CHAPTER XV

MY TUTORS

I use the word advisedly, the direction of my studies, after my twelfth year, being almost entirely taken out of female hands, my mother feeling more confidence in the competence of persons of the other sex to impart to me the sound and thorough instruction she insisted on and which must moreover be in accordance with her own views, and not in the least on the pattern of the ordinary curriculum for girls. Religious instruction she had always been in the habit of giving us herself and she kept up the practice until within a few weeks of my confirmation, preparing over night with great pains the subject of the lesson which she gave us every morning at six o’clock, and which was sometimes a theological disquisition, sometimes a survey of ecclesiastical history. For these, as for all my other lessons, I had to write essays, rather for the purpose of obliging me to summarise and recapitulate systematically all that I had learnt, than as an encouragement to the expression of my own ideas; this exercise was, notwithstanding, probably of the greatest value to me as enabling me to acquire very early great facility with my pen. Already at quite an early age I had my own very decided views about style, and I remember as quite a child coming into conflict with the very first of my male teachers--one of the masters from the Neuwied Grammar-school, engaged to give me German lessons--concerning an essay on “Springtime,” I had written for him. Inspired by so congenial a theme, I had simply let myself go, and the pages I handed to Herr Nohl were probably more remarkable for originality than for academic correctness of form. Whether he laid too much stress on negligencies of styles, which in my youthful impetuosity I was too little inclined to heed, I can no longer say; but I know that his unsparing criticism of my work struck me as unjust, and that the corrections he proposed did not seem to me to improve it at all.

Latin I was taught by my brother’s tutor, joining Wilhelm at his lessons, a plan adopted partly in order to give him the stimulant of emulation, but which became a source of unspeakable pleasure and profit to myself. I had such delight and displayed so much facility in the acquisition of a new language, that linguistic talent was supposed to be my special gift. No one understood, nor was I myself until long after aware, that it was language, and not languages, that was my real concern. Unconsciously, I was forging for my own use the weapon that was to serve me later on, and this peep into the beauties of the Latin tongue--for a mere peep it was, since I laboured under the disadvantage of having to plunge into its mysteries at the point at which my brother had arrived,--was yet of immense service to me, in enlarging my horizon, and affording me a cursory inspection of the treasures of another world. The grammar of that noble idiom I never rightly mastered, it is true, conscientiously as I battled with it. Many and many a night have I fallen asleep over my books, my head resting on the ponderous old dictionary in which I was seeking the key to some involved construction in the verse, whose majestic cadence enchanted my ear, even before I had fully apprehended its true significance. My brother’s tastes were very different from my own; it was not languages that interested him, but mathematics and the exact sciences. Inventions of all sorts were his special hobby, every new kind of machine had a special fascination for him, and he would have loved to be an engineer. The other course of lessons given us by Professor Preuner, on classic art, was perhaps of even greater efficiency in opening my eyes to the glories of the ancient world, since here there were no technical obscurities to interpose themselves between my vision and the masterpieces revealed. In a series of excellent drawings these were displayed to us, and their perfection pointed out and explained with so much enthusiasm by our professor, himself an ardent devotee of Grecian art, that we in turn learned to know and love these treasures of antiquity so thoroughly and well, my subsequent visits to the great European galleries containing the originals had nothing of strangeness or surprise,--it was but as if I were renewing acquaintance with old and well-loved friends, of whom I had lost sight for a while.

An equal meed of gratitude, though on other grounds, is due from me to the old mathematician, Henkel, who had been my father’s tutor in former days, and who now laboured hard, though with but poor results, to introduce the rudiments of his to me most dismal science into my very refractory brain! What endless trouble the dear old man took, and what inexhaustible patience he displayed in the attempt to initiate me into the mysteries of progressions and equations, or even the simple extraction of a square root! Under his kindly tuition I filled many note-books, covered whole pages with figures supposed to calculate the logarithm of a number, without even knowing what a logarithm was! Euclid I never understood at all; I can just remember that in every right-angled triangle the square on the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides; but why? Ah! that is a very different matter! As for algebra, it was utterly incomprehensible to me, so I contented myself with learning a few of the formulæ by heart. Just as in a cousin of mine,--a man of great learning, considerable literary culture, and possessed of a fine taste in painting,--the musical sense is entirely wanting, so to me the properties pertaining to number and quality will forever remain a sealed book.

