SECULAR AND RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
Education in France has neither the moral nor social value it has in
England. In the first place, public-school life has nothing like the
importance it has with us, where a university education almost suffices
to make a gentleman of a young man, for, whatever his origin may be, the
Oxonian is pretty sure to plume himself on the prestige of his training.
In France there is no equivalent for this rank. Where a man has been
educated is of no consequence to him in after life. While he is at
school, his parents, if they happen to be nobles, or snobs who desire to
pass for nobles, or as belonging to a set _bien pensant_, like to be able
to say that their son is at the school of Vaugirard, Madrid, La Poste, or
at the Marists. This fact suffices to pose a family with the hall-mark of
indisputable correctness. Neither the Jesuits nor the Marists offer such
solid advantages in the way of pretension and reputation as the English
universities do, but they secure youth from the taint of Republicanism,
and Society knows that it can rely on their support when the long and
expected _coup d’êtat_ comes off. In certain circles, to be educated Is
not the main thing, but not to be mistaken for one of the _canaille_.
M. Demolins wrote a book, _A quoi tient la supériorité des Anglo-Saxons_,
which made a considerable stir. The author maintains that the violent
contrast between the two races starts in the schoolroom, and reveals to
us already the deep-seated causes of their differences. The French boy
is trained in the suppression of all independence, the discouragement of
all initiative. Those brought up in the secular _lycées_ have nothing
to remember but unqualified misery. The system is less intolerable for
the day-pupils. These come at eight and leave at seven. Each class lasts
two hours, and if the boy’s way lies through any of the big gardens,
he can enjoy, with other outdoor comrades, many an hour of play. The
indoor martyrs are less privileged, for each moment of recreation is
as severely guarded as the hours of class. They have stated intervals
for play; in the earlier years they are contented with running, but,
by-and-by, they crave for more violent and interesting exercise, and
when these are denied them, they give up play. Until lately, all violent
games were forbidden in the _lycées_ because they were regarded as
dangerous, and the college principals are responsible for all accidents
that happen in their schools. Not long ago a _proviseur_ was heavily
fined because one of the students, in flinging a stone, had accidentally
broken a window and hurt another boy’s eye. It is easy enough, under such
extraordinary circumstances, to understand the _proviseur’s_ persistent
discouragement of rough games. Skating is not allowed, for this, too, is
dangerous; and, for the same reason, gymnastics are permitted only once
a week, each student going in turn to the gymnasium and staying there
for about three minutes. And so in French colleges these blustering
years of boyhood know no other variety of pleasure than the treadmill
of the courtyard. Backwards and forwards they walk in recreation hours,
talking together; and need it be supposed that the words of wisdom are
ever on their lips? As I have said, the day-students do not need much
pity. They can make the _lycée_ merely a daily accessory of life—a place
they go to generally with the intention of wasting their time. Should
they have the good-fortune to light upon a first-rate teacher, which is
rare, they will get some profit from the hours spent at the _lycée_. But
the indoor student is wretched. He is a dejected being, with none of
the distractions of his age—unboyish, unjoyous, watched and watching,
prematurely demoralised by his fellow unfortunates, and, like them, the
slave of the very worst possible system of education.
[Illustration: CONSECRATED BREAD
_Dagnan-Bouveret_]
M. Demolins complains that the French rely too much on stiff examinations
as a test of knowledge, and a French youth writes me on this subject: “We
have a great many schools in France; as many as there are professions,
since nobody who has not spent two or three years in some sort of
school, and undergone innumerable examinations, can hope to do anything.
For instance, I have undergone nine examinations, and it is not even
over! Naturally, I only refer to necessary examinations. They begin
at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Before that period you must have
been at a _lycée_ or college. A _lycée_ is a government establishment,
and a college belongs to its township. The training is identical, but
the college professors are less well paid. Their inferiority to the
_lycée_ professors lies in the fact that they have not undergone so many
examinations as these, or, perhaps, only have come out of them less
successfully. In the _lycées_ and colleges there are two methods—the
literary or old method, and the scientific or new one. The old method is
general: literature, geography, history, German or English (never both),
Latin, Greek, mathematics, every year; in the first years only zoölogy,
botany, and geology, and in the last years philosophy. But always the
most important thing is Latin. The youth who has gone through the course
of philosophy has learnt Latin for seven years, Greek for five years and
a half, but, knowing that his Latin will be of no service to him after
he has passed his _baccalauréat_, as soon as he thinks he knows enough
for that examination—and he thinks so at an early hour—he flings his
Latin books at the head of his professor or recklessly goes to sleep upon
them, if he be working merely for place as a bureaucrat; and I, for one,
have not the heart to blame him. Unfortunately, it is the same thing for
German, and English, and everything else. Amongst a hundred young men in
the philosophy class, not more than two will understand or speak German,
and never more than one will speak English. Amongst a hundred French
youths speaking German or English you will find that ninety-nine have
spent some years in Germany or England; the hundredth is a phenomenon.
