Mirabeau.
Honoré Gabriel Riquetti, Count de Mirabeau, one of the most eminent among the great authors, orators, and statesmen of France, was born on March 9, 1749 on his father's estate at Bignon, near Nemours.
The earliest of Mirabeau's ancestors of whom there is any notable record, was Jean Riquetti, a prominent merchant at Marseilles, who, in 1570, bought the château and estate of Mirabeau, near Pertuis, from the well-known Provençal family of Barras and who, a few years later, acquired the title of Esquire.
In 1685, one hundred and fifteen years after the purchase above mentioned, Honoré Riquetti, lineal descendant of the Marseilles merchant, obtained the title of Marquis de Mirabeau, and there was born to this marquis a son, Jean Antoine Riquetti, who achieved a worthy record as a soldier, but whose prominent place in history is due to the fact that he was the grandfather of the great Mirabeau.
Victor Riquetti, son of this second Marquis de Mirabeau and father of the great, the Count de Mirabeau, was in his early manhood an indifferent soldier, but he afterward became distinguished as a writer and leader in French politics. His wife (the mother of Count de Mirabeau) was Marie Geneviève, daughter of M. de Vassan, a brigadier in the French army, she being, also, the widow of the Marquis de Saulyebœuf. This union, entered into without a previous meeting between the principals to the contract, and at a time when the Marquis de Mirabeau was well started in his career as a politician, was not a happy one. The new husband was more loyal to politics than to his wife, so that, when their son, who was destined to achieve fame, was but thirteen years old, there was a separation between the parents by mutual consent.
Thus, in outline, is indicated the ancestry of Mirabeau through a period of nearly two centuries, and, meagre as the showing is, it is evident that he was the scion of a long line of wealth and nobility, his paternal ancestors having served with credit as soldiers, while his father was eminent as a politician. There is a second group of facts which bear interestingly upon the career under discussion.Mirabeau the great was born at a time when more than two-thirds of France was in the hands of privileged classes—the king, the nobility, and the clergy—and at a time, too, when the structure founded upon years of feudalism and absolutism was about to be shaken to its base by the magic of popular public opinion.
Under such conditions, at such a time, and from such stock, occurred the birth of Mirabeau the great; a coming into the world of a babe "scarce half made up;" a child with a head so large that it was a dire deformity, with one foot sadly twisted, and with a tongue that was tied; in brief, an infant ogre born with teeth. So great was the chagrin of the father that he made no effort to conceal his dislike for the misshapen child. Hence, when at three years of age the little one was left wretchedly pitted by a severe attack of small-pox, its fate was listed. It must not, could not, bear the name of Mirabeau.
Accordingly, when the youngster was fourteen years old—after several years of instruction under the private tutorship of Lachabeaussière,père—he was entered under the fictitious name of "Pierre Buffière," at a private military school in Paris. Here, strong of limb, body, and mind, industrious and aggressive, he remained for four years. Then his father placed him in the Berry regiment of cavalry, which regiment had been commanded, sixty-two years before, by his grandfather.
This event marked the end of a boyhood which had been clouded by an almost entire absence of paternal favor, and wholly free from maternal care—the mother's absence having been secured by the father, by alettre de cachet. In addition, that boyhood had been irritated and embittered by a continuous and exasperating development of his natural personal disfigurement. His enormous head grew less in harmony with his torso, his lips and nose became thick and heavy, great moles revealed themselves upon his cheeks, and in every way, physically, his growth was a perpetual disappointment.
However, he was now (1767) the eighteen-year old "Pierre Buffière," a lieutenant of cavalry, conscious of his exceptional mental strength and somewhat vain thereof, and full of ambition and determination to win as he wished and in spite of all of his many obstacles. Unfortunately, but most naturally, considering his temperament, the first test of his will, his passion, and his determination, resulted in his victory. He won the affection of a young woman to whom his colonel had long been devoted, and the scandal resulting therefrom caused the father to obtain alettre de cachet, by authority of which the indiscreet young man was placed in confinement in the Isle of Rhé. Immediately the prisoner began his first illustration of his ability to gain to his own purposes the ability and influence of others—one of his strongest and most useful characteristics. Within two months he had secured the esteem and confidence of his jailer, so that that official soon made a most favorable report, upon the strength of which Mirabeau was accepted as a volunteer to accompany the French expedition sent (in 1769) to conquer Corsica. So well did the young soldier conduct himself during this campaign, that he was not only promoted to a captaincy in the dragoons, but he effected a partial reconciliation with his father, returned to Provence, was permittedto assume his true name and title, and was presented at court. In June, 1772, he married, by his father's advice, Marie Émile de Covet, only daughter of the Marquis de Marignane. She came to him portionless, and he, impetuous, ambitious, and extravagant, became, during the next two years, deeply involved in debt. The marriage was a failure. Again the father utilized thelettre de cachet, and a second time was Mirabeau a prisoner (August 23, 1774), this time in the Château d'If, at Marseilles. Here it was that he wrote his first work of which we have any exact knowledge, its title being: "Essai sur le Despotisme."
In the following year he was transferred from the Château d'If to the Castle of Joux, where he was less strictly confined. He had the freedom of the place and frequent opportunities for visiting the near-by town of Pontarlier. It was in this town that he first met Marie Thérèse, the Marchioness de Monnier, the young and attractive wife of an aged magistrate. A love affair was the result, and it culminated in August, 1776, in an elopement, first to Switzerland and then to Amsterdam. For over nine months the fugitive pair lived together in the Dutch capital, Mirabeau, under the assumed name of St. Mathieu, earning a livelihood as a pamphleteer and by making translations for Holland publishers. Meanwhile the tribunal of Pontarlier had condemned both parties—Mirabeau to be beheaded and his companion (his "Sophie," as she is most widely known) to imprisonment for life. On May 14, 1777, they were arrested at Amsterdam, and Mirabeau was imprisoned by alettre de cachetin the Castle of Vincennes, while Sophie was surrendered to the Pontarlier authorities.
