Part 6
“The correspondence of the architecture is not accidental. You must look at Paris as a picture, and examine the composition, as well as the execution of the parts. Its monuments are not only beautiful in themselves, but are made, as you see, to harmonise with each other. The Louvre, the Institute, the Arch of Neuilly, the Tuileries and its gardens, the Madelaine, the Palais Bourbon, the Seine and all its turretted castles--all are but parts of the same tableau. In this respect Paris, so inferior to London in wealth, and to Rome in situation, is yet more beautiful than either. St. Paul’s harmonises with nothing--Westminster Abbey, also, is lost in its individuality. The “New Gallery” occupies one of the best situations in Europe, only cumbering the ground, which the taste of a better age might have employed to the ornament of the city. London monuments are built as at Thebes, _au son du Tambour_; they are built for the job, and ours for the honour of Paris and posterity. The Madelaine, yet under the architect, was begun sixty years ago; St. Paul’s was built by the same architect, and the same mason. Sir Christopher Wren was employed upon it, at two hundred a-year, and had a suit at law for a few half-pence, which stood unpaid upon his bill.
“This ‘_Palais des Beaux Arts_’ is now the Palace of the Institute. As it stands at the head of our fine arts, as well as letters, I may as well tell you the little I know of its organization. It is the old _Academie Française_, expanded from forty to several hundred members. They are separated into four divisions; having only the hall and library in common; and their common funds are managed by a joint committee from each; and they have a united meeting yearly, on the 1st of May. The vacancies are filled by ballot of the members, with the approbation of the king. Each member receives an annual salary of 1500 francs, except honorary members, who are contented with the honours.
“The ‘_Academie des Beaux Arts_’ distributes prizes in painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving, and musical composition; and the successful candidates pursue their studies at Rome at the expense of the state. The ‘_Academie des Belles Lettres_’ gives also a prize of 1500 francs, and medals for the best memoir on French antiquities. The ‘_Academie des Sciences_’ awards a prize of 3000 francs, on a subject given, and smaller prizes upon specific branches of science; and finally, the ‘_Academie Française_’, upon a proposed subject, pays a prize of 1500 francs, and some of smaller amount. One is called the ‘Montyon Prize,’ for some act of virtue in the common class of society.”
Here my fair cicerone slipped through my fingers--not indeed without an effort on my part to hold her fast. I threatened her not to survive.
“Yes, do; and you can put in for the Montyon prize of this year. We are just under the tower of Philip Augustus, so the end like the beginning of our acquaintance will have something of romance.---- Oh, no, my name would spoil all the interest of the plot; what is a plot without a mystery?”
“A romance beginning with a marriage, has usually a tragical end.”
“And so end the best romances--where could you find for the catastrophe a more desirable place?--Here stood the _Tour de Nesle_ of tragical memory, and you have in view the Pont Neuf, and there is the Morgue.”
“It is a pity,” said I in a pique, “that nature had not taken some of the pains she has lavished upon your brains and your beauty, to give to your heart. You see a stranger, never before a traveller, wandering in your country----”
“A stranger never before a traveller is not to my taste. Such a traveller’s views of human nature are very narrow. He judges of merit always by some mode or fashion of his own, and sets up his whims as the standard of propriety for others. One who has travelled does not think a fellow-creature bad because she may deviate from the little etiquette of his native village. He does not think any thing wrong that is not so essentially. If he should meet for example, a lady, an entire stranger, who would ask his arm, to see these fine pictures of the Louvre; in the alternative of remaining out of doors, and should choose, in return for his politeness, to be entertained an hour with his company, he would not infer that she wanted either sense or good breeding; he would not presume, on such appearances, to treat her with less respect--much less----”
I dropped the hand I had taken without her leave. She then returned it, and bade me adieu, crossing the bridge and traversing the _Quai de La Monnaie_, where she disappeared among the narrow lanes of St. Germain--and there was an end of her.
I intended in setting out to give you the cream of her conversation, but it turns out to be the skim-milk only, and I have no time for revision. There is nothing so insipid and creamless as the fine things people say to one’s self, and especially the fine things one says in reply.
This, with a little package of music, will be handed you by Mr. D----, who is going to accompany it all the way himself. The obliging man! Please to give him your thanks; and to his prettiest little wife in the world, a thousand compliments from your very devoted humble servant.
LETTER XV.
The Schools.--State of Literature.--Minister of Public Instruction.--Education in France.--Prussian System.--Parochial Schools.--Normal Schools.--Institutions of Paris.--Public Libraries.--Machinery of French Justice.--The Judges.--Eloquence of the Bar.--Medicine.--Corporations of Learning.--Their Evils.--The French Institute.--Pretended New System of Instruction.--Professors of Paris.