Besides, it is fashionable to-day in France not to know a word of a
foreign tongue. The scientific method is less general than the literary
method. It comprises chiefly sciences and modern languages—German,
English, Spanish, and Italian. It is certainly more serious than
the other. There is a _baccalauréat_, too, but unlike the literary
_baccalauréat_, which is an aim, the scientific _baccalauréat_ is only
the means of arriving at an aim. The literary _baccalauréat_ leads to
nothing, or to the law school, which is almost the same thing, for,
speaking generally, the students have no other object than the avoidance
of the three years’ military service.” The scientific _baccalauréat_
leads to the Polytechnique school, to St. Cyr, or to the school of
medicine, but those who wish to become officers or doctors do not leave
the _lycée_ after the _baccalauréat_, and some stay on three or four
years longer. The _externes_, that is, those who go to the _lycées_ only
for the classes, are well off, for these find their pleasures and moral
training where they should be found, at home and with comrades of their
own choosing. But the _demi-pensionnaires_ are nearly as unfortunate as
the _internes_, as these are condemned to most of the prison tortures
of one of the worst gifts the genius of Napoleon gave to the land he so
basely used. “Everyone knows well enough our dreadful college,” writes M.
Demolins, “with its much too long classes and studies, its recreations
far too short and without exercise, its prison walks, a monotonous going
and coming between high, heart-breaking walls, and then every Sunday and
Thursday the military promenade in rank, the exercise of aged men and not
of youth.”
For this reason you will never hear a French boy speak with any kindly
sentiment of his school-days. Napoleon, who invented the horrid
system, was a creature absolutely destitute of kindness or humanity.
He wanted more destructive machines, willing for the chance of what is
euphemistically called “glory.” Virile independence in boyhood was just
the very last thing a man like Napoleon could be expected to value. An
English schoolboy will cheerfully go to the wars by force of his own
good-will, but he will not be whipped thither by Government whether he
wills it or not. And you would never find him submitting, as his French
brother does, with patience and resignation to a scholastic system which
atrophies his body and unduly heats his brain. The instincts of his race
must be considered, and these make for energy, action, and independence.
From the _lycée_ to French fiction is a big jump, and at first blush
neither seems to have any connection with the other, yet I do not
hesitate to blame the unhealthy, enervating, and unmanly training of the
former for many of the lamentable scandals of the latter. English boys
are not saintly, but they are certainly admitted, by those who have had
opportunities of judging both, to be cleaner-minded, with a more vigorous
and healthy outlook, than French lads. The same difference exists between
French and English girls. To begin with, the French are naturally less
frank and truthful; and where there is practised dissimulation it is not
easy to answer for the moral and mental cleanliness of the young. These
young fellows, whose sole distraction from excessive and futile mental
labour has been the daily promenade in the courtyard, who have been the
recipients of insidious confidences and unhealthy talk, leave school
blighted and perverted. We need not ask ourselves what, in nine cases out
of ten, follows, the tenth being the admirable youth who takes himself
and his future responsibilities seriously, who loves knowledge with the
disinterestedness and capacity for sacrifice to it that a Frenchman of
the best kind is capable of. But these others, unsoundly bred, without
an outlet for the barbarous spirits of the youthful male,—what will be
their experiences? Denied exercise, they cannot even fall back upon
innocent flirtation with girls of their own age, for this is not possible
in France. And so these newly emancipated citizens straightway wander
off in search of romance into a world that it would have been wise and
right to keep them out of, and whatever freshness the _grisette_ may
leave them can speedily be lost in the still more destructive hands of an
unprincipled married woman. It is the shabby and monotonous love-affairs
of this uninteresting rake, his steady degradation, that procure renown
for the popular romances; to paint him and his dreary deceptions and
drearier outrages on decent feeling a whole school of novelists exists
and thrives, and the great desire of the newly married bride, never
before permitted to read the fiction of her own land, is to learn what
life is through his unmanly and ignoble adventures. Had the boy been
trained differently he would have had another ideal, and there would have
been some place for noble aspirations and generous sentiment in a heart
not yet hardened by squalid cynicism.
[Illustration: THE REFECTORY
_A. Bouvin_]
The great defect of the _lycée_ system is its impersonality. The
Republican professors should borrow a hint from their more successful
ecclesiastical rivals, the Marists and Jesuits, and hold their pupils by
the influence of personal relations, win them by the direct exercise of
moral guidance. There are two courses to adopt in training youth—that
followed by the priesthood, which is insidious, and which regards them
not as so many young men to be taught how to live and conduct themselves
as honourable men, but as so many souls to be saved in a world to
come. The second is the British method, the object of which is to make
men of boys, to teach them to think and act for themselves, to be
self-sufficing, self-supporting, to know how a gentleman should act in
all circumstances, and, should nature have denied him intelligence, to
prove himself, in the depths of his stupidity, at least a “gentlemanly”
ass. I give my preference, I will own, to the British system, like M.
