CHILDHOOD AT DESSAU
In a small town such as Dessau was when I lived there as a child and
as a boy, one lived as in an enchanted island. The horizon was very
narrow, and nothing happened to disturb the peace of the little oasis.
The Duchy was indeed a little oasis in the large desert of Central
Germany. The landscape was beautiful: there were rivers small and
large—the Mulde and the Elbe; there were magnificent oak forests;
there were regiments of firs standing in regular columns like so many
grenadiers; there were parks such as one sees in England only. The
town, the capital of the Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau, had been cared for by
successive rulers—men mostly far in advance of their time—who had
read and travelled, and brought home the best they could find abroad.
Their old castle, centuries old, over-awed the town; it was by far the
largest building, though there were several other smaller places in
the town for members of the ducal family. All the public buildings,
theatres, libraries, schools, and barracks, had been erected by the
Dukes, as well as several private residences intended for some of the
higher officials. The whole town was, in fact, the creation of the
Dukes; the whole ground on which it stood had been originally their
property, but it was mostly held as freehold by those who had built
their own private houses on it. No one would have built a house on
leasehold land, and several of the houses were of so substantial a
character that one saw they had been intended to last for more than
ninety-nine years. The same family often remained in their house for
generations, and the different stories were occupied by three
generations at the same time—by grandparents, parents, and children.
In this small town I was born on December 6, 1823. My father, Wilhelm
Müller, was Librarian of the Ducal Library, and one of the most
popular poets in Germany. A national monument was erected to his
memory at Dessau in the year 1891, nearly a hundred years after his
birth.
[Illustration: MY FATHER]
What a blessing it would be if such a rule were followed with all
great men, who seem so great at the time of their death, and who, a
hundred years later, are almost forgotten, or at all events
appreciated by a small number of admirers only. This Monument- and
Society-mania is indeed becoming very objectionable, for if for some
time there has been no room for tombs and statues in Westminster
Abbey, there will soon be no room for them in the streets of London.
The result is that many of the people who walk along the Thames
Embankment, particularly foreigners, often ask, “Cur?” when looking at
the human idols in bronze and marble put up there; while historians,
remembering the really great men of England, would ask quite as often,
“Cur non?” There is a curious race of people, who, as soon as a man of
any note dies, are ready to found anything for him—a monument, a
picture, a school, a prize, a society—to keep alive his memory. Of
course these societies want presidents, members of council,
committees, secretaries, &c., and at last, subscriptions also. Thus it
has happened that the name of founder (_Gründer_) has assumed,
particularly in Germany, a perfume by no means sweet. Those who are
asked to subscribe to such testimonials know how disagreeable it is to
decline to give at least their name, deeply as they feel that in
giving it they are offending against all the rules of historical
perspective. I should not say that my father was one of the great
poets of Germany, though Heine, no mean critic, declared that he
placed his lyric poetry next to that of Goethe. Besides, he was barely
thirty-three when he died. He had been a favourite pupil of F. A.
Wolf, and had proved his classical scholarship by his _Homerische
Vorschule_, and other publications. His poems became popular in the
true sense of the word, and there are some which the people in the
street sing even now without being aware of the name of their author.
Schubert’s compositions also have contributed much to the wide
popularity of his _Schöne Müllerin_ and his _Winterreise_, so that
though it might truly be said of him that he wanted no monument in
bronze or stone, it seemed but natural that a small town like Dessau
should wish to honour itself by honouring the memory of one of its
sons. In the company of Mendelssohn, the philosopher, and of F.
Schneider, the composer, a monument of my father in the principal
street of his native town, and before the school in which he had been
a pupil and a teacher, could hardly seem out of place. That the Greek
Parliament voted the Pentelican marble for the poet of the
_Griechenlieder_, as it had done for Lord Byron, was another
inducement for his fellow citizens to do honour to their honoured
poet. He died when I was hardly four years old, so that my
recollection of him is very faint and vague, made up, I believe, to a
great extent, of pictures, and things that my mother told me. I seem
to remember him as a bright, sunny, and thoroughly joyful man,
delighted with our little naughtinesses. One book I still possess
which he bought for me and which was to be the first book of my
library. It was a small volume of Horace, printed by Pickering in
1820. It has now almost vanished among the 12,000 big volumes that
form my library, but I am delighted that I am still able, at
seventy-six, to read it without spectacles. I think I remember my
father taking my sister and me on his knees, and telling us the most
delightful stories, that set us wondering and laughing and crying till
we could laugh and cry no longer. He had been a fellow worker with the
brothers Grimm, and the stories he told were mostly from their
collection, though he knew how to embellish them with anything that
could make a child cry and laugh.
People have little idea how great and how lasting an influence such
popular stories about kings and queens, and princesses and knights,
about ogres and witches, about men that have been changed into
animals, and about animals that talk and behave like human beings,
exercise on the imagination of young children. While we listened, a
new world seemed to open before us, and anything like doubt as to the
reality of these beings never existed. What was reality or unreality
to young children of four and five? How few people know what real
reality is, even after they have reached the age of fifty or sixty.
