs Präsident,” in Dessau. The President’s daughter, born in 1800, became the wife of the poet Wilhelm Müller, and the mother of Max Müller. Max Müller has contributed a life of his great-grandfather to theAllgemeine Deutsche Biographie.
Those who read German and care about either Basedow or Comenius should getDie Didaktik Basedows im Vergleiche zur Didaktik des Comenius vonDr. Petru Garbovicianu (Bucarest, C. Gobl), 1887. This is a very good piece of work; it is printed in roman type, and the price is only 1s.6d.
Since the above was in type I have got an important book,L’Education en Allemagne au Dix-huitième Siècle: Basedow et le Philanthropinisme, by A. Pinloche (Paris, A. Colin, 1889.)
§ 1.Qui facit per alium facit per se.It is thus the law holds us accountable for the action of others which we direct. By the extension of this rule we immensely increase the personality of great writers and may credit them with vast spheres of action which never come within their consciousness. No man gains and suffers more from this consideration than Rousseau. On the one hand, we may attribute to him the crimes of Robespierre and Saint-Just; on the other Pestalozzi was instigated by him to turn to farming and—education.
In treating of Rousseau as an educational reformer I passed over a life in which almost every incident tends to weaken the effect of his words. With Pestalozzi we must turn to his life for the true source of his writings and the best comment on them.
§ 2. John Henry Pestalozzi was born at Zurich in 1746. His father dying when he was five years old, he was brought up with a brother and sister by a pious and self-denying mother and by a faithful servant “Babeli,” who had comforted the father in his last hours by promising to stay with his family. Thus Pestalozzi had an advantage denied to Rousseau and denied as it would seem to Locke; therewas scope for his home affections, and the head was not developed before the heart. When he was sent to a day-school he became to some extent the laughing stock of his companions who dubbed him Harry Oddity of Foolborough; but he gained their good-will by his unselfishness. It was remembered that on the shock of an earthquake when teachers and taught fled from the school building Harry Oddity was induced to go back and bring away what his companions considered precious. His holidays he spent with his grandfather the pastor of a village some three miles from Zurich, where the lad learnt the condition of the rural poor and saw what a good man could do for them. He always looked back to these visits as an important element in his education. “The best way for a child to acquire the fear of God,” he wrote, “is for him to see and hear a true Christian.” The grandfather’s example so affected him that he wished to follow in his steps, and he became a student of theology.[151]
§ 3. Even as a student Pestalozzi proved that he was no ordinary man. In his time there was great intellectual and moral enthusiasm among the students of the little Swiss University. Some distinguished professors, especially Bodmer, had awakened a craving for the old Swiss virtues of plain living and high thinking; and a band of students, among whom Lavater was leader and Pestalozzi played a prominent part, became eager reformers. The citizens of the great towns like Geneva and Zurich had become in effect privileged classes; and as their spokesmen the Geneva magistrates condemned theContrat Socialand theEmile.This raised the indignation of the reforming students at Zurich; and though their organ, a periodical called theMemorial, kept clear of politics, one Muller wrote a paper which contained some strong language, and this was held to be proof of a conspiracy. Muller fled and was banished. Pestalozzi and some other of his friends were imprisoned. TheMemorialwas suppressed.
§ 4. It is in thisMemorial, a weekly paper edited by Lavater who was five years Pestalozzi’s senior that we have Pestalozzi’s earliest writing. We find him coming forward as “a man of aspirations.” No one he says can object to his expressing his wishes. And “wishes” with a man of 19 are usually hopes. Among other wishes he says: “I would that some one would draw up in a simple manner a few principles of education intelligible to everybody; that some generous people would then share the expense of printing, so that the pamphlet might be given to the public for nothing or next to nothing. I would then have clergymen distribute it to all fathers and mothers, so that they might bring up their children in a rational and Christian manner. But,” he adds, “perhaps this is asking too much at a time.”
TheMemorialwas suppressed because “the privileged classes” knew that it was in the hands of their opponents. Pestalozzi then and always felt keenly the oppression to which the peasants were exposed; and he spoke of “the privileged” as men on stilts who must descend among the people before they could secure a natural and firm position. He also satirises them in some of his fables, as,e.g., that of the “Fishes and the Pike.” “The fishes in a pond brought an accusation against the pike who were making great ravages among them. The judge, an old pike, saidthat their complaint was well founded, and that the defendants, to make amends, should allow two ordinary fish every year to become pike.”
