Eleanor and Franklin Read online

  Classes went on throughout the day with special periods set aside for the preparation of lessons. To encourage concentration, the pupils were obliged to lie down on the floor after their midday meal and fix their minds for an hour on a single thought, which they later discussed at tea in French. Although athletics were not worshiped here as in the British public schools, two hours of exercise in the afternoon were obligatory. Eleanor went out for field hockey. She was not good at sports, but, as one of her classmates put it, “full of duty again,”5 she persevered and made the first team, one of “the proudest moments” in her life, she said. There was an afternoon snack, more classes and study, and then the bell that alerted them to dress for dinner. Leadership in the school was marked in many ways, and the most ceremonial was to be chosen to sit opposite Mlle. Souvestre at dinner. To occupy this place, Dorothy Strachey wrote, “was an education in itself.” It was this girl’s duty to rise at a nod from Mlle. Souvestre as a signal that dinner was ended. In time, Eleanor was awarded this coveted honor. “Sou,” as the girls called their headmistress, had her favorites. As the students filed by to say good night, she embraced some girls, kissed some, and extended a gracious hand to the rest.

  Eleanor, who was drawn to girls who had difficulties, soon developed her own circle of friends. Carola von Passavant, the daughter of a wealthy Frankfort family, arrived in Allenswood shortly after Eleanor. It was her first time away from her parents and her first time out of Germany. The English girls were “very cool and stiff,” the other German girls not sympathetic. Mlle. Souvestre saw that Carola was having an unhappy time and asked “Totty,” as Eleanor was called at the school, to watch out for her. “That she did and I was thankful for it.”6 Eleanor, Carola, and Marjorie Bennett formed a trio. Eleanor also made friends with Hilda Burkenshaw (“Burky”), whose father was an officer with the British forces in India, and with Avice Horn, who had been sent from Australia to get her education “at home.” Two rather schoolmistressy girls, the Gifford sisters, Helen and Leonie, who later started the successor school to Allenswood, were also among Eleanor’s intimates.

  Eleanor took French with Mlles. Souvestre and Maître, German with Fräulein Prebitsch, and Italian with Signorina Samaia, a mouselike woman with skirts that swept the floor who had come with Mlle. Souvestre from Fontainebleau and was now the school’s energetic administrator. She studied English literature with Dorothy Strachey, who remembered her as “a tall, slim, elegant young girl who was so much more intelligent than all the others!”7 and English history, Latin, and algebra with a variety of instructors. She had three years of drawing and design, and her schoolgirl notebooks were adorned with baroque lettering. She toiled away at music—three years of piano lessons and one of violin—but with indifferent results. “I struggled over the piano and was always poor,” she wrote many years later. “I could not draw much less paint. I envied every good actress but could not act!” She wanted “desperately to have some form of artistic expression,” but soon realized that she had no particular gifts.8 Classes in the dance and three years of “needlework” rounded out her course of study. Allenswood placed little emphasis on science, and there was little concern with American history and government. Beatrice Webb, who was otherwise a good friend and admirer of Marie Souvestre, criticized the school’s “purely literary” training.9

  In contrast to Mr. Roser’s decorous homilies, which had almost turned learning into a chore, Eleanor found the teaching at Allenswood lively and stimulating. According to her teachers, she was eager to learn and keenly interested in all her class work. Her workbooks showed a steady development in standards of taste and judgment, and—after the months when Mlle. Souvestre felt she was “a little bit likely to be influenced in her studies”—a sturdy insistence on thinking for herself.

  The girls were encouraged to go to the theater in London and Paris during the holidays. Eleanor sat in the topmost gallery at the Comédie Française and stood and shouted, as did everyone around her, for Sully, then going blind, in Oedipus Rex.10 She and her friends saw L’Aiglon with Sarah Bernhardt and Cyrano de Bergerac with Coquelin in the leading role. Was it because she remembered these occasions through “the rosy glasses of youth” that she felt in later years they represented the greatest days of the theater?11 “Cyrano,” Eleanor, the Allenswood student, wrote,

  seems to me to be a very able piece of work in which the workman has made good use of everything which could make his readers laugh or cry. It is not a burlesque but it is very amusing and the duel scene in which Cyrano fights and rhymes at the same time is very clever. I do not wonder that Coquelin has made such a success of the part, for on the whole Cyrano is a very sympathetic character and Coquelin is a wonderful actor. I notice his voice which M. told me was so disagreeable but I think it serves admirably in this part and helps to enhance the comic effect . . . it is a play essentially written for the stage and though interesting to read many of the fine points can only be brought out by perfect acting. . . .

