urged him to write something in a more popular form. So he set to work on
a tale which should depict the life of the peasantry and shew the causes
of their degradation and the cure. With extraordinary rapidity he wrote
between the lines of an old account book the first part of his “Leonard
and Gertrude.” The book, which was complete in itself, and through the
good offices of Iselin (of the _Ephemerides_), soon found a publisher,
suddenly sprang into immense popularity, a popularity of which nothing
but the “continuations” could ever have deprived it. In the works of a
great artist we see natural objects represented with perfect fidelity
and yet with a life breathed into them by genius, which is wanting or
at least is not visible to common eyes in the originals. Just so do
we find Swiss peasant life depicted by Pestalozzi. The delineation is
evidently true to nature; and, at the same time, shows Nature as she
reveals herself to genius. But for this work something more than genius
was necessary, viz., sympathy and love. In the preface to the first
edition, he says, “In that which I here relate, and which I have, for the
most part, seen and heard myself in the course of an active life, I have
taken care not once to add my own opinion to what I saw and heard the
people themselves saying, feeling; believing, judging, and attempting.”
In a later edition (1800) he says, “I desired nothing then, and I desire
nothing else now, as the object of my life, but the welfare of the
people, whom I love, and whom I feel to be miserable as few feel them to
be miserable, because I have with them borne their sufferings as few have
borne them.”
§ 27. Wherever German was read this book excited vast interest, and
though it seemed to most people only a good tale, it met with some more
discerning readers. The Bern Agricultural Society sent the author their
thanks and a gold medal, and Pestalozzi was at once recognised as a man
who understood the peasantry and had good ideas for raising them. The
book is and must remain a classic, but Pestalozzi in his zeal to spread
the truth added again and again “continuations,” and these became less
and less popular in the method of exposition.[153]
§ 28. Here and there we get glimpses of the trials Pestalozzi had gone
through in his industrial experiment. “The love and patience,” he writes,
“with which Gertrude bore with the disorderly and untrained little ones
was almost past belief. Their eyes were often anywhere but on their yarn,
so that this would now be too thick, and now too thin. When they had
spoiled it, they would watch for a moment when Gertrude was not looking,
and throw it out of the window by the handful, until they found that she
discovered the trick when she weighed their work at night.” (E. C’s.
trans., p. 122.) And in this connexion Pestalozzi preached his doctrine
of perfect attainment. “‘What you can’t do blindfold,’” said Harry, “‘you
can’t do at all.’” (_ib._)
§ 29. “Gertrude,” we are told, “seemed quite unable to explain her method
in words;” and here no doubt Pestalozzi was speaking of himself; but like
Gertrude he “would let fall some significant remark which went to the
root of the whole matter of education.” As an instance we may take what
Gertrude said to the schoolmaster: “You should do for the children what
their parents fail to do for them. The reading, writing, and arithmetic
are not after all what they most need. It is all well and good for them
to learn something, but the really important thing for them is to _be_
something.” When this truth is fully realized by teachers and school
managers there will be some hope for national education.
§ 30. “Although Gertrude exerted herself to develop very early the manual
dexterity of her children, she was in no haste for them to learn to read
and write; but she took pains to teach them early how to speak: for, as
she said, ‘Of what use is it for a person to be able to read and write if
he cannot speak, since reading and writing are only an artificial sort
of speech.’ ... She did not adopt the tone of an instructor towards the
children ... and her verbal instruction seemed to vanish in the spirit of
her real activity, in which it always had its source. The result of her
system was that each child was skilful, intelligent, and active to the
full extent that its age and development allowed.” (_Ib._ p. 130.)