For three and a half years thereafter Mirabeau was in confinement, a term which proved sufficient to temper his passion, and during which he wrote his well-known "Letters to Sophie," the "Erotica Biblion," and "My Conversion." He also wrote, during this time, his first worthy political production, the "Lettres de Cachet." He was released from this imprisonment on December 13, 1780, and at once sought out Sophie, to quarrel with and leave her, and so, fortunately, end the most disgraceful portion of his life.
Mirabeau, now thirty-one years old, and, according to the times, most liberally experienced in the ways of the then turbulent world, undertook, as his first task, the removal of the sentence of death which still confronted him. Not only did he succeed in this, but, by his plausibility and eloquence, he shifted the entire cost of the proceedings to the shoulders of the complainant—the aged magistrate he had so grossly wronged. His next venture was an effort before the tribunal of Aix, to compel his wife to return to him. Here he failed, as also he failed in an effort to compromise a suit pending between his father and mother. Not only that, but by his pleadings his mother became forever alienated from him, and by reason of his bitter attacks upon the rulings of the court he was forced to leave Paris. Locating at Amsterdam, he began his lasting and respectable relations with Madame de Nehra, daughter of Zwier van Haren, a Dutch writer and politician. She was a woman of education and refinement, who exercised a valuable influence over his rapidly growing celebrity, bringing out his good qualities, subduing his undesirable characteristics, and encouraging allof his better ambitions. It was at her suggestion that he went to England, after a brief stay in Holland, while she repaired to Paris. His mission—which he accomplished—was to publish his "Considérations sur l'Ordre de Cincinnatus" and his "Doutes sur la Liberté de l'Escaut;" while her mission, also successful, was to establish peace between Mirabeau and the authorities at the French capital.
During twenty years of the thirty-six years he had lived, Mirabeau had been, either through his father's intervention or by his own acts, a constant topic of consideration by the French authorities. On the other hand, by virtue of his writings, his declared enmity to all forms of tyranny and oppression, and his distaste for pretence, he had become a popular idol. He was, as Carlyle puts it, "a swallower of formulas," and it seems he had the ability to digest such food thus taken. Therefore, upon his return to Paris in April, 1785, he made a series of attacks upon agiotage, or stock jobbing, most effectively assaulting the Compagnie des Eaux and the Banque de St. Charles. While such efforts proved offensive to the government, it caused such an appreciation of his ability that he was sent, in June, 1786, on a secret mission to Berlin. He remained there for half a year, and during that time he secured the material for his notable work, "Histoire Secrète de la Cour de Berlin." Among other writings which he produced about this time were his "Moses Mendelssohn, ou la Réforme politique des Juifs," and his pamphlet "Dénonciation de l'Agiotage," aimed against the policy of Calonne. Again he was in danger of thelettre de cachet, and so he repaired to Brunswick, where he finished his work "De la Monarchie Prussienne," which was published in 1788.
Up to 1789, Mirabeau had been a dramatic character, an individual revelation of theatric passion, a figure-piece single and alone; but the climax was at hand. The achievement of American independence had been an object-lesson most potent. Louis and his queen, Marie Antoinette, could not check the storm, and for the first time in one hundred and seventy-three years, France was to have an assembly of the nation by its representatives. The "third estate" was aroused and the States-General was summoned. Mirabeau, having a deep-rooted desire to provide for France a government in accord with the wishes and intent of a majority of the people, and having been rejected by the noblesse of his own district, presented himself to the "third estate," as a candidate. He was elected both for Aix and for Marseilles, and he decided to sit for Aix. Naturally an enthusiast, he was present (May 4, 1789) at the opening of the States-General, but with excellent sagacity he entered that body as an independent. To the end of his life, twenty-three months later, he maintained that independence.
The Third Estate takes refuge in the tennis court
The Third Estate takes refuge in the tennis court
When, being shut out in the rain from the great hall of the Estates, the "third estate" established themselves in the adjacent tennis-court, and when, being ejected from there, they came together again and forced the king to recognize them as the representatives of the nation; through all these earlier and wiser stages of the great revolt, Mirabeau was the leader and director. But when, on June 5, 1789, a resolution was passed by the delegates declaring themselves—the people, the Commons of France—to be the National Assembly, he spoke and worked bravelyand eloquently against abandoning the old order of things before formulating an exact and sufficient policy as its successor. He declared the action a hasty one, and finally avoided the issue in the only way possible, by absenting himself when the vote was taken. And yet, eight days later, at the close of the royal sitting, he bade the grand master of ceremonies: "Go and tell your master we are here by the power of the people, and that we are only to be driven out by that of the bayonet."
He advised the Assembly against the publication of pompous proclamations, and classed the demonstration of the night of August 4th as a theoretical display of liberty wholly without practical value. He was opposed to mob-law, and in no sense was he dazzled by the fall of the Bastille. He pleaded in favor of the royal right to veto, and proclaimed that he was willing, even, to advocate a "restoration of the king's legitimate authority as the only means of saving France."