For children, such names as reality and unreality do not exist, nor
the ideas which they express. They listen to what their father tells
them, and they cannot see any difference between what he tells them of
Frederick Barbarossa, of Romulus and Remus suckled by a wolf, or of
the dwarfs that guarded the coffin of Schneewittchen.
Some people, however, have thought that from an educational point of
view, a belief in this imaginary world must be mischievous. I doubt
it, and it would be easy to show that originally these stories and
fables were really meant to inculcate right and good principles.
Luther declared that he would not lose these wonderful stories of his
tender childhood for any sum of money, and Camerarius (_Fabulae
Aesopeae_, p. 406, Lipsiae, 1570) speaks of these German fables as
filling the minds of the people, and particularly of children, with
terror, hope, and religion. The oldest collections in which some of
these Aesopean fables occur, the Pantschatantra and Hitopadesa in
Sanskrit, were distinctly intended for the education of princes, and
though they may make the young listeners inclined to be superstitious,
such superstitiousness is not likely to last long. Children delight in
_Märchen_ as in a kind of pantomime, and when the curtain has fallen
on that fairy world they often think of it as of a beautiful dream
that has passed away. The stories are certainly more impressive than
the proverbs and wise saws which many of them were meant to
illustrate, without always saying, _haec fabula docet_. Even if some
of these stories touch sometimes on what may not seem to us quite
correct, it is done to make children laugh rather at the silliness
than cry at the downright wickedness of some of the heroes. It is by
no means uncommon, for instance, that a good-for-nothing fellow
succeeds, while his virtuous companions fail. But there is either a
reason for it, or the injustice provokes the indignation of children,
long before they have learnt that in real life also virtue does not
always receive its reward, while falsehood often prospers, at least
for a time. There is no harm, I think, in a certain dreaminess in
children. I remember that I have often laughed with all my heart at
Rumpelstilzchen, and shed bitter tears at Brüderchen and
Schwesterchen. I seemed to see brother and sister driven into the
wood, the brother being changed into a deer, and the sister sleeping
with her head on his warm fur, till at last the deer was killed by a
huntsman, and the little sister had to travel on quite alone in the
forest. Of course in the end she became a princess, and the brother a
prince who married a queen, and all ended in great joy and jubilation
in which we all joined. How good for children that they should for a
time at least have lived in such a dreamland, in which truthfulness
was as a rule rewarded, and falsehood punished in the end.
It was like a recollection of a Paradise, and such a recollection,
even if it brought out the contrast between the dream-world and the
real world, would often set children musing on what ought and what
ought not to be. They did not long believe in Dornröschen and
Schneewittchen, they learnt but too soon that Dornröschen and
Schneewittchen belonged to another world. They may even have come to
learn that Dornröschen (thorn-rose) and Schneewittchen (snow-white)
were meant originally for the sleep or death of nature in her
snow-white shroud, and the return of the sun; but woe to the boy who
on first learning these stories should have declared that they were
mere bosh, or, as Sir Walter Scott says, the detritus of nature-myths.
My father’s father, whom I never knew, seems not to have been
distinguished in any way. He was, however, a useful tradesman and a
respected citizen of Dessau, and, as I see, the founder of the first
lending library in that small town. He married a second time, a rich
widow, chiefly, as I was told, to enable him to give his son, my
father, a liberal education. She grew to be very old, and I well
remember her, to me, forbidding and terrifying appearance. She quite
belonged to a past generation, and when I saw her again after having
been in England, she asked me whether I had seen Napoleon who had been
taken prisoner and sent to England, but had lately escaped and resumed
his throne in Paris. She evidently mixed up the two Napoleons, and I
did not contradict her. To me her conversation was interesting as
showing how little the traditions of the people can be relied on, and
how easily, by the side of real history, a popular history could grow
up. After all, the poems of Charlemagne besieging Jerusalem owed their
origin very likely to some similar confusion in the minds of old
women. My sister and I were always terrified when we were sent to
visit her, for with her dishevelled grey hair, her thin white face,
and her piercing eyes, she was to us the old grandmother, or the witch
of Grimm’s stories; and the language she used was such that, if we
repeated it at home, we were severely reprimanded. She knew very
little about my father, but her memory about her first husband and
about her own youth and childhood was very clear, though not always
edifying. Her stories about ghosts, witches, ogres, nickers, and the
whole of that race were certainly enough to frighten a child, and some
of them clung to me for a very long time. On my mother’s side my
relations were more civilized, and they had but little social
intercourse with my grandmother and her relatives. My mother’s father
was von Basedow, the President, that is Prime Minister of the Duchy of
Anhalt-Dessau, a position in which he was succeeded by his eldest son,
my uncle. He was the first man in the town; the Duke and he really
ruled the Duchy exactly as they pleased. There was no check on them of
any kind, and yet no one, as far as I know, ever complained of any
tyranny. My grandfather’s father again was the famous reformer of
public education in Germany. He (1723-1790) had to brave the
conservative and clerical parties throughout the country. His home at
Hamburg was burnt in a riot, and it was then that he migrated to
Dessau, to become the founder of the _Philanthropinum_, and at the
same time the path-breaker for men such as Pestalozzi (1746-1827) and
Froebel (1782-1852). Considering his lifelong struggles, he deserved a
better monument at Dessau than he has found there. No doubt he was a
passionate and violent man, and his outbreaks are still remembered at
Dessau, while his beneficial activity has almost been forgotten. I was
often told that I took after my mother’s family, whatever that may
mean, and this was certainly the case in outward appearance, though I
hope not in temper. My great grandfather, the Pedagogue as he was
called, was a friend of Goethe’s, and is mentioned in his poems.