§ 31. In this book we see that knowledge is treated as valueless unless
it has a basis in action. “The pastor was soon convinced that all
verbal instruction in so far as it aims at true human wisdom and at the
highest goal of this wisdom, true religion, ought to be subordinated
to a constant training in practical domestic labour.... So he strove
to lead the children without many words to a quiet industrious life,
and thus to lay the foundations of a silent worship of God and love of
humanity. To this end he connected every word of his brief religious
teachings with their actual every-day experience, so that when he spoke
of God and eternity, it seemed to them as if he were speaking of father
and mother, house and home; in short of the things with which they were
most familiar” (p. 156). Thus he built on the foundation laid by the
schoolmaster, who “cared for the children’s heads as he did for their
hearts, and demanded that whatever entered them should be plain and clear
as the silent moon in the sky. To insure this he taught them to see and
hear with accuracy, and cultivated their powers of attention” (p. 157).
§ 32. With all his love for the children, an element of severity was
not wanting. Pestalozzi maintained that “love was only useful in the
education of men when in conjunction with fear: for they must learn to
root out thorns and thistles, which they never do of their own accord,
but only under compulsion and in consequence of training” (p. 157).
§ 33. Just at the end of the book “the Duke” appoints a commission to
report on the success of the Bonal experiment, and Pestalozzi makes him
give the following order: “To insure thoroughness there must be among
the examiners men skilled in law and finance, merchants, clergymen,
government officials, schoolmasters, and physicians, _besides women
of different ranks and conditions of life_ who shall view the matter
with their woman’s eyes and be sure there is nothing visionary in the
background” (p. 180). In this respect Pestalozzi is in advance of us
still. No woman has yet sat on an educational commission.
§ 34. Thus we find Pestalozzi at the age of thirty-five turning author,
and for the next six or seven years he worked indefatigably with his
pen. Most men of genius have some leading purpose which unites their
varied activities, and this was specially true of Pestalozzi. He never
lost sight of his one object, which was the elevation of the people;
and this he held to be attainable only by means of education properly so
called. The success of the first part of _Leonard and Gertrude_ he now
endeavoured to turn to account in spreading true ideas of education. With
this intent he published _Christopher and Eliza: My Second Book for the
People_ (1782), which was a kind of commentary on _Leonard and Gertrude_.
But the public wished to be amused, not taught; and the book was a
failure. He was thus driven into the attempt already mentioned to catch
the public ear by continuing _Leonard and Gertrude_, thus endangering his
first and, as it proved, his only great success in literature.
§ 35. To gain circulation for his ideas he also started a weekly paper
called the _Swiss Journal_, and issued it regularly throughout the year
1782; but the subscribers were so few that he was then obliged to give it
up. I have not the smallest doubt that it was, as Guimps says, full of
wisdom, but not the kind of wisdom that readers of periodicals are likely
to care for.[154]
§ 36. In the _Swiss Journal_ we get a hint of the analogy between the
development of the plant and of the man. This analogy, often as it had
been observed before, was never before so fruitful as it became in the
hands of Pestalozzi and Froebel. The passage quoted by Guimps is this:
“Teach me, summer day, that man formed from the dust of the earth, grows
and ripens like the plant rooted in the soil.”
§ 37. Between the close of the year 1787 and 1797 Pestalozzi did not
publish anything. Though he had become famous, had made the acquaintance
of the greatest men in Germany, such as Goethe, Wieland, Herder, and
Fichte, and had been declared a “Citizen of the French Republic,”
together with Bentham, Tom Payne, Wilberforce, Clarkson, Washington,
Madison, Klopstock, Kozciusko, &c., he was nearly starving, and,
naturally enough in that state of affairs both private and public, he
was in great despondency. As we have seen, his whole life and work
were founded on religion and on the only religion possible for us, the
Christian religion; but carried away by his political radicalism he seems
at this time to have doubted whether Christianity was more than the
highest human wisdom. In October, 1793, he wrote to a friend in Berlin:
“I doubt, not because I look on doubt as the truth, but because the sum
of the impressions of my life has driven faith with its blessings from my
soul. Thus impelled by my fate I see nothing more in Christianity but
the purest and noblest teaching of the victory of the spirit over the
flesh, the one possible means of raising our nature to its true nobility,
or in other words of establishing the empire of the reason over the
senses by the development of the purest feelings of the heart.” If this
was the lowest point to which Pestalozzi’s faith sank in the days of the
Revolution, it remained for practical purposes higher than the faith of
most professing Christians then and since.