Demolins, but what I should prefer to it even would be a third, not yet
practised, by which youth might profit by the best in the English course
of training and the best in the French; that is to say, a combination
of the superior French intellectual education and the superior English
moral training. If there were nothing between a well-brought-up fool and
an intellectual cad, then, in Heaven’s name, give us nothing but the
sympathetic fool; but how much better if we could have the well-bred
“intellectual” too! Some years ago a Greek minister, about to send his
son to a public school either in France or England, did me the honour to
take me for a wise and intelligent person,—which I have no pretension
to be,—and asked my advice on the question of a choice of countries. I
told him he would have to decide between knowledge and education. If he
wished his son to be brought up in a healthy, virile fashion, taught
to conduct himself on the lines of the British ideal, which for all
practical purposes is about as fine a one as is to be found, though it,
too, has limitations it were well to recognise and acknowledge—then let
it be England, and Oxford or Cambridge. If, on the other hand, he wished
to see his son a proficient scholar, well grounded in the classics,
intellectually trained in the course of a couple of miserable years, his
brain overworked in the depressing atmosphere of a prison, then let the
French _lycée_ be his choice. The minister decided for knowledge; and I
believe his son returned to Athens a very brilliant young fellow, and all
that a statesman could desire his son to be. He would have learnt less in
England, but certainly he would have had a pleasanter time; and to me it
always seems that our real education only begins when we have left off
compulsory learning; that what we teach ourselves and not what others
teach us is of consequence. A duffer will always be a duffer, however
much you may stuff his head; the main thing is that he should be an
honest duffer. The brilliant boy will never fail to light upon food for
his brains wherever he may find himself.
The misfortune is that everything in France leads to politics, and hence
we have had the disgraceful sight of students in revolt against their
professor, hissing and pelting him because elsewhere he had chosen to
express political views to which these wise and learned young gentlemen
objected, or because his politics were not those of their parents. The
class of an eminent professor at Bordeaux was deserted, and stones were
flung at him in the street by his pupils, for a graceful and manly
reference to the cause of the death of the dean of his university,
whose funeral oration he was called upon to pronounce. Under such
circumstances, it is difficult to acquire a beneficial influence as a
professor, for personal prestige, the value of character—which is the
highest thing we can value in a teacher—are of no account in a land
where, generally speaking, a man is loved or hated, not for the life he
leads, the acts he commits, the duties he leaves unfulfilled, but solely
for the political side he takes. In modern France character is nothing;
politics everything. What students first demand is that their professors
shall be on the side approved of by this immature class. After that they
will condescend to listen to them. But the notion of being guided and
influenced by the older mind, the riper judgment, does not enter their
heads. The only professors who know how to grip and mark for life these
malleable natures are the Jesuits. When Jesuit boys break away from
their keepers, the Jesuits have no bitterer enemies. What intelligent
Protestant has ever given us arguments so powerful and damning against
Jesuit training as those two novels by their old pupils, _Le Scorpion_
of Marcel Prévost, and _L’Empreinte_ by Estaunié? _L’Empreinte_ (The
Stamp) is much the greater study of Jesuitism of the two. Here you see a
young, pliable nature for ever caught in its meshes, not brutalised or
overtly captured, but insidiously demoralised, directed unconsciously
into the path of dissimulation and unsleeping watchfulness, out of
which the manliest efforts he makes afterwards, when he has shaken off
its vice-like grasp of his individuality, never carry him. Here you
understand, as no melodramatic stories of Sue or Dumas could make you
understand, the shuddering intensity of moral hold; the implacable, mild
pursuit; the potency and success of the Jesuits all the world over. It
is a mistake to associate this self-rooted dislike of the Jesuits with
bigoted Protestantism or blatant atheism. Read the exquisite stories of
Ferdinand Fabre, studies by a sincere Catholic of Catholic life, which
bear upon the underhand persecution of excellent, well-meaning country
priests by what are called the Congregationalists, the Black Army, the
Jesuits chiefly. Read that delightful study of Cévennes life under the
Restoration, _Jacquou le Croquant_, by Eugene Le Roy, and see how a good
French Catholic, who loves and reveres the saintly village curate, can
loathe his enemies, the Jesuits. Here, too, as in Ferdinand Fabre’s _Mon
Oncle Celestin_, a beautiful soul, a kind of early Christian,—who lives
only to do good around him, whose life is one long lesson of love, of
sacrifice, and abnegation,—is hounded out of the priesthood, falsely
accused, horribly slandered, and excommunicated; and all by the secret
manœuvres of the Jesuits, because he accepted the Republic, deeming it
more the priest’s duty to concern himself with the private interests
and sorrows and trials of his flock than to dabble in politics; more
occupied in spreading the evangelical precept, “Love one another,”
than in maintaining the power of the Church. I count among my friends
Jesuits whom I like and appreciate, for whose private character I have
the highest possible esteem, whom I have found in all respects amiable,
educated gentlemen, full of gaiety and charm, and of a sympathetic
address rarely to be met with in any other class of men. But of the
order and its principles, based upon knowledge, I feel nothing but
dislike. The Jesuits in China, in South America, have, I understand,
and willingly believe, done good work. We know that they are brave, and
can sacrifice their lives in the cause of their religion. I know from
personal experience that they can be the most charming and sympathetic of
men. But can anyone point out the good they have done in Europe? What are
their charities? What are their good deeds? What noble use do they make
of their extraordinary worldly influence? For, wherever they establish
themselves, it is the world of fashion, and not the poor, they gather
round them. When they open schools, it is for the rich, for the powerful,
for the aristocrats of the land. If you pass their doors, it is carriages
you will see there; well-dressed ladies and men of fashion you will find
on their steps, and not the outcast, the abandoned wife and children,
miserable, poor, and withered humanity. The order is essentially a
political and not a Christian order, established to work upon the
wealthy, and to obtain their suffrages.