§ 5. By this time Pestalozzi had given up theology and had taken to the law. Now under the influence of Rousseau, or rather of the craving for a simple “natural” life which found its most eloquent expression in Rousseau’s writing, Pestalozzi made a bonfire of his MSS. and decided on becoming a farmer.
§ 6. There was another person concerned in this decision. In his childhood he had one day ventured into the shop of one of the leading tradesmen, Herr Schulthess, bent on procuring for his farthings some object of delight; but he found there a little shop-keeper, Anna Schulthess, seven years his senior, who discouraged his extravagance and persuaded him to keep his money. Anna and he since those days had become engaged—not at all to the satisfaction of her parents. Their intimacy had been strengthened by their concern for a common friend, a young man named Bluntschli, who died of consumption. This friend, three years older than Pestalozzi, seems to have understood him thoroughly; and in the parting advice he gave him there was a warning which happily for the general good was in after years neglected. “I am going,” said Bluntschli, “and you will be left alone. Avoid any career in which you might become the victim of your own goodness and trust, and choose some quiet life in which you will run no risk. Above all, do not take part in any important undertaking without having at your side a man who by his cool judgment, knowledge of men and things, and unshakable fidelity may be able to protect you from the dangers to which you will be exposed.”
§ 7. When the friendship with Anna Schulthess had ripened into a betrothal Pestalozzi spent a year in the neighbourhood of Bern learning farming under a man then famous for his innovations. His new ideas Pestalozzi absorbed very readily. “I had come to him,” he says, “a political visionary, though with many profound and correct attainments, views, and anticipations in matters political. I went away from him just as great an agricultural visionary, though with many enlarged and correct ideas and intentions with regard to agriculture.”
§ 8. During his “learning year” he kept up a correspondence with his betrothed, and the letters of both, which have been preserved, differ very widely from love-letters in general. Of himself Pestalozzi gives an account which shows that in part at least he could see himself as others saw him. “Dearest,” he writes, “those of my faults which appear to me most important in relation to the situation in which I may be placed in after-life are improvidence, incautiousness, and a want of presence of mind to meet unexpected changes in my prospects.... Of my great, and indeed very reprehensible negligence in all matters of etiquette, and generally in all matters which are not in themselves of importance, I need not speak; anyone may see them at first sight of me. I also owe you the open confession, my dear, that I shall always consider my duties toward my beloved partner subordinate to my duties towards my country; and that, although I shall be the tenderest husband, nevertheless, I hold myself bound to be inexorable to the tears of my wife if she should ever attempt to restrain me by them from the direct performance of my duties as a citizen, whatever this must lead to. My wife shall be the confidante of my heart, the partner of allmy most secret counsels. A great and honest simplicity shall reign in my house. And one thing more. My life will not pass without important and very critical undertakings. I shall not forget ... my first resolutions to devote myself wholly to my country. I shall never, from fear of man, refrain from speaking when I see that the good of my country calls upon me to speak. My whole heart is my country’s: I will risk all to alleviate the need and misery of my fellow-countrymen. What consequences may the undertakings to which I feel myself urged on draw after them! how unequal to them am I! and how imperative is my duty to show you the possibility of the great dangers which they may bring upon me! My dear, my beloved friend, I have now spoken candidly of my character and my aspirations. Reflect upon everything. If the traits which it was my duty to mention diminish your respect for me, you will still esteem my sincerity, and you will not think less highly of me, that I did not take advantage of your want of acquaintance with my character for the attainment of my inmost wishes.”
§ 9. The young lady addressed was worthy of her lover. “Such nobleness, such elevation of character, reach my very soul,” said she. With equal nobleness she encouraged Pestalozzi in his schemes and took the consequences without a murmur during their long married life of 46 years.
§ 10. Full of new ideas about farming Pestalozzi now thought he saw his way to making a fortune. He took some poor land near Birr not far from Zurich, and persuaded a banking firm to advance money with which he proposed to cultivate vegetables and madder. In September, 1769, he was married, and six months later thepair settled in a new house, “Neuhof,” which Pestalozzi had built on his land.
§ 11. But in spite of his excellent ideas and great industry, his speculation failed. The bankers soon withdrew their money. Pestalozzi was not cautious enough for them. However, his wife’s friends prevented an immediate collapse.
§ 12. But before he had any reason to doubt the success of his speculation Pestalozzi had begun to reproach himself with being engrossed by it. What had become of all his thoughts for the people? Was he not spending his strength entirely to gain the prosperity of himself and his household? These thoughts came to him with all the more force when a son was born to him; and at this time they naturally connected themselves with education. He had now seen a good deal of the degraded state of the peasantry. How were they to be raised out of it?