To my French governesses I owe thanks for having so thoroughly grounded me in their language, that I could employ it for my literary work as well as my mother-tongue, one of my books being written originally in French. They too were my guides on my first incursions in the glorious domain of French literature, whose vast treasure-house I ransacked greedily, dwelling with special delight on the matchless beauty of the great prose-writers, my ear, accustomed to the more marked cadence of German verse, having always, I confess, been slightly deaf to the melody of the Alexandrine couplet. To the earlier poets of course this restriction does not apply, and Villon and Clément Marot became each in his own way dear to me, as were Ronsard and the other illustrious members of the Pléïade.

Then came a moment, on which I can look back with a certain special satisfaction, during which I was left without either governess or preceptor of any sort to pursue my studies entirely on my own account, save for the advice given me for my reading by my parents. Those were the months which I devoured with avidity every book that came in my way--even history, I remember, and not only such works as Schiller’s “Thirty Years’ War” and “Revolt of the Netherlands,” rendered fascinating by their literary style, but, to please my mother, the drier pages of Becker’s great Universal History, in its fourteen volumes, were all waded through, rather more perfunctorily, I fear, than some of my lighter reading! Still, the hours spent thus were surely not altogether lost, and the habit of independent study, once acquired, never left me.

But this course of independent study could not of course be allowed to go on indefinitely, and with the professor on whom, after much deliberation, my parents’ choice ultimately fell, they, like myself, had every reason to be satisfied. This was a very young _savant_, named Sauerwein, a protégé of the Prince Consort’s friend, Baron Stockmar, by whom he was recommended to my parents, as being capable of undertaking the entire direction of my studies, from the stage at which I had now arrived. He was a man of quite remarkable attainments, his linguistic talent in particular having gained for him the reputation of a second Mezzofanti, with such apparent ease did he apply himself to acquiring each new language to add to his already goodly store--about thirty, it seems to me, he spoke quite fluently at the time when I knew him. To myself the charm of Sauerwein’s teaching lay in his having no cut and dried pedagogic method; not considering it the chief object of education to alter the direction towards which his pupil’s tastes and abilities naturally turned, he had no wish to force my mind into a groove into which it could never fit itself, but rather made it his aim to adapt himself to the exigencies of the situation. In after years my tutor owned to me how great his amazement had been, when in the place of the child of thirteen he believed his future pupil to be, he found a young girl, tall for her years and very self-composed, who in a few well-chosen words thanked him for the trouble he was about to give himself. And his surprise reached its height when the following morning he heard the “Prisoner of Chillon” very dramatically recited by the pupil who was to learn English from him!

It was well for me that I was so thoroughly prepared, as to be the better able to profit by the unusual and really admirable course of instruction Herr Sauerwein now entered on. Its range was wide and varied, history--and English constitutional history in particular--occupying a very considerable part of it, an exhaustive knowledge of the political development of that country being deemed essential, at a moment when all other nations seemed bent on blindly copying English customs and institutions, however little compatible these might be with their own mind and character. Many a State has since had to learn to its cost, the mistake of transplanting growths of foreign culture upon their soil, and the impossibility of amalgamating these alien elements with the national life. But at that time, in Germany as elsewhere, the admiration for all things English made historians like Macaulay and Carlyle extremely popular, and also encouraged the study of English literature. That part of the programme was pure delight to me. Under my new preceptor’s guidance I obtained a comprehensive survey of the whole vast field, from Chaucer to modern times. The Scottish dialect was no bar to my appreciation of Burns; many of his poems I learnt by heart, and can remember still. But the literature of my own country was not neglected, and here also we started reviewing it from its origins, deciphering early Gothic fragments, continuing our quest through Eddas and Nibelungen, and lingering with joyful pride among the heroes sung of by Gottfried and by Wolfram, in the poems that are so glorious a national heritage. So well did I love them, the noble knights of King Arthur’s Court, and the doughty champions of the Holy Grail, that I can hardly forgive Wagner the liberties he has taken with these fine old stories, in order to suit them to the requirements of his music, glorious though that be. The versions of these sublime legends given by Wagner came doubtless as a revelation to those to whom they were as yet unknown;--but to us, who had lived among them and loved them from our birth, his arbitrary mode of treatment was rather of the nature of a sacrilege. The term is perhaps too strong, but I cannot forget my keen disappointment at certain features of the representations at Bayreuth. It is on this account that I prefer the _Meistersinger_ to all Wagner’s other works, since he had here no legend to alter or spoil, but simply a material which he could turn and twist as he pleased, and which could only gain by his skilful handling and by the musical atmosphere which his genius conjured up around the personages of his drama.