My childhood at home was often very sad. My mother, who was left a
widow at twenty-eight with two children, my sister and myself, was
heart-broken. The few years of her married life had been most bright
and brilliant. My father was a rising poet, and such was his
popularity that he was able to indulge his tastes as he liked, whether
in travelling or in making his house a pleasant centre of social life.
Contemporaries and friends of my father, particularly Baron Simolin, a
very intimate friend, who spent the Christmas of 1825 in our house,
have written of the bright gaiety, the whole-hearted enjoyment of life
that reigned there, and have told how, though his income was to say
the least of it small, Wilhelm Müller’s home was the rallying-point
for all the cultivated, scientific, and artistic society of Dessau,
who felt attracted by the simple and unaffected yet truly genial
disposition of the master of the house.
It would be interesting to know how much an author could make at that
time by his pen. Publishers seem to have been far more liberal then
than they are now. The circumstances were different. The number of
writers was of course much smaller, and the sale of really popular
books probably much larger. Anyhow, my father, whose salary was
minute, seems to have been able to enjoy the few years of his married
life in great comfort. The thought of saving money, however, seems
never to have entered his poetical mind, and after his unexpected
death, due to paralysis of the heart, it was found that hardly any
provision had been made for his family. Even the life insurance, which
is obligatory on every civil servant, and the pension granted by the
Duke, gave my mother but a very small income, fabulously small, when
one considers that she had to bring up two children on it. It has been
a riddle to me ever since how she was able to do it.
However, it was done, and could only have been done in a small town
like Dessau, where education was as good as it was cheap, and where
very little was expected by society. We must also take into account
the very low prices which then ruled at Dessau with regard to almost
all the necessaries of life. I see from the old newspapers that beef
sold at about threepence a pound (two groschen), mutton at about
twopence. Wine was sold at seven to eight groschen a bottle, a better
sort for twelve to fourteen groschen—a groschen being about a penny.
People drank mostly beer, and this was sold under Government
inspection at two to three groschen per quart. Fish was equally cheap,
and such, at the beginning of the century, was the abundance of salmon
caught in the Elbe, and even in the Mulde at Dessau, that it was
stipulated as in Scotland, that servants should not have salmon more
than twice or thrice in the week. The lowest price for salmon was
then twopence halfpenny a pound. As a boy I can remember seeing the
salmon in large numbers leap over a weir in the very town of Dessau,
and though they had travelled for so many miles inland, the fish was
very good, though not so good as Severn salmon. Game also was very
cheap, and sold for not much more than mutton, nay, at certain times
it was given away; it could not be exported. Corn was sold at three
shillings per _Scheffel_, and by corn was chiefly meant rye. No one
took wheaten bread, and the bread was therefore called brown bread and
black bread. White bread was only taken with coffee, and peasants in
the villages would not have touched it, because it was not supposed to
make such strong bones as rye-bread. With such prices we can
understand that a salary of £300 was considered sufficient for the
highest officers of state.
My mother’s relations, who were all high in the public service, my
grandfather, as I said, being the Duke’s chief minister, made life
more easy and pleasant for us; but for many years my mother never went
into society, and our society consisted of members of our own family
only. All I remember of my mother at that time was that she took her
two children day after day to the beautiful _Gottesacker_ (God’s
Acre), where she stood for hours at our father’s grave, and sobbed and
cried. It was a beautiful and restful place, covered with old acacia
trees. The inscription over the gateway was one of my earliest
puzzles. _Tod ist nicht Tod, ist nur Veredlung menschlicher Natur_
(Death is not death, ’tis but the ennobling of man’s nature). On each
side there stood a figure, representing the genius of sleep and the
genius of death. All this was the work of the old Duke, Leopold
Friedrich Franz, who tried to educate his people as he had educated
himself, partly by travel, partly by intercourse with the best men he
could attract to Dessau.
[Illustration: MY MOTHER]
At home the atmosphere was certainly depressing to a boy. I heard and
thought more about death than about life, though I knew little of
course of what life or death meant. I had but few pleasures, and my
chief happiness was to be with my mother. I shared her grief without
understanding much about it. She was passionately devoted to her
children, and I was passionately fond of her. What there was left of
life to her, she gave to us, she lived for us only, and tried very
hard not to deprive our childhood of all brightness. She was certainly
most beautiful, and quite different from all other ladies at Dessau,
not only in the eyes of her son, but as it seemed to me, of everybody.