§ 13. To Pestalozzi there seemed one answer and one only. This wasby education. To many people in the present day it might seem that “education,” when quite successful, would qualify labourers to become clerks. This was not the notion of Pestalozzi. Rousseau had completely freed him from bondage to the Renascence, and education did not mean to him a training in the use of books. He looked at the children of the lowest class of the peasants and asked himself what they needed to raise them. Knowledge would not do it. “The thing was not that they should know what they did not know, but that they should behave as they did not behave” (supra, p. 169); and the road to right action lay through right feeling. If they could be made conscious that they were loved and cared for, their hearts would open and give back love and respect in return. More than this, they must be taught not only to respect their elders but alsothemselves. They must be taught to help themselves and contribute to their own maintenance. So Pestalozzi resolved to take into his own house some of the very poorest children, to bring them up in an atmosphere of love, and to instruct them in field-work and spinning which would soon partly (as Pestalozzi hoped, wholly) pay for their keep. Thus, just at the time when the experiment for himself failed he began for others an experiment that seemed likely to add indefinitely to his difficulties.
§ 14. In the winter of 1774 the first children were taken into Neuhof. The consequences to his wife and to his little son only four years old might have vanquished the courage of a less ardent philanthropist. “Our position entailed much suffering on my wife;” he writes, “but nothing could shake us in our resolve to devote our time, strength and remaining fortune to the simplification of the instruction and domestic education of the people.”
§ 15. These children, at first not more than 20 in number, Pestalozzi treated as his own. They worked with him in the summer in the garden and fields, in winter in the house. Very little time was given to separate lessons, the children often learning while they worked with their hands. Pestalozzi held that talking should come before reading and writing; and he practised them in conversation on subjects taken from their every day life. They also repeated passages from the Bible till they knew them by heart.
§ 16. In a few months, as we are told, the appearance of these poor little creatures had entirely changed; though fed only on bread and vegetables they looked strong and hearty, and their faces gained an expression of cheerfulness, frankness and intelligence which till then had been totally wanting. They made good progress with their manual workas well as with the associated lessons, and took pleasure in both. In all they said and did, they seemed to show their consciousness of their benefactor’s kind care of them.
§ 17. This experiment naturally drew much attention to it, and when it had gone on over a year Pestalozzi was induced by his friend Iselin of Basel to insert in theEphemerides(a paper of which Iselin was editor), an “appeal ... for an institution intended to provide education and work for poor country children.” In this appeal Pestalozzi narrates his experience. “I have proved,” says he, “that it is not regular work that stops the development of so many poor children, but the turmoil and irregularity of their lives, the privations they endure, the excesses they indulge in when opportunity offers, the wild rebellious passions so seldom restrained, and the hopelessness to which they are so often a prey. I have proved that children after having lost health, strength and courage in a life of idleness and mendicity have, when once set to regular work quickly recovered their health and spirits and grown rapidly. I have found that when taken out of their abject condition they soon become kindly, trustful and sympathetic; that even the most degraded of them are touched by kindness, and that the eyes of the child who has been steeped in misery, grow bright with pleasure and surprise, when, after years of hardship, he sees a gentle friendly hand stretched out to help him; and I am convinced thatwhen a child’s heart has been touched the consequences will be great for his development and entire moral character.”
Pestalozzi therefore would have the very poorest children brought up in private establishments where agriculture and industry were combined, and where they would learn to work steadily and carefully with their hands, the chief part of their time being devoted to this manual work, and their instructionand education being associated with it. And he asks for support in greatly increasing the establishment he has already begun.
§ 18. Encouraged by the support he received and still more by his love for the children and his own too sanguine disposition Pestalozzi enlarged his undertaking. The consequence was bankruptcy. Several causes conspired to bring about this result. Whatever he might do for the children, he could not educate the parents, and these were many of them beggars with the ordinary vices of their class. With the usual discernment of such people they soon came to the conclusion that Pestalozzi was making a fortune out of their children’s labour; so they haunted Neuhof, treated Pestalozzi with the greatest insolence, and often induced their children to run away in their new clothes. This would account for much, but there was another cause of failure that accounted for a great deal more. This was Pestalozzi’s extreme incapacity as an administrator. Even his industrial experiment he carried on in such a way that it proved a source of expense rather than of profit. He says himself, that, contrary to his own principles, which should have led him to begin at the beginning and lay a good foundation in teaching, he put the children to work that was too difficult for them, wanted them to spin fine thread before their hands got steadiness and skill by exercise on the coarser kind, and to manufacture muslin before they could turn out well-made cotton goods. “Before I was aware of it,” he adds, “I was deeply involved in debt, and the greater part of my dear wife’s property and expectations had, as it were, in an instant gone up in smoke.”
