Chapter 7 THE ENGLISH COLONY-THE EDUCATIONAL ADVANTAGES

Of the English colony there is not perhaps a great deal to be said, except that it fills two churches on Sundays, and at all times monopolizes the Ouchy road. It has never consisted of distinguished persons like the English colony at Florence; on the other hand, it has never included so large a proportion of disreputable persons as the English colonies at Brussels and Boulogne. Gibbon cannot be said to have belonged to it, since, in his day, it did not yet exist; and it can hardly claim Dickens, since his sojourn there was of comparatively brief duration.

In the main it is composed of very young and rather elderly members of the respectable middle classes. There is an English club, and there are opportunities of playing bridge. The life is inexpensive, not because commodities are specially cheap, but because there are no wealthy residents to set extravagant standards. A small income goes a long way there; and the climate is salubrious for all those whose bronchial tubes are in a condition to resist the bise.

These are conditions which please a great many people-notably the wandering spinsters who 'live in their boxes,' and the retired officers and civil servants who have to subsist upon their pensions. At Lausanne they can economize without feeling the pinch of poverty, and without feeling envious-or perceiving that their wives feel envious-of more prosperous neighbours. The sunshine costs nothing, and the amusements cost very little; they can go about in knickerbockers and wear out their old clothes without fearing that their solvency will be suspected. There is no need for them to learn a foreign tongue, since they form their own society, and mix very little with the Swiss who accept them, but do not pretend to like them. They live lazily, but healthily, and, on the whole, contentedly.

Of course, there is another side to the medal, and a price to be paid for the advantages. The colonists are exiles who have severed old ties, and have a difficulty in forming new ones. Their existence is rather animal than human, and rather vegetable than animal. They lose their energy and their intelligence; they are like plants no longer growing in a garden, but uprooted and flung upon the grass. A stranger finds it difficult to converse with them, and fancies that they must be terribly bored. Perhaps they are; but perhaps, too, it is better to be bored in the sunshine than busy in a London fog. So they linger on, persuading themselves that they do so for their children's sake rather than their own, and referring the stranger, if he happens to question them, to the wonderful educational advantages of the town.

But what is the sober truth about those educational advantages? That is another branch of the subject which seems to be worth a passing word.

Assuredly the Swiss have a great reputation as educators, and that reputation stands nowhere higher than in the Canton of Vaud. Yverdon is in the Canton of Vaud, and it was there that Pestalozzi kept his school. Moreover, just as it has been said that every citizen of Ticino is by nature a hotel-keeper, so it has been said that every citizen of Vaud is by nature a professor. Professors, as we have already seen, were among the Canton's chief 'articles of export' during the Bernese domination, and kings preferred the Vaudois professors to any others. Yet a sufficient number of professors-and perhaps the best of them-have always remained behind, so that teaching and learning have continued to be great native industries. The question which is left is, How do the Swiss systems of education compare with ours?

The answer is commonplace, and sounds platitudinous: they are better than ours in some respects, and inferior in others. Let us elaborate and particularize.

Scholarship, in the accepted English sense of the word, hardly exists in Switzerland. A Swiss Jebb is almost unthinkable, and if anyone proposes to find a Swiss Bentley in Casaubon, the answer must be that Casaubon was not really Swiss, though he was, for a time, a professor at Geneva. In the matter of the classics the German scholars have always been more learned than the Swiss, and the English scholars have always been both more learned and more graceful; indeed, in the sort of scholarship which enables a man to speak and write his own language properly the Swiss have always been sadly to seek. Swiss French is atrocious, and the French of Lausanne, though a shade better than that of Fribourg, is worse than that of Geneva or Neuchatel. When the French themselves wish to say that a man's style is clumsy, they liken it to 'a Swiss translation from the Belgian.'

