THE ENGLISH COLONY--THE EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES
Of the English colony there is not perhaps a great deal to be said,
except that it fills two churches on Sundays, and at all times
monopolizes the Ouchy road. It has never consisted of distinguished
persons like the English colony at Florence; on the other hand, it
has never included so large a proportion of disreputable persons
as the English colonies at Brussels and Boulogne. Gibbon cannot
be said to have belonged to it, since, in his day, it did not yet
exist; and it can hardly claim Dickens, since his sojourn there
was of comparatively brief duration. In the main it is composed of
very young and rather elderly members of the respectable middle
classes. There is an English club, and there are opportunities of
playing bridge. The life is inexpensive, not because commodities are
specially cheap, but because there are no wealthy residents to set
extravagant standards. A small income goes a long way there; and the
climate is salubrious for all those whose bronchial tubes are in a
condition to resist the _bise_.
These are conditions which please a great many people--notably the
wandering spinsters who 'live in their boxes,' and the retired
officers and civil servants who have to subsist upon their pensions.
At Lausanne they can economize without feeling the pinch of poverty,
and without feeling envious--or perceiving that their wives
feel envious--of more prosperous neighbours. The sunshine costs
nothing, and the amusements cost very little; they can go about in
knickerbockers and wear out their old clothes without fearing that
their solvency will be suspected. There is no need for them to learn
a foreign tongue, since they form their own society, and mix very
little with the Swiss who accept them, but do not pretend to like
them. They live lazily, but healthily, and, on the whole, contentedly.
Of course, there is another side to the medal, and a price to be
paid for the advantages. The colonists are exiles who have severed
old ties, and have a difficulty in forming new ones. Their existence
is rather animal than human, and rather vegetable than animal. They
lose their energy and their intelligence; they are like plants no
longer growing in a garden, but uprooted and flung upon the grass. A
stranger finds it difficult to converse with them, and fancies that
they must be terribly bored. Perhaps they are; but perhaps, too, it
is better to be bored in the sunshine than busy in a London fog.
So they linger on, persuading themselves that they do so for their
children's sake rather than their own, and referring the stranger, if
he happens to question them, to the wonderful educational advantages
of the town.
But what is the sober truth about those educational advantages? That
is another branch of the subject which seems to be worth a passing
word.
Assuredly the Swiss have a great reputation as educators, and that
reputation stands nowhere higher than in the Canton of Vaud. Yverdon
is in the Canton of Vaud, and it was there that Pestalozzi kept his
school. Moreover, just as it has been said that every citizen of
Ticino is by nature a hotel-keeper, so it has been said that every
citizen of Vaud is by nature a professor. Professors, as we have
already seen, were among the Canton's chief 'articles of export'
during the Bernese domination, and kings preferred the Vaudois
professors to any others. Yet a sufficient number of professors--and
perhaps the best of them--have always remained behind, so that
teaching and learning have continued to be great native industries.
The question which is left is, How do the Swiss systems of education
compare with ours?
The answer is commonplace, and sounds platitudinous: they are better
than ours in some respects, and inferior in others. Let us elaborate
and particularize.
Scholarship, in the accepted English sense of the word, hardly exists
in Switzerland. A Swiss Jebb is almost unthinkable, and if anyone
proposes to find a Swiss Bentley in Casaubon, the answer must be that
Casaubon was not really Swiss, though he was, for a time, a professor
at Geneva. In the matter of the classics the German scholars have
always been more learned than the Swiss, and the English scholars
have always been both more learned and more graceful; indeed, in
the sort of scholarship which enables a man to speak and write his
own language properly the Swiss have always been sadly to seek.
Swiss French is atrocious, and the French of Lausanne, though a
shade better than that of Fribourg, is worse than that of Geneva or
Neuchâtel. When the French themselves wish to say that a man's style
is clumsy, they liken it to 'a Swiss translation from the Belgian.'
[Illustration: A STREET IN ST. SAPHORIN]
Nor have the Swiss ever made any notable contribution to original
philosophic thought. Their principal metaphysicians, like Charles
Bonnet, have been merely theologians in disguise, who have started
by assuming the points which they undertook to prove, and have
been unable to keep their metaphysics and their theology apart,
as did, for example, Bishop Berkeley and Dean Mansell. The great
names in the history of speculative thought--such names as those of
Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Herbert Spencer, and T.