He was a leader of magnificent power, enthusiastic in the advocacy and support of his convictions; a statesman who would not speak, write or do, in politics, anything not in accord with his estimate as to what was right. True, he was accused of treason for speaking in support of the king's right to proclaim war or peace, but three days thereafter he defended himself against the charge, and with overwhelming success. He was a leader who worked prodigiously. In addition to his duties as a member of the Assembly, he was also publisher and editor of a paper first called theJournal des États-Généraux, later theLettres à mes Constituants, and at last theCourrier de Provence. As clerk of the Comité Diplomatique of the Assembly and because of his thorough knowledge of foreign affairs, he was the constant adviser of Montmorin, the foreign secretary. Thus, by his wise appreciation of the subject, he established harmony between the Assembly and Montmorin, and so prevented foreign intervention, at the same time maintaining the honor of France abroad. But this bulwark to the nation's safety was about to topple and fall, precipitated by its own decay. As in all things, Mirabeau had been colossal in his excesses, and like them, the punishment was great. He wished to live, but he did not fear death. Early in 1791 the structure began to weaken, and realizing that the time was at hand, Mirabeau carefully collected all of his writings, and after classifying them, forwarded them to his firm friend and companion, Sir Gilbert Elliott, in England. So far as he was able, he continued to contribute to the guidance and protection of his country. He was patient and fearless, his only regret taking the form of a pardonable conceit that, could he but live, the Revolution could be controlled and guided, that the awful Reign of Terror, so soon to follow, could be averted. The progress of his decline was without hindrance, in spite of all that science could devise. It is reported that, as he looked out from his sick-room, on the day of his death, on the brilliant spring-time sun, he said: "If he is not God, he is at least his cousin-german." Those were, it is said, his last spoken words, although some time later when unable to articulate, he feebly held a pen in his hand as he wrote the single word: "dormir." And so, on April 2, 1791, hedied. Thus ended the life of a wondrous statesman; a singular career, of which Carlyle (in his "French Revolution") says: "Strange lot! Forty years of that smouldering with foul fire-damp and vapor enough; then victory over that;—and like a burning mountain, he blazes heaven high; and for twenty-three resplendent months pours out, in flame and molten fire-torrents, all that is in him, the Pharos and the Wondersign of an amazed Europe;—and then lies hollow, cold, forever."[Back to Contents]
Author signature.
Robespierre.
Maximilien Isidore Robespierre, the leader of the most violent of those theorizers who overthrew the French monarchy, the exponent of all that deep-rooted hatred which the commoners of France, as the result of long centuries of oppression, harbored against their king, nobles, and clergy; Robespierre, who ruled the infant republic during her first bold defiance of united Europe, yet whose name has become, even among his countrymen, a symbol of horror, was born at Arras, in 1758. His father was an advocate in the supreme council of Artois, and, ruined by his dissipation, had left France long before the revolution. An orphan at the age of nine, and without fortune, Maximilien was indebted to the benevolent protection of the Bishop of Arras, M. de Conzié, for the situation of bursar of the College of Louis XIV. We are assured that from his infancy he manifested a cruel, reserved, and timid disposition, and an ardent love of liberty and independence. After having passed through his studies, and obtained the honor of being chosen by his fellow-students to address Louis XVI., upon the entrance of that prince into Paris, he returned to Arras, where, having become an advocate of the council of Artois, he composed strictures against the magistrates of that province. A daring enthusiast, in 1789 he was elected, on account of his revolutionary principles, by the third estate of Artois, to a seat in the Constituent Assembly. We shall not follow him in detail in that assembly: we shall simply remark, that he spoke much without obtaining any particular influenceand evinced himself constantly the enthusiastic champion of the people. Robespierre, in all his harangues, appears to foresee events. The avowed enemy of royalty, we behold him on the side of republicanism, of which he ventured to alter the name on the day when the Assembly decreed the French government monarchical. We behold him again, after the arrest of the king at Varennes, resuming his projects for the destruction of that monarch, preparing the movements which took place at the Champ-de-Mars, on July 14, 16, 17, 1791, and attacking, on the 14th, in the Assembly, the principle of the inviolability of the sovereign, in the hope of having him arraigned; but at the end of the sitting, finding his opinion rejected, he began to tremble for his temerity, and required that they should not provoke the ruin of persons who had engaged in that affair.
If Robespierre was unable to distinguish himself among the orators of the Constituent Assembly; if his principles appeared obnoxious to the innovators acting from sentiment in 1789; if they often drew upon him the indignation of his colleagues; they were the means of his acquiring among the Jacobins that reputation and favor which, daily increasing, rendered him at last the idol of the people and the ruler of the government. He was called "The Incorruptible." The day of the closing of the Assembly, the populace surrounded him on his coming out of the hall, put a crown of oak upon his head, placed him in a carriage, and, taking out the horses, dragged him to his house, exclaiming as they moved, "Behold the friend of the people, the great defender of Liberty!" Robespierre was fully sensible of the advantages which might result from his alliance with the Jacobins. He devoted himself entirely to the direction of a club bearing that name, and refused, in order to give up his whole time to the objects they had in view, the office of accuser in the criminal tribunal at Paris, to which he had been appointed. Until his election to a seat in the Convention, he was never seen personally to engage in those insurrections which produced the atrocious attack upon the king, nor in the horrible massacres which, in 1792, covered Paris with murder and blood, and the French name with eternal opprobrium. He refused even to preside at the tribunal of August 10th, because, as he said, "He had long since denounced and accused the conspirators, whom this tribunal was ordained to judge." But he had scarcely entered the Convention when he resolved to raise his faction upon the ruins of all the others, and his power upon the destruction of those factions which he might employ. To attain this end, he was seen at first to strengthen the ties by which he had already been united to Marat and Danton, and to avail himself particularly of the latter, in order to overthrow the Girondins, who, from the fifth session, had suspected his ambition, and accused him of aspiring to the dictatorship. It was during this struggle that Louvet pronounced against him that very eloquent harangue, which Madame Roland called the "Robespierreiad." Assisted by his brother and by Danton, Robespierre, in the sitting of November 5th, overpowered the Girondins, and went to the Jacobins to enjoy the fruits of his victory, where Merlin de Thionville declared him an eagle, and a barbarous reptile. From that moment he never ceased to promote the death of Louis XVI., with an asperity and a perseverance almost incredible.In short, until the fatal day of the martyrdom of that amiable and unfortunate prince, he continually importuned the tribune to pronounce upon him (according to the expression of one of his colleagues)des vociférations de cannibale, and the most atrocious prejudgments. It is almost superfluous to add, that he voted for his death on the day of the nominal appeal to the nation.
