Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 66, No 405, July 1849

"Whoever hopes a faultless school to see,Hopes what ne'er was, nor is, nor is to be."

Meanwhile the Swiss Pension was not without solid advantages, and might justly lay claim to some regard, if not as a school for learning, at least as a moral school; its inmates for the most part spoke truth, respected property, eschewed mischief, were neither puppies, nor bullies, nor talebearers. There were, of course, exceptions to all this, but then they were exceptions; nor was the number at any time sufficient to invalidate the general rule, or to corrupt the better principle. Perhaps a ten hours' daily attendance in class, coarse spare diet, hardy and somewhat severe training, may be considered by the reader as offering some explanation of our general propriety of behaviour. It may be so; but we are by no means willing to admit, that the really high moral tone of the school depended either upon gymnastic exercises or short commons, nor yet arose from the want of facilities for getting into scrapes, for here, as elsewhere, where there is the will, there is ever a way. We believe it to have originated from another source – in a word, from the encouragement held out to the study of natural history, and the eagerness with which that study was taken up and pursued by the school in consequence. Though Pestalozzi might not succeed in making his disciples scholars, he certainly succeeded in making many among them naturalists; and of the two – let us ask it without offence – whether is he the happier lad (to say nothing of the future man) who can fabricate faultless pentameters and immaculate iambics to order; or he who, already absorbed in scanning the wonders of creation, seeks with unflagging diligence and zeal to know more and more of the visible works of the great Poet of Nature? "Sæpius sane ad laudem atque virtutem naturam sine doctrinâ, quam sine naturâ valuisse doctrinam;" which words being Cicero's, deny them, sir, if you please.

The Pension, during the period of our sojourn at Yverdun, contained about a hundred and eighty élèves, natives of every European and of some Oriental states, whose primitive mode of distribution into classes, according to age and acquirements, during school hours, was completely changed in playtime, when the boys, finding it easier to speak their own tongue than to acquire a new one, divided themselves into separate groups according to their respective nations. The English would occasionally admit a German or a Prussian to their coterie; but that was a favour seldom conferred upon any other foreigner: for the Spaniards, who were certainly the least well-conducted of the whole community, did not deserve it: among them were to be found the litigious, the mischief-makers, the quarrellers, and – for, as has been hinted, we were not all honest – the exceptional thieves. The Italians we could never make out, nor they us: we had no sympathy with Pole or Greek; the Swiss we positively did not like, and the French just as positively did not like us; so how could it be otherwise? The ushers, for the most part trained up in the school, were an obliging set of men, with little refinement, less pretension, and wholly without learning. A distich from Crabbe describes them perfectly —

"Men who, 'mid noise and dirt, and play and prate,Could calmly mend the pen, and wash the slate."

Punishments were rare; indeed, flogging was absolutely prohibited; and the setting an imposition would have been equally against the genius loci, had lesson-books existed out of which to hear it afterwards. A short imprisonment in an unfurnished room – a not very formidable black-hole – with the loss of a goutte, now and then, and at very long intervals, formed the mild summary of the penal "code Pestalozzi."