  But she was not sure, she added, that Cyrano merited more than one or two readings: Shakespeare, on the other hand, was “a continent.”

  What distinguishes men of great genius? It is the power of creation and generalization. They gather into one character scattered personalities and they bring to the knowledge of the world new creations. Do we not believe in Don Quixote’s existence as in that of Caesar? Shakespeare is something terrible [she first used word “gigantic” but crossed it out] in this respect. He was not one man but a continent. He had in him great men, entire crowds, and landscapes.

  Men of genius, she went on,

  do not need to pay attention to style, they are good in spite of their faults and because of them, but we, the lesser ones, only prevail by perfect style. Hugo will surpass everyone in this century because of his inspiration, what inspiration! I hazard here an opinion which I would not dare speak anywhere. It is that the greatest men often write very badly and all the better for them. It is not in them that we must look for perfect style but in the secondary writers (Horace, Labruyere)—One must know the masters by heart, adore them, try to think as they do and then leave them forever. For technical instruction there is little of profit to draw from the learned and polished men of genius.

  The nature of the poetic mission and understanding intrigued her, and she returned to the subject.

  To a poet nothing can be useless. He must be conversant with all that is terribly awful and wonderfully beautiful. He must be able to admire alike what is splendidly great or elegantly small. The plants of the garden, the insects and birds of the air are all important, for he knows most who is best able to vary his scenes and to furnish his readers with moral and useful instruction.

  But the knowledge of nature “is only half the task of a poet,” she wrote in the same essay.

  He must be acquainted with all the different modes of life. He is required to estimate the happiness and misery of every condition, to trace the power of the passions, and to observe all the changes through which the mind passes owing to the different customs and climates from infancy to old age. He must free himself from the ideas of his time and regard right and wrong apart from the customs of his age. He must [word indecipherable] nature and consider himself above the criticism of his time trusting to posterity to acknowledge his merit. He must consider himself the arbiter of the thoughts of future generations as a being superior [?] to time and place.

  Her notebook on English literature began with Beowulf, devoted a considerable amount of space to the Age of Chaucer and ended with the Age of Johnson. A separate notebook was filled with the passages from Shakespeare’s plays that she considered worth transcribing. Her readings in French literature were equally extensive, and in Italian she read The Divine Comedy and Orlando Furioso.

  Her report cards showed a steady progression and mastery:

  FRENCH LANGUAGE

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1899

  “has begun too recently to be able to judge but interests herself very
much in her lessons”

  JANUARY TO APRIL, 1900

  “she works admirably in French and history and is the first out of a class of nine.”

  MAY TO JULY, 1900

  “works at French with much intelligence and taste, has made progress but cannot yet work on her own well enough”

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1901

  “works with application”

  MAY TO JULY, 1902

  “very advanced”

  GERMAN

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1899

  “works very well, spelling needs improving”

  JANUARY TO APRIL, 1900

  “very good pupil, is always interested in her work”

  MAY TO JULY, 1900

  “excellent”

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1901

  “worked well”

  MAY TO JULY, 1902

  “very industrious—has made remarkable progress.”

  LATIN

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1899

  “is going over the elements with good results”

  JANUARY TO APRIL, 1900

  “has worked splendidly. Excellent”

  ITALIAN

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1901

  “very good student, she works with zeal and much intelligence”

  MAY TO JULY, 1902

  “excellent student, she speaks and writes Italian easily.”

  ENGLISH LITERATURE

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1899

  “Intelligent, as far as can be seen in the few lessons she has had”

  JANUARY TO APRIL, 1900

  “Intelligent, but she is not quite up to the level of the class she is in.”

