P. turns author. "E. H. of Hermit."

66

As he

Even

mind as to the true method of attaining that object. afterwards wrote to Gessner (Wie Gertrud u.s.w.), 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).*

In these aphorisms Pestalozzi states the main principles at work in

P.'s belief.

§ 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 nis own mind; but this bare statement is not well suited to communicate these principles to the minds of others. For most readers the aphorisms have as little attraction as the enunciations, say, of a book of Euclid would have for those who knew no geometry. But as his future life was guided by the principles he has formulated in this paper it seems necessary for us to bear some of these in mind.

What he mainly insists upon is that all wise guidance must proceed from a knowledge of the nature of the creature to be guided; further that there is a simple wisdom which must direct the course of all men. "The path of Nature," says he, “which brings out the powers of men must be open and plain; and human education to true peace-giving wisdom must be simple and available for all. Nature brings out all men's powers by practice, and their increase springs from use." The powers of children should be strengthened by exercise on what is close at hand; and this should be done without hardness or pressure. A forced and rigid sequence in instruction is not Nature's method, says he : this would make men one-sided, and truth would not penetrate freely and softly into their whole being. The pure feeling for truth grows in a small area; and human wisdom must be grounded on a perception of our closest relationships, and must show itself in skilled management of our nearest concerns. Everything we do against our consciousness of right weakens our perception of truth and disturbs the purity of our fundamental conceptions and experiences. On this account all wisdom of man rests in the strength of a good heart that follows after truth, and all the blessing of man in the sense of simplicity and innocence. Peace of mind must be the outcome of right training. To get out of his surroundings all he needs for life and enjoyment, to be patient, painstaking, and in every difficulty trustful in the love of the Heavenly Father, this comes of a man's true education to wisdom. Nothing concerns the human race so closely and intimately as-God. "God a. Father of thy household, as source of thy blessing-God as thy Father; in this belief thou findest rest and strength and wisdom, which no violence nor the grave itself can overthrow." Belief in God which is a part of our nature, like

The "Hermit" a Christian.

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 f 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

the sense of right and wrong and the feeling we can never quench of what is just and unjust, must be made the foundation in educating the human race. The subject of that belief is that God is the Father of men, men are the children of God. To this divine relationship Pestalozzi refers all human relationships as those of parent and child, of ruler and subject. The priest is appointed to declare the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of men.

The only text I have seen is that reprinted by Raumer (Gesch. d. Päd.). From Otto Fischer (Wichtigste Pädagogen), I learn that this is the edition of 1807, which differs, at least by omission, from the original of 1780.

Success of “Leonard and Gertrude."

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

V

them.

Gertrude's patience tried.

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.*

§ 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

* There are now four parts, first published respectively in 1781, 1783. 1785, and 1787 (O. Fischer). The English translation in two small vols. (1825) ends with the First Part, but Miss Eva Channing has recently sought to weld the four parts into one (Boston, U.S.--D. C. Heath & Co.), and in this form the book seems to me not only very instructive but very entertaining also. Not many readers who look into it will fail to reach the end, and few are the books connected with education of which this could prudently be asserted. "All good teachers should read it with care," says Stanley Hall in his Introduction, and if they thus read it and catch anything of the spirit of Pesta lozzi both they and their pupils will have reason to rejoice.