It was Saturday, and a half holiday, when we arrived at Yverdun, and oh the confusion of tongues which there prevailed! All Bedlam and Parnassus let loose to rave together, could not have come up to that diapason of discords with which the high corridors were ringing, as, passing through the throng, we were conducted to the venerable head of the establishment in his private apartments beyond. In this gallery of mixed portraits might be seen long-haired, highborn, and high-cheek-boned Germans; a scantling of French gamins much better dressed; some dark-eyed Italians; Greeks in most foreign attire; here and there a fair ingenuous Russian face; several swart sinister-looking Spaniards, models only for their own Carravagio; some dirty specimens of the universal Pole; one or two unmistakeable English, ready to shake hands with a compatriot; and Swiss from every canton of the Helvetic confederacy. To this promiscuous multitude we were shortly introduced, the kind old man himself taking us by the hand, and acting as master of the ceremonies. When the whole school had crowded round to stare at the new importation, "Here," said he, "are four English boys come from their distant home, to be naturalised in this establishment, and made members of our family. Boys, receive them kindly, and remember they are henceforth your brothers." A shout from the crowd proclaiming its ready assent and cordial participation in the adoption, nothing remained but to shake hands à l'Anglaise, and to fraternise without loss of time. The next day being Sunday, our skulls were craniologically studied by Herr Schmidt, the head usher; and whatever various bumps or depressions phrenology might have discovered thereon were all duly registered in a large book. After this examination was concluded, a week's furlough was allowed, in order that Herr Schmidt might have an opportunity afforded him of seeing how far our real character squared with phrenological observation and measurement, entering this also into the same ledger as a note. What a contrast were we unavoidably drawing all this time between Yverdun and Westminster, and how enjoyable was the change to us! The reader will please to imagine as well as he can, the sensations of a lately pent up chrysalis, on first finding himself a butterfly, or the not less agreeable surprise of some newly metamorphosed tadpole, when, leaving his associates in the mud and green slime, he floats at liberty on the surface of the pool, endowed with lungs and a voice, – if he would at all enter into the exultation of our feelings on changing the penitential air of Millbank for the fresh mountain breezes of the Pays de Vaud. It seemed as if we had – nay, we had actually entered upon a new existence, so thoroughly had all the elements of the old been altered and improved. If we looked back, and compared past and present experiences, there, at the wrong end of the mental telescope, stood that small dingy house, in that little mis-yclept Great Smith Street, with its tiny cocoon of a bedroom, whilom our close and airless prison; here, at the other end, and in immediate contact with the eye, a noble chateau, full of roomy rooms, enough and to spare. Another retrospective peep, and there was Tothill Fields, and its seedy cricket ground; and here, again, a level equally perfect, but carpeted with fine turf, and extending to the margin of a broad living lake, instead of terminating in a nauseous duck-pond; while the cold clammy cloisters adjoining Dean's Yard were not less favourably replaced by a large open airy play-ground, intersected by two clear trout-streams – and a sky as unlike that above Bird-Cage Walk as the interposed atmosphere was different; whilst, in place of the startling, discordant Keleusmata of bargees, joined to the creaking, stunning noise of commerce in a great city, few out-of-door sounds to meet our ear, and these few, with the exception of our own, all quiet, pastoral, and soothing, such as, later in life, make and which are not without their charm even to him "who whistles as he goes for want of thought." No wonder, then, if Yverdun seemed Paradisaical in its landscapes. Nor was this all. If the views outside were charming, our domestic and social relations within doors were not less pleasing. At first, the unwelcome vision of the late head-master would sometimes haunt us, clad in his flowing black D.D. robes – "tristis severitas in vultu, atque in verbis fides," looking as if he intended to flog, and his words never belying his looks. That terrible Olympian arm, raised and ready to strike, was again shadowed forth to view; while we could almost fancy ourselves once more at that judicial table, one of twenty boys who were to draw lots for a "hander." How soothingly, then, came the pleasing consciousness, breaking our reverie, that a very different person was now our head-master – a most indulgent old man whom we should meet ere long, with hands uplifted, indeed, but only for the purpose of clutching us tight while he inflicted a salute on both cheeks, and pronounced his affectionate guten morgen, liebes kind, as he hastened on to bestow the like fatherly greeting upon every pupil in turn.

