It is also my opinion that the antiphonious double choir of the two
educational colleagues, Wehmeier and Falterle, had hitherto trained our
Norman, as well as two similar gymnasiarchs, Governess England and
domestic French instructress France, have actually educated the
charity-school-girl Germany according to the best school-books, so that
now we, in our turn, are in a condition to school the Poles, and, with
the ferule, from the desk of our princely schools, to kantschu them down
as much as is necessary.
But now too much had waked up in Albano. He felt overswelling energies
which found no teacher. His father, roving round through Italy, seemed
to be neglecting him. That seat of the muses, Pestitz,--which now had
_one_ more muse added to its number,--seemed to be unjustly barred
against him. Often he knew not how to stay away. Fancy, heart, blood,
and ambition were at boiling heat. In such a case, as in every
fermenting cask, nothing is more dangerous than an empty space, whether
from a want of knowledge or of occupation.
_Dian filled up the cask._
He came each week from the city, as if he had to arrange the hammer-work
of the church, according to plans, as well as the building of its walls.
A youth who sees his first Greek cannot, at the outset, rightly believe
it at all; he takes him for a classic glorification,--a printed sheet
out of Plutarch. And if his heart burns like that of my hero, and if his
Greek is of Spartan descent, like Dian,--namely, an unconquered
_Mainotte_, who has been brought up in the classic double choir of the
æsthetic singing-schools in Atiniah (Athens) and Rome,--then is it
natural that the inspired youth should stand every day in the dust-and
rubbish-clouds of the falling church-walls, and wait to see his
commander come forth from behind the cloudy pillar.
Dian accompanied his beloved in his walks, often read half the night
with him, and took him with him on the architectural journeys which he
had constantly to make into the country. He introduced him with inspired
reverence into the holy world of Homer and of Sophocles, and went with
him among the loftier beings of this twin Prometheus, those nobly
formed, completely developed men, yet unperverted by a partial
provincial culture, who, like Solomon, had a time for everything
human,--for laughing, weeping, eating, fearing, and hoping,--and who
shunned merely rude immoderateness; who sacrificed on the altars of all
gods, but on that of Nemesis first of all. And Dian, whose inner man was
a whole, from which no member is torn away, no one swollen, and all
fully grown, himself went round with his darling as such a Greek of
Homer and Sophocles. While Wehmeier and the foster-parents were always
running after him with a pulpit and a pew, at every passionate
expression of anger, or desire, or exultation, he, on the contrary, with
fair, liberal freedom, made room for him to unfold himself to his full
breadth and height. He respected in the youth the St. Elmo's or St.
Helena's fire, as he did frost in an old man: the heart of vigorous men,
he thought, must, like a porcelain vase, in the beginning, be turned too
large and too wide; in the furnace of the world it would soon enough
shrink up to a proper size. I too require of youth, at first,
intolerance, then, after some years, tolerance,--that as the stony, sour
fruit of a strong young heart, this as the soft winter-fruit of an older
head.
But while the Architect drew with him, and with him examined casts of
the antiques and works of art, he at the same time made manifest most
beautifully to the youth his love for the artistical _sign of the
Balance_ in man (who ought to be his own work of art), and his aversion
to every paroxysm, which breaks the outward beauty as well as the inward
into folds and wrinkles, and his desire to regulate his form and his
heart after the lofty pattern of repose on the antiques.
The Architect, as artists often do, and the Swiss still oftener,
preserved European culture and rural _naïveté_ and simplicity side by
side, like his beloved profession, wherein, more than in other arts,
beauty and surveying reason border upon each other; he therefore at
first let Albano look in and listen at the window of the philosophical
lecture-hall from without, standing in the open air. He led him, not
into the stone-quarry, lime-pit, and timber-yard of metaphysics, but
directly into the ready-made, beautiful oratory, formed of the materials
thence collected, otherwise called Natural Theology. He did not let him
forge and solder ring after ring of any iron chain of reasoning, but
showed such a one to him as a deep-reaching well-chain, whereby Truth,
sitting at the bottom, is to be drawn up; or as a chain hanging from
heaven, whereby the lower gods (the philosophers) are to draw Jupiter
down. In short, the _skeleton_ and _muscle-preparation_ of metaphysics
he concealed in the _God-man_ of religion. And so it should be (in the
beginning); grammar is learned from language more easily than the latter
from the former; criticism from works of art, the skeleton from the
body, more easily than the reverse; although we always do reverse it.