In proof of this statement I need only quote a common phrase among
middle-class Catholics, “If you are not rich or clever, never go near the
Jesuits.” They appreciate brains as much as money, for they can make good
use of both, but you will never hear their praises sung by the poor, the
“little” class, useful neither socially nor politically, through whom
they cannot hope to advance their order and secure it prestige. The order
was founded by an aristocrat and a soldier. Aristocratic it has ever
since remained in its sympathies; and the moral of the Dreyfus affair has
given us a good notion of the military principles of honour, justice,
and truth which modern France owes to its training. For assuredly it is
the Jesuits who have exercised a wider influence upon the educational
forces of France than any other society; it is they who are the deadliest
enemy of the Republic; and as they hold all the forts of tradition,
aristocratic, fashionable, and military, France may be said to be in
their hands. It is to be hoped that when posterity comes to judge the
recent crisis through which France has passed it will not spare a society
which deserves ill at the hands of humanity.
One of the things for which the Jesuits are to be praised or blamed,
according as you may view the proceeding, is the extraordinary way they
follow their pupil out into the world and through the various phases of
his career. If he forsakes them, as the harassed hero of _L’Empreinte_
does, an invisible hand arrests his course at every step. He is the
victim of the implacable pursuit of those who trained him, while he can
never throw off the habit of dissimulation acquired in his impressionable
youth. Let him go where he will, let him be what he will, the moral of
M. Estaunié’s masterly study is that he is stamped with the imperishable
stamp of Jesuitism. He cannot be frank and straightforward, even with a
violent effort, and he knows that, whatever he does, he is being watched
and followed. _L’Empreinte_ is a book that should be given to every newly
married pair, in the hope of making them think twice when their son
is born, before deciding to have him brought up by the Jesuits. Since
France is, on the whole, a Catholic country, it would be unfair to the
large majority of the race to attempt to suppress the seminaries, and
prevent French boys from being trained by priests. If the professors are
laymen, with a tolerably free hand, there is no reason why the principals
should not be ecclesiastics. A good priest can do no harm anywhere, if
only he will abstain from politics and sedition. Indeed, if he thought
a little more of rigid truthfulness, and recognised the value of sports
in a boy’s training, I should be disposed to regard him as an excellent
college principal, for we may be sure that his influence will be directed
against vice of every kind. Unfortunately, the ecclesiastical temperament
tends to undue interference and espionage, for which the habits of the
confessional are mainly responsible. In these novels by Jesuit pupils
in revolt, the abuses of the confessional in the training of boys are
clearly indicated, and though these abuses are considerably diminished in
the case of secular priests, I still have no faith in the discretion of
the good Fathers of Stanislas.
When I was present at the distribution of prizes at the Sorbonne, a very
imposing spectacle, the display of Stanislas was that of a charming,
well-bred group of French lads, but behind each I saw the spectre of
dissimulation, the insidious suggestion of the “priestly Father,” and
the glory of the Church to the detriment of the State, the significant,
inalterable law of Catholicity, that the triumph of good is the
justification of evil, and that the law of Christ is less important than
the maintenance of sacerdotal prestige and power. I looked attentively
at those boys, and asked myself what the value of such training could
be for them. For the priests who have educated them, they represent so
many prized instruments against the Republic, and possibly so many future
souls in paradise. But they themselves? When the present fashionable
craze for mere “exterior” Catholicity—which is nothing more than an
exasperated revolt against foreign influences, on a level, in the record
of modern civilisation, with the outbreak of the Boxers of China—shall
have exhausted itself, many of the lads will be mediocre freethinkers;
the greater part will be what are euphemistically called “non-practical
Catholics,” that is, men who are not expected to go to Mass of a Sunday
in the shooting season, because it interferes with their sport; who
regard confession as a distraction for women; who allow neither God nor
the devil to stand between them and the most shameless vices, but who are
married and buried by the ritual of Holy Mother, the Church, and whose
friends, after their death, piously contemplate them aloft, wreathed and
winged, playing harps and chanting hymns, who in life never listened with
pleasure to any but ribald songs and unedifying verse.
