The Village Rector, Honoré de Balzac [best historical biographies .txt] 📗

to its choice minds? As a matter of fact, it affords them the
meanest opportunities; there is not a man who has issued from the
Ecoles who does not bitterly regret, when he gets to be fifty or
sixty years of age, that he ever fell into the trap set for him by
the promises of the State. Does it seek to obtain men of genius?
What man of genius, what great talent have the schools produced
since 1790? If it had not been for Napoleon would Cachin, the man
of genius to whom France owes Cherbourg, have existed? Imperial
despotism brought him forward; the constitutional regime would
have smothered him. How many men from the Ecoles are to be found
in the Academy of Sciences? Possibly two or three. The man of
genius develops always outside of the technical schools. In the
sciences which those schools teach genius obeys only its own laws;
it will not develop except under conditions which man cannot
control; neither the State nor the science of mankind,
anthropology, understands them. Riquet, Perronet, Leonardo da
Vinci, Cachin, Palladio, Brunelleschi, Michel-Angelo, Bramante,
Vauban, Vicat, derive their genius from causes unobserved and
preparatory, which we call chance,--the pet word of fools. Never,
with or without schools, are mighty workmen such as these wanting
to their epoch.

Now comes the question, Does the State gain through these
institutions the better doing of its works of public utility, or
the cheaper doing of them? As for that, I answer that private
enterprises of a like kind get on very well without the help of
our engineers; and next, the government works are the most
extravagant in the world, and the additional cost of the vast
administrative staff of the _Ponts et Chaussees_ is immense. In
all other countries, in Germany, England, Italy, where
institutions like ours do not exist, works of this character are
better done and far less costly than in France. Those three
nations are remarkable for new and useful inventions in this line.
I know it is the fashion to say, in speaking of our Ecoles, that
all Europe envies them; but for the last fifteen years Europe,
which closely observes us, has not established others like them.
England, that clever calculator, has better schools among her
working population, from which come practical men who show their
genius the moment they rise from practice to theory. Stephenson
and MacAdam did not come from schools like ours.

But what is the good of talking? When a few young and able
engineers, full of ardor, solve, at the outset of their career,
the problem of maintaining the roads of France, which need some
hundred millions spent upon them every quarter of a century (and
which are now in a pitiable state), they gain nothing by making
known in reports and memoranda their intelligent knowledge; it is
immediately engulfed in the archives of the general Direction,--
that Parisian centre where everything enters and nothing issues;
where old men are jealous of young ones, and all the posts of
management are used to shelve old officers or men who have
blundered.

This is why, with a body of scientific men spread all over the
face of France and constituting a part of the administration,--a
body which ought to enlighten every region on the subject of its
resources,--this is why we are still discussing the practicability
of railroads while other countries are making theirs. If ever
France was to show the excellence of her institution of technical
schools, it should have been in this magnificent phase of public
works, which is destined to change the face of States and nations,
to double human life, and modify the laws of space and time.
Belgium, the United States of America, England, none of whom have
an Ecole Polytechnique, will be honeycombed with railroads when
French engineers are still surveying ours, and selfish interests,
hidden behind all projects, are hindering their execution.

Thus I say that as for the State, it derives no benefit from its
technical schools; as for the individual pupil of those schools,
his earnings are poor, his ambition crushed, and his life a cruel
deception. Most assuredly the powers he has displayed between
sixteen and twenty-six years of age would, if he had been cast
upon his own resources, have brought him more fame and more wealth
than the government in whom he trusted will ever give him. As a
commercial man, a learned man, a military man, this choice
intellect would have worked in a vast centre where his precious
faculties and his ardent ambition would not be idiotically and
prematurely repressed.

