When I had set in order round my sitting-room and school-room my valuables (they were manuscripts) 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 analyze 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 goddess, 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, Constitution, Laws, Rome, Athens? As regards Mr. Schröckh, 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 theunderstandingthan thememory. 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 ofinstructiondoes not make good to them the place of the instructor, nor theamusingone that of more wholesome play. Poetry is for abeardlessage too unintelligible and unwholesome; the teacher whoreads a lecturemust be a miserable one, if he does not far more emphaticallyspeak. 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 aspelling-schoolof morals, but their heart may become an illuminatedRotunda[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 theirgood 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 theSundayenjoyment 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 everymeans 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 cometoo oftenor onlyfrom 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 agrowing 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, andmake 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 namedHetz, 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.
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 aCamerarius, 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 thenumberof their admirers does not keep pace with theworthof 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 thespiritof the ancients must grow dull, as well as for theirspeech. 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. Theartificial, 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 Tyrôlese 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 Æschylus, 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 truestnine-proofof 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 agradus ad Parnassumin 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 theformalcultivation 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 mereimmovablegoods, 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 Schlötzer'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!
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.
Where censure would hurt the child's sense of honor and self-respect, there I suppressed it, in order to teach my colleagues round about by example, that the sense of honor and character which our days do not sufficiently educate, is the best thing in man--that all other feelings, even the noblest, let him fall out of their arms at hours when the sentiment of honor holds him up in its own--that among men whose principles are silent and whose passions scream into each other's ears, their sense of honor alone imparts to the friend, the creditor and the beloved an iron security.
Seven days earlier than the regular time my Gustavus communed; for the Consistory--the Westphalian tribunal[37][or Star Chamber], of the parsons, the Penitentiary of the churches and the counterpoise of the government, sent out to us at the castle with pleasure these seven days which his communion-age wanted of its full weight, tor the same number of guilders, as a spiritual fast-dispensation or remission on account of age, (venia ætatis). My pupil had therefore--while the most competent religious teacher sat idle at home--to march out twice a week to the stupid senior parson Setzmann in Auenthal, who fortunately was no jurist as I was, and in whose parsonage a herd of catechumens were obliged to thrust their noses into the coagulated catechismal milk;--Gustavus instead of the beast's tapering snout brought with him a too short muzzle.
Nevertheless, senior Setzmann was not bad; on a parliamentary wool-sack he might have sat till he became an orator,i. e., a creature who, among the persons who in the beginning do not believe him, persuades himself first of all. An orator is as easy to be persuaded as he is able to persuade. The senior, in the first hour after the sermon each Sunday, was pious enough; he might indeed incur damnation, but it would be merely for want of sermons and of beer. A reasonable intoxication stands instead, to an incredible degree, of both theasceticand thepoeticenthusiasm. The readers are no friends of mine who say it is out of mere envy and chagrin that my Gustavus heard his lectures, if I record and send it out into the world that the cellar was the Parson's church of St. Paul and St. Peter--that his soul, like the flying fish, soared upward only so long as its wings were oiled--that he appeared always intoxicated and tenderly affected at once, and never aspired to enter heaven, until he could no longer see it. Hermes and Oemler say that I should avoid offence--although theexampleof Setzmann must give a greater than the making fun of it--if I should deliver in Latin, that theaquæ supercelestesof his eyes always accompanied his two-inches-deeperhumores peccantes.
