The Invisible Lodge Part 6

I should be glad if, before I and the reader leave his house, we might take with us a medallion, an adumbration of this Hoppedizel, as a souvenir; but I shrink from the labor--I would rather emboss all the characters of this work on paper or wax than this man. His character consists of a compilation of a hundred characters, his knowledge of all departments of knowledge, his acuteness of skepticism, his vice of stoicism, his virtue of a system upon virtue, and his actions of jokes and tricks; and grimaces.

For all that, or _for_ all that, the Captain liked him, because he saw him often (he was grum to almost everyone who did not visit him) and because both were merry blades, and because people love each other in a hundred instances without a devil's knowing why. Falkenberg would have exchanged shots with Behemoth himself, for any friend, even for the one who had been the first to _take him in_--he would have done it out of honor and good-heartedness; the Professor, on the contrary, preferred pure morals, as one might pure mathematics, to applied morality, and seldom acted. One loves to remember, therefore, the proof of his fine consistency to his principles which he once gave as a guest in Auenthal, when at midnight, instead of the Captain, only his riderless nag came home out of the heavy snowdrifts. Another, _e. g_., the Captain himself, would have mounted the same nag and ridden out to seek and save the lost; but the Professor neatly snuffed the tallow candle and seated himself by the wife, who continued to weep disconsolately, and who at a former time used to worry herself almost to death if her husband was a little late at night, although she scolded herself soundly for it the very next morning--and said to her composedly: "She might just cry as much as she liked, he would gladly allow it; it did little harm, rather it lightened the heart, and withal washed the pupil of the eye and refracted a too intense light; besides the superfluous tears must needs filter through the nasal cavity into the throat and stomach and help digestion; but as to her husband, the worst that could have befallen him would be that he had frozen to death; but he knew, partly from experience, that there was no gentler way of dying than by cold--for, in fact, it was the same as if one were hanged or drowned, for one died by an apoplectic stroke."

But, as I said the Captain loved, and left him nevertheless.

FIFTEENTH SECTION.

The Fifteenth Section.

Before our departure I gave back to all, particularly the Resident Lady von Bouse, the music I had borrowed of them; and to her, who had lent me so much that came from Italy, I lent something still better from Germany, namely, my sister Philippina: the same is to help train there the little daughter of the Lady Resident, though, under the delicate fingers of so talented a dame, she will herself receive more training than she gives. Only may she there never transform her lively, tremulous, gay, and yet sensitive, heart into a coquettish one! May she lighten for her Laura (the name of the lady's daughter) the yoke of a coquettish breeding, inasmuch as the poor child continually pines under the gla.s.s-bell of the window, wedges her body under the bedclothes in two ounces of whalebone, squeezes her little hands again, even at night, into the casing of gloves, and trains her little head backward, with lead on her locks. As is well known, her mother, the Lady Resident, lives half a league from town, at Marienhof, in the so-called New Palace, adjoining an old one, which, I believe, is let.

... But my retinue in this biography is, I perceive, becoming swollen with every sheet by more and more personages, so that my driving and turning are made more and more disagreeable. I would rather have been a Diet of the Empire and had millions of subjects and income, than this plaguy heptagon of characters, which it is so hard to drive into the right sections, and in which I myself am the most cross-grained. For I, as mere biographer, have the aid neither of Imperial Chamber nor of Executive-posse against my heptagon; but were I an Imperial Diet they would soon give me many a--promise.

Around our parting-carriage in Scheerau crowded: the jolly coldness of the Professor--the busy scream of his lady stoic--the delicate smile of the Pestilentiary with the fitchew-tails--the good heart of his sonny, who could hardly by any lies be torn from Gustavus--and my own grateful remembrances of invisible hours, of beloved beings and of all my dear school-girls. Alas, that man here below must see so much pa.s.s away before he himself pa.s.ses!