§ 19. The precise arrangement made with the creditors we do not know. The bare facts remain that the children were sent away, and that the land was let for the creditors’benefit; but Pestalozzi remained in the house. This was settled in 1780.
§ 20. We have now come to the most gloomy period in Pestalozzi’s history, a period of eighteen years, and those the best years in a man’s life, which Pestalozzi spent in great distress from poverty without and doubt and despondency within. When he got into difficulties, his friends, he tells us, loved him without hope: “in the whole surrounding district it was everywhere said that I was a lost man, that nothing more could be done for me.” “In his only too elegant country house,” we are told, “he often wanted money, bread, fuel, to protect himself against hunger and cold.” “Eighteen years!—what a time for a soul like his to wait! History passes lightly over such a period. Ten, twenty, thirty years—it makes but a cipher difference if nothing great happens in them. But with what agony must he have seen day after day, year after year gliding by, who in his fervent soul longed to labour for the good of mankind and yet looked in vain for the opportunity!” (Palmer.)
§ 21. But he who was always ready to sacrifice himself for others now found someone, and that a stranger, ready to make a great sacrifice for him. A servant, named Elizabeth Naef, heard of the disaster and distress at Neuhof, and her master having just died she resolved to go to the rescue. At first Pestalozzi refused her help. He did not wish her to share the poverty of his household, and he felt himself out of sympathy with her “evangelical” form of piety. But Elizabeth declared she had come to stay, and when Pestalozzi found he could not shake her determination he consented, saying, “Well, you will find after all that God is in our house also.”
§ 22. To this pious sensible but illiterate peasant womanPestalozzi was fond of tracing many of his ideas. She was the original of hisGertrude, and it was of her he wrote: “God’s sun pursues its path from morning to evening; yet your eye detects no movement, your ear no sound. Even when it goes down, you know that it will rise again and continue to ripen the fruits of the earth. Extreme as it may seem, I am not ashamed to say that this is an image of Gertrude as of every woman who makes her house a temple of the living God and wins heaven for her husband and children.” (Leonard and Gertrude). She was invaluable at Neuhof and restored comfort to the household. In after years she managed the establishment at Yverdun and married one of the Krüsis who were Pestalozzi’s assistants.
§ 23. Writing of the gloomy years at Neuhof Pestalozzi afterwards said; “My head was grey, yet I was still a child. With a heart in which all the foundations of life were shaken, I still pursued in those stormy times my favourite object, but my way was one of prejudice, of passion and of error.” But with Pestalozzi self-depreciation had “almost grown the habit of his soul,” and in his writings at Neuhof at this period we find no traces of this prejudice, passion and error from which he supposes himself to have suffered. He certainly did not abandon his love of humanity; and in his sacrifice for it he sought a religious basis. In these Neuhof days he wrote: “Christ teaches us by His example and doctrine to sacrifice not only our possessions but ourselves for the good of others, and shews us that nothing we have received is absolutely ours but is merely entrusted to us by God to be piously employed in the service of charity.” (Quoted by Guimps. R’s trans. 72.) Whatever were his doubts and difficulties, he never swerved from pursuing the great object of his life, and nothing could cloud hismind as to the true method of attaining that object. As he afterwards wrote to Gessner (Wie Gertrudu.s.w.), “Even while I was the sport of men who condemned me I never lost sight for a moment of the object I had in view, which was the removal of the causes of the misery that I saw on all sides of me. My strength too kept on increasing, and my own misfortunes taught me valuable truths. I knew the people as no one else did. What deceived no one else always deceived me, but what deceived everybody else deceived me no longer.... My own sufferings have enabled me to understand the sufferings of the people and their causes as no man without suffering can understand them. I suffered what the people suffered and saw them as no one else saw them; and strange as it may seem, I was never more profoundly convinced of the fundamental truths on which I had based my undertaking than when I saw that I had failed.” (R’s. Guimps 74.)