"Silence in the heartFor thought to do her part,"THE DORMITORY

The sleeping apartments at the chateau occupied three of the four sides of its inner quadrangle, and consisted of as many long rooms, each with a double row of windows; whereof one looked into the aforesaid quadrangle, while the opposite rows commanded, severally, views of the garden, the open country, and the Grande Place of the town. They were accommodated with sixty uncurtained stump bedsteads, fifty-nine of which afforded gîte to a like number of boys; and one, in no respect superior to the rest, was destined to receive the athletic form of Herr Gottlieb, son-in-law to Vater Pestalozzi, to whose particular charge we were consigned during the hours of the night. These bedrooms, being as lofty as they were long, broad, and over-furnished with windows, were always ventilated; but the in-draught of air, which was sufficient to keep them cool during the hottest day in summer, rendered them cold, and sometimes very cold, in the winter. In that season, accordingly, especially when the bise blew, and hail and sleet were pattering against the casements, the compulsory rising to class by candlelight was an ungenial and unwelcome process; for which, however, there being no remedy, the next best thing was to take it as coolly, we were going to say – that of course– but, as patiently as might be. The disagreeable anticipation of the réveil was frequently enough to scare away sleep from our eyes a full hour before the command to jump out of bed was actually issued. On such occasions we would lie awake, and, as the time approached, begin to draw in our own breath, furtively listening, not without trepidation, to the loud nose of a distant comrade, lest its fitful stertor should startle another pair of nostrils, on whose repose that of the whole dormitory depended. Let Æolus and his crew make what tumult they liked inside or outside the castle – they disturbed nobody's dreams – they never murdered sleep. Let them pipe and whistle through every keyhole and crevice of the vast enceinte of the building – sigh and moan as they would in their various imprisonments of attic or corridor; howl wildly round the great tower, or even threaten a forcible entry at the windows, nobody's ears were scared into unwelcome consciousness by sounds so familiar to them all. It was the expectation of a blast louder even than theirs that would keep our eyes open – a blast about to issue from the bed of Herr Gottlieb, and thundering enough, when it issued, to startle the very god of winds himself! Often, as the dreaded six A.M. drew nigh, when the third quarter past five had, ten minutes since, come with a sough and a rattle against the casements, and still Gottlieb slept on, we would take courage, and begin to dream with our eyes open, that his slumbers might be prolonged a little; his face, turned upwards, looked so calm, the eyes so resolutely closed – every feature so perfectly at rest. It could not be more than five minutes to six – might not he who had slept so long, for once oversleep himself? Never! However placid those slumbers might be, they invariably forsook our "unwearied one" just as the clock was on the point of striking six. To judge by the rapid twitchings – they almost seemed galvanic – first of the muscles round the mouth, then of the nose and eyes, it appeared as though some ill-omened dream, at that very nick of time, was sent periodically, on purpose to awaken him; and, if so, it certainly never returned απρακτος. Gottlieb would instantly set to rubbing his eyes, and as the hour struck, spring up wide awake in his shirt sleeves – thus destroying every lingering, and, as it always turned out, ill-founded hope of a longer snooze. Presently we beheld him jump into his small-clothes, and, when sufficiently attired to be seen, unlimber his tongue, and pour forth a rattling broadside – Auf, kinder! schwind!– with such precision of delivery, too, that few sleepers could turn a deaf ear to it. But, lest any one should still lurk under his warm coverlet out of earshot, at the further end of the room, another and a shriller summons to the same effect once more shakes the walls and windows of the dormitory. Then every boy knew right well that the last moment for repose was past, and that he must at once turn out shivering from his bed, and dress as fast as possible; and it was really surprising to witness how rapidly all could huddle on their clothes under certain conditions of the atmosphere!