Then she had a most perfect voice, and when I first began music she
helped and encouraged me in every possible way. We played _à quatre
mains_, and soon she made me accompany her when she sang. As far as I
can recollect, I was never so happy as when I could be with her. She
read so much to us that I was quite satisfied, and saw perhaps less of
my young friends than I ought. When my mother said she wished to
die, and to be with our father, I feel sure that my sister and I were
only anxious that she should take us with her, for there were few
golden chains that bound us as yet to this life. I see her now,
sitting on a winter’s evening near the warm stove, a candle on the
table, and a book from which she read to us in her hands, while the
spinning-wheel worked by the servant-maid in the corner went on
humming all the time. She read Paul Gerhard’s translation of St.
Bernard’s:
“Salve caput cruentatum,
Totum spinis coronatum,
Conquassatum, vulneratum,
Arundine verberatum,
Facies sputis illita.”
“O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden,
Voll Schmerz und voller Hohn!
O Haupt zu Spott gebunden
Mit einer Dornenkron,
O Haupt sonst schön gezieret
Mit höchster Ehr und Zier,
Jetzt aber hoch schimpfiret:
Gegrüsset seist du mir!”
Though the German translation does not come near the powerful majesty
of the original, yet such was the effect produced on me that I saw the
bleeding head before my eyes, and cried and cried until my mother had
to comfort me by assuring me that the sufferer was now in Heaven and
that it was only a song to be sung in church. How deeply such scenes
seem engraved on the memory; how vividly they return when the rubbish
of many years is swept away and all is again as it was then, and the
_caput cruentatum_ looks down on us once more, as it did then, with
the human eyes full of divine love, so truly human that one could say
with St. Bernard, “Tuum caput huc inclina, in meis pausa brachiis.”
But willingly as I listened to these readings at home, and full as my
heart was of love to Christ, I suffered intensely when I was taken to
church as a young boy. It was a very large church, and in winter
bitterly cold. Even though I liked the singing, the long sermon was
real torture to me. I could not understand a word of it, and being
thinly clad my teeth would have chattered if I had not been told that
it was wrong “to make a noise in church.” Oh! what misery is inflicted
on childhood by this enforced attendance at church. When a church can
be warmed the suffering is less intense, but a huge whitewashed church
that feels like an ice-cellar is about the worst torture that human
ingenuity could have invented to make children hate the very name of
church. These early impressions often remain for life, and the worst
of it is that the idea remains in the minds of children, and of
grown-up people too, that by going to church and repeating the same
prayers over and over again, and listening to long and often dreary
sermons, they are actually doing a service to God (_Gottesdienst_).
Why does no new prophet arise and say in the name of God, as David did
in the name of Jehovah, “Sermons and long prayers ‘thou didst not
desire’”?
Many years later I had to discuss the same question with Keshub
Chunder Sen, the Indian Reformer. He wanted to know what kind of
service should be adopted by his new church, the Brahmo Somaj; his
friends thought of sermons, singing, and processions with flags and
flowers through the streets. “No,” I said to him, “service of God
should be service of men; if you want divine service, let it be a real
service, such as God would approve of. Let other people go to church,
to their mosques or their temples, but take you your own friends on
certain days of the week to whatever you like to call your
meeting-place, and after a short prayer or a few words of advice send
some of them to the poorest streets in the city, others to the
prisons, others to the hospitals. Let them pray with all who wish to
pray, but let them speak words of true love and comfort also, and when
they can, let them help them with their alms. That would be a real
Divine Service and a divine Sunday for you, and you would all come
home, it may be sadder, but certainly wiser and better men.”
I am afraid he did not agree with me. He did not think that true
religion was to visit the poor and the afflicted. That might do for a
practical people like the English, but the Hindu wanted something
else, he wanted some outward show and ceremony for the people, and at
the same time some silent communion with God. Who can tell what
different people understand by religion? and who can prescribe the
spiritual food that is best for them? “Only,” I said, “do not call it
practical to encourage millions of people to waste hours and hours in
mere repetition, and to spend millions and millions in supplying this
cold comfort, when next door to the magnificent cathedral there are
squalid streets, and squalid houses, and squalid beds to lie and die
on.”
The religious and devotional element is very strong in Germany, but
the churches are mostly empty. A German keeps his religion for
weekdays rather than for Sunday. When the German regiments marched,
and when they made ready for battle, they did not sing ribald songs,
they sang the songs of Luther and Paul Gerhard, which they knew by
heart and which strengthened them to face death as it ought to be
faced.
Fortunately, while enforced attendance at church was apt to produce
the strongest aversion in the young heart against anything that was
called religion, religious instruction both at home and at school too
was excellent, and undid much of the mischief that had been done
during cold winter days. True religious sentiments can be planted in
the soul at home only, by a mother better even than by a father. The
sense of a divine presence everywhere, πἁντα πλἡρη θεὡν, once planted
in the heart of a child remains for life. Of course the child soon
begins to argue, and says to his mother that God cannot be at the same
time in two rooms. But only let a mother show to the child the rays of
the sun in the sky, in the streets, and in every corner of the house,
and it will begin to understand that nothing can be hid from the eyes
of Him who is greater than the sun. And when a child doubts whether
the voice of conscience can be the voice of God, and asks how he could
hear that voice without seeing the speaker, ask him only whose voice
it can be that tells him not to do what he himself wishes to do, and
not to say what he could say without any fear of men; and his idea of
God will be raised from that of a visible being like the sun, to the
concept of a presence that never vanishes, that is not only without,
in the sky, in the mountains, and in the storm, but nearer also
within, in the sense of fear, in the sense of shame, and in the hope
of pardon and love.
