Part 19

I am firmly convinced that all the phenomena of the child-world, those which delight us as well as those which grieve us, depend upon fixed laws as definite as those of the cosmos, the planetary system, and the operations of nature; and it is therefore possible to discover them and examine them. When once we know and have assimilated these laws, we shall be able powerfully to counteract any retrograde and faulty tendencies in the children, and to encourage, at the same time, all that is good and virtuous.

FOR THE CHILDREN

From 'The Letters of Froebel'

I wish you could have been here this evening, and seen the many beautiful and varied forms and lovely patterns which freely and spontaneously developed themselves from some systematic variations of a simple ground form, in stick-playing. No one would believe, without seeing it, how the child soul, the child life, develops when treated as a whole, and in the sense of forming a part of the great connected life of the world, by some skilled kindergarten teacher--nay, even by one who is only simple-hearted, thoughtful, and attentive; nor how it blooms into delicious harmonies like a beautifully tinted flower. Oh, if I could only shout aloud with ten thousand lung-power the truth that I now tell you in silence! Then would I make the ears of a hundred thousand men ring with it! What keenness of sensation, what a soul, what a mind, what force of will and active energy, what dexterity and skill of muscular movement and of perception, and what calm and patience, will not all these things call out in the children!

How is it that parents are so blind and deaf, when they profess to be so eager to work for the welfare, the health, and peace of their children? No! I cannot understand it; and yet a whole generation has passed since this system first delivered its message, first called for educational amendment, first pointed out where the need for it lay, and showed how it could be satisfied.

If I were not afraid of being taken for an idiot or an escaped lunatic, I would run barefoot from one end of Germany to the other and cry aloud to all men:--"Set to work at once for your children's sake on some universally developing plan, aiming at unity of life purpose, and through that at joy and peace." But what good would it do? A Curtman and a Ramsauer, in their stupidity or maliciousness, make it their duty to stigmatize my work as sinful, when I am but quietly corresponding with just my own friends and sympathizers; for they say I am destroying all pleasure in life for the parents: "Who could be so silly as I,--amongst sane men who acknowledge that parents have a right to enjoy life,--I who perpetually call to these parents in tones of imperative demand, 'Come, let us live for our children!'" (Kommt, laszt uns unseren Kindern leben!)

MOTIVES

From 'The Education of Man.' By permission of Josephine Jarvis, the translator, and A. Lovell & Co., publishers

Only in the measure that we are thoroughly penetrated by the pure, spiritual, inward, human relations, and are faithful to them even in the smallest detail in life, do we attain to the complete knowledge and perception of the Divine-human relation; only in that measure do we anticipate them so deeply, vividly, and truly, that every yearning of our whole being is thereby satisfied,--at least receives its whole meaning, and is changed from a constantly unfulfilled yearning to an immediately rewarded effort....

How we degrade and lower the human nature which we should raise, how we weaken those whom we should strengthen, when we hold up to them an inducement to act virtuously, even though we place this inducement in another world! If we employ an outward incentive, though it be the most spiritual, to call forth better life, and leave undeveloped the inner, spontaneous, and independent power of representing pure humanity which rests in each man, we degrade our human nature.

But how wholly different every thing is, if man, especially in boyhood, is made to observe the reflex action of his conduct, not on his outward more or less agreeable position, but on his inner, spontaneous or fettered, clear or clouded, satisfied or dissatisfied condition of spirit and mind! The experiences which proceed from this observation will necessarily more and more awaken the inner sense of man: and then true sense, the greatest treasure of boy and man, comes into his life.

APHORISMS

I see in every child the possibility of a perfect man.

The child-soul is an ever-bubbling fountain in the world of humanity.

The plays of childhood are the heart-leaves of the whole future life.

Childish unconsciousness is rest in God.

From each object of nature and of life, there goes a path toward God.

Perfect human joy is also worship, for it is ordered by God.

The first groundwork of religious life is love--love to God and man--in the bosom of the family.

Childhood is the most important stage of the total development of man and of humanity.

Women must make of their educational calling a priestly office.

Isolation and exclusion destroy life; union and participation create life.

Without religious preparation in childhood, no true religion and no union with God is possible for men.

The tree germ bears within itself the nature of the whole tree; the human being bears in himself the nature of all humanity; and is not therefore humanity born anew in each child?

In the children lies the seed-corn of the future.

The lovingly cared for, and thereby steadily and strongly developed human life, also the cloudless child life, is of itself a Christ-like one.