Where, then, is progress? Man and State are both kept backward by
this system. Does not the experience of a whole generation demand
a reform in the practical working of these institutions? The duty
of culling from all France during each generation the choice minds
destined to become the learned and the scientific of the nation is
a sacred office, the priests of which, the arbiters of so many
fates, should be trained by special study. Mathematical knowledge
is perhaps less necessary to them than physiological knowledge.
And do you not think that they need a little of that second-sight
which is the witchcraft of great men? As it is, the examiners are
former professors, honorable men grown old in harness, who limit
their work to selecting the best themes. They are unable to do
what is really demanded of them; and yet their functions are the
noblest in the State and demand extraordinary men.

Do not think, dear sir and friend, that I blame only the Ecole
itself; no, I blame the system by which it is recruited. This
system is the _concours_, competition,--a modern invention,
essentially bad; bad not only in science, but wherever it is
employed, in arts, in all selections of men, of projects, of
things. If it is a reproach to our great Ecoles that they have not
produced men superior to other educational establishments, it is
still more shameful that the _grand prix_ of the Institute has not
as yet furnished a single great painter, great musician, great
architect, great sculptor; just as the suffrage for the last
twenty years has not elected out of its tide of mediocrities a
single great statesman. My observation makes me detect, as I
think, an error which vitiates in France both education and
politics. It is a cruel error, and it rests on the following
principle, which organizers have misconceived:--

_Nothing, either in experience or in the nature of things, can
give a certainty that the intellectual qualities of the adult
youth will be those of the mature man._

At this moment I am intimate with a number of distinguished men
who concern themselves with all the moral maladies which are now
afflicting France. They see, as I do, that our highest education
is manufacturing temporary capacities,--temporary because they
are without exercise and without future; that such education is
without profit to the State because it is devoid of the vigor of
belief and feeling. Our whole system of public education needs
overhauling, and the work should be presided over by some man of
great knowledge, powerful will, and gifted with that legislative
genius which has never been met with among moderns, except perhaps
in Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Possibly our superfluous numbers might be employed in giving
elementary instruction so much needed by the people. The
deplorable amount of crime and misdemeanors shows a social disease
directly arising from the half-education given the masses, which
tends to the destruction of social ties by making the people
reflect just enough to desert the religious beliefs which are
favorable to social order, and not enough to lift them to the
theory of obedience and duty, which is the highest reach of the
new transcendental philosophy. But as it is impossible to make a
whole nation study Kant, therefore I say fixed beliefs and habits
are safer for the masses than shallow studies and reasoning.

If I had my life to begin over again, perhaps I would enter a
seminary and become a simple village priest, or the teacher of a
country district. But I am too far advanced in my profession now
to be a mere primary instructor; I can, if I leave my present
post, act in a wider range than that of a school or a country
parish. The Saint-Simonians, to whom I have been tempted to ally
myself, want now to take a course in which I cannot follow them.
Nevertheless, in spite of their mistakes, they have touched on
many of the sore spots which are the fruits of our present
legislation, and which the State will only doctor by insufficient
palliatives,--merely delaying in France the moral and political
crisis that must come.

Adieu, dear Monsieur Grossetete; accept the assurance of my
respectful attachment, which, notwithstanding all these
observations, can only increase.

Gregoire Gerard.

According to his old habit as a banker, Grossetete had jotted down his reply on the back of the letter itself, heading it with the sacramental word, _Answered_.

It is useless, my dear Gerard, to discuss the observations made in
your letter, because by a trick of chance (I use the term which
is, as you say, the pet word of fools) I have a proposal to make
to you which may result in withdrawing you from the situation you
find so bad. Madame Graslin, the owner of the forests of Montegnac
and of a barren plateau extending from the base of a chain of
mountains on which are the forests, wishes to improve this vast
domain, to clear her timber properly, and cultivate the stony
plain.

To put this project into execution she needs a man of your
scientific knowledge and ardor, and one who has also your
disinterested devotion and your ideas of practical utility. It
will be little money and much work! a great result from small
means! a whole region to be changed fundamentally! barren places
to be made to gush with plenty! Isn't that