At school our religious teaching was chiefly historical and moral.
There was no difficulty in finding proper teachers for that, and there
were no attempts on the part of parents to interfere with religious
instruction or to demand separate teaching for each sect. It is true
that religious sects are not so numerous in Germany as they are in
England. Some, though by no means all, children of Roman Catholic and
Jewish parents were allowed to be absent from religious lessons. But
most parents knew that the history of the Jewish religion would be
taught at school in so impartial and truly historical a spirit as
never to offend Jewish children. Respect for historical truth, and an
implanted sense of the reverence due to children, would keep any
teacher from making the history of the Christian Church, whether
before or after the Reformation, an excuse for offending one of the
little ones committed to his care. If Jews or Roman Catholics wished
for any special religious instruction it was given by their own
priests or Rabbis, and was given without any interference on the part
of the Government. But such was at my time the state of public feeling
that I hardly knew at school who among my young friends were Roman
Catholics, or Lutherans, or Reformed. I must admit, however, that the
very name of Luther might have offended Roman Catholics. He was
represented to us as a perfect saint, almost as inspired and
infallible. His hymns sung in church seemed to us little different
from the Psalms of David, and I well remember what a shock it gave me
when at Oxford, much later in life, I heard Luther spoken of like any
other mortal, nay, as a heretic, and a most dangerous heretic too.
When I was a boy I remember that in some places the same building had
to be used for Protestant and Roman Catholic services. All that, I am
afraid, is now changed, and the old liberal and tolerant feeling then
prevailing on all sides is now often stigmatized as indifference, and
by other ugly names. It should really be called the golden age of
Christianity, and this so-called indifference should be classed among
the highest Christian virtues, and as the fullest realization of the
spirit of Christ.
Thus we grew up from our earliest youth, being taught to look upon
Christianity as an historical fact, on Christ and His disciples as
historical characters, on the Old and New Testaments as real
historical books. Though we did not understand as yet the deeper
meaning of Christ and of His words, we had at least nothing to unlearn
in later times, or to feel that our parents had ever told us what they
themselves could not have held to be true. Our simple faith was not
shaken by mere questions of criticism, or by the problem how any human
being could take upon himself to declare any book to be revealed,
unless he claimed for himself a more than human insight. The simplest
rules of logic should make such a declaration impossible, whatever the
sacred book may be to which it is applied. Granted that the Pope was
infallible, how could the Cardinals know that he was, unless they
claimed for themselves the same or even greater infallibility? It is
far more easy to be inspired than to know some one else is or was
inspired; the true inspiration is, and always has been, the spirit of
truth within, and this is but another name for the spirit of God. It
is truth that makes inspiration, not inspiration that makes truth.
Whoever knows what truth is, knows also what inspiration is: not only
_theopneustos_, blown into the soul by God, but the very voice of God,
the real presence of God, the only presence in which we, as human
beings, can ever perceive Him.
How often have I in later life tried to explain this to my friends in
France and in England who endured mental agonies before they could
arrive at the simple conclusion that revelation can never be
objective, but must always be subjective. I may return to this
question at a later period of my life, when I had to discuss with
Renan, at Paris, with Froude, Kingsley, and Liddon, in England, and
tried to show how entirely self-made some of their difficulties were.
At present I have only to explain how it was that I had never to
extricate myself from a net in which so many honest thinkers find
themselves entangled without any fault of their own; as Samson, when
he awoke, found himself bound with seven green withs and had to break
them with all his might before he could hope to escape from the
Philistines. The Philistines never bound me. During my early
school-days these difficulties did not exist, but I have often been
grateful in after life that the seven locks of my head have never been
woven with the web.