In all things works one creative life, because the life of all things proceeds from one God.

Let us live with our children: so shall their lives bring peace and joy to us; so shall we begin to be and to become wise.

What boys and girls play in earliest childhood will become by-and-by a beautiful reality of serious life; for they expand into stronger and lovelier youthfulness by seeking on every side appropriate objects to verify the thoughts of their inmost souls.

This earliest age is the most important one for education, because the beginning decides the manner of progress and the end. If national order is to be recognized in later years as a benefit, childhood must first be accustomed to law and order, and therein find the means of freedom. Lawlessness and caprice must rule in no period of life, not even in that of the nursling.

The kindergarten is the free republic of childhood.

A deep feeling of the universal brotherhood of man,--what is it but a true sense of our close filial union with God?

Man must be able to fail, in order to be good and virtuous; and he must be able to become a slave in order to be truly free.

My teachers are the children themselves, with all their purity, their innocence, their unconsciousness, and their irresistible claims; and I follow them like a faithful, trustful scholar.

A story told at the right time is like a looking-glass for the mind.

I wish to cultivate men who stand rooted in nature, with their feet in God's earth, whose heads reach toward and look into the heavens; whose hearts unite the richly formed life of earth and nature, with the purity and peace of heaven,--God's earth and God's heaven.

FROISSART

(1337-1410?)

BY GEORGE MCLEAN HARPER

Froissart is the artist of chivalry. On his pages are painted, with immortal brilliancy, the splendid shows, the coronations, weddings, tourneys, marches, feasts, and battles of the English and French knighthood just before the close of the Middle Ages. "I intend," he says in the Prologue of his chronicle, "to treat and record history and matter of great praise, to the end that the honorable emprises and noble adventures and deeds of arms, which have come about from the wars of France and England, may be notably enregistered and placed in perpetual memory, whereby chevaliers may take example to encourage them in well-doing."

Chivalry, in the popular understanding, is the fine flower of feudalism, its bloom of poetic and heroic life. But in reality it was artificial, having grown from an exaggerated respect for certain human qualities, at the expense of others fully as essential and indeed no less beautiful. Courage is good; but it is not rare, and the love of fighting for fighting's sake is made possible only by disregarding large areas of life to which war brings no harvest of happiness, and over which it does not even cast the glamor of romance. The works of civilized communities--agriculture, industry, commerce, art, learning, religion--were nearly at a standstill in the middle of the fourteenth century, when Europe was turned into a playground for steel-clad barbarians.

This perversion of nature could not last. The wretched Hundred Years' War had run but half its course when the misery and disgust among the real people, who thought and wrought, drove them to such despairing efforts as the Jacquerie in France and Wat Tyler's Rebellion in England. It was the English archers, as Froissart reluctantly admits, and not the knights, who won the battle of Poitiers. Gunpowder and cannon, a few years later, doomed the man-at-arms, and the rise of strong monarchies crowded out the feudal system. The thunder of artillery which echoes faintly in the last pages of Froissart is like a parting salvo to all the pageantry the volume holds. From cannon-ball and musket-shot the glittering procession has found refuge there. Into the safe retreat of these illuminated parchments, all the banners and pennons, lances, crests, and tapestries, knights and horses under clanking mail, had time--and but just time--to withdraw. We find them there, fresh as when they hurried in, the colors bright, the trumpets blowing.

Jean Froissart was born at Valenciennes in Hainault, in 1337, the year of his birth almost coinciding with Chaucer's. He tells us in his long autobiographical poem, 'L'Espinette Amoureuse,' that he was fond of play when a boy, and delighted in dances, carols, and poems, and had a liking for all those who loved dogs and birds. In the school where he was sent, he says, there were little girls whom he tried to please by giving them rings of glass, and pins, and apples, and pears. It seemed to him a most worthy thing to acquire their favor, and he wondered when it would be his turn to fall really in love. Much of this poem, which narrates tediously the love affair that was not long in coming, is probably fictitious; but there is no doubt of the accuracy of his description of himself in the opening lines, as fond of pleasure, prone to gallantry, and susceptible to all the bright faces of romance. From love and arms, he says, we are often told that all joy and every honor flow. He informs us elsewhere that he was no sooner out of school than he began to write, putting into verse the wars of his time.