§ 24. Pestalozzi still had a few friends who did not despise the dreamer of dreams. Among them was the editor of theEphemerides, Iselin. This friend encouraged him to write, and there soon appeared in theEphemeridesa series of reflexions under the title of “The Evening Hour of a Hermit.” Not many editors would have printed these aphorisms, and they attracted little or no attention at the time, but they have proved worth attending to. “The fruit of Pestalozzi’s past years, they are,” says Raumer, “at the same time the seed-corn of the years that were to come, the plan and key to his action in pedagogy.... The drawing of the architect of genius contains his work, even though the architect himself has not skill enough to carry out his own design.” (Quoted by Otto Fischer).[152]
§ 25. What was the connexion between Pestalozzi’s belief at this season and complete belief in dogmatic Christianity? The question is one that will always be asked and can never, I think, be fully answered. In the dayspreceding the French Revolution it was a proof of wisdom to “Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, and cling to Faith,” even though the Faith were “beyond the forms of Faith” (see Tennyson’sAncient Sage). But Pestalozzi did far more than this. He traced all virtue and strength in the people to belief in the Fatherhood of God; and he saw in unbelief the severance of all the bonds of society. The “Hermit” does not indeed use the phrases common among “evangelical” Christians, but that he was indeed a Christian is established not only by the general tone of his aphorisms but still more clearly by his last words: “The Man of God, who with his sufferings and death has restored to humanity the lost feeling of the child’s disposition towards God is the Redeemer of the world; he is the sacrificed Priest of the Lord; he is the Mediator between God and God-forgetting mankind. His teaching is pure justice, educating philosophy of the people; it is the revelation of God the Father to the lost race of his children.”
§ 26. The “Evening Hour” remaining almost unnoticed, Pestalozzi’s friends urged him to write something in a more popular form. So he set to work on a tale which should depict the life of the peasantry and shew the causes of theirdegradation and the cure. With extraordinary rapidity he wrote between the lines of an old account book the first part of his “Leonard and Gertrude.” The book, which was complete in itself, and through the good offices of Iselin (of theEphemerides), soon found a publisher, suddenly sprang into immense popularity, a popularity of which nothing but the “continuations” could ever have deprived it. In the works of a great artist we see natural objects represented with perfect fidelity and yet with a life breathed into them by genius, which is wanting or at least is not visible to common eyes in the originals. Just so do we find Swiss peasant life depicted by Pestalozzi. The delineation is evidently true to nature; and, at the same time, shows Nature as she reveals herself to genius. But for this work something more than genius was necessary, viz., sympathy and love. In the preface to the first edition, he says, “In that which I here relate, and which I have, for the most part, seen and heard myself in the course of an active life, I have taken care not once to add my own opinion to what I saw and heard the people themselves saying, feeling; believing, judging, and attempting.” In a later edition (1800) he says, “I desired nothing then, and I desire nothing else now, as the object of my life, but the welfare of the people, whom I love, and whom I feel to be miserable as few feel them to be miserable, because I have with them borne their sufferings as few have borne them.”
§ 27. Wherever German was read this book excited vast interest, and though it seemed to most people only a good tale, it met with some more discerning readers. The Bern Agricultural Society sent the author their thanks and a gold medal, and Pestalozzi was at once recognised as a man who understood the peasantry and had good ideas for raisingthem. The book is and must remain a classic, but Pestalozzi in his zeal to spread the truth added again and again “continuations,” and these became less and less popular in the method of exposition.[153]
§ 28. Here and there we get glimpses of the trials Pestalozzi had gone through in his industrial experiment. “The love and patience,” he writes, “with which Gertrude bore with the disorderly and untrained little ones was almost past belief. Their eyes were often anywhere but on their yarn, so that this would now be too thick, and now too thin. When they had spoiled it, they would watch for a moment when Gertrude was not looking, and throw it out of the window by the handful, until they found that she discovered the trick when she weighed their work at night.” (E. C’s. trans., p. 122.) And in this connexion Pestalozzi preached his doctrine of perfect attainment. “‘What you can’t do blindfold,’” said Harry, “‘you can’t do at all.’” (ib.)
§ 29. “Gertrude,” we are told, “seemed quite unable to explain her method in words;” and here no doubt Pestalozzi was speaking of himself; but like Gertrude he “would let fall some significant remark which went to the root of the whole matter of education.” As an instance we may takewhat Gertrude said to the schoolmaster: “You should do for the children what their parents fail to do for them. The reading, writing, and arithmetic are not after all what they most need. It is all well and good for them to learn something, but the really important thing for them is tobesomething.” When this truth is fully realized by teachers and school managers there will be some hope for national education.