Gustavus went out to him on breezy spring-afternoons over the young grass, enjoying on his way the prospect of two charming things. The first was this missionary of the young village heathen himself, whose enthusiastic breath stirred like a tempest Gustavus's ideas, every one of which was a sail, and who, especially in the last and sixth week, when he stretched the young subjects of thesix weeks' confinementon the last of the sixth article, so lengthened the ears of my Gustavus that there grew out from them a pair of wings that flew away with his little head. Secondly, his heart was set upon abroad bandabove a broad neckerchief and a corresponding apron, all of which, moreover, was as blossom-white as he, and adorned the fairest body in the whole parish--namely, that of Regina--who was preparing herself there for the second communion. Such a phenomenon, my Gustavus, quite naturally attracted more than distracted thee; and if the school-government had set over against me only half of such a muse on the seat of instruction in the place of my pot-bellied leaky conrector--Heavens! I should have learned, furthermore memorized, furthermore declined, likewise conjugated, and finally expounded! It was, therefore, secondly, no witchcraft, Gustavus--inasmuch as thine ear only was turned to thewindwardside of the pastor, but thine eye to thesunnyside of Regina--that thou shouldst have made small account of the extra half hour which the senior gave, by way of befooling his conscience. He made, in order to quiet that assessor and judge and summoner in the heart, the conscience, his catechizings half an hour,[38]and his sermons three quarters longer than the whole diocese. Man likes to do more than his duty better than to do his duty.
As Gustavus did not know that girls overlook nothing and overhear everything, the whole catechism was to him a love letter, in which he conversed with her. When she had to answer the senior, he grew red; "the senior" (he thought), "cannot answer for his questioning and tormenting," and his optic nerve took root in her face.
As the Falkenbergs had no special communion-chamber with velvet floor, my god-father, the Captain, went at the head of his vassals up round the altar; and, therefore, Gustavus did too.
On the eve of Confession-Sunday--Oh ye tranquil days of my purest raptures, pass by again before me and give me your childish hand, that I may faithfully describe you in all your beauty!--on Saturday, after dinner, Gustavus--who even during the meal had hardly been able to look upon his parents for love and emotion--went up stairs in order, after so beautiful a custom, to beg pardon of his parents for his faults. Man is never so beautiful as when he begs or grants forgiveness. He went up slowly, in order that his eyes might grow dry and his voice steadier; but when he came before the parental eyes, he quite broke down again; he held for a long time in his glowing hand the paternal one, with the intention of saying something, were it only the three words: "Father, forgive me!" but he could not find any voice, and parents and child transformed words into silent embraces.
He came to me also.... in certain moods one is glad that another is in the same, and therefore forgives one.... I would, Gustavus, that I had thee at this moment in my chamber. If childrenconceiveof God--not (as grown up people do), as one like themselves, that is as a child--but as a man: for a child's heart, that is enough. Gustavus, after these confessions, went--reeling, trembling, stupefied, as if he saw, what he thought, namely, God--down into the deserted cavern of his childhood, where below the earth's surface he had been trained up, and where his first days and first plays and wishes lay buried. Here he would fain kneel down, and, in this state of confused devotion, wherein the genius of suns and worlds in that perhaps holiest time of our life beholds all warm hearted children, transform his whole soul into a single sound, a single sigh, and offer it up on the altar of thanksgiving; but this greatest human thought tore itself away like a new soul from his, and overmastered it--Gustavus lay prostrate, and even his thoughts were dumb ... But the voice is heard that remains in the bosom, and the thought is seen that sinks back under the rays of the genius; and in the other world, man gives voice to prayers which were stifled here below....
On the evening of this sacredly blissful day, peace, as a tender nurse,[39]bore on her secure hands his overfreighted heart; he did not violently throw his short childish and human arms around the goddess of joy, but she gently folded her maternal arms round him. This zephyr of tranquillity--instead of that hurricane of exultation which hurries man through and against everything--still continued on Whitsuntide to play around his blossoming young life, and his being lay as if wafted on a soft cloud when the radiant Whitsunday sun found him; but when the flower-fragrance of the decorated breast, the feeling and the pressure of the rustling attire, the pealing of the bells whose prolonged vibrations ran like golden threads around all individual scenes and bound them together in one, the odor of the birch trees and the green claro-oscuro of the church, even the fasting--when all this flung his feelings and the globules of his blood into flying circles, then did there stand in his bosom a kindled sun; never did the image and ideal of a virtuous man burn before him in so great cloud-transcending outlines as then!