In 1361 he went to England, where Edward III was reigning with Philippa his queen, a daughter of the Count of Hainault. His passport to the favor of his great countrywoman was a book, the result of these rhymings, covering the period from the battle of Poitiers, 1356, to the time of his voyage. This volume is not known to exist, nor any copy of it. The Queen made him a clerk of her chamber. He had abundant opportunity in England to gratify his curiosity and fill his note-book, for the court was full of French noblemen, lately come over as hostages for King Jean of France, who was captured at the battle of Poitiers.

In 1365 he took letters of recommendation from the Queen to David Bruce, King of Scotland, whom he followed for three months in his progress through that realm; spending a fortnight at the castle of William Douglas and making everywhere diligent inquiry about the recent war of 1345. In his delightful little poem 'The Debate between the Horse and the Greyhound,' beginning, "Froissart from Scotland was returning," we have a lifelike figure of the inquisitive young chronicler, pushing unweariedly from inn to inn on a tired horse and leading a footsore dog.

Between his thirtieth and his thirty-fourth year he was sometimes in England and sometimes in various parts of the Continent. In August 1369, while he was abroad, his patroness Queen Philippa died. She had encouraged him to continue his researches and writings, and he had presented her with a second volume, in prose, which has come down to us as a part of the chronicle. He admits that his work was an expansion of the chronicle of Jean le Bel, Canon of Saint Lambert at Liege, for he says:--"As all great rivers are made by the gathering together of many streams and springs, so the sciences also are extracted and compiled by many clerks: what one knows, the other does not."

On hearing of the Queen's death, Froissart settled in his own country of Hainault. There he won favor from princes, as was his custom, by giving them manuscripts of his chronicle, which was growing apace. By the middle of 1373 we find him become a churchman and provided with a living, in which he remained ten years, compiling fresh history and correcting what he had already written and put in circulation. A little later, 1376 to 1383, he made a more thorough revision of his chronicle, going so far as to modify its spirit, which had been favorable to English character and policy, and make it more agreeable to partisans of France. Although Froissart was not a Frenchman, his writings are all in the French language, which was of course his native tongue.

About the beginning of 1384 he was made a canon of the Church, at Chimay, a small town near the French frontier, and in this region he observed the military movements then going on there, and recorded them immediately in Book ii. of his chronicle. Four years of quiet were however too much for his mobile and energetic spirit; and in 1388, hearing that the Count Gaston de Foix, in the Pyrenees, was a man likely to know many details of the English wars in Gascony and Guyenne, he set out to visit him, taking among other presents a book of his poetry and two couples of hounds. When he still had ten days to travel he met a gentleman of Foix, with whom he journeyed the rest of the way, beguiling the time with talk about the sieges the various towns upon their route had suffered.

"At the words which he spoke I was delighted, for they pleased me much, and right well did I retain them all; and as soon as I had dismounted at the hostelries along the road which we traveled together, I wrote them down, at evening as in the morning, to have a better record of them in times to come; for there is nothing so retentive as writing."

Count Gaston received him hospitably, and filled his three months' sojourn with stories of great events. Then Froissart visited many towns of Provence and Languedoc. These peregrinations furnished much of the material for Book iii. Little more is known of his life, except with respect to a visit to England which he made in 1394, and which enabled him to collect material for a large part of Book iv., the last in the chronicle. He is supposed to have died at Chimay, later than 1400, and perhaps, as tradition asserts, in 1410.

It is an engaging picture, this, of a genial, sharp-eyed, somewhat worldly churchman, riding his gray horse over hill and dale in quest of knowledge. We can fancy him arriving at his inn of an evening, and at once asking the obsequious host what knight or other great person dwells in the neighborhood. He loses no time before calling at the castle, and is gladly admitted when he tells his well-known name. He is ready to pay for any historical information with a story from his own collection. He is welcome everywhere, and for his part does not regret the time thus spent, nor the money,--several fortunes, by his own count,--for he has the light heart of the true traveler. It is always sunshine where he goes. The clangor of arms and the blare of trumpets hover ever above the horizon. Around the corner of every hill sits a fair castle by a shining river. From town to town, from province to province, his love of listening draws him on. To realize the charm of journeying in those days, we must remember that the local customs and qualities were almost undisturbed by communication; two French cities only a score of miles apart would often differ from each other as much as Nuremberg does from Venice.

"And I tell you for a truth," we read, "that to make these chronicles I have gone in my time much through the world, both to fulfill my pleasure by seeing the wonders of the earth, and to inquire about the arms and adventures that are written in this book."