On the way Gustavus's weeping continued to sound in upon our pensive silence; but the old man, whose own heart, indeed, was melted, at last grew wild about it, and said to me: "I see more and more that the Moravian" (he meant the Genius) "has softened him to a milk-sop; if you, Mr. Tutor, don't make him a bit tough, I shall one day have him a lachrymose soldier, who will hardly be fit for a chaplain; for even _he_ must many a time know how to bring out a good round oath."

He carried the Moravian in his head as far as the little town of Issig, where the following soliloquy went on beside our carriage: "I am an a.s.s and a regular out and out villain, a miserable varlet. Oh, I am a rascal altogether, and a notorious, reprobate old h.e.l.l-brand! Ought I not to be sawed in halves and roasted, the devil that I am, the blockhead and beast!" All this came from a school-boy, around whom all his schoolfellows swarmed and clapped. "He talks," (said my Patron) "like a Moravian beast, who runs himself down, in order to run all others down still more." But not in the least: it was a poor devil who was hungry and humorous, and for whom the whole school had contributed bread crumbs and apples, on condition that he would do them the favor to abuse himself outrageously....

... Lovely Auenthal! is thy snow already gone?

SIXTEENTH SECTION.

Educational Programme.

When I had set in order round my sitting-room and school-room my valuables (they were ma.n.u.scripts) and my effects (the inventory of which was not over thirty lines deep), and my paternal and maternal property (that was I myself); when I had already previously taken three long strides to see the prospect from my window, which consisted of a windmill, the evening sun and a little starling's house on a birch tree, then I could forthwith be a ready-made tutor and needed only to begin. I could now look serious the whole week, and oblige my pupil to also--all my words could be weekly sermons, all my faces tables of the law. I had even two ways before me of being a fool: I could make an immortal soul decline, conjugate, memorize and a.n.a.lyze itself half dead in Latin--I could also dip and drown his young pineal gland so deeply in the higher sciences, that it should be quite bloated and puffed up with great draughts of logic, politics and statistics. I could accordingly (who should prevent it?) plane out the bony walls of his cranium to a dry bookcase, or press apart the living head into a profile-board, on which learned heads should be adumbrated; his heart, meanwhile, might be wrought over from being a high altar of nature to a wire-table of the Old Testament, from a celestial globe to a paternoster-globule of sanctimony--or, in fact, to a swimming-bladder of worldly policy; verily, I could be a ninny and make him a still greater one....

Thou precious one! thou confiding, friendly soul, that didst throw thyself with thy whole fate, with thy whole future, into my arms! Oh, I am already distressed that so much depends upon me!

Seeing, however, that just as much depends on the tutor of my future children, I will have printed for him here the following sheets of an Educational Programme, which he cannot take ill of me, because I really do not yet know the good man and do not mean him.

"My dear Mr. Tutor!

"Were I yours, you would certainly sit down and write out for me the following very good rules:

"Let Natural History be the sugar-cake which the schoolmaster shall put into the child's pocket in the first study hour, as a bait to lure him on; so, too, stories from history. Only let not history itself come as yet! What might not this lofty G.o.ddess, whose temple stands on nothing but graves, make of us, if she should then for the first time address us, when our head and heart were now open, and both understood her language of eternity--Fatherland, People, Const.i.tution, Laws, Rome, Athens? As regards Mr. Schrockh, who appends thereto respectable literary history and pure orphan-house morality, I only beg that you will not, Mr. Tutor, cut out from his book the copper-plate engravings, and the English binding I also insist upon.

"Geography is a wholesome first course for the child's soul; arithmetic and geometry are also suitable for an early scientific breakfast; not because they teach to think, but because they do not teach it (the greatest arithmeticians and differentiators and mechanicians are often the shallowest philosophers), and because the exertion attending them does not weaken the nerves, as is proved by the case of revenue auditors and algebraists.

"But philosophy, or the effort of deep thinking, is deadly to children, or snaps off forever the too thin point of deep thought. To resolve virtue and religion into their first principles with children is equivalent to cutting away a man's breast and dissecting the heart, to show him how it beats. Philosophy is no bread-earning science, but mental broad itself, and a necessary: and one cannot teach either it or love; both, if taught too early, unman body and soul.