But the evening! Then did the little communicants stroll round in modest groups with lighter heart and fuller stomach and with a distinct sense of food and finery. Gustavus--of whose flames the supper had smothered some portion, though a soft glow still lingered--roamed slowly up and down his garden, (for his brain was no dancing-place, but a moss-bank of joyous feelings), and tore open the tulip-leaves which had closed in slumber, in order to let loose from their flowery prison many a belated bee. At last, he leaned against the post of the rear garden gate and looked down longingly over the meadows into the village, where the rows of parents were chatting together and with eyes of motherly vanity following their children,--parents who to-day walked out for the first and haply for the last time, because peasants and orientals love best to sit. At that moment there moved cautiously around the garden-wall a shy picket of peasants' children, whose object was to hear more nearly the old starling, which Gustavus had to-day brought in its cage out into open air, and amuse themselves with the racy and saucy words the bird would utter in his tone of genuine irony. Children in strange clothes, and strange places, are strangers to each other; but Gustavus had fortunately his key-note at hand by which to pass over into conversation with them, the starling, and had only to begin one with him. And the plan succeeded; the rhetorical arts of the bird soon made the conversation so general and unembarrassed, that one could talk with every one about everything. Gustavus began to tell stories, but before a younger and fairer public than mine; his stories he invented and related at the same moment, and his fancy's wings hit against nothing in the immeasurable careering-ground. In fact, one invents more ingeniouscontesin talking than in writing, and Madame D'Aunoy, whom I would rather marry than read, would have given us grown-up children better fairy tales if she had invented them before the ears of the little ones.
Under the pretext of sitting down, he invited and entreated his whole audience and public to come up to a terrace which, with a stairway, was woven and arched around a linden-tree in the garden.... I do not let my readers sit down so quickly; for bees, carvers, and I, love lindens exceedingly, those for the honey, these for the soft wood, and I for the sake of the name and the fragrance.
But here is still something quite different to love--three maiden communicants were listening at the open garden gate, and reinforced the audience at a distance; in a word, Regina was down below, and her brother was already in the party above; the gallery or the boxes must needs at last--since calling up availed nothing--drag up the female parterre. I myself narrate now with more fire; no wonder that Gustavus did so too. Regina seated herself farthest off from him, but opposite to him. He began an entirely fresh history, because thebureau d'esprithad become much stronger. He depicted a poor, miserable little girl--children love best stories about children--one without supper, without parents, without bed, without a hood, and without sins, but who, when a star had dressed itself in finery and journeyed down, found on the ground a bright dollar, on which was set a silver angel, which angel grew even brighter and broader, till he actually spread his wings and flew up from the dollar to heaven, and then brought down to the little one from all the stars up there everything she wanted, and indeed magnificent things, whereupon the angel set himself back on the silver again, and very neatly pressed himself down there. What flames, during this creation, burst forth from Gustavus's words, from his eyes and features into his auditory! And then, too, the moon meanwhile embroidered the linden-night on the floor with wavering points of silver--a belated bee cruised through the glowing circle, and a bumming hawk-moth around a crowned head--on the double ground of linden-green and sky-blue leaves quivered among stars--the night-breeze rocked itself on their foliage, and on gold-spangles of the decorated Regina, and washed with cool waves her fiery cheek and Gustavus's breath of flame.... But, verily, I assert,thepulpit he needed not, so magnificent were pulpit and orator. How could that be necessary for him, when he was narrating to the bride of Christ and his own; when the whole past day rose again with its dazzling nimbus; when he infused pity into the breasts of the unpreoccupied and unsophisticated children, and wrung it forth again from their eyes; and when he saw certain maidenly ones grow moist.... His own melted into ecstasy, and he expanded his smile more and more broadly, in order to cover therewith his eye, which had already veiled itself more tenderly.... "Gustavus!" the call had twice come from the Castle; but in this blissful hour no one heard it, till the voice rang out for the third time, nearer down in the garden. The stupefied Secret Society rolled down the steps--only Regina still lingered by the side of Gustavus, under the dark foliage, in order, as hastily as possible, to remove with her apron the traces of the story from her eyes, and to pin herself up a little--he stood so near to the face on which so many fair evening twilights of his life had gone down--so near and so dumb, and held her back a little when she offered to follow the rest--had she stood still, he could not have held her, but when she tore herself away, then he clasped her more tightly and in a larger embrace--her struggling drew both more closely together, but to his intoxicated soul nearness supplied the place of the kiss--the struggle brought his trembling lips to hers--but still it was not till, as she pushed back his breast from hers, and pricked his with the pin, that with inexpressible love, intensified by his own blood, he clasped her to himself, as if he would fain drain out her soul from her lips and pour in his own--they stood on two distant heavens, leaning over to each other above the abyss, and clinging to each other on the trembling ground, in order not, by letting go, to plunge down headlong between the heavens into the abyss beneath....