Unfortunate is it for the youth of our day, that they are obliged to
shake the drops and the insects from the tree of knowledge, before the
fruit.
And now he boldly threw open to him all the chamber-doors of the
philosophical schools, i. e. the three heavens; for in this youthful
season one still takes the wick of every learned light of the world for
asbestos, as Brahmins dress themselves in asbestos; and the masses of
ice around the poles of our spiritual world represent, at this early
age, like the actual ones in the visible world, cities and temples on
azure-blue columns.
Now when Albano had read himself to the flaming point upon some great
idea or other, as Immortality or Deity, he had then to write upon it;
because the Architect believed, and I too, that in the educational world
nothing goes beyond writing,--not even reading and speaking; and that a
man may read thirty years with less improvement than he would gain by
writing a half. It is just in this way that we authors mount to such
heights; hence it is that even the worst of us, if we hold out, become
somewhat, at last, and write ourselves up from Schilda to Abdera, and
from there away up to Grub Street.
But what a glowing hour then came on for our darling! What are all
Chinese lantern-festivals to the high festival for which an inflamed
youth lights up all the chambers of his brain, and in this illumination
throws out his first essays?
In the forepart, and on the very threshold of the essay perhaps, Albano
still crept along step by step, and made use merely of his head; but as
he got further on, and his heart quivered with wings, and like a comet
he must needs sweep along before only shimmering constellations of great
truths, could he then restrain himself from imitating the rosy-red
Flamingo, who, in his passage towards the sun, seems to paint himself
into a flying brand, and to clothe himself in wings of fire? When at
length he reached the practical application, verily every one was like
the others; in each he formed and sowed an Arcadia full of human angels,
who in three minutes could cross over on a Charon's pontoon thrown in
for the purpose, and land in the Elysium which floated so near: in every
one of these practical applications all men were saints, all saints
beatified; all mornings blossoms, and all evenings fruit; Liana
perfectly well, and he not far from it--her lover;--all nations ascended
more easily the noonday heights; and he upon his own, like men upon
mountains, saw everything good nearer to him. Ah! the whole boggy
present, full of stumps and blood-suckers, had he kicked aside, and was
now encircled only with floating green worlds, full of pastures, which
the sun-ball of his head had projected into the ether.
Blissful, blissful time! thou hast long since gone by! O, the years in
which man reads and makes his first poems and systems, when the spirit
creates and blesses its first worlds, and when, full of fresh
morning-thoughts, it sees the first constellations of truth come up
bringing an eternal splendor, and stand ever before the longing heart,
which has enjoyed them, and to which time, by and by, offers only
astronomical newspapers and refraction-tables on the morning-stars, only
antiquated truths and rejuvenated lies! O, then was man, like a fresh,
thirsty child, suckled and reared with the milk of wisdom; at a later
period he is only cured with it, as a withered, sceptical, hectic
patient! But thou canst, indeed, never come back again, glorious season
of _first love_ for the truth, and these sighs can only give me a
warmer remembrance of thee; and if thou ever shouldst return, it
certainly could not be down here in the low mine-shaft of life, where
our morning splendor consists of the little flames that play upon the
quartz crystals, and our sun is a mine-lamp,--no; but it may happen
then, when death reveals us, and tears away from over the heads of the
pale-yellow workmen the coffin-lid of the mine-shaft, and we now again
stand as first men on a new, full earth, and under a fresh, immeasurable
heaven!
Into this golden age of his heart fell also his acquaintance with
Rousseau and Shakespeare, of whom the former exalted him above his
century, and the latter above this life. I will not say here how
Shakespeare ruled, sovereign, in his heart,--not through the breathing
of living characters, but by lifting him up out of the loud kingdom of
earth into the silent realm of infinity. When one dips his head at night
under water, there is an awful stillness round about him; into a similar
supernatural stillness of the under-world does Shakespeare introduce us.
What many schoolmasters may blame in Dian is this, that he gave the
youth all books indiscriminately, without any exact course of reading.
But Alban asked, in later years: "Is such a course anything but folly?
Is it possible? For does Fate ever arrange the appearance of new books,
or systems, or teachers, or outward circumstances, or conversations, so
according to paragraphs, that one needs nothing more than to transcribe
all that passes upon the memory, and he shall have the order into the
bargain? Does not every head need and make its own? And does more depend
on the order in which the meats follow each other, or on the digestion
of them?"