I have read attentively a little _mémoire_ of the Stanislas College,
relating all that is to be told about its routine and order. A sadder
pamphlet in connection with boyhood could not be found anywhere. Not a
moment’s liberty, not an hour of honest gaiety; under the eye of the
overseer from their up-rising to their down-lying. It is bad enough to
think of girls so trained in convents; but as the world expects less
initiative, less independence, from women, it matters less for them,
though it matters much more than parents believe. But who can expect such
an unhealthy system as that of Stanislas to turn out straightforward,
manly youths? I will translate some of the laws of the institution, and
the reader may judge for himself. If it makes him wish to have been
brought up at Stanislas, under the care of the good Marists (priests
devoted to the service of Mary), I can only say that I do not envy his
taste. To begin with, the system of emulation I regard as disastrous;
it invariably opens the door to cheating and lying, to jealousy and
ill-will. Pride, sense of duty, affection for their masters, are much
higher incentives to study than marks, which imply too much espionage
on the part of the masters. Stanislas teaches by the desire of reward
and the fear of punishment. Even in the case of very young children I
hold that this system is deplorable; in that of youths, who are fencing,
riding, studying philosophy and the higher mathematics, I can only
qualify it as idiotic. Why should a boy receive a prize for behaving
himself decently? The moment you put a premium on good conduct you
invite the hypocritical to perfect themselves in the art of duplicity in
order to compete for it. What master can honestly pronounce on a boy’s
character, and swear that the good boy is quite as good as he looks? The
moment you tell him that to appear good is to merit a prize, his goodness
ceases to be disinterested, and, therefore, virtuous; and in order not
to lose his own prize, won by the assiduous suppression of impulse, of
temperamental revelation, of all natural instinct, is he not apt to fall
into the approved vice of assisting in the discovery of the faults of
his rivals? The only prizes we can accept without moral danger are those
awarded for actual work done. These have their pitfalls for character
too, but there is not nearly such peril of demoralisation. The conduct
and work of pupils are appreciated every week by the number of marks, and
rewards and punishments are allotted accordingly. A hundred marks buys an
outing. Is not this atrocious? That bad conduct should keep a boy indoors
when he might be out with his parents is a recognised form of punishment
for ill-behaviour; but that he should have to purchase by marks the
right to go out seems to me altogether wrong. Even a boy should have his
rights, his heritage of free birth; and to be forced to pay for these
upon the judgment of others is an iniquity. Forty-one long pages are
devoted to the explanation of this futile, shabby, and spying system of
emulation, a kind of artificial moral respiration, in which all apertures
for simplicity, frankness, and spontaneity are hermetically sealed.
[Illustration: THE CHAMBER OF DEPUTIES]
Here, now, are the rules of the establishment. Silence is compulsory,
except at recreation hours, and then speech is strictly controlled by
the president, for, says the pamphlet, “One of the first conditions
of the college order is silence; those who are unable to keep silence
are running the risk of utter ignorance and worthlessness.” One of the
attributes of piety, also enjoined, is found to be “friendship for
those who are worthy of it.” I should like the Marists to explain to me
what they mean by such an extraordinary assertion. In the first place,
who is to pronounce on the kind of person worthy of friendship, least
of all a schoolboy? Is the pious boy himself worthy of inspiring the
sentiment? Many a pious person is incapable of feeling friendship for
anybody. This does not take from his piety. It merely proves that he is
charming, or cordial, or good-natured, which many an impious soul may
be. And why seek to turn a pleasing young animal into a hateful little
prig, asking himself, when he should be playing games and flattening
an enemy’s nose, if the boy he projects bestowing his friendship on is
worthy or not of it? Let the other boy be a black, a brute, or a beggar,
his comrade should be content if he likes him. Friendship can never have
a more solid, human, and wholesome basis. When we read this sentence we
feel that the little Stanislas prig, with his eyes turned down, and his
toes turned out, wants a good kicking. If only one could hope to see his
nose bleed! but alas! these are the laws of the recreation ground: “All
violent and dangerous games are forbidden, likewise all games that touch
upon gambling, and cries, and songs, and whistling, and, in general, all
that resembles disorder of any kind. It is forbidden to fling stones,
to communicate with pupils of another division, to lie on the ground,
to drag one another about, to fight. And the pupils can never leave the
recreation-ground without leave.”
