F. MAX MUELLER.
LITERARY CORRESPONDENCE.
I.
Some distinguished foreigners have called my attention to the Manuals of Moral and Civic Instruction which circulate in our schools, thinking with reason that they mark perhaps the most important reform in public teaching. There have been published in France a dozen or more during the last ten years or so. The clerical party has thundered against these little books: it had good reason for alarm, for they aim at nothing less than to take the place of the catechism.
How do they replace it? What is their inferiority, or, what their advantages? What is their principle, their disposition? This can be sufficiently judged of by the five we have before us, signed by names more or less known, those of PAUL BERT, PIERRE LALOI, CHARLES BIGOT, MME. HENRY GRÉVILLE, and GABRIEL COMPAYRÉ.[139]
[139] Paul Bert, L'Instruction civique à l'école, Picard-Bernheim, Pub.; Pierre Laloi, La première année d'instruction morale et civique, Armand Colin, Pub.; Charles Bigot, Le petit Français, Weill et Maurice, Pub.; Mme. Henry Gréville, Instruction morale et civique des jeunes filles, Weill et Maurice, Pub.; Gabriel Compayré, Eléments d'instruction morale et civique, Paul Delaplane, Pub.
The manuals of MM. Paul Bert and Laloi, are models of style: the one in familiar, easy dialogues; the other in simple and clear precepts, set off and illustrated by pleasant stories. Lists of questions facilitate the use of the book by the master. The divisions or chapters relate to special subjects,—the military service, taxes, the fatherland, the parliament, the law, the government, etc. So much as to the form; let us look at the groundwork.
The catechism imparted general moral precepts which concerned the man, and particular commands which concerned the Christian. Our manuals also tend to form the man; but in the man, above all, the good Frenchman. We find there glowing pages on the love of one's native land, and on the beauty of one's country, which we must love. Far be it from me to cast censure on this noble sentiment. Nevertheless, I do not think exaggeration on that point is desirable, lest we should seek a cause of patriotism even in the acknowledged superiority, from a gastronomic point of view, of the hare of France over the hare of Germany! Our writers, undoubtedly, have too much tact to lay themselves open to this ridicule. It is very striking, though, that the notion of the moral man considered as a Frenchman, German, Englishman, or Italian, is narrower than that of the Christian man: this reversion into the folds of nationality is a characteristic phenomenon of our old world in this latter end of the century. If our encyclopædists had hit on the idea of writing a laic catechism, the tone of it would have been different. Our authors of to-day alas! have only too much excuse to wish to form at first the little Frenchman, and to promote the reaction against a cosmopolitanism which had become dangerous to our national existence. They have done it, however, with sufficient caution, and without detriment to justice.
I shall not say as much for M. Paul Bert, in relation to his manual dedicated to the Revolution. Still here, undoubtedly, it is necessary to make allowance for the political necessities of the present time. But what a danger to sanctify at any cost the sanguinary epoch of our democracy; what an error to date the French era from 1789, and to make our children believe that our fathers should have had hardly the sentiment of public virtue! The worst is not that their young souls are thus embittered, but that their judgment on the facts of history is falsified. We are here only too much inclined to disregard the necessity of human evolution, and to imagine that it suffices to change the label of the sack to improve the merchandise. M. Bigot and M. Laloi, at least, have more wisdom, more prudence in this respect.
The ambition of the catechism, on another point, seems to go beyond that of our manuals. It offered an explanation of the world, a complete conception of human destiny, in a word, a doctrine which returns into itself. This doctrine holds no longer, it is known nevertheless, and it is necessary now to replace it. Unfortunately scientific morality has not yet found its formula in a practical book, and the divergences of views are confessed in our manuals, where the conception of a fundamental ensemble almost entirely fails. It is sufficient to read the tables of contents to convince oneself of this. The work of M. Compayré, who addresses himself especially to the "middle and higher grades," changes suddenly in Book III. entitled La Nature humaine et la morale. What signifies the definition, that "morality is nothing more than the ensemble of the laws that nature has engraved in your soul before human legislators inscribed them in their codes"? What is doing here the vain affirmation of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul, and this "let us contemplate and adore" which sums it up? In the mouth of M. Compayré it is only a concession and an avowal of infirmity. A frank spiritualist will resolutely establish his moral conception on his belief; but nominal deism causes God to play the rôle of an ignominious personage who has no longer a suitable occupation on the scene.