So to horse, good Canon of Chimay! Throw aside books; there is news of fighting in the South; after the battle, soldiers will talk. There have been deeds of courage and romance. Hasten thither, while the tale of them is new!

If he were not so celebrated as a chronicler, Froissart would be known as one of the last of the wandering minstrels. He had the roving foot; he lived by charming the rich into generosity with his recitals. And he wrote much poetry, which is little read, except where it has some autobiographical interest. We possess the long poems, 'L'Espinette Amoureuse,' 'Le Buisson de Jeunesse,' 'Le Dit du Florin,' and several shorter pieces, with fragments of his once famous versified romance 'Meliador.'

His great prose work, while professing to be a history, in distinction from the chronicles of previous writers, is however not an orderly narration, nor is it a philosophical treatment of political causes and effects. It is a collection of pictures and stories, without much unity except the constant purpose of exhibiting the prowess of knighthood. There is not much indication even of partisanship or patriotic feeling. Froissart generally gives due meed of praise to the best knight in every bout, the best battalion in every encounter, regardless of sides.

The subjects treated are so numerous and disparate that no general idea of them can be given. They cover the time from 1326 to 1394, and lead us through England, Scotland, Flanders, Hainault, France, Italy, Spain, and Northern Africa. Among the most interesting passages are the story of King Edward's campaign against the Scots; his march through France; the battle of Crecy; the siege of Calais; Wat Tyler's Rebellion, which Froissart the well-fed parasite treats with an odd and inconsistent mingling of horror and contempt; the Jacquerie, which he says was the work of peasant dogs, the scum of the earth; the battle of Poitiers, with a fine description of the Black Prince waiting at table on poor captured King Jean; and the rise and fall of Philip van Artevelde.

Froissart's chronicle used to be regarded as authoritative history. But as might have been expected from his mode of inquiry, it is full of geographical, chronological, and other errors. Getting his information by ear, he wrote proper names phonetically, or turned them into something resembling French. Thus Worcester becomes "Vaucestre," Seymour "Simon," Sutherland "Surlant," Walter Tyler "Vautre Tuilier," Edinburgh "Hedaimbourch," Stirling "Eturmelin." The persons from whom he got his material were generally partisans either of France or of England, and often told him their stories years after the events; so that although he tried to be impartial himself, and to offset one witness by another, he seldom heard a judicial account of a battle or a quarrel. He seems to have consulted few written records, though he might easily have seen the State papers of England and Hainault.

It is useless to blame him, however; for the writing of mere history was not his purpose. With all his fine devotion to his life work,--a devotion which is the more admirable when we consider his pleasure-loving nature,--with all his attention to fairness, his great concern was not so much to instruct as to delight, first himself, secondly the great people of his age, and lastly posterity, on whom he ever and anon cast a shrewd and longing glance. To please his contemporaries, he several times revised his work. Posterity has nearly always preferred what might be called the first edition, which is the most unconscious and entertaining, though the least precise.

But if we must deny him much of the value as a political historian which was once attributed to him, we may still regard him as a great authority for the general aspect of life in the fourteenth century. Manners, customs, morals, as well as armor and dress, are no doubt correctly portrayed in his book. We learn from it what was deemed virtue and what vice; we learn that although religion was sincerely professed by the upper classes, it was not very successfully practiced, and had amazingly little effect upon morals. We are struck, for instance, with the absence of imagination or sympathy which permitted people to witness the horrible tortures inflicted on prisoners and criminals, although their minds were frequently filled with visions of supernatural beings. Froissart unconsciously makes himself, too, a medium for studying human character in his time, by his negative morality, his complacent recording of crimes, his unconcerned mention of horrors. Yet from his bringing up as a poet, and his scholarly associations, and his connection with the Church, it is likely he was a gentler man than nine-tenths of the knights and squires and men-at-arms about him.

There is an indifference colder even than cynicism in his failure to remark on the sufferings of the poor, which were so awful in his age. It is the result of class prejudice, and seems deliberate. The burned village, the trampled grain-field, the cowering women, the starved children, the rotting corpses, the mangled forms of living and agonizing foot-soldiers,--all these consequences of war he sees and occasionally mentions, yet they hardly touch him. But he is forever mourning the death of stricken knights as if it were a woeful loss. Yet for all his association with the governing class, we never find ourselves thinking of him as anything but a commoner raised to fortune by genius and favor. He has not the distinction of Joinville, who was a nobleman in the conventional sense and also in the truest sense.