If, after that, the reader does not agree with me that it is a fine thing
to be a British lad, with his cricket, his football, his occasional
black eyes, his surreptitious feeding, his long-drawn accounts with
the lemonade and ginger-wine merchant, his chatter, and escapades,
I can only advise that misguided individual to send his son with
all haste to Stanislas, and let him be turned out in its approved
fashion, a first-rate, consummate prig and humbug, a well-mannered,
French-speaking young hypocrite, perfected in the art of duplicity and
self-repression, who, on the order of the Marist Fathers, only bestows
his friendship on those worthy of it—individuals, it is to be hoped, of
his own self-conscious, sanctimonious way of thinking. He has been bred
to calculate the value of every action and every word, for each leads
to punishment or reward. He has never, for five mortal minutes, been
permitted to show himself for the young barbarian he is. He is a pious
old diplomat, a rascal in _posse_, a sage in _esse_, when he ought to
be a simple, high-spirited, or dreaming child. Between his spiritual
readings, his meditations, his confessions, church services, retreats,
and rigid discipline, whose control of every minute only ceases when the
poor martyr enters the lovely land of dreams,—where the Marists, if they
could, would follow him, to see that imagination played no tricks on
their training, and that in that world of vagaries and topsyturvyism he
was still the pious, silent, and obedient lad they had formed,—he is not
a form of boyhood it is pleasant to contemplate. He is allowed fifteen
minutes to dress of a morning, under watch, to see “that he dresses
promptly and decently beside his bed,” and out of that there is not much
time for ablutions. Possibly, like the kings of France, his washing
consists of ten fingers dipped into a basin no larger than a milk-bowl.
In class he must make no movement of foot or desk, his mind must not
wander, he may not open any other book but the class-book in use, he
must not draw, or give himself up to any frivolous occupation—presumably
verse-making. If he has need to open his desk, he must only lift the lid
half-way, and never lock it, as the prefect visits it once a week. He
washes his feet once a week and his body once a month, and in summer
bathes twice a week. In the parlour he can be visited only by his
parents, or persons duly authorised by his parents, and when he goes home
of a Sunday he must be escorted from the college and back by a “person of
confidence,” furnished with a signed and dated letter. This person can
under no circumstances be accepted if a young man.
Those who have the responsibility of the Stanislas pupil on his outing
must observe the precautions exacted by the directors. On going out he
receives an entrance ticket, which his parents or guardian must fill up
with the details of his day, and this account is verified and stamped on
his return to the college. The pupil who returns without an escort is
punished for a month. Should he obtain leave on false pretences, he is
expelled. He can advance by a day or prolong for a day his winter and
Easter vacations, by payment of three thousand marks. His letters to
his parents or guardian are not read, but they must bear the signature
of these on the envelope to assure their privacy; all the rest of his
correspondence is under strict control, and the introduction of a book,
not a class one, a pamphlet, or a newspaper, constitutes an infraction
of the rules so grave as to merit expulsion. This system of education
begins at childhood, when he enters the eleventh class and graduates
into the preparatory classes for the Naval School and St. Cyr, when his
moustache is beginning to bud and he is still supposed to bestow his
friendship on those who are worthy of it. Poor youth! He has learnt
everything—from the Catechism to mathematics, from philosophy (of a kind)
to fencing, riding, and gymnastics (also of a kind, and warranted never
to last longer than half an hour, twice a week)—except simple manliness,
independence, and the real philosophy, which will help to carry him
decently through the surprises and snares of existence, and help him
to meet unaided an emergency. Toss him roughly from his Stanislas bark
upon the turbulent sea of experience, and what may you expect from this
fatuous, trained young hypocrite? The wave rolls over him, carries him
to the bottom, and he comes up all covered with mud. Of course he abuses
freedom, a stimulant he has never known, and he speedily converts it into
the intoxicant of licence.
It will be seen that the training of boys, whether in French seminaries
or in French _lycées_, is not the most perfect of its kind. There is
the careful home-training, too, which is, of course, the best. But here
also the shadow of the Church towers over childhood. The boy leaves his
nurse’s hands to toddle into those of his ecclesiastical tutor, Monsieur
l’Abbé. He attends _cours_ and studies at home, with the priest, and
when he attends the classes of a _lycée_ he is duly escorted back and
forth, with all imaginable precautions to prevent from getting in his
mind what should not be there; and finally he is sent to St. Cyr or
Saumur, with the usual results. Gyp has given us an amusing sketch of the
innocent little lad of this period in _Le Petit Bob_, about as black a
little rascal as ever breathed, and of the model Jesuit boy, “Monsieur
Fred,” an accomplished rake, when he is not supposed to look above the
rim of his prayer-book.