A STREET IN ST. SAPHORIN

Nor have the Swiss ever made any notable contribution to original philosophic thought. Their principal metaphysicians, like Charles Bonnet, have been merely theologians in disguise, who have started by assuming the points which they undertook to prove, and have been unable to keep their metaphysics and their theology apart, as did, for example, Bishop Berkeley and Dean Mansell. The great names in the history of speculative thought-such names as those of Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Comte, Herbert Spencer, and T. H. Green-have been English, or German, or French, or Dutch. One does not find a single Swiss name among them. The great Swiss names, when we get away from theology, all stand for something scientific, practical, concrete. Lavater, Gesner, Saussure, Jomini-such are a few of the instances that may be cited to point our moral and lead us up to our generalization, which is as follows:

Elementary education is excellent in Switzerland; but the higher education is too technical and utilitarian to satisfy those who consider that the function of education is to cultivate the mind. The elementary schools of the Canton of Vaud are probably better than those of the County of London; but the Universities of Geneva and Lausanne are a poor substitute for those of Oxford and Cambridge.

Let us by all means give praise where praise is due. The Medical Faculties of Berne and Lausanne have a European reputation; and it is said that engineering is nowhere taught better than at the Zurich Polytechnic. The practical side of the Swiss character is also well exemplified in the various schools for waiters, for watch-makers, and for bee-keepers. But it is possible-or it seems so to an English University man-for education to be too practical; and the Swiss have surely committed that excess in devising that educational abomination, the School of Commerce. Nothing is ever taught in a School of Commerce that a man who has been properly educated elsewhere cannot pick up in six weeks; and the curriculum, though it may sharpen the wits, can only, at the best, produce a superior kind of bagman.

Swiss education, therefore, has its drawbacks even for a Switzer; and, for a young Englishman of the better class, it has other drawbacks in addition. It is not merely that he learns less than he would in England because an unfamiliar language is the medium of instruction. He also acquires the wrong tone and the wrong manner, misses opportunities of making useful friends, and finds himself, when he grows up, a stranger in his own country-a stranger not only to the people, but to the ways and modes of thought. That is a disadvantage which was pointed out as long ago as the eighteenth century, by Dr. John Moore, when a nobleman who had thought of sending his son to the University of Geneva asked his advice on the subject. 'The boy would return,' said the doctor, 'a kind of a Frenchman, and would so be disqualified for success in English life.'

The same criticism still applies. We are better cosmopolitans nowadays than were Dr. Moore's contemporaries, but the differences between the nations still subsist; and, just as each nation has the system of education which it deserves, so it has the system of education which best prepares a man to fight the battle of life in his own country. In England, more than in any other country, success depends comparatively little upon book-learning, and very much upon character and the possession of certain qualities which, in our insular pride, we vaunt as specially 'British.' These qualities are not to be acquired in the Swiss schools. The qualities that are to be acquired there may, in some respects, be better and more solid; but they are not so useful in Great Britain. An English boy educated in a Swiss school is, as a rule, when he leaves, rather a clumsy lout, with a smattering of bad French, emancipated from certain prejudices which might be useful to him, but steeped in other prejudices which are likely to stand in his way. One always has the feeling that more might have been made of him at home: not merely at Eton or Harrow, but at Clifton or Marlborough, or even at St. Paul's or the Bedford Grammar School.

On the whole, therefore, the educational raison d'être of the English colony at Lausanne disappears under investigation-at any rate, so far as the boys are concerned. The girls, from a certain point of view, may be better off there; for the Swiss girls' schools are good, and the snobbishness which is the vice of English girls' schools is discouraged in them. For the girls, difficulties only arise when they reach a marriageable age. There are no husbands for them at Lausanne, or anywhere in Switzerland, unless it be at Montreux, where Anglo-Indians sometimes come on leave, since all the men whom they meet-one is speaking only of their own countrymen-are either too young or too old-mere students, or else superannuated veterans. They know it, and lament their lot aloud; and the Swiss know it, too, and make remarks. The English colony at Lausanne, they say, is une vraie pépinière de vieilles filles.

But this is an excursus. We must return to Lausanne, and take another look at its social and intellectual life.

THE DENTS DU MIDI AND LA TOUR FROM "ENTRE DEUX VILLES"

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