.... Could I depict his first kiss in a thousand times more burning colors, I would do it; for it is one of thefirst impressionstaken of the soul, one of the May-flowers of love; it is the best dephlegmation [or distillation] known to me of the earthly man. Only in this German and Belgic life is it impossible to bring it about that man shall take the first kiss for more than five or six times. By and bye he always consults his technical definition, which he carries in his head, of a kiss, and cites the paragraph in which it is found; but the sum and substance of the stupid paragraph is, that the thing is properly amutual pressure of red skins. Verily, an author of feeling cannot sit down and reflect that a kiss is one of the few things that can be enjoyed only when the bodily taste does not make itself prominent under the spiritual--but that such an author of feeling (who is no other than myself)--falls to upbraiding those who have not so much understanding as himself;--he upbraids not merely Messrs. Veit Weber and Kotzebue, in whose writings so many kisses occur, but other people also, in whose lives so many occur, especially whole picnic-parties who, after the blessing, wipe and cup each other's cheeks with their lips. If the thing is carried so far, that this fine lip-bloom of one face must be rumpled against skins of sheep and of silk-worms, against gloves (hand-sandals)[40]--then will an author of so much sensibility want to cut off the hands of thesuffering partyand the lips of the acting one....
My reason for showering the reader whom the last kiss has heated with this cold douche is not, assuredly, that I may deal with him as fate does with me; for she has made it a rule, every time that I find myself in the midst of theoil of gladnesswith which such scenes as that of Gustavus--or even the mere description of them--anoints me, to plunge me forthwith into brine and oil of vitriol. But I would do precisely the reverse, and halve with the reader the odious feeling at the exchange of opposite scenes, which poor Gustavus experienced to the full, when the voice called down: "Will you instantly--!" The Captain's lady threw into her tone a more offensive gravity than my innocent Gustavus had as yet understanding enough to feel. The loving maiden, in such surprises, loses the courage which the lover gains. The first verses of the fulminated penal psalm pierced the ear of the guiltless Regina, who stole, mute and weeping, out of the garden, and thus closed in darkness her day of joy. The softer verses took hold of the narrative-poet, who had it in mind to wind up hiscontes morauxæsthetically and pathetically,[41]and was now himself arrested by another's pathos.
Ernestina's heart, lips and oars had been trained behind the strictest grating; hence her soul, melodious as it was, lapsed (at a mere kiss) into a strange, harsh key; she admitted, in regard to the most beautiful maiden no more than: "She is a good girl." In general, the woman who judges very indulgently certain missteps of a sister is with all her toleration suspicious; a perfectly pure female soul puts on, at most, the air of this tolerance for one less pure.
On innocent lips Gustavus imprinted the first and last kiss; for in Whitsuntide-week the shepherdess went back to Maussenbach as messenger to the castle. We shall hear no more of her. And so it will go on through the book, which, like life, is full of scenes that never occur again. Even now the sun is rising higher in Gustavus's day of life and begins to scorch--one flower of joy after another bows its head already in the forenoon to slumber, and by 10 o'clock at night the drooping flora with its vanished beauty will be asleep.