STARTS HIS FIRST SCHOOL.

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equally with his own to the public good, and yet we may well believe that Madame Pestalozzi never repented of her choice.

The new married couple were soon in difficulties. The Zurich firm, not satisfied with the rumours which reached them of the management of the madder plantation, sent two competent judges to examine into the state of affairs, and so unfavourable was their report, that the firm preferred getting back what money they could to leaving it any longer in Pestalozzi's hands. The cause of the failure of my undertaking,' says Pestalozzi, 'lay essentially and exclusively in myself, and in my pronounced incapacity for every kind of undertaking which requires practical ability.' By means of his wife's property, however, he was enabled to go on with his farming.

6

Pestalozzi now resolved on an experiment such as Bluntschli had warned him against, and such as he himself must have had in his mind when he wrote his love-letter. Some years before this, he had had his attention drawn to the subject of education by the publication of Rousseau's 'Emile.' Feeling deeply the degradation of the surrounding peasantry, he looked for some means of raising them out of it, and it seemed to him that the most hopeful way was to begin with the young, and to train them to capacity and intelligence. He therefore, in 1775, started a poor school. He soon had fifty children sent him, whom he housed, boarded, and clothed, without payment from the parents. The children were to work for their maintenance, during summer in the fields, in winter at spinning and other handicrafts.

Pestalozzi himself was the schoolmaster, Neuhof was the school-house.

In this new enterprise Pestalozzi was still more unsuccessful than he had been in growing the madder. He was very badly treated both by parents and children, the latter often running away directly they got new clothes; and his industrial experiments were so carried on that they were a source of expense rather than 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.'

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).

In after years he thus wrote of this gloomy period. 'Deep dissatisfaction was gnawing my heart. Eternal truth and eternal rectitude were converted by my passion to airy castles. With a hardened mind, I clung stubbornly to mere sounds, which had lost within me the basis of truth. Thus I degraded myself every day more and more with the worship of commonplace and the trumpetings of those quackeries, wherewith these modern times pretend to better the condition of mankind.' Again he says, '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 these years were not spent in idleness. Having no other means of influence, and indeed no other employment, he took to writing, and his experience as a teacher stood him in good stead as an author. In 1780 appeared, though not as a separate publication, the 'Evening Hour of a Hermit.' To this series of aphorisms Pestalozzi appealed many years afterwards to prove that he had always held

the same views which he subsequently tried to carry out in practice.*

We hardly know how to reconcile the calm faith which is shown in the 'Evening Hour' with what Pestalozzi has told us of his frame of mind at this ⚫ period, and with the fact that he joined a French revolutionary society-the Illuminati-and became their leader in Switzerland. He did not, however, continue long with them; and there is no difficulty in reconciling the Evening Hour' with all that we know of Pestalozzi in later life.

6

In 1781 appeared the book on which Pestalozzi's fame as an author mainly rests-- Leonard and Gertrude'—a work extorted from him, as he says, by sympathy with the sufferings of the people. In this simple tale-which flowed from his pen, he knew not how, and developed itself of its own accord-we have an admirable picture of village life in Switzerland. No wonder that the Berne Agricultural Society sent the author a gold medal, with a letter of thanks; and that the book excited vast interest, both in its native country and throughout Germany. It is only strange that Leonard and Gertrude' has not become a favourite, by means of translations, in other countries. There was, indeed, an English translation, in two volumes, published more than fifty years ago; but this forerunner of the tales of Gotthelf is now hardly known in this country, even by name. In the works of a great artist, we see natural objects represented with perfect fidelity, and yet with a life

* I have given some extracts in Appendix, p. 310.

HIS WRITINGS AT NEUHOF.

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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.'

Pestalozzi's friends now came to the conclusion that he had found his vocation at last, and that it was novel-writing; but, throughout Europe, he met with many more discriminating readers.

During his residence at Neuhof, where he continued to drag on a weary and depressed existence till he had been there, altogether, thirty years, he published several works, none of which had the success of Leonard and Gertrude.' In 1782 appeared Christopher and Alice,' and in 1795 some fables, which he called Figures to my A B C Book.' But the work which gave its author most trouble to compose, on which, he says, he laboured for three long