Paris, November 20th, 1835.
One of the eminent merits of the French character is the distinction they bestow upon letters. A literary reputation is, at once, a passport to the first respect in private life, and to the first honours in the state. In Paris it gives the tone, which it does nowhere else, to fashionable society. It is not that Paris loves money less than other cities, but she loves learning more; and that titled rank being curtailed of its natural influence, learning has taken the advance, and now travels on in the highway to distinction and preferment, without a patron, and without a rival. At the side of him, whose blood has circulated through fifty generations, or has stood in the van of as many battles, is the author of a French History, born without a father or mother.
Who is Guizot, and who Villemain, Cousin, Collard, Arago, Lamartine, that they should be set up at the head of one of the first nations in Europe? Newspaper editors, schoolmasters, astronomers, and poets, who have thrust the purpled nobles, and time-honoured patricians from the market of public honours, and have sat down quietly in their seats. The same marks of literary supremacy are seen through every feature of the community. Who was at Madame Recamier’s last night? Chateaubriand; and at the Duchesse d’Abrantes? Chateaubriand.--At the Pantheon, the whole nave of the Temple is assigned to two literary men; and the Prince of Eckmuhl, and such like, are crammed into the cellar. At Père la Chaise, David wears the cross of St. Louis, by the side of Massena. Molière is the only author in the world since the Greeks, whose birth-day is a national festival. His statue is crowned on that day at the Theatre Français, and his plays are represented, by order of government, upon all the national theatres. We ought then to presume that the literary and scientific institutions of the French should correspond with this sentiment in favour of learning; and so they do.
Here are two sheets of large post, which I must try to fill with this subject. I say _try_, because I write in obedience to your orders, and in total defiance of inclination. This will be the only letter I have written since I came here, to any of your bearded sex, and I feel already very grave and dull. Not that I think ladies more frivolous than men, or men more stupid than ladies, but it is my humour. I can write to my lady acquaintance without thinking, which I esteem a special favour, during my residence in Paris.--They do not expect me to be wise, and what extravagant notions you may have on this subject I don’t know.--If I write you nothing but what you know already, it will not be my fault, for I am unacquainted with the extent of your information, and you have not been specific in your inquiries.
The authority which presides over the Public Instruction in France, is personified under the term “University,” at the head of which is a minister, who has a salary of twenty thousand dollars, and a rank with the other ministers. A “Central Board” of nine members, has a general superintendence of the studies, and expense of the establishments. The divisions of the kingdom for the “Royal Courts,” are the school districts, which are called Academies; these have each a “Governor,” representing the minister, and an “Academical Board,” the Central Board at Paris; and each has its establishments, which are the Faculties, the Royal and Communal Colleges, Primary Schools, and Private Institutions. The Instruction is Superior, Secondary, and Primary.
The “Faculties” teach theology, law, medicine, science, and letters. They confer degrees of Bachelor, Licentiate, and Doctor; and are thirty-five in number. Three are Medical Faculties, at Paris, Montpelier and Strasburg; eight are Theological; of the Catholic Religion, six; of the Protestant, two; and nine are Faculties of Law. There are thirty Royal, three hundred and twenty Communal; and two Private Colleges; one hundred and twenty Private Institutions, or Boarding Schools, and one thousand and twenty-five Select Private Schools. The studies of these are Philosophy, Natural History, Elementary Mathematics, Latin, Greek, and modern languages.
The Primary Schools embrace only reading, arithmetic, and writing: and the “Primary Superior” add history, geography, elements of chemistry, and surveying. Their number is about fifty thousand.
At Paris there is a “Normal School,” for the education of Professors; and throughout the kingdom about sixty for masters of the Primary Schools.
The minister is appointed by the king, and the other officers directly, or indirectly by him. There are thirty General Inspectors, two for each academy or district. The “Proviseurs” have a care of the household and conduct of the students, and “Censors” superintend studies. Teachers are selected at a distance from their own departments, so that no local interests may grow up against the great central authority. Private institutions are forbidden to teach any thing else than grammar, elements of arithmetic, and geometry. Reports from the Academical Boards are examined twice a-week by the Central Board of the University, and the University presents a report every two years, to the Chamber of Deputies.