In less than five minutes the whole school was dressed, and Gottlieb, in his sounding shoes, having urged the dilatory with another admonitory schwind, schwind! has departed, key and candle in hand, to arouse the remaining sleepers, by ringing the "Great Tom" of the chateau. So cold and cheerless was this matutinal summons, that occasional attempts were made to evade it by simulated headach, or, without being quite so specific, on the plea of general indisposition, though it was well known beforehand what the result would be. Herr Gottlieb, in such a case, would presently appear at the bedside of the delinquent patient, with very little compassion in his countenance, and, in a business tone, proceed to inquire from him, Why not up? – and on receiving for reply, in a melancholy voice, that the would-be invalid was sehr krank, would instantly pass the word for the doctor to be summoned. That doctor – we knew him well, and every truant knew – was a quondam French army surgeon – a sworn disciple of the Broussais school, whose heroic remedies at the chateau resolved themselves into one of two – i. e., a starve or a vomit, alternately administered, according as the idiosyncracy of the patient, or as this or that symptom turned the scale, now in favour of storming the stomach, now of starving it into capitulation. Just as the welcome hot mess of bread and milk was about to be served to the rest, this dapper little Sangrado would make his appearance, feel the pulse, inspect the tongue, ask a few questions, and finding, generally, indications of what he would term une légère gastrite, recommend diète absolue; then prescribing a mawkish tisane, composed of any garden herbs at hand, and pocketing lancets and stethoscope, would leave the patient to recover sans calomel– a mode of treatment to which, he would tell us, we should certainly have been subjected in our own country. Meanwhile, the superiority of his plan of treatment was unquestionable. On the very next morning, when he called to visit his cher petit malade, an empty bed said quite plainly, "Very well, I thank you, sir, and in class." But these feignings were comparatively of rare occurrence; in general, all rose, dressed, and descended together, just as the alarum-bell had ceased to sound; and in less than two minutes more all were assembled in their respective class-rooms. The rats and mice, which had had the run of these during the night, would be still in occupation when we entered; and such was the audacity of these vermin that none cared alone to be the first to plant a candle on his desk. But, by entering en masse, we easily routed the Rodentia, whose forces were driven to seek shelter behind the wainscot, where they would scuffle, and gnaw, and scratch, before they finally withdrew, and left us with blue fingers and chattering teeth to study to make the best of it. Uncomfortable enough was the effort for the first ten minutes of the session; but by degrees the hopes of a possible warming of hands upon the surface of the Dutch stoves after class, if they should have been lighted in time, and at any rate the certainty of a hot breakfast, were entertained, and brought their consolation; besides which, the being up in time to welcome in the dawn of the dullest day, while health and liberty are ours, is a pleasure in itself. There was no exception to it here; for when the darkness, becoming every moment less and less dark, had at length given way, and melted into a gray gloaming, we would rejoice, even before it appeared, at the approach of a new day. That approach was soon further heralded by the fitful notes of small day-birds chirping under the leaves, and anon by their sudden dashings against the windows, in the direction of the lights not yet extinguished in the class-rooms. Presently the pigs were heard rejoicing and contending over their fresh wash; then the old horse and the shaggy little donkey in the stable adjoining the styes, knowing by this stir that their feed was coming, snorted and brayed at the pleasant prospect. The cocks had by this time roused their sleepy sultanas, who came creeping from under the barn-door to meet their lords on the dunghill. Our peacock, to satisfy himself that he had not taken cold during the night, would scream to the utmost pitch of a most discordant voice; then the prescient goats would bleat from the cabins, and plaintively remind us that, till their door is unpadlocked, they can get no prog; then the punctual magpie, and his friend the jay, having hopped all down the corridor, would be heard screaming for broken victuals at the school-room door, till our dismissal bell, finding so many other tongues loosened, at length wags its own, and then for the next hour and a half all are free to follow their own devices. Breakfast shortly follows; but, alas! another cold ceremony must be undergone first. A preliminary visit to pump court, and a thorough ablution of face and hands, is indispensable to those who would become successful candidates for that long-anticipated meal. This bleaching process, at an icy temperature, was never agreeable; but when the pipes happened to be frozen – a contingency by no means unfrequent – and the snow in the yard must be substituted for the water which was not in the pump, it proved a difficult and sometimes a painful business; especially as there was always some uncertainty afterwards, whether the chilblained paws would pass muster before the inspector-general commissioned to examine them – who, utterly reckless as to how the boys might "be off for soap," and incredulous of what they would fain attribute to the adust complexion of their skin, would require to have that assertion tested by a further experiment at the "pump head."

