Part 10
"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 album 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 principal (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 passion which shall compel and lighten for him the hardest. Now to this end no lugubrious passions 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 stitched 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 nobility 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 circumstantial as Voss does his Idyls_.
"Thus have I used the molding and modeling tool upon my Gustavus, not, assuredly, 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 principal 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 godfather 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 Classics, 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 constituted 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 washing schedule of those classic 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 classic 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 vassals 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 assert that in the classic 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, circumspection 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 Gods, 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 antitheses 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 noble! The ancients were men, not literati. What are you? And what do you get from them?...
_Copiam vocabulorum_.--In the Middle Ages every least benefit derived from the ancients was great; but now, in the eighteenth century, when all nations have hewn a _gradus ad Parnassum_ in the granite of the Muses, two or three steps more or less make very little difference. Have, then, modern nations not written in the ancient taste? Were it so, then, at any rate, models, which have not multiplied themselves at all in copies, might easily be spared. But it is not even so, and an Omar-like conflagration of all the ancients could only snatch from us a little more than if the still extant autumnal-flora of a few Greek temples and other ruins were swept away; we should still possess houses in the Greek taste. The models themselves surely wrote without models, and the statue of Polycletes was fashioned after the statue of a Polycletes. Despite the study of the ancient writings, the poetic and creative power once lay in Germany, and still lies in Italy, on the sick bed.
Whoever, like Heyne, will make the ancients necessary to the _formal_ cultivation of the soul, such a one forgets that any language is equal to that, and that a more unlike language, as the Oriental, can do it still better, and that this cultivation sometimes costs us as dear as many a Baron finds his French. The Greeks and Romans became Greeks and Romans without the formal cultivation of Greek and Latin authors--they became so through government and climate.
It is unfortunate for the finest productions of the human mind that their fineness is rubbed off under the hands of the pupils of the First, Second and Third Classes; that the Heads of Schools can imagine that a better edition or better nominal and scientific explanations should put the young gynmasiasts into a better position to appreciate the sublime classic ruins than an improved and corrected edition of Shakespeare and the appended romances with notes would enable a schoolman or a Frenchman to open his eyes before this English Genius--that these same Heads accordingly imagine that nothing keeps a eunuch or infant cold to the charms of a Cleopatra except the wrappages of these charms, and that the Heads are nowise behind me and nature.[34]
For Nature trains our taste through prominent beauties for finer ones. The youth prefers wit to sentiment, bombast to sense, Lucan to Virgil, the French to the ancients. At bottom this taste of the minor is in one respect not far out of the way, namely, that it feels certain minor beauties more strongly than we, but the flaws bound up with them and the higher charms more feebly than any of us; for we should only be so much the more perfect, if at the same time with our present feeling for the Greek epigram we could combine our lost youthful enthusiasm for the French. One should therefore let the youth satisfy himself with these dainties, as the confectioner does his apprentice with the other kind, so long, till he shall become sated with them and hungry for higher food. But now-a-days, inversely, he translates himself to satiety from the ancients, and forms and spices with them his taste for the moderns. In our authorial world we see the sad result; that teachers begin at the end and undertake, by means of writers who properly only give the tenderest, best taste the last finish, to carve that of the gymnasiast out of the rough, and so follow neither nature nor me.
The Head Masters are apprehensive, to be sure, that "the young people might thereby get more wit into their heads than is proper, if one should read Seneca, epigrams and corrupt authors." My first answer is that the constitution of the German is robust and healthy enough to be less exposed to the spotted fever of wit than other peoples: _e. g_., the witty book "On Marriage" or the writings of Hamann, we compensate for by a thousand pure works which have no wit in them. I have of often thought, therefore, just as the German knows little of his superior merit, so, too, he knows nothing of this one, that he has no superfluous wit, although the reviewers often enough reproach me and the romancers with this superfluity. But I and these authors demand impartial judges on the subject. Even these otherwise insignificant reviewers themselves are, to their honor, so little like a Seneca or a Rousseau, both of whom condemned, combatted, and yet affected the witty style, that they strictly rebuke the fault of wit in others, and happily avoid it themselves.
My second answer goes deeper: before the body of man is developed, every artificial development of the soul is injurious to him; philosophical straining of the understanding, poetic exertion of the fancy, unsettle the youthful powers themselves, and others too. Only the development of wit, which, in the case of children, is so little thought of, is the most harmless--because it works only in light, fugitive effects;--the most beneficial--because it sets the new wheel-work of ideas into quicker and quicker motion--because, through invention, it imparts interest and control over one's ideas--because that of others and one's own (wit) in these early years charms us most with its brilliancy. Why have we so few inventions, and so many scholars in whose heads lie mere _immovable_ goods, and the ideas of every science dwell secluded from each other club-wise in convents, so that, when a man writes on one science, he never thinks of anything that he knows in another? Merely because children are taught ideas more than the handling of ideas, and because in school their thoughts have to be fixed as immovably as their fundaments.
One should imitate Schloetzer's hand in history and other sciences. I accustomed my Gustavus to hear, to understand and thereby to invent for himself, analogies from different sciences, _e. g_., All things great or weighty move slowly; hence the Oriental Princes do not walk at all--nor the Dalai Lama; the Sun--the Sea-crab--wise Greeks (according to Winkelmann) walked slowly--so does the hour-hand--the ocean--the clouds in fair weather--move slowly. Or; In winter, men, the earth, the pendulum, go slower. Or; The following were kept secret,--the name of Jehovah--of Oriental Princes--of Rome and its patron Deity--the Sybilline books--the first early Christian Bible, the Catholic, the Veda, etc. It is indescribable what pliability of all ideas is thereby communicated to children's minds. Of course the various kinds of knowledge must be there first, which one would thus associate. But enough! the pedant neither approves nor understands me; and the better teacher says himself: enough!
SEVENTEENTH SECTION.
Holy Supper.--Succeeding Love-feast and Kiss of Love.
Oh, beloved Gustavus! the wintered days of our love burst forth and bloom again from my ink-stand, as I delineate them! Hast thou, reader, ever had a spring-time of life, and does its image still hang in thy memory; then lay it, in the winter-month of life, to thy warm bosom and give its colors life, as the heating of the stove discloses and animates its invisible spring-pictures--and then think of thy flowery days, while I depict one.... Our four walls were the railings of a richer paradise than any pleasure park exhibits, the cherry tree at our window was our Dessian School-grove[35] and Kindergarten, and two human beings were happy, although one commanded and the other obeyed. The machinery of praise, which was so emphatically extolled in the regulations for my tutor, I laid aside, because it was not applicable to one, but to a whole school; my chain-pump-work was his love for me. Children love so easily, so heartily; how poorly must he manage who makes them hate him! On the scale of my punitory Carolina or Theresiana--instead of the usual pedagogic disgraces and corporal inflictions--stood coldness--a mournful look--a mournful reproof--and, severest of all, the threat of going away. Children like Gustavus, of tender heart, and of a fancy that flutters at every breath of wind, are easily diverted and directed; but at the same time a single false twitch at the rein will confuse and bring them to a stand-still forever. Especially are the honeymoon weeks of such an education as dangerous as those after marriage to a woman of fine feelings, with whom a single cacochymic[36] afternoon is not to be effaced again by any subsequent seasons of day or year. I will just confess: on such a sensitive woman's account was I made tutor. As women (so it ran in my mind) have, in a striking degree, all the perfections of children--their faults somewhat less:--accordingly a man, who knows how to attach and fasten his web to the widely diverging boughs of childhood, _i. e_., who can adapt himself to a child, cannot possibly fare so ill as others when he--marries.