§ 30. “Although Gertrude exerted herself to develop very early the manual dexterity of her children, she was in no haste for them to learn to read and write; but she took pains to teach them early how to speak: for, as she said, ‘Of what use is it for a person to be able to read and write if he cannot speak, since reading and writing are only an artificial sort of speech.’ ... She did not adopt the tone of an instructor towards the children ... and her verbal instruction seemed to vanish in the spirit of her real activity, in which it always had its source. The result of her system was that each child was skilful, intelligent, and active to the full extent that its age and development allowed.” (Ib.p. 130.)
§ 31. In this book we see that knowledge is treated as valueless unless it has a basis in action. “The pastor was soon convinced that all verbal instruction in so far as it aims at true human wisdom and at the highest goal of this wisdom, true religion, ought to be subordinated to a constant training in practical domestic labour.... So he strove to lead the children without many words to a quiet industrious life, and thus to lay the foundations of a silent worship of God and love of humanity. To this end he connected every word of his brief religious teachings with their actual every-day experience, so that when he spoke ofGod and eternity, it seemed to them as if he were speaking of father and mother, house and home; in short of the things with which they were most familiar” (p. 156). Thus he built on the foundation laid by the schoolmaster, who “cared for the children’s heads as he did for their hearts, and demanded that whatever entered them should be plain and clear as the silent moon in the sky. To insure this he taught them to see and hear with accuracy, and cultivated their powers of attention” (p. 157).
§ 32. With all his love for the children, an element of severity was not wanting. Pestalozzi maintained that “love was only useful in the education of men when in conjunction with fear: for they must learn to root out thorns and thistles, which they never do of their own accord, but only under compulsion and in consequence of training” (p. 157).
§ 33. Just at the end of the book “the Duke” appoints a commission to report on the success of the Bonal experiment, and Pestalozzi makes him give the following order: “To insure thoroughness there must be among the examiners men skilled in law and finance, merchants, clergymen, government officials, schoolmasters, and physicians,besides women of different ranks and conditions of lifewho shall view the matter with their woman’s eyes and be sure there is nothing visionary in the background” (p. 180). In this respect Pestalozzi is in advance of us still. No woman has yet sat on an educational commission.
§ 34. Thus we find Pestalozzi at the age of thirty-five turning author, and for the next six or seven years he worked indefatigably with his pen. Most men of genius have some leading purpose which unites their varied activities, and this was specially true of Pestalozzi. He never lost sightof his one object, which was the elevation of the people; and this he held to be attainable only by means of education properly so called. The success of the first part ofLeonard and Gertrudehe now endeavoured to turn to account in spreading true ideas of education. With this intent he publishedChristopher and Eliza: My Second Book for the People(1782), which was a kind of commentary onLeonard and Gertrude. But the public wished to be amused, not taught; and the book was a failure. He was thus driven into the attempt already mentioned to catch the public ear by continuingLeonard and Gertrude, thus endangering his first and, as it proved, his only great success in literature.
§ 35. To gain circulation for his ideas he also started a weekly paper called theSwiss Journal, and issued it regularly throughout the year 1782; but the subscribers were so few that he was then obliged to give it up. I have not the smallest doubt that it was, as Guimps says, full of wisdom, but not the kind of wisdom that readers of periodicals are likely to care for.[154]
§ 36. In theSwiss Journalwe get a hint of the analogy between the development of the plant and of the man. This analogy, often as it had been observed before, was never before so fruitful as it became in the hands of Pestalozzi and Froebel. The passage quoted by Guimps is this: “Teach me, summer day, that man formed from the dust of the earth, grows and ripens like the plant rooted in the soil.”
§ 37. Between the close of the year 1787 and 1797 Pestalozzi did not publish anything. Though he had become famous, had made the acquaintance of the greatest men in Germany, such as Goethe, Wieland, Herder, and Fichte, and had been declared a “Citizen of the French Republic,” together with Bentham, Tom Payne, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Washington, Madison, Klopstock, Kozciusko, &c., he was nearly starving, and, naturally enough in that state of affairs both private and public, he was in great despondency. As we have seen, his whole life and work were founded on religion and on the only religion possible for us, the Christian religion; but carried away by his political radicalism he seems at this time to have doubted whether Christianity was more than the highest human wisdom. In October, 1793, he wrote to a friend in Berlin: “I doubt, not because I look on doubt as the truth, but because the sum of the impressions of my life has driven faith with its blessings from my soul. Thus impelled by my fate I seenothing more in Christianity but the purest and noblest teaching of the victory of the spirit over the flesh, the one possible means of raising our nature to its true nobility, or in other words of establishing the empire of the reason over the senses by the development of the purest feelings of the heart.” If this was the lowest point to which Pestalozzi’s faith sank in the days of the Revolution, it remained for practical purposes higher than the faith of most professing Christians then and since.