"It pleases me that you yourself explained you would send out French before Latin, speaking before rules of grammar (_i. e_., the go-cart before theories of muscular motion), and undertake the languages later, because they are apprehended more through the _understanding_ than the _memory_. One reason why Latin is so difficult is that it comes on so early; in the fifteenth year one can do therein, with a finger, what at an earlier period required a whole hand.

"It is abominable that even now our children have to read and sit and make the fundament the underpinning and base of their education. The book of _instruction_ does not make good to them the place of the instructor, nor the _amusing_ one that of more wholesome play. Poetry is for a _beardless_ age too unintelligible and unwholesome; the teacher who _reads a lecture_ must be a miserable one, if he does not far more emphatically _speak_. In short, no children's books!

"In a pedagogical alb.u.m we should both write: Useless censure is worse than no censure at all. Faults which age takes away let not the teacher undertake to, who has more lasting ones to combat, etc. Let their catechism be Plutarch and Feddersen (only without his miserable style); _i. e_., no moralities, but narratives with a moral effect--and moreover, at no stated hour, but at the right one, so that the brains of my children may not be a _spelling-school_ of morals, but their heart may become an illuminated _Rotunda_[29] of virtue.

"Since a purblind, narrow, anxious propriety of behavior is the most stupid and unnatural, accordingly you teach the children the best by not enjoining upon them any: by nature they respect neither silver stars nor silver heads--do not wean them to any such.

"My greatest prayer is--which I have had printed many years beforehand--that you be the most jocose man in my house; merriment makes all fields of knowledge for children fields of sugar-cane. Mine must, while with you, have full liberty to jest, talk, sit at their _good pleasure_. We grown people, reasonable as we are, could not stand the abominable school-confinement of our offspring a week; and yet we expect it of them, with their brains and veins busy as swarming ant-hills. In brief: Is childhood, then, only the painful preparation-day for the _Sunday_ enjoyment of later age, or is it not rather itself a Sabbath eve, which brings its own joys? Ah, if we in this empty, drizzling life do not regard every _means as a nearer end_ (as well as every end a more distant means), what then do we find here below? Your princ.i.p.al (an abominable word) took as much pleasure in his betrothal as in his wedding.

"Playful instruction does not mean sparing and saving the child effort, but awakening in him a pa.s.sion which shall compel and lighten for him the hardest. Now to this end no lugubrious pa.s.sions are at all serviceable--_e. g_., fear of censure, of punishment, etc.--but only joyous ones; in play every girl in Scheerau would learn Arabic, if her lover wrote to her in no other language than in that synonymous one.

Hope of praise (the praise of external distinctions alone excepted) is what harms children far less than censure, and something to which no child, least of all the best ones, can grow obdurate. I will tell you here what my own tutor made use of as an educational espalier: he st.i.tched for himself a cipher-book; in this he gave each member of his lyceum (nineteen in all) for every task a large or small number; these numbers when they had reached a certain fixed sum, gained a letter of n.o.bility or certificate of diligence, whereupon one took his praise home with him. Since rewards are ineffectual when they come _too often_ or only _from afar_, accordingly he, in this ingenious manner constructed the way to the remote reward out of daily little ones. We could, moreover, save up our numbers; and nothing so strongly holds children to diligence as a _growing property_ (or ciphers or of writing-books). The striking out of such numbers was a punishment. He thereby made us all so diligent, me particularly, that a few years after I was able to write a biography, which is even now being read.

"Never talk with my darlings briefly or abstractly, but in the concrete, and _make your narratives as explicit and circ.u.mstantial as Voss does his Idyls_.

"Thus have I used the molding and modeling tool upon my Gustavus, not, a.s.suredly, to adjust him to the biography of him which I was composing, but to fit him for life itself; but deuce take the heart of a man, I say, who will not do for his own children what he did for another's.