§ 38. At this time we find him complaining: “My agriculture swallows up
all my time. I am longing for winter with its leisure. My time passes
like a shadow.” He was then forty-six years of age and seemed to himself
to have done nothing.
§ 39. Another five years he had to wait before he found an opportunity
for action. During this time, impelled by Fichte, he endeavoured to give
his ideas philosophic completeness, and after labouring for three years
with almost incredible toil he published in 1797 his “Inquiry into the
Course of Nature in the Development of the Human Race.” This book is
pronounced even by his biographer Guimps to be “prolix and obscure,” and,
says Pestalozzi, “nobody understood me.” But even in this book there was
much wisdom, had the world cared to learn; but the world had then no
place for Pestalozzi, and as he says at the end of this book, “without
even asking whether the fault was his or another’s, it crushed him with
its iron hammer as the mason crushes a useless stone.” He was, however,
not actually crushed, and a place was in time found for him.
§ 40. The world might be pardoned for neglecting an _Inquiry_ which even
a biographer finds “prolix and obscure.” But why could it see nothing
in another book which Pestalozzi published in the same year, “Figures
to my ABC Book,” or according to its later title, “Fables,” a series of
apologues as witty and wise as those of Lessing.[155]
§ 41. As I have said already (_supra_ p. 239) there seems a marked
distinction between thinkers and doers, at least in education, and we
seldom find a man great in both. But with all his weakness as a practical
man Pestalozzi proved great both as a thinker and a doer. He not only
thought out what should be done, but he also made splendid efforts to
do it. His first attempt at Neuhof was, as we have seen, all his own;
so was the next at Stanz; but afterwards he had to work with others,
and the work would have come to a standstill if he had not gained the
co-operation of the magistrates, the parents of the children, and his
own assistants. So he never again had the free hand, or at least the
free thought which bore such good fruit in his enforced cessation
from practice in the years between 1780 and 1798. It is well then to
ask, as his biographer Guimps has asked, what was the main outcome of
Pestalozzi’s thought before he plunged into action a second time in 1798.
§ 42. Pestalozzi set himself to find a means of rescuing the people from
their poverty and degradation. This he held would last as long as their
moral and intellectual poverty lasted; so there was no hope except in an
education that should make them better and more intelligent. In studying
the children even of the most degraded parents he found the seeds, as it
were, of a wealth of faculties, sentiments, tastes, and capabilities,
which, if developed, might make them reasonable and upright human
beings. But what was called education did nothing of the kind. Instead
of developing the noblest part of the child’s nature it neglected this
entirely, and bringing to the child the knowledge, ideas, and feelings
of others, it tried to make him “learn” them. So “education” did little
beyond stifling the child’s individuality under a mass of borrowed
ideas. The schoolmaster worked, as it were, from without to within. This
Pestalozzi would change, and make education begin in the child and work
from within outwards. Acting on this principle he sought for some means
of developing the child’s inborn faculties, and he found as he says:
“Nature develops all the powers of humanity by exercising them; they
increase with use.” (_Evening Hour_, Aph. 22.) No means can be found of
exercising the higher faculties which can be compared with the actual
relations of daily life; so Pestalozzi declares: “The pure sentiment of
truth and wisdom is formed in the narrow circle of the relationships
which affect us, the circumstances which suggest our actions, and
the common knowledge which we cannot do without.” And taking as his
starting-point the needs, desires, and connexions of actual life he was
naturally led to associate the work of the body with that of the mind,
to develop industry and study side by side, to combine the workshop and
the school. With regard to instruction he was never tired of insisting
on the importance of thorough mastery in the first elements, and there
was to be no advance till this mastery was attained. (See what “Harry”
says, _supra_ p. 306.) “The schools,” he says (_E. H._, No. 28), “hastily
substitute an artificial method of words for the truer method of Nature
which knows no hurry but waits.”