And now let us glance at the training of the girls. This is, if possible,
more deplorable than that of the boys. But it is an admirable testimony
to the natural superiority of the Frenchwoman’s character that even the
long-persistent effort to spoil her in early years does not prevent
her from turning her liberty, when it comes, to excellent account. The
little French girl in her mother’s home is happier, I believe, than any
other little girl of the world. No child has such tender, such watchful,
such devoted, parents as she. She is enveloped in love and care from
her cradle, and her privilege is to hear delightful speech about her. A
foreign _gouvernante_ will be engaged to teach her whatever language it
is intended she shall speak fluently—German or English. If she is not to
go to a convent (and this will be, in her interest, the only intelligent
decision) she attends _cours_ like her brother, and the _gouvernante_
is superseded by the certificated governess. A good governess, that
is, a cultured and liberal-minded lady, is a priceless blessing, but,
unhappily, she is rare. I do not know why the best class of women avoid
the mission of training the young, for, in the case of a woman without
children of her own to train, it ought to be regarded as an exceptionally
noble undertaking. It is not, however; and more’s the pity. Society is
to blame, with its inane traditions, and, along with it, the senseless
passion for inflicting slight and pain upon those in an inferior position
which besets so many women in their own homes. And so, not wishing to be
treated as servants, without any proper status or dignity, the superior
women, who would make the best governesses, seek more independent and
congenial occupation; and the training of girls at home falls into the
hands of hopeless mediocrities, who have little knowledge and less
manners, whose point of view is squalid and shabby and personal. I have
listened to the complaints of many an unhappy governess, and I will own
I have always been shocked and sickened by the silly way these women
allow their lives to be poisoned by considerations they should have the
dignity to ignore. How are young women to acquire a noble influence
over their pupils when they are busy lamenting the fact that biscuits
at lunch were not offered to them, or other such material and vulgar
slights which they usually dwell upon as unendurable? If they have heart
enough to love, and brains enough to teach and guide, their pupils, and
sufficient independence of character not to let themselves be trampled
upon, overworked, or snubbed, of what would they have to complain? Let
them raise the tone of their position, and they will get all the respect
they need and have a right to. I know Frenchwomen who are grandmothers,
who still love and admire the feeble and disabled governesses of their
girlhood who have helped to train their children and their grandchildren.
But in France the superior woman, who might have made an excellent
governess, is apt to enter one of the teaching orders, where, instead of
doing the good she was intended to do singly, she helps in the crowd to
work evil.
The home education of girls will be referred to in another chapter; here
I wish to treat of the other kind,—the conventual training. Speaking from
extensive knowledge of it, and of wide personal experience, I do not
hesitate to qualify it as the very worst possible. It is bad everywhere,
but nowhere is it so bad as in France. Its essential object is the
destruction of independence and candour. I do not say that a frank girl
will never be met with in a convent, but you will never find her among
the privileged ones; she will be one of the black sheep, one of the
unpliable, one of those who cannot be utilised to full advantage for the
greater glory of God, A. M. D. G.! There never was a more subtle legend
invented by man for the pursuit of his own aims under the mantle of
self-abnegation.
The convent girl is the creature of her environment. You will know her
by the hall-mark of her manners. These will be perfect when she comes
out of The Assumption, or any other Parisian convent of fashionable
renown. Wealthy converted Jews, of rabid anti-Semitic tendencies, send
their daughters to these famous establishments for the knotting of useful
social ties. I have known of the children of a great foreign merchant
being accepted in one of these centres of aristocratic exclusiveness,
on the condition that they concealed the fact that they belonged to the
commercial classes, and the result was that the unfortunate children,
with the natural ease of their imaginative years, drifted into glorious
bragging and lying. There was no objection on the part of their trainers
to any exercise of imagination that served to ennoble them; the objection
would have been provoked by betrayal of the truth. It will be said that
this is an exceptional example perhaps. Not so. The last thing recognised
by nuns is the virtue of poverty, the value of the lowly born. This
fact is so widely recognised by women who visit convents that they
themselves will not conceal from you the importance nuns attach to dress,
and their indifference to shabbily attired visitors. I still vividly
remember a rebuke addressed to a girl in an Irish convent who had got
into a scrape with a companion of inferior social rank. “I am surprised
at your choice of companion,” said the nun loftily. “Remember, should
you and she encounter outside these walls, you will be in your carriage
and she will be on foot, and she may count herself honoured if you are
permitted to salute her.” There is no reason why there should not be
vulgar-minded women within convent walls as well as within the walls of
pomp and fashion, for, alas! vulgarity and snobbishness abound; but it
is significant that nuns, of whatever nationality you find them, have a
strong predilection for the wealthy and well-born. So, it will be said,
have the large majority of people, regarding these as the elect of the
earth. Well, if so, let girls, when they come to be women, find this out
for themselves. But as children and girls, let not their freedom, their
spontaneity, be hampered by such unlovely distinctions. Teach them to
love all that is good and pleasant in humanity, and let the daughter of a
marchioness at school make friends with the daughter of a grocer, without
condescension on one side, or undue humility or concealment on the other.