Within any moderate limits, it would be impossible to give the details of this monstrous proceeding. Of all the disorders which had occurred during the stormy period which had seen him on the throne of France, Louis was accused. He was assigned counsel; and MM. Tronchet, Lamoignon, Malesherbes, and De Séze, with his approbation, undertook his defence. Their exertions, though creditable to themselves, were of no avail; and on January 16, 1793, after hearing them in his defence, and his solemn denial of the crimes laid to his charge, and after a sitting of nearly thirty-four hours, the punishment of death was awarded.
Constant in his hatred of the Girondins, Robespierre attacked them with great vehemence until May 31st, when he obtained a complete triumph. His most dangerous enemies among the men of that faction were outlawed, and others arrested. The success of this day rendered him absolute ruler of the Convention, and founded that tyrannical empire which only terminated with his life.
Robespierre's arrest.
Robespierre's arrest.
Among the factions which had lent him their assistance, the Hebertistes were the first that separated from his cause. This faction aspired to sole dominion, but the good fortune or the address of Robespierre was able at once to oppose to it the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, and it sunk in March, 1794, under their united efforts. Danton, who had been particularly serviceable on this occasion, whose energy had been of such utility, who had aided him in sweeping away the other factions; Danton, in short, whom he ought to have considered as the instrument of his power, became a formidable enemy, after being for a length of time a most devoted friend and faithful ally. The two parties were at issue; one or the other must necessarily be overcome. The cunning of Robespierre triumphed over the inconsiderate ardor of his rival, whom he took pains to render unpopular by sending him to enrich himself in Belgium. A few days afterward he was accused, arrested, and conveyed to the scaffold with Desmoulins, La Croix, Fabre, and others. In the course of the same month (April, 1794) he delivered over to the Revolutionary Tribunal the remainder of the party of the Hebertistes, and that of the Cordeliers, whom he degraded by the name of Atheists, and from that moment to the period of his downfall he met no opposition. It was then that his language assumed a different tone. "I must be," "it is necessary," "I will," were his general expressions; and the Convention, as he himself called it, was only hismachine à décrets. What is worthy of remark is, that France, groaning under the struggles of different parties, should applaud the conduct of Robespierre, from an idea that she would be less miserable under a single tyrant. His new plan of religion, ridiculous as it was, gained him some adherents; but it must be evident to every reflecting mind that Robespierre must have conceived himself at the head of the government, since he, whose sole object had hitherto been to destroy, attempted to rebuild. It is impossible to conjecture how long his power mighthave continued, had he spared his colleagues, and if he had not incited to resistance men who, until then, had blindly executed his orders, and who desired nothing more than to continue to serve and obey him; but in sacrificing the leaders of the Revolutionary Government, Robespierre sought a support in the moderate party. This policy ruined him; those whose destruction he had meditated occasioned his downfall. Danger, however, inspired him with courage. From June 10th, Ruamps and Bourdon de l'Oise, in particular, had expressed some distrust of the Committee of Public Safety, which produced a discussion in which Robespierre, speaking with an air of despotism, had the good fortune to silence them. This was the moment he should have chosen to overwhelm the party, which redoubled its intrigues for his destruction; and at whose head Tallien rendered himself remarkable. His friend, St. Just, advised him to strike the first blow. Robespierre had passed several days in retirement, occupied in projecting, at a moment when he ought to have acted. When he reappeared on the 26th, at the Convention, his partisans abandoned him; he in vain endeavored to regain the ground he had lost. Sensible of the danger which threatened him, he called together his most intimate friends on the night of the 26th. St. Just pressed him immediately to act. He hesitated for twenty-four hours, and this delay was the sentence of his death. The next day Billaud-Varennes removed the veil, and Robespierre having rushed to the tribune to reply to him, the cries of "Down with the tyrant!" drove him instantly from the assembly. A few minutes after a decree was passed for his arrest, and that of St. Just, Couthon, and Lebas. "The robbers triumph," he exclaimed, on turning to the side of the conquerors. He was afterward conducted to the Luxembourg, and in a little time removed from that palace and conveyed to the tribune which had delivered him up. He for some instants cherished the hopes of a triumph; the national guard, under the command of Henriot, assembled in his defence. But the Convention having put him out of the protection of the law, the Parisians abandoned him, and at three o'clock in the morning he found himself with his accomplices in the power of the officers of the Convention. At the moment he was about to be seized he discharged a pistol at his head, which only fractured his lower jaw; others say it was fired by Medal, one of the gendarmes, who had stepped forward to arrest him, and against whom he defended himself. He was immediately conducted to the Commune, from thence conveyed to the Conciergerie, and executed on the same day, July 28, 1794.
His last moments presented a terrific scene; his mouth full of blood, his eyes half closed, his head bound up with a bloody handkerchief, he was thrown into the same cell which had been successively inhabited by Hébert, Danton, and Chaumette. When he quitted the prison to meet his punishment, the proscribed persons obstructing the passage, the jailer cried out, "Make way for monsieur the incorruptible!" He was conveyed in a cart between Henriot and Couthon; the people halted before the house, two women danced before the wagon, and one of them exclaimed; "Your sufferings intoxicate us with joy! You will descend to hell, accompanied by the curses of all wives and mothers." The executioner,in order to dispatch him, rudely tore away the bandage from his wound. He uttered a cry of horror; his lower jaw separated itself from the upper. The blood again flowed, and his head exhibited a spectacle of the most frightful kind. He died at the age of thirty-six.