§ 43. In this account of Pestalozzi’s doctrine before 1798 I have as
usual followed M. Guimps. According to him Pestalozzi had discovered
“a principle which settles the law of man’s development, and is the
fundamental principle of education.” This principle M. Guimps briefly
states as follows: “All the real knowledge, useful powers, and noble
sentiments that a man can acquire are but the extension of his
individuality by the development of the powers and faculties that God
has put in him, and by their assimilation of the elements supplied by
the outer world. There exists for this development and the work of
assimilation a natural and necessary order, an order which the school
mostly sets at nought.”
§ 44. Now we come to the period of Pestalozzi’s practical activity. In
1798 Switzerland was overrun by the French. Everything was remodelled
after the French pattern; and in conformity with the existing phase in
the model country the government of Switzerland was declared to be in the
hands of five “Directors.” Pestalozzi was a Radical, and he at once set
to work to serve the new government with his pen. The Directors gladly
welcomed such an ally as the author of _Leonard and Gertrude_, and they
made him editor of a newspaper intended to diffuse the revolutionary
principles among the people. Naturally enough they supposed that he,
like other people, “wanted” something; but when asked what he wanted
he replied simply that he wished to be a schoolmaster. The Directors,
especially Le Grand, took a genuine interest in education, and were
quite willing that Pestalozzi should be allowed a free hand in his “new
departure.” They therefore agreed to find the funds with which Pestalozzi
might open a new Institution in Aargau.
§ 45. But the editorship and the plans for the new Institution came to an
abrupt ending. The Catholic cantons did not acquiesce in giving up their
local liberties and being subjected to a new government in the hands of
men whom they regarded as heretics and even atheists. Consequently those
missionaries of enlightenment, the French troops, at once fell upon them
and slaughtered many without distinction of age or sex. The French, we
are told, did not expect to meet with resistance; so their light became
lightning and struck dead the stupid people who could not or would not
see. “Our soldiers” (it is Michelet who speaks) “were ferocious at
Stanz.” (_Nos Fils_, 217). This ferocity at Stanz in September, 1798, was
in secret disapproved of by the Directors, who were nominally responsible
for it. But all they could do was to provide in a measure for the “111
infirm old people, the 169 orphans, and 237 other children,” who were
left totally destitute. Le Grand proposed to Pestalozzi that he should,
for the present, give up his other plans and go to Stanz (which is on
the Lake of Lucerne) to take charge of the orphan and destitute children.
Pestalozzi was not the man to refuse such a task as this. He at once set
out. Some buildings connected with an Ursuline convent were, without the
consent of the nuns, made over to him. Workmen were employed upon them,
and as soon as a single room could be inhabited Pestalozzi received
forty children into it. This was in January, 1799, in the middle of a
remarkably cold winter.
§ 46. Thus under circumstances perhaps less unfavourable than they seemed
began the five months’ trial of pure Pestalozzianism. The physical
difficulties were immense. At first Pestalozzi and all the children were
shut up day and night in a single room. He had throughout no helper of
any kind but one female servant, and he had to do everything for the
children, even what was most menial and disgusting. As soon as possible
the number was increased, and before long was nearly eighty, some of
the children having to go out to sleep. But great as were the material
difficulties, those arising from the opposition and hatred of the people
he came to succour were still worse. To them he seemed no philanthropist,
but only a servant of the devil, an agent of the wicked government which
had sent its ferocious soldiers and slaughtered the parents of these
poor children, a Protestant who came to complete the work by destroying
their souls. Pestalozzi, who was making heroic efforts in their behalf,
seems to have wondered at the animosity shown him by the people of Stanz;
but on looking back we must admit that in the circumstances it was only
natural.