  MAY TO JULY, 1900

  “Good”

  SEPTEMBER TO DECEMBER, 1901

  “Works very well. Very satisfactory.”

  MAY TO JULY, 1902

  “Very good. Her progress was very marked this term.”

  The Allenswood years shaped Eleanor’s tastes in literature, music, theater, and the arts generally, but what made those years among the most important in her life was its headmistress, the seventy-year-old Mlle. Marie Souvestre. The daughter of Emile Souvestre, a well-known philosopher and novelist and an innovator in the field of adult education, she inherited his interest in ideas and the arts as well as his moral zeal in politics. Strongly anti-Royalist, almost radical in his sympathies, he had been obliged on occasion to take refuge in Geneva.

  His daughter was just as staunchly outspoken and nonconformist in her views. She was at home in the world of high politics and high culture and was welcome in all the great Liberal houses in England. Although her body had thickened with age, she was a woman of striking presence. Her forehead was strong and unlined, her face finely featured, her hair silvery white, and her eyes penetrating. She communicated a sense of force and authority and gave a Gallic flavor to any company she was in. Her lectures in history and literature were wide-ranging discourses on social movements. Beatrice Webb spoke of her “brilliancy of speech,” which Dorothy Strachey said “darted here and there with the agility and grace of a hummingbird” and which influenced the literary style and taste of Lytton Strachey. “Cette grande femme,” he called her.12 No one read Racine like Marie Souvestre. She gave the French classics, one of her pupils said, “a new vividness and reality and a wider meaning.” Her special gift was “the intense enthusiasm she could inspire in the young for things of the mind, for courageous judgment, and for a deep sense of public duty.”

  Mlle. Souvestre’s classes were conducted in her library, a spacious book-lined room that was always full of flowers. The sculpture and paintings seemed quite daring to the girls—the work of such artist-friends as Rodin, Puvis de Chavannes, Barbedienne. The occasions Eleanor treasured most were the evenings when she and a few other girls were invited to Mlle. Souvestre’s study, where for a few hours after dinner Mademoiselle read aloud, encouraged them to recite poems, and talked with them.

  A passionate advocate, Mlle. Souvestre “often fought seemingly lost causes,” but causes, Eleanor noted, that “were often won in the long run.” She was a Dreyfusard, and for years before Captain Dreyfus was vindicated, the spellbound girls heard every move in the case over and over again. From that time on, Eleanor later said, she became conscious of the feeling in herself that “the underdog” was always to be championed.

  When the Boer War came along, Mlle. Souvestre was Pro-Boer. She had a great many friends in government circles; in fact, one of her old pupils was a daughter of an Englishman high in the government at that time. But that did not deter her from being a pro-Boer running a girls’ school in England or from her out-spoken criticism of British policies. On the other hand, she was scrupulously fair and allowed the British girls to celebrate their victories in South Africa, although she would take the rest of us into her library and talk to us at length on the rights of small nations while the British celebration was going on.13

  Despite the vigor of her convictions, or perhaps because of them, she insisted that her students think for themselves. Intellectual independence and a lively sense of curiosity, she felt, were the most important traits she could develop in her girls. She wanted them to become personalities without losing the grace, the sweetness, the elegance which she felt were “the charm and smile of life.” She herself had broken free from the constraining circle of inherited ideas, and she wanted the girls she cared about to do the same, to be openminded, curious, and to reach out. Eleanor, who had been taught by her mother and grandmother that conformity was the way to win society’s approval, was a little upset with the demand that she be herself and self-reliantly say what she, not her teacher, thought.

  Mlle. Souvestre’s class sat on little chairs in her library, the headmistress in “a tall, straight armchair,” with Signorina Samaia “on a little stool close and behind.” Mlle. Souvestre talked, gave them a reading list, and asked them to do an essay based on their reading. Later, when the girls read their essays, she devastated those who parroted what she had said. A half-century later Eleanor could still see the indignant headmistress, as one of the girls read her paper aloud, take it away and tear it up. “You are giving me back what I gave you and it does not interest me.” She insisted that her girls sift things through their own intelligence. “Why was your mind given you but to think things out for yourself?”

