Part 22

§ 13. To Pestalozzi there seemed one answer and one only. This was _by education_. To many people in the present day it might seem that “education,” when quite successful, would qualify labourers to become clerks. This was not the notion of Pestalozzi. Rousseau had completely freed him from bondage to the Renascence, and education did not mean to him a training in the use of books. He looked at the children of the lowest class of the peasants and asked himself what they needed to raise them. Knowledge would not do it. “The thing was not that they should know what they did not know, but that they should behave as they did not behave” (_supra_, p. 169); and the road to right action lay through right feeling. If they could be made conscious that they were loved and cared for, their hearts would open and give back love and respect in return. More than this, they must be taught not only to respect their elders but also themselves. They must be taught to help themselves and contribute to their own maintenance. So Pestalozzi resolved to take into his own house some of the very poorest children, to bring them up in an atmosphere of love, and to instruct them in field-work and spinning which would soon partly (as Pestalozzi hoped, wholly) pay for their keep. Thus, just at the time when the experiment for himself failed he began for others an experiment that seemed likely to add indefinitely to his difficulties.

§ 14. In the winter of 1774 the first children were taken into Neuhof. The consequences to his wife and to his little son only four years old might have vanquished the courage of a less ardent philanthropist. “Our position entailed much suffering on my wife;” he writes, “but nothing could shake us in our resolve to devote our time, strength and remaining fortune to the simplification of the instruction and domestic education of the people.”

§ 15. These children, at first not more than 20 in number, Pestalozzi treated as his own. They worked with him in the summer in the garden and fields, in winter in the house. Very little time was given to separate lessons, the children often learning while they worked with their hands. Pestalozzi held that talking should come before reading and writing; and he practised them in conversation on subjects taken from their every day life. They also repeated passages from the Bible till they knew them by heart.

§ 16. In a few months, as we are told, the appearance of these poor little creatures had entirely changed; though fed only on bread and vegetables they looked strong and hearty, and their faces gained an expression of cheerfulness, frankness and intelligence which till then had been totally wanting. They made good progress with their manual work as well as with the associated lessons, and took pleasure in both. In all they said and did, they seemed to show their consciousness of their benefactor’s kind care of them.

§ 17. This experiment naturally drew much attention to it, and when it had gone on over a year Pestalozzi was induced by his friend Iselin of Basel to insert in the _Ephemerides_ (a paper of which Iselin was editor), an “appeal ... for an institution intended to provide education and work for poor country children.” In this appeal Pestalozzi narrates his experience. “I have proved,” says he, “that it is not regular work that stops the development of so many poor children, but the turmoil and irregularity of their lives, the privations they endure, the excesses they indulge in when opportunity offers, the wild rebellious passions so seldom restrained, and the hopelessness to which they are so often a prey. I have proved that children after having lost health, strength and courage in a life of idleness and mendicity have, when once set to regular work quickly recovered their health and spirits and grown rapidly. I have found that when taken out of their abject condition they soon become kindly, trustful and sympathetic; that even the most degraded of them are touched by kindness, and that the eyes of the child who has been steeped in misery, grow bright with pleasure and surprise, when, after years of hardship, he sees a gentle friendly hand stretched out to help him; and I am convinced that _when a child’s heart has been touched the consequences will be great for his development and entire moral character_.”

Pestalozzi therefore would have the very poorest children brought up in private establishments where agriculture and industry were combined, and where they would learn to work steadily and carefully with their hands, the chief part of their time being devoted to this manual work, and their instruction and education being associated with it. And he asks for support in greatly increasing the establishment he has already begun.

§ 18. Encouraged by the support he received and still more by his love for the children and his own too sanguine disposition Pestalozzi enlarged his undertaking. The consequence was bankruptcy. Several causes conspired to bring about this result. Whatever he might do for the children, he could not educate the parents, and these were many of them beggars with the ordinary vices of their class. With the usual discernment of such people they soon came to the conclusion that Pestalozzi was making a fortune out of their children’s labour; so they haunted Neuhof, treated Pestalozzi with the greatest insolence, and often induced their children to run away in their new clothes. This would account for much, but there was another cause of failure that accounted for a great deal more. This was Pestalozzi’s extreme incapacity as an administrator. Even his industrial experiment he carried on in such a way that it proved a source of expense rather than of profit. He says himself, that, contrary to his own principles, which should have led him to begin at the beginning and lay a good foundation in teaching, he put the children to work that was too difficult for them, wanted them to spin fine thread before their hands got steadiness and skill by exercise on the coarser kind, and to manufacture muslin before they could turn out well-made cotton goods. “Before I was aware of it,” he adds, “I was deeply involved in debt, and the greater part of my dear wife’s property and expectations had, as it were, in an instant gone up in smoke.”

§ 19. The precise arrangement made with the creditors we do not know. The bare facts remain that the children were sent away, and that the land was let for the creditors’ benefit; but Pestalozzi remained in the house. This was settled in 1780.