Education in France is a universal and uninfringible monopoly, and has the benefits and evils of such systems. The Central Board establishes uniformity in books, and instruction; it decides whether you are to teach your son pot-hooks, or straight strokes; but it impedes also improvement in the school-books, and processes of teaching; it selects competent instructors, but it represses the exercise of ingenuity by prescribing their duties; it cuts up the Lancasters, the Fellenbergs, and Pestalozzis by the roots. I say nothing of the independence of mind, without which there is neither genius, nor virtue, which is repressed by so absolute an authority. It suppresses also imposture in the teachers, but it destroys, too, the spirit of competition which imparts life and vigour to all human employments. It does not suppress the jobbing which arises out of all government projects, or intrigue, or favouritism in the appointment of its officers.
This is the system lately engrafted upon the great Prussian plan, which it is the fashion to praise so much about in the world. Time will perhaps reveal its merits; but this is by no means certain. There are other causes at work for the diffusion of knowledge amongst the people, and it is so easy to ascribe the merit to the Prussians; besides, it is not likely that, once used to receive instruction from their magistrates, as it were, for nothing, the people should consent to educate themselves at their own cost; or that, seeing for a long time effects produced by a certain machinery, especially so remote from their causes, they should conceive them producible by any other.
I have looked at the working of this plan in Paris and several of the neighbouring towns, and am sorry that I cannot share in the flattering hopes entertained of its results. Burke lays it down as “one of the finest problems of legislation” to know “what the state ought to undertake to direct by the public wisdom, and what it ought to leave, with as little interference as possible, to individual discretion.” “All governments,” he observes, “fall into the error of legislating too much.” I have no good hopes of any system of education under the management of a government.
Nothing is so badly managed as a government itself all over the world; and to have as little as possible of it seems to me the perfection of social economy. The rich and middling classes will take care of their own children always, and no one, I presume, will say that they will not do it better under the impulse of parental feeling than they who act only from delegated authority. Why do we not put the cultivation of the earth under the management of a company? A parent, being able, feels as strong a necessity to educate his son as to cultivate his field. To the parent only, who is destitute, and to whom there is but the alternative of a bad system or none; to him only whose instincts are frozen by necessity, should the sceptre of legislation be extended--extended as medicine to the health, with prudence, and only when the native vigour is irrecoverable by the natural stimulus. You cannot by any human device prevent the division of the poor and rich into different schools; they do not attempt it even in arbitrary Prussia. And it is better the government, with its broad shoulders, than individuals, should make the distinction.
Under a general system the two parties mutually prejudice each other. On the one hand, the current of private charity, so fruitful in its natural channel, is dried up by it. A community of which the individuals give cheerfully; one the timber, another the stone, another his personal services, towards a building, will, under a public system, require to be paid for their smallest contributions; and how many rich legacies have we inherited in Philadelphia, not a dollar of which would have been given under a public system. On the other hand, how many communities through the country, able to support good private schools, without the intermeddling of the government, have no longer the ability, and are obliged either to send their children abroad, or place them, with a total disregard of their morals and education, in a public school, where sixty scholars are taught by an old gentleman of sixty. It is easy to imagine what sort of schools are those in which the teacher receives, as in New England, twenty, or as in Pennsylvania, thirty dollars a month, for this wide diffusion of his services.
The Scotch have been putting this forty-pound-a-year system to the test these two hundred years in their Parochial Schools, and with the most tender nursing, their schools are in the same puny and ricketty condition as at their seven months’ birth. The Scotch are a persevering people, and if they begin by building a house at the roof, they keep building on even after the inutility of their labours has been demonstrated. So the turkeys in your Schuylkill county, their eggs being removed, and stones substituted, continue hatching on as usual. The Yankees, a shrewder people, are beginning to find out that their school system, copied from the Scotch, notwithstanding the care with which they starve their teachers, is actually getting worse every year. I have no objection to the government giving money, the more, the better, but I have no hesitation in saying that it will serve no useful purpose unless the relation between parent and teacher is preserved, and the executive department left to their management. In this delicate concern, the arm of the government should be concealed; her virtues should be busy without noise.
If I were the state; if I owned, for example, your community of Pottsville, I would contribute all I could towards buildings, apparatus, and libraries, and circulating useful books, and above all towards elevating the character and acquirements of the teachers. I would devise some way, by a succession of honours and profits, to make men teach, as in the army they make them fight. For instance, I would pay a per centage, up to a certain number of pupils, to each school; and the teacher with ten years’ approved services should receive a state diploma and the title of professor; thirty years’ services should entitle him to half pay, and I would take care of his wife and children at his decease. I would not encourage universities but for the advanced age of the pupils, and the transcendent branches; so as to give them a higher character, and leave the field of general instruction open to the common teachers, and to a fair and equal competition of abilities. Thus I should find abundant means of employing all my school funds; and this without the Inspectors, Censors, Proviseurs, and the other expensive apparatus of the “_Bureau Central de Paris_.”