Robespierre was not a monster; his life attests it; nor was he solely guilty of the atrocities which signalized his reign. By his downfall he was loaded with all those iniquities which, had he triumphed, he would have attributed to his opponents.[Back to Contents]
Jean Henri Pestalozzi.
Those of us who can look back forty years must well remember the fancy that society took, on a sudden, to interrogate children. It is an odd thing to recall now one of the strangest fashions of a period full of wild fashions. After a long term of insular seclusion, through the war, we welcomed all sorts of foreigners to our soil, and all manner of foreign notions to our minds. The grand discovery of the benefit of questioning children made great way in the country, and among some of the best-hearted people in it. Wherever one went, among the educated classes, one found the same thing going on. Children of all ages, but especially the younger, were undergoing cross-examination from morning till night. It was a terrible time for them. I have seen some fall into a habit of tears when asked a question which they could not answer. I have seen more fall into a habit of glib lying, under the teazing constraint. I have seen tempers ruined for life by the constant irritation, and most old people can probably say that they have seen promising intellects frittered away; minds above the average at the outset of life rendered incurably desultory, shallow, and conceited. If there are readers of Wordsworth who are puzzled at this day about the drift of his poem, called "Anecdote for Fathers, Showing how the Practice of Lying May be Taught,"let them remember that it was written at a time when "the Pestalozzian system" was in vogue in England, and throughout Europe; and then they will see what a good lesson it yields. If, at this day, the image flits across our memories of some pale child, with a fretful brow, red eyes, and a constant disposition to get out of the room, or to hide behind the window curtains, when spoken to, we may refer that image back to the days of the "Pestalozzian system," as it was fashionably understood in this country.
It was a cruel injustice to Pestalozzi to render him responsible for all this mischief. His mission was, not to craze children's brains and break their hearts, but the very contrary. We, in fact, gave his name to a mere reaction from a mistake of our own—to one kind of ignorance into which we fell in our escape from another.
In our desire for popular education, early in the century, we had supposed the thing to be done was to put certain facts into the learner's mind—to lay them upon his memory, as it were. To quicken and spread the process, we set children who had learned a thing one minute to teach it to other children the next. This did not answer. We called it "the Lancasterian system," and supposed the nation would be educated in a trice. When we found, at the end of ten or twenty years, that boys and girls left school after sitting nine years on the benches, unable to do any good with book or pen, while they had lost their home-training in the workshop, the field, or the dairy, we were ready for a reaction; and to that reaction we most unjustly gave the name of "Pestalozzian system."
The notion was that we had been all wrong in putting knowledge into children's heads; and that the right way was to get ideas out of them. Henceforth we were to develop faculties, and not impose knowledge. It was a great day for us when the conception was formed, and began to spread. Without it, education would never have advanced even as far as it has. But we blundered over it sadly at first; and among our mistakes, it was not the least that we christened our follies after Pestalozzi. Every great step in social progress is taken in the name of some representative man. It is the business of those who come after to absolve those representatives from the disrepute of mistakes which were none of theirs; and we may hope that Pestalozzi's memory has long been clear from the charge of torturing on the rack of cross-examination the generation of children whom he loved so well. What it was that he did propose is best seen by looking at his life; for, if he was not a very practical man in the sense of wisely conducted affairs, he was still less of a theorist. He knew very well what he meant and what he wanted; but he had no compact system to propose, grounded on any new theory of the human faculties. The foremost man in the educational revolution of modern times, he obeyed his instincts, and left it for incompetent followers to make a scheme of doctrine out of what he said and did.
What were those instincts? And how did he use them?
We first see him as a very peculiar little boy, whose best friend was his mother's maid, Barbara. His name is Italian, but he was a Swiss. His ancestors had been citizens of Milan; but one of them, becoming Protestant at the time of theReformation, had to seek a Protestant country to live in, and went to Zurich. The father of this little John Henry was a physician. He died so early that he left a very bare provision for his widow and their only son; and, aware of the prudence that their circumstances would require, he recommended them, on his death-bed, to the care of the trusty maid Barbara, who fully justified the confidence. She carried them through with an appearance of respectability on the smallest means, and nourished the pride of narrow circumstances in the boy, in striving to avoid the opposite fault of meanness. She told him that no Pestalozzi had ever eaten the bread of dependence, and that his mother's self-denial raised him above the degradation suffered by many another orphan in Zurich. These lessons and Barbara's own character, account for much of the passionate advocacy of the claims and the independence of the poor, and of the respect for their virtue, which were the chief features of the whole life of the man. From six years old, when his father died, he looked upon all orphans with an interest compounded of fellow-feeling and of lofty pity for their inferiority in independence. His great, but as yet unconscious, desire was to help the whole class to independence.
It does not appear why he devoted himself, as he grew up, to the study of languages. Probably he had no choice as to the course of his training; but we find him, so early as the age of eighteen, leaving that study and preparing himself with great zeal for the pulpit. His deeply religious nature might well indicate this career; but he early failed in it and gave it up. His first attempt to preach ended in mortification, and it is not difficult to perceive why. His education must have been defective, for, to the end of his long life, he spoke a jargon of German or French, sometimes mixing the two; a kind of language which none but his intimates could comprehend. His articulation was defective; his countenance was so ugly as to be forbidding; and, during the latter part of his life at least, his personal habits were worse than slovenly. The failure in the pulpit is not wonderful; nor yet that in the law, which he tried next. He turned again to his first pursuit, and published some philological writings. While eager about a new method of teaching Latin, he one day took up Rousseau's "Émile," and the book determined the whole course of his life.
