Rousseau’s precepts are wise and brilliant. We hear him exclaiming: “It is less consequence to prevent him [the child] from dying than to teach him how to live;” “The man who has lived most is not he who has numbered the most years, but he who has had the keenest sense of life;” “The best bed is that which brings us the best sleep.” These aphorisms are as apt as those of Franklin; but in their exercise it is necessary to consider the concomitants brought into play.
Émile is made an orphan; thus Rousseau gives himself full sway; thus does he free himself from the necessity of constant consultation with parents. He is determined to love the boy, to encourage him in his sports, to develop his amiable instincts, his natural self. Émile must not cry for the sweets of life; he must have a need for all things rather than a joyful desire for some. Instead of teaching virtue to him, Rousseau will try to shield him from a knowledge of all vice. Where Plato recommends certain pastimes, he will train Émile to delight in himself—thus making of him something of a youthful egoist. This amœba state, endowed with all physical liberty, deprived of all dignity of childish memory, is to be the boyhood of Émile. He “shall never learn anything by heart, not even fables and not even those of La Fontaine, artless and charming as they are.” Though he does not possess the judgment to discriminate, he must be told the bare facts, and he must discover for himself the relations which these facts bear to each other. At the age of twelve, he shall hardly know a book when he sees it. Rousseau calls books “cheerless furniture.”
So much for the boy; the girl Sophie fares as ill. Being of the woman kind as well as of the child brand, she is to develop in even a more colourless fashion. Fortunately all theory is not human actuality, and Émile must have peopled his world in a way Rousseau could not prevent. We are given natural rights and hereditary endowments; even the savage has his standards and his dreams. Rousseau’s plan of existence ignored the social evolution of history. Yet Émile might by such training have been saved many wearisome explanations of the Mr. Barlow type, and it is ofttimes true, as Mr. G. K. Chesterton claims, that the mysteries of God are frequently more understandable than the solutions of man.
There was much in Rousseau’s book to rouse opposition; there was equally as much to appeal to those whose instinctive love of childhood was simply awaiting the flood gates to be opened. Like the Grimm fairy tales of suspended animation, on the instant, the paternal instinct began to be active, the maternal instinct to be motherly. Rousseau—emended, modified, accentuated—overran England, France, and Germany. Children were now recognised as children; it remained to be seen whether they were to be children.
The didactic era is in no way more fitly introduced than with the names of Madame de Genlis and Arnaud Berquin in France, together with the Edgeworth and Aikin families and Thomas Day in England. To each, small space may be allotted, but they are worthy of full and separate consideration.
Stéphanie Félicité [Ducrest de St. Aubin], Comtesse de Genlis (1746–1830), is represented upon the library shelves by nearly a hundred volumes. They were written during the course of a varied existence, at the court of Louis XV and at home. Her Mémoires are told in a facile and delightful style, and indicate how she so thoroughly balanced the many conflicting elements in her duties that she remains for those days a rare example of wife, mother, society woman, and student. Her discernment of people, as revealed in these pages, was penetrating and on the whole just; and, though a typical product of her time, her nature was chastened by a refined and noble spirit.
The first glimpse she affords of herself is as a child of six, when she was taken to Paris. There, her brother was placed at a seat of learning, where the master guaranteed within six weeks’ time to teach him reading and spelling by means of a system of counters. The little girl’s teeth were shedding—not a prepossessing phase of growth at best. But, in addition, she was encased in whalebone stays, her feet were squeezed into tight shoes, her curls done up in corkscrew papers, and she was forced to wear goggles. The height of cruelty now followed. Country-bred as she had been, her manner was not in accord with the best ideas; her awkwardness was a matter of some concern. In order to give better poise to her head, a thick iron collar was clapped upon her supple throat. Here she was then, ready for regular lessons in walking. To run was to court disfavour, for little girls, especially city ones, were not allowed to do such an improper thing; to leap was an unspeakable crime; and to ask questions was an unwarranted license. It is small wonder that later on she should utilise the memory of such abject slavery in “The Dove,” one of the numerous plays included in her “Theatre of Education.”
Her early years thus prepared Madame de Genlis for the willing acceptance of any new educational system, especially one which would advocate a constant companionship between parents and child. For she had been reared with but exceptional glimpses of her father and mother; during one of these times she relates how the former, in his desire to make her brave, forced her to catch spiders in her hands. Such a picture is worthy a place by the side of Little Miss Muffet.
Like all children, Madame de Genlis was superior to her limited pleasures; she possessed an imagination which expanded and placed her in a heroic world of her own making. There is peculiar pleasure in discovering under narrow circumstances the good, healthy spirit of youth. Madame de Genlis seemed proud to record a certain dare-devil rebellion in herself during this period. The pendulum that is made to swing to its unnatural bent brings with the downward stroke unexpected consequences. And so, when she married De Genlis, it is no surprise to read that she did so secretly—a union which is most charmingly traced in the Memoirs.
She developed into a woman with deep religious sensibility; with forceful personality; with artistic talent, well exemplified by a masterly execution on the harp. Living in an atmosphere of court fêtes, the drama occupied no small part in her daily life. Whether at her Château Genlis or elsewhere, she was ever ready for her rôle in theatricals, as dramatist or as actress. She played in Molière, and was accounted excellent in her characters; naught pleased her better than a disguise; beneath it her vivacity always disported itself.