§ 38. At this time we find him complaining: “My agriculture swallows up all my time. I am longing for winter with its leisure. My time passes like a shadow.” He was then forty-six years of age and seemed to himself to have done nothing.
§ 39. Another five years he had to wait before he found an opportunity for action. During this time, impelled by Fichte, he endeavoured to give his ideas philosophic completeness, and after labouring for three years with almost incredible toil he published in 1797 his “Inquiry into the Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race.” This book is pronounced even by his biographer Guimps to be “prolix and obscure,” and, says Pestalozzi, “nobody understood me.” But even in this book there was much wisdom, had the world cared to learn; but the world had then no place for Pestalozzi, and as he says at the end of this book, “without even asking whether the fault was his or another’s, it crushed him with its iron hammer as the mason crushes a useless stone.” He was, however, not actually crushed, and a place was in time found for him.
§ 40. The world might be pardoned for neglecting anInquirywhich even a biographer finds “prolix and obscure.” But why could it see nothing in another bookwhich Pestalozzi published in the same year, “Figures to my ABC Book,” or according to its later title, “Fables,” a series of apologues as witty and wise as those of Lessing.[155]
§ 41. As I have said already (suprap. 239) there seems a marked distinction between thinkers and doers, at least in education, and we seldom find a man great in both. But with all his weakness as a practical man Pestalozzi proved great both as a thinker and a doer. He not only thought out what should be done, but he also made splendid efforts to do it. His first attempt at Neuhof was, as we have seen, all his own; so was the next at Stanz; but afterwards he had to work with others, and the work would have come to a standstill if he had not gained the co-operation of the magistrates, the parents of the children, and his ownassistants. So he never again had the free hand, or at least the free thought which bore such good fruit in his enforced cessation from practice in the years between 1780 and 1798. It is well then to ask, as his biographer Guimps has asked, what was the main outcome of Pestalozzi’s thought before he plunged into action a second time in 1798.
§ 42. Pestalozzi set himself to find a means of rescuing the people from their poverty and degradation. This he held would last as long as their moral and intellectual poverty lasted; so there was no hope except in an education that should make them better and more intelligent. In studying the children even of the most degraded parents he found the seeds, as it were, of a wealth of faculties, sentiments, tastes, and capabilities, which, if developed, might make them reasonable and upright human beings. But what was called education did nothing of the kind. Instead of developing the noblest part of the child’s nature it neglected this entirely, and bringing to the child the knowledge, ideas, and feelings of others, it tried to make him “learn” them. So “education” did little beyond stifling the child’s individuality under a mass of borrowed ideas. The schoolmaster worked, as it were, from without to within. This Pestalozzi would change, and make education begin in the child and work from within outwards. Acting on this principle he sought for some means of developing the child’s inborn faculties, and he found as he says: “Nature develops all the powers of humanity by exercising them; they increase with use.” (Evening Hour, Aph. 22.) No means can be found of exercising the higher faculties which can be compared with the actual relations of daily life; so Pestalozzi declares: “The pure sentiment of truth and wisdom is formed in the narrow circle of the relationshipswhich affect us, the circumstances which suggest our actions, and the common knowledge which we cannot do without.” And taking as his starting-point the needs, desires, and connexions of actual life he was naturally led to associate the work of the body with that of the mind, to develop industry and study side by side, to combine the workshop and the school. With regard to instruction he was never tired of insisting on the importance of thorough mastery in the first elements, and there was to be no advance till this mastery was attained. (See what “Harry” says,suprap. 306.) “The schools,” he says (E. H., No. 28), “hastily substitute an artificial method of words for the truer method of Nature which knows no hurry but waits.”
§ 43. In this account of Pestalozzi’s doctrine before 1798 I have as usual followed M. Guimps. According to him Pestalozzi had discovered “a principle which settles the law of man’s development, and is the fundamental principle of education.” This principle M. Guimps briefly states as follows: “All the real knowledge, useful powers, and noble sentiments that a man can acquire are but the extension of his individuality by the development of the powers and faculties that God has put in him, and by their assimilation of the elements supplied by the outer world. There exists for this development and the work of assimilation a natural and necessary order, an order which the school mostly sets at nought.”