  Challenged, Eleanor began to seek points Mlle. Souvestre had not made, and felt that it was even more satisfactory to come up with an idea that she had not found in the assigned reading. She glowed when Mlle. Souvestre returned a paper with the comment “well thought out,” even if she added, “but you have forgotten this or that point.”

  Beatrice Webb was less impressed by Mlle. Souvestre as a thinker. She lamented Mademoiselle’s reliance on the sparks of intuition rather than the rigors of scientific method in arriving at social judgments. Like her father, Mlle. Souvestre was primarily a moralist in politics, and she was concerned more with social justice than with social analysis. In this regard she strengthened Eleanor’s disposition toward a social idealism based on intuitive reason and the promptings of the heart rather than intellectual analysis.

  In what did Mlle. Souvestre succeed, a pupil later asked, and answered her own question—“in exciting, in amusing, in passionately interesting the intellect, in putting such a salt and savour into life, that it seemed as if we could never think anything dull again.”

  Mlle. Souvestre’s fervent concern with public affairs and politics was another novelty for Eleanor; at Grandma Hall’s there had been fashionable indifference. Uncle Ted’s exploits in Cuba, his progress to the governorship, the vice presidency, and presidency were, of course, discussed at Tivoli, but as part of the family chronicle, not because they were national events. Politics, so far as the women were concerned, was still strictly the business of the men, as it had been in Grandfather Hall’s day. Mlle. Souvestre, on the other hand, was “a radical free thinker,” an intimate of the group that surrounded Frederic Harris
on, leader of the English Positivists, who was a staunch supporter of trade unionism and an advocate of the “religion of humanity.”

  The headmistress was sensationally different from the devout Christians who directed the English public schools in her attitude toward religion: she called herself an atheist. That shocked Eleanor. If Grandma Hall had had the slightest inkling of this, she would surely have summoned Eleanor home immediately, regardless of Auntie Bye’s devotion to the Frenchwoman.

  As Mlle. Souvestre explained it, she could not comprehend a God who occupied Himself with the insignificant doings of individual men, and she considered pathetic the belief that He passed out rewards for good behavior and punishment for bad. Right should be done for its own sake; only the weak needed religion. These views were held by a large body of anticlerical opinion on the continent, but they were new and startling to Eleanor.

  Did Christians do right only because of the rewards that were promised in heaven? Eleanor puzzled over this for many years, and in the end concluded that the charge was meaningless so far as her own feeling about God was concerned. “I was too young then to come back with the obvious retort that making those around you happy makes you happy yourself and, therefore, you are seeking a reward just as much as if you were asking for your reward in your future life.”14

  But she also maintained that listening to Mlle. Souvestre’s anticlericalism did her no harm in that it prompted her to reexamine her own beliefs. She could not accept Mlle. Souvestre’s concept of a God indifferent to man and his activities on earth. Eleanor felt that God commanded what her own heart bid her do. Eleanor has “the warmest heart that I have ever encountered,” Mlle. Souvestre noted on Eleanor’s first report. Religion and prayer touched mystic chords in Eleanor that bound her to her dead father and to all humanity. Mlle. Souvestre’s indifference to religion did not interfere with Eleanor’s enjoyment of the Passion play which Aunt Tissie took her to see or of the Christmas midnight mass that she and Burky attended with Mlle. Souvestre in Rome. She concluded, with pathetic eagerness, that the headmistress could not be an atheist “at heart for she was as much moved as we were by the music and the lights!” Beatrice Webb questioned Marie Souvestre’s ability to appreciate religious feeling. Yet one of Mademoiselle’s dearest friends, the French evangelist the Reverend Charles Wagner, did not consider it a violation of his friend’s basic convictions to confide her soul to the hands of the Lord at her funeral in the Church “de L’oratoire Saint-Honoré.” So Eleanor may have been more discerning than Mrs. Webb in ascribing some religious sentiment to Mlle. Souvestre.