I remember a number of small events in my school-life at Dessau, but
though they were full of interest to me, nay, full of meaning, and not
without an influence on my later life, they would have no meaning and
no interest for others, and may remain as if they had never been. The
influence which music exercised on my mind, and, I believe, on my
heart also, I have related in my _Musical Recollections_. The image of
those passing years, though its general tone was melancholy, chiefly
owing to my mother’s melancholy, seemed to me at the time free from
all unhappiness. My work at school and at home was not too heavy; I
was fond of it, and very fond of books. Books were scarce then, and
whoever possessed a new and valuable book was expected to lend it to
his friends in the little town. If a man was known to possess, say,
Goethe’s works or Jean Paul’s works, the consequence was that one went
to him or to her to ask for the loan of them. And not only books, but
paper and pens also were scarce. The first steel pens came in when I
was still in the lower school, and bad as they were they were looked
upon as real treasures by the schoolboys who possessed them. Paper was
so dear that one had to be very sparing in its use. Every margin and
cover was scribbled over before it was thrown away, and I felt often
so hampered by the scarcity of paper that I gladly accepted a set of
copybooks instead of any other present that I might have asked for on
my birthday or at Christmas. I am sorry to say I have had to suffer
all my life from the inefficiency of our writing master, or maybe from
the fact that my thoughts were too quick for my pen. In other subjects
I did well, but though I was among the first in each class, I was by
no means cleverer than other boys. In the lower school work was more
like conversation or like hearing news from our teachers. The idea of
effort did not yet exist. The drudgery began, however, when I entered
the upper school, the gymnasium, and learnt the elements of Latin and
Greek. Though our teachers were very conscientious, they tried to make
our work no burden to us, and the constant change of places in each
class kept up a lively rivalry among the boys, though I am not sure
that it did not make me rather ambitious and at times conceited.
Still, I had few enemies, and it seemed of much more consequence who
could knock down another boy than who could gain a place above him. I
feel sure I could have done a great deal more at school than I did,
but it was partly my music and partly my incessant headaches that
interfered with my school work.
I remember as a boy that certain streets were inhabited exclusively by
Jewish families. A large number of Jews had been received at Dessau by
a former Duke; but though he granted them leave to settle at Dessau
when they were persecuted in other parts of Germany, he stipulated
that they should only settle in certain streets. These streets were by
no means the worst streets of the town; on the contrary they showed
greater comfort and hardly any of the squalor which disgraced the
Jewish quarters in other towns in Germany. As children we were brought
up without any prejudice against the Jews, though we had, no doubt, a
certain feeling that they were tolerated only, and were not quite on
the same level with ourselves. We also felt the religious difficulty
sometimes very strongly. Were not the Jews the murderers of Christ?
and had they not said: “the blood be on us and on our children”? But
as we were told that it was wrong to harbour feelings of revenge, we
boys soon forgot and forgave, and played together as the best friends.
I remember picking up a number of Jewish words which would not have
been understood anywhere else. I was hardly aware that they were
Jewish and used them like any other words. But I once gave great
offence to my friend Professor Bernays, who was a Jew. He had uttered
some quite incredible statement, and I exclaimed, “Sind Sie denn ganz
maschukke?”—Hebrew for “mad.” I meant no harm, but he was very much
hurt.
I knew several Jewish families, and received much kindness from them
as a boy. Many of these families were wealthy, but they never
displayed their wealth, and in consequence excited no envy. All that
is changed now. The children of the Jews who formerly lived in a very
quiet style at Dessau, now occupy the best houses, indulge in most
expensive tastes, and try in every way to outshine their non-Jewish
neighbours. They buy themselves titles, and, when they can, stipulate
for stars and orders as rewards for successful financial operations,
carried out with the money of princely personages. Hence the
revulsion of feeling all over Germany, or what is called
Anti-Semitism, which has assumed not only a social but a political
significance. I doubt whether there is anything religious in it, as
there was when we were boys. The Anti-Semitic hatred is the hatred of
money-making, more particularly of that kind of money-making which
requires no hard work, but only a large capital to begin with, and
boldness and astuteness in speculating, that is in buying and selling
at the right moment. The sinews of war for that kind of financial
warfare were mostly supplied by the fathers and grandfathers of the
present generation. Sometimes, no doubt, the capital was lost, and in
those cases it must be said that the Jewish speculator disappears from
the stage without a sigh or a cry. He begins again, and if he should
have to do what his grandfather did, walk from house to house with a
bag on his back, he does not whine.
One cannot blame the Jews or any other speculators for using their
opportunities, but they must not complain either if they excite envy,
and if that envy assumes in the end a dangerous character. The Jews,
so far from suffering from disabilities, enjoy really certain
privileges over their Christian competitors in Germany. They belong to
a _regnum_, but also to a _regnum in regno_. They have, so to say, our
Sunday and likewise their Sabbath. Jew will always help Jew against a
Christian; and again who can blame them for that? All one can say is
that they should not complain of their unpopularity, but take into
account the risk they are running. No one hated the Jews such as they
were in Dessau fifty years ago. They had their own schools and
synagogues, and no one interfered with them when they built their
bowers in the streets at the time of their Feast of Tabernacles, and
lived, feasted, and slept in them to keep up the memory of their
sojourning in the desert. They indulged in even more offensive
practices, such as, for instance, putting three stones in the coffins
to be thrown by the dead at the Virgin Mary, her husband, and their
Son. No one suspected or accused them of kidnapping Christian
children, or offering sacrifices with their blood. They were known too
well for that. Conversions of Jews were not infrequent, and converted
Jews were not persecuted by their former co-religionists as they are
now. Even marriages between Christians and Jews were by no means
uncommon, particularly when the young Jewesses were beautiful or rich,
still better if they were both. Disgraceful as the Anti-Semitic riots
have been in Germany and Russia, there can be no doubt that in this as
in most cases both sides were to blame, and there is little prospect
of peace being re-established till many more heads have been broken.