§ 44. Now we come to the period of Pestalozzi’s practical activity. In 1798 Switzerland was overrun by the French. Everything was remodelled after the French pattern; and in conformity with the existing phase in the model country the government of Switzerland was declared to be in the hands of five “Directors.” Pestalozzi was a Radical, andhe at once set to work to serve the new government with his pen. The Directors gladly welcomed such an ally as the author ofLeonard and Gertrude, and they made him editor of a newspaper intended to diffuse the revolutionary principles among the people. Naturally enough they supposed that he, like other people, “wanted” something; but when asked what he wanted he replied simply that he wished to be a schoolmaster. The Directors, especially Le Grand, took a genuine interest in education, and were quite willing that Pestalozzi should be allowed a free hand in his “new departure.” They therefore agreed to find the funds with which Pestalozzi might open a new Institution in Aargau.
§ 45. But the editorship and the plans for the new Institution came to an abrupt ending. The Catholic cantons did not acquiesce in giving up their local liberties and being subjected to a new government in the hands of men whom they regarded as heretics and even atheists. Consequently those missionaries of enlightenment, the French troops, at once fell upon them and slaughtered many without distinction of age or sex. The French, we are told, did not expect to meet with resistance; so their light became lightning and struck dead the stupid people who could not or would not see. “Our soldiers” (it is Michelet who speaks) “were ferocious at Stanz.” (Nos Fils, 217). This ferocity at Stanz in September, 1798, was in secret disapproved of by the Directors, who were nominally responsible for it. But all they could do was to provide in a measure for the “111 infirm old people, the 169 orphans, and 237 other children,” who were left totally destitute. Le Grand proposed to Pestalozzi that he should, for the present, give up his other plans and go to Stanz (which is onthe Lake of Lucerne) to take charge of the orphan and destitute children. Pestalozzi was not the man to refuse such a task as this. He at once set out. Some buildings connected with an Ursuline convent were, without the consent of the nuns, made over to him. Workmen were employed upon them, and as soon as a single room could be inhabited Pestalozzi received forty children into it. This was in January, 1799, in the middle of a remarkably cold winter.
§ 46. Thus under circumstances perhaps less unfavourable than they seemed began the five months’ trial of pure Pestalozzianism. The physical difficulties were immense. At first Pestalozzi and all the children were shut up day and night in a single room. He had throughout no helper of any kind but one female servant, and he had to do everything for the children, even what was most menial and disgusting. As soon as possible the number was increased, and before long was nearly eighty, some of the children having to go out to sleep. But great as were the material difficulties, those arising from the opposition and hatred of the people he came to succour were still worse. To them he seemed no philanthropist, but only a servant of the devil, an agent of the wicked government which had sent its ferocious soldiers and slaughtered the parents of these poor children, a Protestant who came to complete the work by destroying their souls. Pestalozzi, who was making heroic efforts in their behalf, seems to have wondered at the animosity shown him by the people of Stanz; but on looking back we must admit that in the circumstances it was only natural.
§ 47. And yet in spite of enormous difficulties of every kind Pestalozzi triumphed. Within the five months hespent with them he attached to him the hearts of the children, and produced in them a marvellous physical, intellectual, and moral change. “If ever there was a miracle,” says Michelet, “it was here. It was the reward of a strong faith, of a wonderful expansion of heart. He believed, he willed, he succeeded.” (Nos Fils223.)
What was the great act of faith by which Pestalozzi triumphed? According to M. Michelet he stood before these vicious and degraded children and said, “Man is good.” Pestalozzi does not tell us this himself; and as a benighted believer in Christianity, I venture to differ from the enlightened Michelet. As far as I can judge from Pestalozzi’s own teaching the source of his strength was his belief in the goodness not of Man but of God.
§ 48. But encouraged and rewarded as he was by the result, Pestalozzi could not long have maintained this fearful exertion. He was over fifty years of age, and he must soon have succumbed; indeed he was already spitting blood when in June, 1799, the French soldiers, whose action had brought him to Stanz, drove him away again. Falling back before the Austrians they had need of a hospital in Stanz, and demanded the buildings occupied by Pestalozzi and the children. So almost all the children had to be sent away, and then at last Pestalozzi took thought for his own health and retired to some baths in the mountains. But most of his peculiarities in teaching may be said to date from the experience at Stanz; and I will therefore give this experience in his own words.
§ 49. The following is the account given in his letter to his friend Gessner. (I have in part availed myself of Mr. Russell’s translation of Guimps, pp. 149ff.)