A frontispiece to the 1802 edition of Arnaud Berquin’s (1749–1791) works represents his bust being garlanded and crowned, and his “L’Ami des Enfans” being regarded by a group of admirers, both young and old. But though this very volume was received with honours by the French Academy, and though by it Berquin claims his right to immortality, French children of the present refrain from reading him as systematically as we refrain from reading “Sandford and Merton,” which, as it happens, Berquin translated into French. There are popular editions of “L’Ami des Enfans,” but children do not relish the tameness of such moral literature. The editor detailed to write Berquin’s short life, which was spent in the study of letters, and in following up one “Ami” by another, sacrifices incident and fact for encomium. It is easy to claim for Berquin modesty and goodness during his residence in his native town near Bordeaux and after his arrival in Paris during 1772; it is interesting to know that he was encouraged to use his talents by the praise of his friends, but far more valuable would it have been to tell just in what manner he reached that ethical state which overflowed in his “L’Ami des Enfans,” published during the years 1782 and 1783. The full purport of the volume is summed up exuberantly in the following paragraph:
“Quelle aimable simplicité! quel naturel! quel sentiment naïf respirent dans cette ingénieuse production! Au lieu de ces fictions extravagantes, et de ce merveilleux bizarre dans lesquels on a si longtemps égaré l’imagination des enfans, Berquin ne leur présente que des aventures dont ils peuvent être témoins chaque jour dans leur famille.”
The tales and playlets written by Berquin are almost immoral in their morality. It is a question whether the interest of children will become absorbed by the constant iteration of virtue; whether goodness is best developed through the exploitation of deceit, of lying, of disobedience, and of wilful perverseness. To be kind means to be rewarded, to be bad is synonymous with punishment. Berquin and his followers might have drawn up a moral code book in pocket form, so stereotyped was their habit of exacting an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. What are the punishments of vanity, what the outcome of playing when the afternoon task is to watch the sheep? The pictures made to illustrate the stories depict boys and girls kneeling in supplication, while the grown persons almost invariably stand in disdainful attitude. The children who would be their own masters and go out in a boat, despite parental warning, are upset: there is the algebraic formula. “Plainness the Dress of Use” is probably a worthy subject for a tale, and “A Good Heart Compensates for Many Indiscretions” a pathetic title for a play. But young people as a general rule are not maudlin in their feelings; even granting that there are some given that way, they should not be encouraged in holding a flabby standard of human, as well as of divine, justice. “L’Ami des Enfans” is filled with such sentimental mawkishness.
II. The Edgeworths; Thomas Day; Mrs. Barbauld; and Dr. Aikin.
At the early age of twenty-three, Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744–1817) decided to educate his son, Richard, according to the principles set down by Rousseau. He thrust the little fellow back into a state of nature by taking his shoes and stockings off and by cutting the arms from all his jackets. But, try as he did in every way to make a living Émile out of young Richard, the father found that the theories did not work. When he took the luckless boy to Paris and called upon Rousseau, there ensued an examination of results, and the sum-total was pronounced a failure. Hon. Emily Lawless writes in some glee:
“It is impossible to read without a smile of the eminently unphilosophic wrath expressed by the sage, because each time that a handsome horse or vehicle passed them on their walk, his temporary charge—a child of seven—invariably cried out, ‘That’s an English horse!’ ... a view which he solemnly pronounced to be due to a sadly early ‘propensity to party prejudice’!...”
Edgeworth lost entire faith in the practical application of the Rousseau scheme in after years; but the lasting effect it seems to have produced upon the unfortunate victim was to place him in the ranks of mediocrity, for he was hardly ever spoken of thereafter by his family; and in order to remove himself from further disturbance, as soon as he reached years of discretion, he hastened to place miles between himself and the scenes of his youth; Richard came to America.
Edgeworth’s love affairs—for four times he was married—are involved, and do not concern us, save as they effect Thomas Day. But, personally, he enters our plan as influencing his daughter, Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849), with whom he wrote “Practical Education.” There are some men—and Edgeworth was bordering on the type—who assume an almost dreadful position in a household; who torture the mind of boy or girl by prying, and by wishing to emphasise hidden meaning in everything; who make children fear to ask questions lest a lecture, dry and unoriginal, be the penalty. Such men have a way of fixing youth with intense, severe gaze—of smiling with a fiendish self-complacency over their own superiority—of raising their eyebrows and reprimanding should the child be watching the flight of a sparrow instead of being ever alert for an unexpected question or bit of information which a grown person might put to him on earth. Such men are the kind who make presents of Cobbet’s “Advice to Young Men,” and who write mistaken sentiments of nobility on the fly-leaf of Samuel Smiles’s “Self-Help.”
Edgeworth’s redeeming trait was his earnest desire to bring the best within reach of his children, and he considered his severity the proper kind of guidance for them. Whatever sin of commission is to be laid to his charge, it is nevertheless true that it was not so great as to destroy the love Maria had for him. The literary critic has to reckon with the total amount of effect his teaching, his personal views had upon the writings of his daughter. That he did influence her is certain, and nowhere more thoroughly shown than in her work for children. In theory this work traces its origin to Rousseau, while in its modelling it bears a close relationship to Madame de Genlis and to Berquin.
Banish dolls is the cry in “Practical Education,” and if you have toys in the nursery at all, let them be of a useful character—not mechanical novelties, but cubes, cylinders, and the like. Place before children only those pictures which deal with familiar objects, and see to it that the pose of every figure, where there are figures, is natural; a boy once went with Sir Joshua Reynolds through an art gallery, and invariably he turned with displeasure away from any form represented in a constrained attitude. This is the general tone of the Edgeworths as teachers.