What helped very much to keep the peace in the small town of Dessau,
as it did all over Germany, nay, all over the world, till about the
year 1848, was the small number of newspapers. In my childhood and
youth their number was very small. In Dessau I only knew of one, which
was then called the _Wochenblatt_, afterwards the _Staatsanzeiger_. At
that time newspapers were really read for the news which they
contained, not for leading or misleading articles and all the rest.
What a happy time it was when a newspaper consisted of a sheet, or
half a sheet in quarto, with short paragraphs about actual events,
which had often taken place weeks and months before. A battle might
have been fought in Spain or Turkey, in India or China, and no one
knew of it till some official information was vouchsafed by the
respective Governments or by Jewish bankers. War-correspondents or
regular reporters did not exist, and the old telegraphic dispatches
were sent by wooden telegraphs fixed on high towers, which from a
distance looked like gallows on which a criminal was hanging and
gesticulating with arms and feet. Anybody who watched these signals
could decipher them far more easily than a hieroglyphic inscription.
The peace of Europe, nay, of the whole world, was then in the keeping
of sovereigns and their ministers, and Prince Metternich might
certainly take some credit for having kept what he called the Thirty
Years’ Peace. Shall we ever, as long as there are newspapers, have
peace again—peace between the great nations of the world, and peace
at home between contending parties, and peace in our mornings at home
which are now so ruthlessly broken in upon, nay, swallowed up by
those paper-giants, most unwelcome yet irresistible callers, just when
we want to settle down to a quiet day’s work? It is no use protesting
against the inevitable, nor can we quite agree with those who maintain
that no newspaper carries the slightest weight or exercises the
smallest influence on home or foreign politics. A very influential
statesman and wise thinker used to say that we should never have had
Christianity if newspapers had existed at the time of Augustus. When
unsuccessful _littérateurs_ or bankrupt bankers’ clerks were the chief
contributors to the newspapers, their influence might have been small;
but when Bismarcks turned journalists, and Gortchakoffs prompted,
newspapers could hardly be called _quantités négligeables_.
The horizon of Dessau was very narrow, but within its bounds there was
a busy and happy life. Everybody did his work honestly and
conscientiously. There were, of course, two classes, the educated and
the uneducated. The educated consisted of the members of the
Government service, the clergy, the schoolmasters, doctors, artists,
and officers; the uneducated were the tradesmen, mechanics, and
labourers. The trade was mostly in the hands of Jews, it had become
almost a Jewish monopoly. When one of these tradesmen went bankrupt,
there was a commotion over the whole town, and I remember being taken
to see one of these bankrupt shops, expecting to find the whole house
broken up and demolished, and being surprised to see the tradesman
standing whole, and sound, and smiling, in his accustomed place. My
etymological tastes must have developed very early, for I had asked
why this poor Jew was called a bankrupt, and had been duly informed
that it was because his bank had been broken, _banca rotta_, which of
course I took in a literal sense, and expected to see all the
furniture broken to pieces. The commercial relations of our Dessau
tradesmen did not extend much beyond Leipzig, Berlin, possibly Hamburg
and Cologne. If a burgher of Dessau travelled to these or to more
distant parts the whole town knew of it and talked about it, whereas a
journey to Paris or London was an event worthy to be mentioned and
discussed in the newspapers. These old newspapers are full of curious
information. We find that if a person wished to travel to Cologne or
further, he advertised for a companion, and it was for the Burgomaster
to make the necessary arrangements for him.
French was studied and spoken, particularly at Court, but English was
a rare acquirement, still more Italian or Spanish. There was, however,
a small inner circle where these languages were studied, chiefly in
order to read the master-works of modern literature. And this was all
the more creditable because there were no good teachers to be found at
Dessau, and people had to learn what they wished to learn by
themselves, with the help of a grammar and dictionary. We learnt
French at school, but the result was deplorable. As in all public
schools, the French master who had to teach the language at the Ducal
Gymnasium could not keep order among the boys. He of course spoke
French, but that was all. He did not know how to teach, and could not
excite any interest in the boys, who insisted on pronouncing French as
if it were German. The poor man’s life was made a burden to him. His
name was Noel, and he had all the pleasing manners of a Frenchman, but
that served only to rouse the antagonism of the young barbarians. The
result was that we learnt very little, and I was sent to an old Jew to
learn French and a little English. That old Jew, called Levy Rubens,
was a perfect gentleman. He probably had been a commercial traveller
in his early days, though no one knew exactly where he came from or
how he had learnt languages. He had taught my father and grandfather
and he was delighted to teach the third generation. He certainly spoke
French and English fluently, but with the strongest Jewish accent, and
this was inherited by all his pupils at Dessau. I feel ashamed when I
think of the tricks we played the old man—putting mice into his
pockets, upsetting inkstands over his table, and placing crackers
under his chairs. But he never lost his temper; he never would have
dared to punish us as we deserved; but he went on with his lesson as
if nothing had happened. He took his small pay, and was satisfied
when his lessons were over and he could settle down to his long pipe
and his books. He lived quite alone and died quite alone, a
hardworking, honest, poor Jew, not exactly despised or persecuted, but
not treated with the respect which he certainly deserved, and which he
would have received if he had not been a Jew.