If any one of the honourable and useful departments of a state is filled with an inferior class of men, it shows a defect in the policy of such a state. If I wished to devise some means the most direct, to degrade the character of a teacher, I could not hit upon one more efficacious than this French and Prussian system. All that the Prussian receives to console his condition of absolute dependence, is two hundred dollars per annum; the highest professor at the gymnasium, receives five hundred. With this “appointment” he must be all schoolmaster, without any alloy of gentleman about him. It is certain that not any of the respectable literary circles of Europe will receive this working man of the Muses into their society.
The Prussians are not addicted to commerce; nor do they read newspapers, nor meddle with the state; their habits are quiet and agricultural; and they care much less about the heads of their children, than that their cabbages may have good heads for _sour crout_. If not educated by the government, they would, no doubt, remain ignorant of letters. The Prussian system may, then, be a very good system for Prussia; but it is not, therefore, necessary or applicable to the United States;--except it be to our German nests of Pennsylvania; but these are melting away, and will soon be lost in the general improvements of the state.
A part of this system are the Normal Schools, which we are trying, also, to introduce into New England. They seem to me of little value, for they can teach but little that is not taught in any other place of education; besides, under present circumstances, they defeat their own purpose. A good school for educating teachers in America, would, perhaps, be the very best place one could imagine to disqualify men for teaching. I know the trustees of the “Girard College” think otherwise, and entertain sanguine hopes of supplying the whole country with eminent teachers from that institution. I do not see the reasonableness of their hopes; unless we may suppose that the young gentlemen of talent, out of gratitude, will forego the opportunities they may have of wealth and distinction in other professions, to starve themselves for the benefit of the state of Pennsylvania.
Several writers here express fears that this monopoly of education may be turned to the prejudice of liberty; which I believe to be a vain apprehension. The teachers being laymen, it is certain it will not be turned to the profit of the hierarchy. The French literature, which finds its way into every country of Europe, is a complete code of ridicule of the priesthood and nobility; and the more people are taught to read, the more difficult will be the re-establishment of these two orders. Public opinion is but little modified by the books and lectures of the schools; and the minister’s authority, however absolute in the University of Paris, will be but little felt, if in contradiction with that greater university--the world. The studies of the schools are forced upon unripe and unwilling minds; those of society are voluntary, and introduced as reason is developed. Besides, it is human nature to relish most that which is most prohibited. Nothing ever brought the works dangerous to religion more into reputation, than the denunciations of the clergy. In crimes and errors, one cannot cure the patient, by starving and checking perspiration. It happens, too, that the French books, which are most replenished with wit and genius, are precisely those which are most obnoxious. It is true, however unfortunate, that education, liberty, and irreligion are sown here in the same soil, and grow together under the same cultivation. To preserve the French student from the contagion of principles dangerous to the aristocratic and clerical institutions, he must be forbidden the whole of the national classics down to Lafontaine’s Fables, including the history of his country--I was going to say, the company of his father and mother, and his schoolmasters.
I must now give you an account of the particular institutions of Paris. You have your choice of five royal colleges; “_Louis le Grand_,” “_Henri IV._,” and “_St. Louis_,” which receive boarders and externs; and “_Charlemagne_,” and “_Bourbon_,” externs only. The average number of pupils for each is about a thousand. The studies are ancient and modern languages, mathematics, chemistry, natural philosophy, natural history, geography, penmanship, and drawing. They are superintended by a “Proviseur” and a “Directeur General des Etudes.” In August, there is a general competition for prizes, between a few pupils selected from each college, conducted with pomp before the heads of the universities, and other dignitaries of the city. A subject is given, the competitors are locked up, and a council of the university decides, and the names of the successful students, and the schools to which they belong, are published in the journals; which excites a wonderful emulation amongst fifty, and a wonderful jealousy and discontent amongst five hundred; and many get prizes on these days who get nothing else all the rest of their lives.
The price of boarding and instruction is about 220 dollars per annum. There are besides these, and of the same character, “_St. Barbe_ or _Rollin_,” and “_Stanislaus_,” two private colleges. There are in the city, and under the inspection of the university, 116 academies for gentlemen, and 143 for ladies; and a great number of primary schools, in which about 10,000 children are taught gratuitously or for a small price; the boys by the “_Frères de la Doctrine Chretienne_,” and the girls by the “_Sisters of Charity_,” or nearly the half by the “_Frères Ignorantins_,” who profess reading and writing only, with the catechism; any one having higher attainments being disqualified. There are schools also for the blind and dumb.