Why should not a school seek rather to be a republic, based upon the
lovable and republican principles of Christ’s Christianity? The children
of both classes will be the gainers, and each will leave school with a
hearty esteem for the other. Relations can terminate here, for there
is no reason why school girls should continue to be friends if their
parents see any cause for objection to the intimacy; but there is every
reason that they should learn to appreciate the good there is to be found
in those of a different social rank from theirs—inferior or superior.
This is the very last thing they may hope to learn in a fashionable
convent, since there are no greater worshippers at the shrine of birth
and fortune than nuns. I am aware that the difficulties in the way of
maintaining such a free mingling of the classes would assuredly come from
the parents. The nobles would be horrified if assurance were withheld
of perfect social exclusiveness for their offspring, and still more
angry would be the sham nobles, the purse-proud snobs, whose selection
of a convent for their daughters depends solely upon its fashionable
reputation. It may also be contended that the society of the better
classes unfits a girl of the commercial class for her after surroundings.
But this fact also is based upon false prejudice. Lift the girl’s moral
tone, and she will find something else in the acquirement of good manners
than contempt of her equals.
My next and still greater charge against conventual education is the
elimination by strict supervision of all sentiment of honour. In France
two girls are forbidden to talk in the recreation-ground. When they
are seen to do so, instead of being separated in an open fashion, a
third is secretly ordered to go and join them in a friendly way, and
then return and report the subject of their talk to the nun in charge.
Needless to say, only the girls regarded as trustworthy and virtuous are
told off for this diplomatic duty. I myself, being a hopelessly black
sheep, and, in consequence, excellent material for the exercise of this
peculiar form of virtue, was long enough its victim before I grasped the
fact, and could not understand how reverend mothers and such exalted
personages came to be familiar with all my whispered revolutionary
chatter. It would be wonderful if girls so trained should in after
life scruple to read letters, to steam them if necessary, to listen at
doors, and to betray confidences of every kind. And girls who know no
other form of distraction and play than the dull walking up and down the
recreation-ground, the nightly trial of round games, where you sit in
a large circle on benches, with a string and a button attached to it,
which one girl passes to the other through her closed fist, all singing
French _rondes_, such as _J’ai perdu le cor de ma clarionette_, or
_Malbrouck s’en va-t-en guerre_, or the glories of Cadet Roussel? And
this, remember, for girls of sixteen and seventeen—craving intelligent
and exciting pastimes!
How fervently I used to bless the headache or cold that permitted me to
slip up to bed after supper, and escape from the evening recreation into
the more peopled and interesting solitude of my own thoughts. Things
may be better since my day. Tennis, bathing, golf, cricket, and racing
may now be admitted as feminine pastimes in those holy establishments
where I spent so many miserable and profitless years. I hear that even
baths are introduced, and that it is no longer deemed by French nuns an
offence against modesty to wash oneself. But I recall a very different
state of affairs—a state so curious that my French friends do not like
to credit it when I assure them of it. I was fourteen when I was sent
to school in France to acquire the tongue of courts and diplomacy. On
the first morning that I awoke in the long, white-curtained dormitory, I
proceeded to wash and dress myself as I had been taught to wash and dress
in English convents. I had deposited my dressing-gown on my bed, and was
splashing my neck with water, when, to my astonishment, a nun approached
me noiselessly, lifted my dressing-gown from the bed, and holding her
shocked glance averted murmured, _La pudeur, mon enfant, la pudeur_,
as she covered my dripping neck in the folds of my dressing-gown. When
I clamoured for an explanation, I was told it was not considered decent
in France for a young girl to wash her neck. We were worse off than the
young gentlemen of Stanislas, whose feet are washed once a week; ours
were washed only once a fortnight, and then a cloth was kept over them,
lest the sight of our naked feet in the water should lead to the loss of
our souls. For the years I was there, nobody, to my knowledge, ever had a
bath of any kind. However, this is all changed, I am happy to say. French
nuns have had to move with the times and accept the modern institution of
baths.
I hope they have also grown to accept the institution of men. When I
was at school we were strictly forbidden to lift our eyes to a man’s
face. When the old doctor of eighty passed through the courtyard, if any
of us happened to be about there was an instant cry of alarm, _Baissez
les yeux, mesdemoiselles. Il y a du monde._ _Du monde_ always meant
the wolf in trousers and coat, and we were invited ever to tremble,
blush, and lower our eyes in the dreadful creature’s presence. It was a
garrison town, and whenever we walked abroad and found officers upon our
path nuns would skurry down our black-robed ranks, crying in terrified
undertones, _Baissez les yeux, mesdemoiselles. Messieurs les officiers
vous regardent._ Will any one explain to me the mental and moral value of
such training? Is it not shocking that innocent girls should be bred in
the notion that there is any reason why they should not look men frankly
and simply in the face?
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