H. Green--have been English, or German, or French, or Dutch. One
does not find a single Swiss name among them. The great Swiss names,
when we get away from theology, all stand for something scientific,
practical, concrete. Lavater, Gesner, Saussure, Jomini--such are a
few of the instances that may be cited to point our moral and lead us
up to our generalization, which is as follows:
Elementary education is excellent in Switzerland; but the higher
education is too technical and utilitarian to satisfy those who
consider that the function of education is to cultivate the mind. The
elementary schools of the Canton of Vaud are probably better than
those of the County of London; but the Universities of Geneva and
Lausanne are a poor substitute for those of Oxford and Cambridge.
Let us by all means give praise where praise is due. The Medical
Faculties of Berne and Lausanne have a European reputation; and it
is said that engineering is nowhere taught better than at the Zurich
Polytechnic. The practical side of the Swiss character is also well
exemplified in the various schools for waiters, for watch-makers, and
for bee-keepers. But it is possible--or it seems so to an English
University man--for education to be too practical; and the Swiss
have surely committed that excess in devising that educational
abomination, the School of Commerce. Nothing is ever taught in
a School of Commerce that a man who has been properly educated
elsewhere cannot pick up in six weeks; and the curriculum, though it
may sharpen the wits, can only, at the best, produce a superior kind
of bagman.
Swiss education, therefore, has its drawbacks even for a Switzer;
and, for a young Englishman of the better class, it has other
drawbacks in addition. It is not merely that he learns less than he
would in England because an unfamiliar language is the medium of
instruction. He also acquires the wrong tone and the wrong manner,
misses opportunities of making useful friends, and finds himself,
when he grows up, a stranger in his own country--a stranger not
only to the people, but to the ways and modes of thought. That is
a disadvantage which was pointed out as long ago as the eighteenth
century, by Dr. John Moore, when a nobleman who had thought of
sending his son to the University of Geneva asked his advice on
the subject. 'The boy would return,' said the doctor, 'a kind of a
Frenchman, and would so be disqualified for success in English life.'
The same criticism still applies. We are better cosmopolitans
nowadays than were Dr. Moore's contemporaries, but the differences
between the nations still subsist; and, just as each nation has
the system of education which it deserves, so it has the system of
education which best prepares a man to fight the battle of life in
his own country. In England, more than in any other country, success
depends comparatively little upon book-learning, and very much upon
character and the possession of certain qualities which, in our
insular pride, we vaunt as specially 'British.' These qualities are
not to be acquired in the Swiss schools. The qualities that are to be
acquired there may, in some respects, be better and more solid; but
they are not so useful in Great Britain. An English boy educated in
a Swiss school is, as a rule, when he leaves, rather a clumsy lout,
with a smattering of bad French, emancipated from certain prejudices
which might be useful to him, but steeped in other prejudices which
are likely to stand in his way. One always has the feeling that more
might have been made of him at home: not merely at Eton or Harrow,
but at Clifton or Marlborough, or even at St. Paul's or the Bedford
Grammar School.
On the whole, therefore, the educational _raison d'être_ of the
English colony at Lausanne disappears under investigation--at any
rate, so far as the boys are concerned. The girls, from a certain
point of view, may be better off there; for the Swiss girls' schools
are good, and the snobbishness which is the vice of English girls'
schools is discouraged in them. For the girls, difficulties only
arise when they reach a marriageable age. There are no husbands
for them at Lausanne, or anywhere in Switzerland, unless it be at
Montreux, where Anglo-Indians sometimes come on leave, since all the
men whom they meet--one is speaking only of their own countrymen--are
either too young or too old--mere students, or else superannuated
veterans. They know it, and lament their lot aloud; and the Swiss
know it, too, and make remarks. The English colony at Lausanne, they
say, is _une vraie pépinière de vieilles filles_.
But this is an excursus. We must return to Lausanne, and take another
look at its social and intellectual life.
[Illustration: THE DENTS DU MIDI AND LA TOUR FROM "ENTRE DEUX
VILLES"]