Pestalozzi : a Remembrance
A HUNDRED years have passed since Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was laid to rest, aged, poor : unsuccessful as the world deems success, reverenced : a prophet barely articulate, but a regenerator of the world.
Brought up in severe poverty, he early dedicated himself to the idea of serving his people through the children of the poorest. " We are a rabble," he exclaimed justly. lie saw deeper than the vague ideals of Bodmer and Rousseau, yet he himself was entirely unpractical in business and in leadership. He saw that the poor believe only in those who know them and all that pertains to them, and believe that no one cares for them but those who hold out to them a helping hand. This was the secret of his work at Neuhof, Stans, Burgdorf and Yverdun. Often in his earlier days he had himself but dry bread to eat : " I suffered what the people suffered." His DoTrontan " Lienhard mid Gertrud " showed an entirely new and intimate sympathy with the lives and difficulties of the poorest and most degraded.
Through his long life of constant struggle, a noble- minded wife, a faithful serving maid and others stood true to him. That is a gracious recognition in which he writes : " the sun, the great mother that broods over the earth, is the symbol of Gertrud and of every woman who makes her home a sanctuary of God and serves Leaven before husband and children."
At Burgdorf and Yverdun he had become a European celebrity. Monarchs and statesmen, such as Fichte, saw in his experiments hope and guidance for their own Countries shattered by the Napoleonic wars. We have any accounts of his remarkable personality and habits.
Though he was negligently dressed, his hair unkempt, xtraordinarily ugly, one had but to look into his wonder- Id eyes to feel a regard and affection for him. He could not write or spell correctly, he never read a book. He vas unable to teach properly in any subject. But he ad a vision for the whole, and the power of kindling houghtful men to work according to his ideas. He uniself said, " I am only the quickener of the establish- nent : others must bring forth what I think." He had 0 car for music, no eye for art, no appreciation of *dry. He was as inartistic as he looked. Even his I-alk was extraordinary : it was a hasty shamble. He lioyed banter as an occasion for the exercise of his it and repartee. He was the soul of his large household : IC loved all as though they were his children : to everyone le was " Father."
Subjected to mean attacks, he wrote to a friend : " It s at least an honour to survive as a ruin : there are 1!('Ilses and people who never even become ruins. . . . I feel as though I had sometimes seen an angel sitting on my old jade and helping my waggon out of the mud." In his New Year's address in 1817, he asked how the dream had come into his soul which demanded a strength out of all proportion to what he had : " Friends and brothers, it sprang from a love which, imperfect in itself, hoped all things, believed all things that it desired, and endured also all things that it must."
A member of the Government of Aargau ironically, named him the " Quixote of Humanity." Singlehearted and ludicrous he was. It is this element of the naïve that helps to win our love for him. In an age of aesthetics and vague ideals he was a social reformer, but a practising one. He loved mankind, but he knew that one can only serve mankind by serving one's neighbour.
Saint Francis of Assisi chose poverty as bringing him close to Christ. Not less deliberately Pestalozzi resolved to be poor in order to help the poor.
" 0 Love Eternal, why
Am I a fool for Thee ?"
Lest we be thought foolish and mystical, let us quote also from Emerson—" the mass of men worry themselves into nameless graves : here and there a great soul forgets himself into immortality."
II. ALEXANDER CLAY.
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