From the study of our old Germanic legends in their epic form, we passed on to the early poetic monuments of other lands, collections of primitive songs and ballads being ransacked for their best specimens, whilst the great national epics were made the object of more exhaustive scrutiny. Throughout the whole of this vast field of exploration, my tutor’s remarkable linguistic equipment made him the surest and best qualified of guides; Sanscrit and Russian were as familiar to him as the Neo-Latin tongues or Celtic idioms; snatches of Hungarian song alternated on his lips with verses of the Persian and Arabic poets; and his reading was as extensive as his literary taste was sound. Some of the fine old poems with which I then became acquainted--the “Kalerala” or “Ramayana” and “Mahalharata” for instance, in which the soul of a whole race has been enshrined and preserved, have since by the talent and industry of translators, and increased facilities of publication, been made easily accessible to all; but in those days neither the Finnish, nor the great epics of Hindustan, were popularly known, and it was no mean privilege I enjoyed, in being led through these labyrinths of delight by one to whom every step of the way was familiar.

It was Sauerwein’s aim, to give me something more than a superficial acquaintance with all that is best in the literature of the whole world; our course of reading was in consequence strangely diversified; Ossian and the Minnesänger, Sakuntala and the “Gerusalemme Liberata,” these were but a few of the multitudinous and bewildering contrasts forced upon my youthful brain, to which some credit is perhaps due for having borne without ill results so unusual a strain. On my progress in Italian Herr Sauerwein laid special stress, and, as I afterwards learnt, from the very kindest motives. He was well aware both of my poetic proclivities and of the persistent attempts to stifle these, and, thinking it a pity that my imaginative powers should not have fair play, he quietly encouraged me under cover of the Italian essays set me and into which no one else looked, to give my fancy the reins and write as the spirit prompted. Long after, he showed me a whole pile of these compositions, and told me of the satisfaction he had felt in watching the dawn of a talent, of whose existence no one else, and I myself least of all, was really cognisant at that time. Little did he think, when he recited to me some of the old Welsh songs, that one day, in the assembly of the bards, I should be acclaimed by them as one of their number. Nor could my mother foresee, in the infinite pains she bestowed on improving my handwriting, that the Gothic and ornamental letters she set before me as models would become to me as a simple running-hand, and that I should fill whole volumes with finely traced characters, imitating the missals illuminated with such care and reverence by pious monks of old.

I had as schoolroom a little room leading out of my mother’s, so that she could be present at all my lessons, in the next room, even when she was too ill to leave her bed. Few mothers I think can have taken their duties more seriously. Our religious instruction, as I said, she always gave us herself, assisted by my father. Her old clerical friend, Pastor Dilthey, came and stayed with us at Monrepos just a few weeks before my confirmation, to prepare me for it, but the real work of preparation had been accomplished by my mother beforehand. The examination that precedes the ceremony took place in Monrepos, in our own woods, in the presence of more than a hundred people, members of our family on both sides and many friends, and among the latter that most constant of friends, the Empress Augusta, who never missed an opportunity of showing her affection and regard. Never shall I forget that solemn moment of my life, and my dear little Otto’s touching words, which he wrote for me in the little volume of the “Imitation” he gave me in remembrance of the day. For some time before the confirmation, in order that I might give my whole thoughts to preparing for so serious an event, my music-lessons had been stopped; I had not been allowed to practise at all, so that it was with renewed energy that I returned to it afterwards. The riding-lessons which I now had from one of my uncle’s equerries, a most excellent riding-master, gave me less pleasure. This exercise, like dancing, seemed dull to me, from lack of intellectual stimulus.

But I should never have done if I tried to enumerate all those who contributed to my education, and from whom at some time or other I have learnt. It was not always from one’s regular professors that the most useful lessons came. We are forever learning, for Life itself is a school from which there is no playing truant, and whose teaching only stops at the grave. As for educational systems and theories, Nature, the greatest teacher of all, often laughs these to scorn. The best of them is but a bed of Procrustes, to fit which human limbs are ruthlessly lopped or stretched. Wiser were we to leave to Nature’s self the task of fashioning each individual in youth. She has not made all on one pattern, and diversity, not uniformity, is her aim.