Insisting that the pursuit of learning was the most unnatural of human occupations, he not only gave it up, but burned all his papers; not only his notes, but manuscripts on Swiss law and Swiss history. He would live henceforth as a son of the soil. He sold his small patrimony to buy a bit of land to farm; married the daughter of a merchant of Zurich, and began domestic life at two and twenty. His wife's connection gave him an interest in a cotton manufactory; and he became well acquainted with two classes of laborers at once. The discovery of their intellectual degradation shocked him. Both the farm-laborers and the spinners were so inferior to the poor of his imagination, that he was at once stimulated and dismayed. He was thirty when he set about the sort of work which made him the world's benefactor. He collected about fifty poor and desolate children on his little estate, lived with them in a state of hardship, taught themto work, and to think, and to read, and made friends of them. In the absence of other assistants, he adopted the plan of setting them to teach one another; a feature of his method which recommended it where the Lancasterian system existed. Having no skill, and no prudence in the management of affairs, he was soon ruined, and the establishment was broken up.
This was the occasion of his giving us the book which made his name famous all over Europe. To explain his views, and to get immediate means of support, he wrote "Leonard and Gertrude," which might soon after be seen on the tables of all benevolent and literary persons in all countries. Its disclosure of continental peasant life was perhaps the first charm to us; but it also changed the character of educational effort in England as elsewhere. Perhaps this popularity gave the good man honor in his own country.
After the Revolutionary War in Switzerland, the Canton of Unterwalden was overrun with wretched children who seemed to belong to nobody. They prowled about the burned hamlets, and infested town and country like little wolves. The government asked Pestalozzi to take charge of some of them, and offered him some little aid. It was a singular spectacle when this uncouth man, then in the vigor of his years (it was in 1798), entered the ruins of a ravaged convent, with his mob of one hundred and fifty outcast children. He was all alone with them; and some of them were sickly and stunted; many were fretful; and not a few ferocious, or malicious, or impudent, or full of suspicion and falsehood. He lived and labored among them, nursed them, taught them, and soon began to open their minds and gain their hearts. In a little while their avidity for knowledge astonished him. The facts of the case indicate that he had an aptitude for communicating with children's minds that amounted to genius. Our mistake, twenty years later, was in supposing that the virtue lay in that part of the method which could be imitated. Pestalozzi, conversing with young creatures who had never supposed that anybody cared for them, surprised them by his interest in what they felt and thought. His questions roused their faculties, and sent a glow through their feelings; and their improvement transcended all precedent. Reports of his conversation and his achievements set others to work; and there was such an interrogation of children as was never dreamed of before.
One question which Pestalozzi asked of this set of pupils is memorable. They had seen Altdorf in flames. About those blackened ruins there were again desolate children, living as they could. Pestalozzi sounded the minds of his pupils as to doing something in the case. When they eagerly desired to take in twenty among them, Pestalozzi asked them whether they could bear the consequences. They must work harder even than now; they must live yet more barely; they might have to share their dinners and their clothes with strangers whom they might not like. He would not allow a rash decision. He made them fully understand what they were undertaking, and put off the settlement of the question. Still, the pupils said, "Let them come!"
The ravage of the war swept away this institution; but Pestalozzi could never again be overlooked. His special function was recognized at home and abroad.His books were translated into many languages; and the emperors and kings of Europe were eager to apply his wisdom to the education of their people. He was summoned to Paris to join a consultation on the interests of Switzerland, ordered by Napoleon. But he made his escape from Paris at the first possible moment; he did not want imperial patronage which interfered with his work at home; but he would have nothing to do with politics. He desired to live with children and the poor, to open their minds, and make them good and happy.
It seemed as if he had attained his utmost wishes when the town of Yverdun offered him its castle and grounds for a school, with perfect freedom as to the management. For a few years the promise of educational advancement was truly splendid. Some of Pestalozzi's own pupils became able and devoted assistants; and other young men of the highest qualifications devoted themselves as apostles of his mission. Here and there over Europe establishments arose where boys, and sometimes girls, were trained at once in industry and intellectual progress. Those who were in the gardens, or the harvest field, or the dairy at one time of the day, were studying languages, mathematics, or music at other hours. And where this direct imitation of the Swiss establishments was not attempted, there was a visible improvement in methods of instruction. We learned to see that books and education, books and teaching, are not the same thing. Oral instruction came into use elsewhere than at mothers' knees; and amid some gross abuses, "the Pestalozzian system" began to work great good.
There is almost always some dreary chapter in the history of these representative men. In Pestalozzi's there were several; but the dreariest of all was the last.
There never was a movement which depended more entirely for success on the personal qualifications of its agents. We need not look further than the next street, or the next house, to see how one person differs from another in the faculty of genuine intercourse with children's minds. The smallness of the number of the well-endowed with this power, is the best reason for the large use of books in schools; and Pestalozzi's genius for companionship with inferior minds caused a too exclusive recourse to oral instruction. Thus, when assistants came upon the scene, there was diversity, disagreement, disappointment, and no little disorder. We need not go into the painful story of warring tempers and incompatible interests. The institution declined for some years, and then was broken up—the government of the Canton warning the manager of the concern, who acted in Pestalozzi's name, to leave the country.
Pestalozzi, the children's friend.
Pestalozzi, the children's friend.
It needs no explanation that Pestalozzi was in some respects weak. The failure of all his establishments and his inability to keep out of debt show this. His faculties of imagination and sympathy overpowered the rest of his mind. He early seized a great truth—that of the claim of every human being to the full development of his faculties, whatever they may be; and the concentration of his strongest powers on this great truth made him a social reformer of a high order. He was not a philosopher; he was not a man of good sense, or temper, or practical ability, generally speaking; though sense, temper, and ability appearedto be all transcendent in the particular direction taken by his genius. Among his inferiors—and particularly friendless children—he was a prophet and apostle; among men he was a child, and sometimes a perverse one.