"My daughters, on the other hand, worthy Sir Tutor, the elder as well as the younger, I do not commit to you for the same school-hour--girls might as well share with boys the same dormitory as the same school-room--in fact I would have for them no school-hours at all. A tutor, in order to know how to train girls, must (as you know) have so much knowledge of the world, so much knowledge of woman, so much wit, so much flexibility of humor with so much firmness;--meanwhile mine are trained by a very clever governess--household labor under the eye of a cultured mother.

"Before closing these secret instructions, I further remark that they are wholly useless--first, for you, because a man of genius even with any other method whatever is still omnipotent; secondly, for a clumsy head, because such a one, let him do what he will, will always exhaust children's mental powers as an old bedfellow does the bodily powers of a younger. In fact, I have sent forward this pedagogical Swabian code and mirror into the world long before I do my children--consequently not for you at all, but for a book."

Namely, for this one.

By way of showing my princ.i.p.al what I had done in education, I said as follows: "The Superintendent in Upper Scheerau has a setter named _Hetz_, which he would not give for a menagerie of lap-dogs. Now, one would think that, as the man has church-children, children of his own and wines and East India fowls enough, he would be content; but no: Hetz does not allow it. For so soon as the soup smokes on the table, Hetz begins cruising round the table, jumps up,--his snout then lies on a water-level with the leg of venison--and pecks and pokes so with his nose at every knee, particularly at the official, that the man, for his part, gobbles away as in a purgatory and frequently does not know whether he is eating sugar or salt. It did not relieve him at all that he often himself barked at the dog; but at the next meal, from forgetfulness or fury, he hit the pest with a bone which he flung at him. This single bone spoiled the whole dog. For the shepherd of souls, I fear, there is no longer any help, till Hetz, who will not change himself, in some way goes out of the world. Me, on the contrary, Hetz always treats with reason and forbearance. Why? So long as I ate at that table I never gave Hetz a morsel, in a single instance. With Hetzes and humans firmness is omnipotent. Whoso cannot educate a dog, Mr. Captain, neither can he educate a child. I would try tutors who would eat my bread, by no other touchstone than this: that they should tame for me squirrels and mice; whoever understood this best should be admitted, _e. g_., Wildau, for his bee-taming." But my gracious G.o.dfather never laughed heartily at my jests or Fenk's; on the other hand at one of Hoppedizel's he would laugh immoderately, and yet he loves both of us better.

When I shall have rescued in an extra sheet two more educational idiosyncrasies--one of which is that I exercised the wit of my pupil as strongly as his understanding; the second, that I went over with him only authors from the ages of the baser metals;--then we will go on again with his life.

EXTRA-LEAF.

Why I Allow My Gustavus Wit and Corrupt Authors and Forbid Him The Cla.s.sics, I Mean Greek and Roman.

I must first show, in three words, or pages, that and why the study of the ancients is declining,[30] and secondly, that it is no great matter.

We have now, as is well known, come out of the philological centuries, when nothing but Latin was used at altars, in pulpits, on paper or in thinking, and when it knit together all learned dressing-gowns and night-caps from Ireland to Sicily into one confederacy; when it const.i.tuted the state language and often the language of conversation in the great world, when one could not be a scholar without carrying in his head an inventory of all Greek and Roman household furniture, and a bill of fare and was.h.i.+ng schedule of those cla.s.sic people. Now-a-days our Latin is German to that of a _Camerarius_, who therefore would not have found it necessary to compose his Smalcaldic war in Greek; at the present day a sermon is seldom written in Latin, not to say in Greek, as once, and therefore cannot be translated, as once, into Latin, but merely into German. In our days no lady squeezes her powdered and mitred head through the narrow cla.s.sic collar, unless it be the daughters of Hermes. This was known to my readers longer ago than to me, because I am younger--just as the present improved reviewing, translating and interpreting of the ancients is well known to both of us. Only the _number_ of their admirers does not keep pace with the _worth_ of them; all our branches of knowledge share now-a-days among themselves a universal monarchy over all readers; but the ancients sit alone with their few philological va.s.sals on a rock-of-San-Marino.

There are now none but Polyhistors who have read everything else, but not the ancients.