THE REFECTORY"Forbear to scoff at woes you cannot feel,Nor mock the misery of a stinted meal." – Crabbe.

The dietary tables at the chateau, conspicuous alike for the paucity and simplicity of the articles registered therein, are easily recalled to mind. The fare they exhibited was certainly coarse– though, by a euphemism, it might have been termed merely plain– and spare withal. The breakfast would consist of milk and water – the first aqueous enough without dilution, being the produce of certain ill-favoured, and, as we afterwards tasted their flesh, we may add ill-flavoured kine, whose impoverished lacteals could furnish out of their sorry fodder no better supplies. It was London sky-blue, in short, but not of the Alderney dairy, which was made to serve our turn at Yverdun. This milk, at seven in summer, and at half-past seven in winter, was transferred boiling, and as yet unadulterated, into earthenware mixers, which had been previously half-filled with hot water from a neighbouring kettle. In this half-and-half state it was baled out for the assembled school into a series of pewter platters, ranged along the sides of three bare deal boards, some thirty feet long by two wide, and mounted on tressels, which served us for tables. The ministering damsels were two great German Fraus, rejoicing severally in the pleasing names of Gretchen and Bessie. When Frau Gretchen, standing behind each boy, had dropt her allowance of milk over his right shoulder – during which process there was generally a mighty clatter for full measure and fair play – the other Frau was slicing off her slices of bread from a brown loaf a yard long, which she carried under her arm, and slashed clean through with wonderful precision and address. It was now for all those who had saved pocket-money for menus-plaisirs to produce their cornets of cinnamon or sugar, sprinkle a little into the milk, and then fall to sipping and munching with increased zest and satisfaction. So dry and chaffy was our pain de ménage that none ventured to soak it entire, or at once, but would cut it into frustrums, and retain liquid enough to wash down the boluses separately. In a few minutes every plate was completely cleaned out and polished; and the cats, that generally entered the room as we left it, seldom found a drop with which they might moisten their tongues, or remove from cheeks and whiskers the red stains of murdered mice on which they had been breaking their fast in the great tower. So much for the earliest meal of the day, which was to carry us through five hours, if not of laborious mental study, at least of the incarceration of our bodies in class, which was equally irksome to them as if our minds had been hard at work. These five hours terminated, slates were once more insalivated and put by clean, and the hungry garrison began to look forward to the pleasures of the noon-day repast. The same bell that had been calling so often to class would now give premonitory notice of dinner, but in a greatly changed tone. In place of the shrill snappish key in which it had all the morning jerked out each short unwelcome summons from lesson to lesson, as if fearful of ringing one note beyond the prescribed minute, it now would take time, vibrate far and wide in its cage, give full scope to its tongue, and appear, from the loud increasing swell of its prolonged oyez, to announce the message of good cheer like a herald conscious and proud of his commission. Ding-dong! – come along! Dinner's dishing! – ding-dong! Da capo and encore! Then, starting up from every school-room form throughout the chateau, the noisy boys rushed pell-mell, opened all the doors, and, like emergent bees in quest of honey, began coursing up and down right busily between the salle-à-manger and the kitchen – snuffing the various aromas as they escaped from the latter into the passage, and inferring from the amount of exhaled fragrance the actual progress of the preparations for eating. Occasionally some "sly Tom" would peep into the kitchen, while the Fraus were too busy to notice him, and watch the great cauldron that had been milked dry of its stores in the morning, now discharging its aqueous contents of a much-attenuated bouillon– the surface covered with lumps of swimming bread, thickened throughout with a hydrate of potatoes, and coloured with coarse insipid carrots, which certainly gave it a savoury appearance. It was not good broth – far from it, for it was both sub-greasy and super-salted; but then it was hot, it was thick, and there was an abundant supply. It used to gush, as we have said, from the great stop-cock of the cauldron, steaming and sputtering, into eight enormous tureens. The shreds of beef, together with whatever other solids remained behind after the fluid had been drawn off, were next fished up from the abyss with long ladles, and plumped into the decanted liquor. The young gastronome who might have beheld these proceedings would wait till the lid was taken off the sauerkraut; and then, the odour becoming overpoweringly appetising, he would run, as by irresistible instinct, into the dining-room, where most of the boys were already assembled, each with a ration of brown bread in his hand, and ready for the Fraus, who were speedily about to enter. The dinner was noisy and ungenteel in the extreme – how could it be otherwise? ventre affamé n'a point d'oreilles. Hardly was the German grace concluded, and the covers removed, when that bone of contention, the marrow bone, was caught up by some big boy near the top of the table, and became the signal for a general row. All in his neighbourhood would call out second, third, fourth, fifth, &c., for said bone; and thus it would travel from plate to plate, yielding its contents freely to the two or three first applicants, but wholly inadequate – unless it could have resolved itself altogether into marrow – to meet all the demands made upon its stores. Then arose angry words of contention, which waxed hot as the marrow waxed cold, every candidate being equally vociferous in maintaining the priority of his particular claim. Earnest appeals in German, French, Spanish, English, &c., were bandied from one to the other in consequence, as to who had really said après toi first! At last the "dry bone" was found undeserving of further contention; and, ceasing to drop any more fatness upon any boy's bread, the competition for it was dropt too. When now we had half-filled our stomachs with a soup which few physicians would have withheld from their fever patients on the score of its strength, we threw in a sufficiency of bread and sauerkraut to absorb it; and, after the post-prandial German grace had been pronounced, the boys left the table, generally with a saved crust in their pockets, to repair to the garden and filch – if it was filching – an alliaceous dessert from the beds, which they washed in the clear stream, and added, without fear of indigestion, to the meal just concluded within the chateau. Most of us throve upon this Spartan diet; but some delicate boys, unendowed with the ostrich power of assimilation usual at that period – for boys, like ostriches, can digest almost anything – became deranged in their chylopoietics, and continued to feel its ill effects in mesenteric and other chronic ailments for years afterwards. An hour was given for stomachs to do their work, before we reassembled to ours in the class-room. At half-past four precisely, a gouté, was served out, which consisted of a whacking slice of bread, and either a repetition of the morning's milk and water, or café au lait, (without sugar "bien entendu,") or twenty-five walnuts, or a couple of ounces of strong-tasted gruyère, or a plateful of schnitz (cuttings of dried apples, pears, and plums). We might choose any one of these several dainties we liked, but not more. Some dangerous characters – not to be imitated – would occasionally, while young Frau Schmidt stood doling out the supplies from her cupboard among the assembled throng, make the disingenuous attempt to obtain cheese with one hand and schnitz with the other. But the artifice, we are happy to say, seldom succeeded; for that vigilant lady, quick-eyed and active, and who, of all things, hated to be imposed upon, would turn round upon the false claimant, and bid him hold up both his hands at once – which he, ambidexter as he was, durst not do, and thus he was exposed to the laughter and jeers of the rest. At nine, the bell sounded a feeble call to a soi-disant supper; but few of us cared for a basin of tisane under the name of lentil soup – or a pappy potato, salted in the boiling – and soon after we all repaired to our bedrooms – made a noise for a short time, then undressed, and were speedily asleep under our duvets, and as sound, if not as musical, as tops.