He died at the age of eighty-one, preserving, in the midst of great pain, his enthusiasm for justice, his special love for children and the poor, and his strong religious sentiment. Two days before his death he spoke long and nobly, while taking leave of his family and his enterprises. His country, and we hope the world, has remembered his good offices to society, and forgiven his foibles.[Back to Contents]
Cuvier.
Georges Chrétien Léopold Dagobert Cuvier was born at Montbéliard, a place of manufacturing industry about forty miles from Besançon, now within the French dominions, then a little principality pertaining to the Duke of Wurtemberg. Young Cuvier was remarkable for his intelligence and precocity; and an incident in his boyish days indicated the bent of his genius, and the sphere of knowledge and discovery in which as a man he was destined to excel. He found one day, among his father's books, Buffon's work on natural history, and it suggested the idea of copying and coloring the plates, after he had carefully studied the text. The contents formed his chief reading for many years. The relatives of Cuvier were poor. His father was a pensioned officer in a Swiss regiment in the service of France. His mother was an affectionate, godly, wise woman. To her early lessons in Latin, geography, and drawing, and to her communications of religion, he always acknowledged himself much indebted. He went to the public gymnasium at the age of ten, and remained there for four years, bearing off prizes for learning andathletics. Through the patronage of a Wurtemberg princess he was sent to the university of Stuttgart, where he pursued a course of scientific study, particularly in the division relating to natural history. There he acquitted himself with distinction, not only in that special department, but also in the most sacred branch of learning. "The young Cuvier," said his examiners, "has shown just notions of Christianity well adapted to his years," and "considerable skill" in reading the Greek Testament.
Circumstances compelled him in early life to do something toward earning a livelihood, and in 1794 he became tutor in a French Protestant family living in the castle of Fiquainville, near Fécamp. In that little Norman fishing-town he found much to gratify his curiosity; and he might often be seen scouring the country after birds, butterflies, and other insects; or prying into nooks and corners on the shore, after shell-fish and other marine productions; while the treasures of the boundless sea inspired wonder, with a longing to explore its depths and to become acquainted with the forms of life hidden under its waters.
He appears to have continued in the family of Count d'Hericy for nearly seven years. He was introduced to thesavantsof Paris by his researches, and accepted an invitation to remove thither in 1795. He reached the French metropolis just after the horrors of the Revolution. Papers written by him already on his favorite subject had brought him into notice; and he found congenial employment in the Jardin des Plantes—the home of his after-studies and the sphere of his scientific exploits. There he worked and lectured, and obtained the office of assistant to the aged professor of comparative anatomy. In the year of his appointment, he made a mark in the study which he rendered so famous, by a memoir on the Megalonyx, a fossil animal known by a few of its bones, and which, contrary to received opinion, he boldly proved to have been a gigantic sloth. This was the first of those able comparisons of the fossil with the present world which revolutionized geology, extended comparative anatomy, and absolutely created the science of palæontology. He was also appointed to a professorship of natural philosophy in the College of France; then he rose, step by step, under the favor and patronage of Napoleon, who made him an inspector-general of schools; secretary to the French Institute; councillor of the new Imperial University, and organizer of reformed colleges in Italy, Holland, and Germany, after the vast extension of the empire. Even at Rome he was thus employed in 1813; and though a Protestant, he there won the good opinion of the authorities. The conquest and banishment of the great ruler of France did not spoil the fortunes of Cuvier; for, after the restoration of Louis XVIII., he was confirmed by that monarch in the office of state councillor, to which he had been appointed by the emperor, and in 1819 he was made a baron of France.
Just before this he visited England, and was received with the highest honors. Another visit followed in 1830. An amusing circumstance occurred on one of these occasions, indicative of his wide-spread fame amid the lower as well as the upper classes of society. When in London, owing to the absence of his valet, he sent for a barber to shave him. When the operation was finished he offeredpayment. "I am too much honored," replied the Gascon—for such the operator happened to be, "by having shaved the greatest man of the age, to accept any recompense." M. Cuvier allowed him the honor to the full extent, and engaged him to perform the function repeatedly, for which, at length, he was willing to pocket payment.
Cuvier's life must have been most laborious. The same year in which he was made baron, he became president of the Committee of the Interior; and the numerous and various affairs which there passed under his review, and required his examination, were perfectly wonderful; together with his scientific employments, they seem more than any mortal man could accomplish. But by economy of time and distribution of labor, concentration of thought, retentiveness of memory, and a profound knowledge of principles in every department, he acquitted himself in a manner which secured universal admiration.
Charles X., of France, and the King of Wurtemberg, vied with each other in the honors they conferred on Cuvier; and on the accession of Louis Philippe to the French throne the new sovereign continued the favors shown by his predecessors, and in 1832 made the baron a French peer. But his end was now drawing nigh. "Gentlemen," he said one day to his hearers, in opening a new course of lectures, "these will be the objects of our future investigations, if time, health, and strength shall be given to me to continue and finish them with you." But an overwrought brain the very next day produced paralysis, and the distinguished statesman and philosopher died at the age of sixty-three, on May 13, 1832.