§ 47. And yet in spite of enormous difficulties of every kind Pestalozzi
triumphed. Within the five months he spent with them he attached to
him the hearts of the children, and produced in them a marvellous
physical, intellectual, and moral change. “If ever there was a miracle,”
says Michelet, “it was here. It was the reward of a strong faith, of a
wonderful expansion of heart. He believed, he willed, he succeeded.”
(_Nos Fils_ 223.)
What was the great act of faith by which Pestalozzi triumphed? According
to M. Michelet he stood before these vicious and degraded children
and said, “Man is good.” Pestalozzi does not tell us this himself;
and as a benighted believer in Christianity, I venture to differ from
the enlightened Michelet. As far as I can judge from Pestalozzi’s own
teaching the source of his strength was his belief in the goodness not of
Man but of God.
§ 48. But encouraged and rewarded as he was by the result, Pestalozzi
could not long have maintained this fearful exertion. He was over fifty
years of age, and he must soon have succumbed; indeed he was already
spitting blood when in June, 1799, the French soldiers, whose action
had brought him to Stanz, drove him away again. Falling back before
the Austrians they had need of a hospital in Stanz, and demanded the
buildings occupied by Pestalozzi and the children. So almost all the
children had to be sent away, and then at last Pestalozzi took thought
for his own health and retired to some baths in the mountains. But most
of his peculiarities in teaching may be said to date from the experience
at Stanz; and I will therefore give this experience in his own words.
§ 49. The following is the account given in his letter to his friend
Gessner. (I have in part availed myself of Mr. Russell’s translation of
Guimps, pp. 149 _ff._)
“My friend, once more I awake from a dream; once more I see my
work destroyed, and my failing strength wasted.
“But, however weak and unfortunate my attempt, a friend of
humanity will not grudge a few moments to consider the reasons
which convince me that some day a more fortunate posterity will
certainly take up the thread of my hopes at the place where it
is now broken....
“I once more made known, as well as I could, my old wishes
for the education of the people. In particular, I laid my
whole scheme before Legrand (then one of the Directors),
who not only took a warm interest in it, but agreed with me
that the Republic stood in urgent need of a reform of public
education. He also agreed with me that much might be done for
the regeneration of the people by giving a certain number of
the poorest children an education which should be complete, but
which, far from lifting them out of their proper sphere, would
but attach them the more strongly to it.
“I limited my desires to this one point, Legrand helping me in
every possible way. He even thought my views so important that
he once said to me: ‘I shall not willingly give up my present
post till you have begun your work.’ ...
“It was my intention to try to find near Zurich or in Aargau a
place where I should be able to join industry and agriculture
to the other means of instruction, and so give my establishment
all the development necessary to its complete success. But
the Unterwalden disaster (September, 1798) left me no further
choice in the matter. The Government felt the urgent need of
sending help to this unfortunate district, and begged me for
this once to make an attempt to put my plans into execution
in a place where almost everything that could have made it a
success was wanting.
“I went there gladly. I felt that the innocence of the people
would make up for what was wanting, and that their distress
would, at any rate, make them grateful.
“My eagerness to realise at last the great dream of my life
would have led me to work on the very highest peaks of the
Alps, and, so to speak, without fire or water.
“For a house, the Government made over to me the new part of
the Ursuline convent at Stanz, but when I arrived it was still
uncompleted, and not in any way fitted to receive a large
number of children. Before anything else could be done, then,
the house itself had to be got ready. The Government gave the
necessary orders, and Rengger pushed on the work with much zeal
and useful activity. I was never indeed allowed to want for
money.
“In spite, however, of the admirable support I received, all
this preparation took time, and time was precisely what we
could least afford, since it was of the highest importance
that a number of children, whom the war had left homeless and
destitute, should be received at once.
“I was still without everything but money when the children
crowded in; neither kitchen, rooms, nor beds were ready to
receive them. At first this was a source of inconceivable
confusion. For the first few weeks I was shut up in a very
small room; the weather was bad, and the alterations, which
made a great dust and filled the corridors with rubbish,
rendered the air very unhealthy.