If we open the two school-rooms, we shall see the Band-box-master, in
the forenoon, sitting and brooding upon the two-yolked eggs of the
_élève_, and the accomplishing master, in the afternoon, just as the
cock-pigeon guards the nest the former part of the day, and the female
the latter.
Now Wehmeier, as well as his competitor, was fain to take possession of
his pupil with wholly new instructions; but what were new to him were
new to himself. Like most of the older schoolmasters, he knew--of
astronomy, except the little that was found in the book of Joshua, and
of physics, except the few errors which existed in his rather-forgotten
than torn-up manuscript books, and of philosophy, except that of
Gottsched, which required, however, a riper pupil, and of other real
sciences--strictly speaking, nothing, except a little history. If
ever--in the literary Sahara, to which the tormenting screw of
school-lessons, without end, and the beggar's or cripple's wagon of a
life without pay, that had been turned rather into dross than into ore,
had exiled him--new methods of teaching or new discoveries came to his
ears (they never came to his eyes), he noted, at the moment, that they
were his own, only with a shade of variation; and he concealed from no
one the plagiarism. I heartily beg, however, all silken and powdered and
curly-haired Princes' instructors, blame not too sorely my poor
Wehmeier, so deeply overlaid with the heavy, thick strata of fate, for
his subterranean optics and his crookedness of posture, but reckon his
eight children and his eight school-hours and his approaching fifties in
his life's grotto of Antiparos, and then decide whether the man can,
under these circumstances, come out again into light?
But yet of history he knew, as was said, something; and this he seized
upon as pedagogical lucky-bone and Fortunatus's wishing-cap. Had he not
already, in that epical, picturesque style of paraphrase,--whereby he
could relate the smallest market-town history in such an interesting and
fictitious way, (for whence will a good story-teller draw the thousand
lesser but necessary touches but from his head?)--lectured out to his
Albano Hübner's Biblical History, in a manner extremely touching? And
which wept most during the delivery, teacher or scholar?
Now he had three historical courses open before him. He could strike
into the geographical road, which begins with the wretchedest history in
the world,--the history of countries. But only the British and the
French, at most, can begin history as an epic, and a description of the
earth backward; on the contrary, a Haarhaar, Baireuth, or Mecklenberg
princely patristic gives hollow teeth hollow nuts to crack, without meat
for head and heart. And does not one magnify thereby a twig of history,
on which the accident of birth has deposited the young barkchafer, most
disproportionately into a tree of consanguinity? And what cares one in
Berlin, for instance, to inquire after a lineage of Margraves, or in
Hof, after the pedigree of the Regents of Hohenzollern?
The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses
in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according
to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the
22d October,[35] hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's
and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the
29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to
the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is
compelled to listen to the case.
This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange.
He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the
rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us
more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the
heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives
from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace
for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works
of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against
every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning,
walk along several times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen,
ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within,
although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,--the
biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,--not the shadowy world of
states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy
family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with
which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher,
as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds
of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and
descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the
whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that
blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could
he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality?
Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the
Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato
and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was
cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the
eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard
nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible
effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so,
from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting
which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,--hair, moss,
roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,--was hidden by
the floor of the (geographical and historical) Old World, which, like
the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full
of broken inscriptions.