Down to the time of Cuvier, the classification of animal life had been most imperfect and unsatisfactory. The basis adopted by Ray was open to criticism. Comparative anatomy, rising into importance during the eighteenth century, continued through that period in a state of infancy. Linnæus and Buffon rendered valuable service; but all former students in this branch of science were surpassed by Cuvier. A curious anecdote is recorded of the ignorance of natural objects which continued even after the opening of the present century. When the committee of the French Academy were employed in preparing the well-known Academy dictionary, Cuvier came one day into the room where they were holding a session. "Glad to see you, M. Cuvier," said one of the forty; "we have just finished a definition which we think quite satisfactory, but on which we should like to have your opinion. We have been defining the word 'crab,' and explained it thus: 'Crab, a small red fish, which walks backward.'" "Perfect, gentlemen," said Cuvier; "only, if you will give me leave, I will make one small observation in natural history. The crab is not a fish, it is not red, and it does not walk backward. With these exceptions your definition is excellent."
Cuvier was the first to give a really philosophical view of the animal world in reference to the plan on which each animal is constructed. There are, he says, four such plans—four forms on which animals appear to have been modelled, and of which the ulterior divisions, with whatever titles naturalists have decorated them, are only very slight modifications, founded on the development or addition of some parts which do not produce any essential change in the plan. Thesefour great branches of the animal world are thevertebrata,mollusca,articulata, andradiata.
Comparative anatomy found in Cuvier a student who appreciated its importance and revived its efficiency and honors. He saw more distinctly than anyone before, that large classes of animals, when carefully examined, are but modifications of a common type; that, for example, there is after all a strong resemblance, when their skeletons are looked at, between a man and a bird, and also a complete analogy between the human skull and the head of a fish. It was in the pursuit after such analogies that Cuvier was led into the track where he found the basis of his new anatomical classifications.
For his wonderful volumes on fossil animals, Cuvier had made some preparation by an essay, presented in 1810 to the Academy, on the geology of the basin of Paris, a district singularly rich in fossil remains. Montmartre and its vicinity, covered with buildings and crowded with people, would not strike many observers as a promising field for scientific exploration; but it is the peculiarity of genius to read instruction where others can find only a blank, or a record of commonplace character. Cuvier discovered in the geological construction and the fossil remains of the Paris basin, elements for the solution of the most critical scientific questions, relative not only to that locality, but to the globe at large. Long before, he had begun to treasure up facts, the collocation of which ultimately constituted his marvellous additions to human knowledge. In 1800 he finds a few teeth, in following years a few bones; and after many years' patience and skill he ascertains and demonstrates the existence and place of a number of tapir-like animals which he classed asLophiodon PaleotheriumandAnoplotherium, formerly abounding on the banks of the ponds which have left their mud and marl in the tertiary strata of the Paris basin. His anticipations seemed like prophecies, based, as they were, on a tooth or a bone; but subsequent discoveries enabled him to verify them all, so that they became parts of scientific and general knowledge. The effect of these discoveries on the scientific world was prodigious.
"The great work of Cuvier," says Lord Brougham, "stands among those rare monuments of human genius and labor, of which each department of exertion can scarcely ever furnish more than one, eminent therefore above all the other efforts made in the same kind. In the stricter sciences, the 'Principia' of Newton, and in later times its continuation and extension in La Place's 'Mécanique Céleste;' in intellectual philosophy, Locke's celebrated work; in oratory, Demosthenes; in poetry, Homer, leave all competitors behind by the common consent of mankind; and Cuvier's researches in fossil osteology will probably be reckoned to prefer an equal claim to distinction among the works on comparative anatomy."
"If," says Cuvier, "you have but the extremity of a bone well preserved, you may, by attention, consideration, and the aid of resources which analogy furnishes to skill, determine all the rest as well as if you had the entire skeleton submitted to you."
The great scientific value of the work lies in its comparative anatomy, creating as it were (as we have said) the science of palæontology at a leap; but there are in it also sundry other philosophical deductions in geology, such as the following: that in the strata called primitive there are no remains of life or organized existence;—that all organized existences were not created at the same time, but at different times, probably very remote from each other, vegetables before animals, the mollusca and fishes before reptiles, and the latter before the mammalia;—that the transition limestone exhibits remains of the lowest forms of existence; and the chalk and clay conceal the remains of fishes, reptiles, and quadrupeds, beings of a former order of things, which have now disappeared;—that among fossil remains no vestige appears of man or his works; that the fossil remains in the more recent strata are those which approach nearest to the present type of the corresponding living species; and that these strata show the former prevalence of fresh water as well as sea-water.
The extraordinary sagacity of Cuvier, coupled with his extensive knowledge, qualified him for the execution of this herculean task. His power of geological classification sprang out of his zoölogical skill, and he was a great pioneer in previously unexplored fields of research, where relations between the organic and inorganic changes of the earth were revealed to the eye of the philosopher. "His guiding ideas had been formed, his facts had been studied, by the assistance of all the sciences which could be made to bear upon them. In his geological labors he seems to see some beautiful temple, not only firm and fair in itself, but decorated with sculptures and painting, and rich in all that art and labor, memory and imagination, can contribute to its beauty."
These remarks occur in connection with Whewell's sketch of the contributions to science made by Cuvier: "I may observe, that he is allowed by all to have established on an indestructible basis many of the most important generalizations which zoölogy now contains; and the principal defect which his critics have pointed out has been that he did not generalize still more widely and boldly. It appears, therefore, that he cannot but be placed among the great discoverers in the studies which he pursued; and this being the case, those who look with pleasure on the tendency of the thoughts of the greatest men to an intelligence far higher than their own, must be gratified to find that he was an example of this tendency, and that the acknowledgment of a creative purpose, as well as a creative power, not only entered into his belief, but made an indispensable and prominent part of his philosophy."
"Beauty, richness, abundance," says Cuvier, "have been the ways of the Creator, no less than simplicity. We conceive nature to be simply a production of the Almighty, regulated by a wisdom the laws of which can only be discovered by observation."[Back to Contents]