Taste for the _spirit_ of the ancients must grow dull, as well as for their _speech_. I do not a.s.sert that in the cla.s.sic parrot-centuries this spirit was more truly felt than now; for Vossius hung upon Lucan, Lipsius on Seneca, Casaubon on Persius; I do not say that in those days a Faust, an Iphigenia, a Messiah, a Damocles, were written, as now. But I speak of the present taste of the people, not of the men of genius.

If the spirit of the ancients consisted in their firm, steady step to the object, in their hatred of a double, three-fold finery of ruffles, in a certain childlike sincerity; then it must be growing always easier for us to feel that spirit and harder for us to breathe it in our work; with every century our style must betray an inspection, circ.u.mspection and retrospection that increases with the increase of our learning; the fullness of our composition must hinder its roundness; we refine finery, bind[31] the binding and draw an overcoat over the overcoat; we must needs decompose the white sunbeam of truth, as it no longer strikes us for the first time, into colors, and whereas the ancients were prodigal of words and thoughts we are penurious with both. Still it is better to be an instrument of six octaves, whose tones easily sound impurely and run into each other, than a monochord, whose only string is harder to get out of tune; and it were just as bad if every one, as if no one, wrote like Monboddo.

With our unfruitfulness in works after the old style, the taste for these works proportionately increases. The ancients felt the worth of the ancients--not at all; and their simplicity is enjoyed by those only who cannot attain it: by ourselves. For this reason, I think the Greek simplicity differs from that of the Orientals, savages and children[32]

only in the higher talent by which the serene Greek climate caused that simplicity to be distinguished. That is the inborn, not the acquired.

The _artificial_, acquired simplicity is an effect of culture and taste; the men of the 18th century have to wade up to this Alpine source through marshes and torrents; but one who is up there by its side never more forsakes it, and only peoples, not individuals, can degenerate from the taste of a Monboddo to that of a Balzac. This acquired taste, which the youthful genius always attacks and the elder mostly acknowledges, must from Fair to Fair by practice upon all that is beautiful grow in the case of individuals more and more keen and sensitive; but nations themselves fall away every century farther and farther from the Graces, who, like the Homeric G.o.ds, hide themselves in clouds. The ancients therefore could no more feel the natural simplicity of their productions, than the child or the savage does that of his. The pure, simple manners of an Alpherd or a Tyrolese are matter of admiration neither to their own possessor nor to his compatriot, but only to the refined count which cannot attain to them; and if the great folk of the Romans enjoyed the sports of naked children, with which they adorned their chambers, it was the great folk but not the children, who had the enjoyment and the taste. The ancients, therefore, wrote with an involuntary taste, without reading with the same--as authors of genius to-day, _e. g_., Hamann, read with far more taste than they write--hence these fever-pustules and rash-eruptions on the otherwise healthy children of a Plato, an aeschylus, even a Cicero; hence the Athenians clapped no orators more than the turners of ant.i.theses and the Romans none more than the punsters. For the immoderate admiration of Shakespeare they wanted nothing but Shakespeare himself. For that very reason these nations could, like the child, degenerate from natural simplicity to polished, varnished witticisms.

Secondly, I promised to affirm on three pages that the neglect of the ancients does little harm. For of what use, then, is the cultivation of them? They are, like virtue, far less felt and enjoyed than is generally professed.[33] The enjoyment of them is the truest _nine-proof_ of the best taste; but this best taste presupposes such an intellectual appreciation of all kinds of beauty, such a pure and fair symmetry of all inner faculties, that not merely Home finds taste irreconcilable with a bad heart, but I also know nothing--next to Genius, which always attains it after the discharge of its intellectual exuberance--more rare than this very perfection of taste. O ye Conrectors and Gymnasiarchs, you who moan and weep over the depreciation of the ancients, if you still had eyes, they would weep over your appreciation! Oh, it requires other hearts and spiritual wings (not mere lung-wings) than belong to your pedagogic bodies to discern why the ancients called Plato the divine, why Sophocles is great and the Anthologists are n.o.ble! The ancients were men, not literati. What are you? And what do you get from them?...