§ 20. We have now come to the most gloomy period in Pestalozzi’s history, a period of eighteen years, and those the best years in a man’s life, which Pestalozzi spent in great distress from poverty without and doubt and despondency within. When he got into difficulties, his friends, he tells us, loved him without hope: “in the whole surrounding district it was everywhere said that I was a lost man, that nothing more could be done for me.” “In his only too elegant country house,” we are told, “he often wanted money, bread, fuel, to protect himself against hunger and cold.” “Eighteen years!—what a time for a soul like his to wait! History passes lightly over such a period. Ten, twenty, thirty years—it makes but a cipher difference if nothing great happens in them. But with what agony must he have seen day after day, year after year gliding by, who in his fervent soul longed to labour for the good of mankind and yet looked in vain for the opportunity!” (Palmer.)

§ 21. But he who was always ready to sacrifice himself for others now found someone, and that a stranger, ready to make a great sacrifice for him. A servant, named Elizabeth Naef, heard of the disaster and distress at Neuhof, and her master having just died she resolved to go to the rescue. At first Pestalozzi refused her help. He did not wish her to share the poverty of his household, and he felt himself out of sympathy with her “evangelical” form of piety. But Elizabeth declared she had come to stay, and when Pestalozzi found he could not shake her determination he consented, saying, “Well, you will find after all that God is in our house also.”

§ 22. To this pious sensible but illiterate peasant woman Pestalozzi was fond of tracing many of his ideas. She was the original of his _Gertrude_, and it was of her he wrote: “God’s sun pursues its path from morning to evening; yet your eye detects no movement, your ear no sound. Even when it goes down, you know that it will rise again and continue to ripen the fruits of the earth. Extreme as it may seem, I am not ashamed to say that this is an image of Gertrude as of every woman who makes her house a temple of the living God and wins heaven for her husband and children.” (_Leonard and Gertrude_). She was invaluable at Neuhof and restored comfort to the household. In after years she managed the establishment at Yverdun and married one of the Krüsis who were Pestalozzi’s assistants.

§ 23. Writing of the gloomy years at Neuhof Pestalozzi afterwards said; “My head was grey, yet I was still a child. With a heart in which all the foundations of life were shaken, I still pursued in those stormy times my favourite object, but my way was one of prejudice, of passion and of error.” But with Pestalozzi self-depreciation had “almost grown the habit of his soul,” and in his writings at Neuhof at this period we find no traces of this prejudice, passion and error from which he supposes himself to have suffered. He certainly did not abandon his love of humanity; and in his sacrifice for it he sought a religious basis. In these Neuhof days he wrote: “Christ teaches us by His example and doctrine to sacrifice not only our possessions but ourselves for the good of others, and shews us that nothing we have received is absolutely ours but is merely entrusted to us by God to be piously employed in the service of charity.” (Quoted by Guimps. R’s trans. 72.) Whatever were his doubts and difficulties, he never swerved from pursuing the great object of his life, and nothing could cloud his mind as to the true method of attaining that object. As he afterwards wrote to Gessner (_Wie Gertrud_ u.s.w.), “Even while I was the sport of men who condemned me I never lost sight for a moment of the object I had in view, which was the removal of the causes of the misery that I saw on all sides of me. My strength too kept on increasing, and my own misfortunes taught me valuable truths. I knew the people as no one else did. What deceived no one else always deceived me, but what deceived everybody else deceived me no longer.... My own sufferings have enabled me to understand the sufferings of the people and their causes as no man without suffering can understand them. I suffered what the people suffered and saw them as no one else saw them; and strange as it may seem, I was never more profoundly convinced of the fundamental truths on which I had based my undertaking than when I saw that I had failed.” (R’s. Guimps 74.)

§ 24. Pestalozzi still had a few friends who did not despise the dreamer of dreams. Among them was the editor of the _Ephemerides_, Iselin. This friend encouraged him to write, and there soon appeared in the _Ephemerides_ a series of reflexions under the title of “The Evening Hour of a Hermit.” Not many editors would have printed these aphorisms, and they attracted little or no attention at the time, but they have proved worth attending to. “The fruit of Pestalozzi’s past years, they are,” says Raumer, “at the same time the seed-corn of the years that were to come, the plan and key to his action in pedagogy.... The drawing of the architect of genius contains his work, even though the architect himself has not skill enough to carry out his own design.” (Quoted by Otto Fischer).[152]

§ 25. What was the connexion between Pestalozzi’s belief at this season and complete belief in dogmatic Christianity? The question is one that will always be asked and can never, I think, be fully answered. In the days preceding the French Revolution it was a proof of wisdom to “Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, and cling to Faith,” even though the Faith were “beyond the forms of Faith” (see Tennyson’s _Ancient Sage_). But Pestalozzi did far more than this. He traced all virtue and strength in the people to belief in the Fatherhood of God; and he saw in unbelief the severance of all the bonds of society. The “Hermit” does not indeed use the phrases common among “evangelical” Christians, but that he was indeed a Christian is established not only by the general tone of his aphorisms but still more clearly by his last words: “The Man of God, who with his sufferings and death has restored to humanity the lost feeling of the child’s disposition towards God is the Redeemer of the world; he is the sacrificed Priest of the Lord; he is the Mediator between God and God-forgetting mankind. His teaching is pure justice, educating philosophy of the people; it is the revelation of God the Father to the lost race of his children.”

§ 26. The “Evening Hour” remaining almost unnoticed, Pestalozzi’s friends urged him to write something in a more popular form. So he set to work on a tale which should depict the life of the peasantry and shew the causes of 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.