Our public school was as good as any in Germany. These small duchies
generally followed the example of Prussia, and they carried out the
instructions issued by the Ministry of Education at Berlin according
to the very letter. Besides, several of the reigning dukes had taken a
very warm and personal interest in popular education, and at the
beginning of the century the eyes of the whole of Germany, nay, of
Europe, were turned towards the educational experiments carried on by
my great-grandfather, Basedow,[6] at the so-called Philanthropinum at
Dessau under the patronage of the Duke and of several of the more
enlightened sovereigns of Europe, such as the Empress Catherine of
Russia, the King of Denmark, the Emperor Joseph of Austria, Prince
Adam Czartoryski, &c. Even after Basedow’s death the interest in
education was kept alive in Dessau, and all was done that could be
done in so small a town to keep the different schools—elementary,
middle-class, and high schools—on the highest possible level of
efficiency.
[6] Johann Bernhard Basedow, von seinem Urenkel, F. M. M.
(Essays, Band IV).
Bathing was a very healthful recreation, though I very nearly came to
grief from trusting to my seniors. They could swim and I could not
yet. But while bathing with two of my friends in a part of the river
which was safe, they swam along and asked me to follow them. Having
complete confidence in them I jumped in from the shore, but very soon
began to sink. My shouts brought my friends back, and they rescued me,
not without some difficulty, from drowning.
In an English school the influence of the master is, of course, more
constant, because one of the masters is always within call, while in
Germany he is visible during school-hours only. If a master is fond of
his pupils, and takes an interest in them individually, he can do them
more good than parents at home, or the teacher at a day school. The
boys at a German school are, no doubt, a very mixed crew, but that
cannot be helped. This mixture of classes may be a drawback in some
respects, but from an educational point of view the sons of very rich
parents are by no means more valuable than the poor boys. Far from it.
Many of the evils of schoolboy life come from the sons of the rich,
while the sons of poor parents are generally well behaved. But for all
that, there was a rough and rude tone among some of the boys at
school, arising from defects in the education at home, and this
sometimes embittered what ought to be the happiest time of life,
particularly in the case of delicate boys. The son of a Minister has
often to sit by the side of the son of a wealthy butcher, and the very
fact that he is the son of a gentleman often exposes the more refined
boy to the bullying of his muscular neighbour. I was fortunate at
school. I could hold my own with the boys, and as to the masters,
several of them had known my father or had been his pupils, and they
took a personal interest in me.
I remember more particularly one young master who was very kind to me,
and took me home for private lessons and for giving me some good
advice. There was something sad and very attractive about him, and I
found out afterwards that he knew that he was dying of consumption,
and that besides that he was liable to be prosecuted for political
liberalism, which at that time was almost like high treason. I believe
he was actually condemned and sent to prison like many others, and he
died soon after I had left Dessau. His name was Dr. Hönicke, and he
was the first to try to impress on me that I ought to show myself
worthy of my father, an idea which had never entered my mind before,
nay, which at first I could hardly understand, but which,
nevertheless, slumbered on in my mind till years afterwards it was
called out and became a strong influence for the whole of my life. I
still have some lines which he wrote for my album. They were the
well-known lines from Horace, which, at the time, I had great
difficulty in construing, but which have remained graven in my memory
ever since:
“Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis,
Est in iuvencis est in equis patrum
Virtus nec imbellem feroces
Progenerant aquilae columbam.
Doctrina sed vim promovet insitam,
Rectique cultus pectora roborant;
Utcunque defecere mores,
Dedecorant bene nata culpae.”
In my childhood I had to pass through the ordinary illnesses, but it
was the faith in our doctor that always saved me. The doctor was to my
mind the man who was called in to make me well again, and while my
mother was agitated about her only son, I never dreamt of any danger.
The very idea of death never came near me till my grandfather died
(1835), but even then I was only about twelve years old, and though I
had seen much of him, particularly during the years that my mother
lived again in his house, yet he was too old to take much share in his
grandchildren’s amusements. He left a gap, no doubt, in our life, but
that gap was filled again with new figures in the life of a boy of
twelve. He was only sixty-one years old when he died, and yet my idea
of him was always that of a very old man. Everything was done for him,
his servant dressed him every morning, he was lifted into his carriage
and out of it, and he certainly lived the life of an invalid, such as
I should not consent to own to at seventy-six. He made no secret that
he cared more for the son of his son who was the heir, and was to
perpetuate the name of von Basedow, than for the son of his daughter.
He was very fond of driving and of shooting, and he frequently took my
cousin out shooting with him. When my cousin came home with a hare he
had shot, I confess I was sometimes jealous, but I was soon cured of
my wish to go with my grandfather into the forest. Once when I was
with him in his little carriage, my grandfather, not being able to see
well, had the misfortune to kill a doe which had come out with her two
little ones. The misery of the mother and afterwards of her two young
ones, was heart-rending, and from that day on I made up my mind never
to go out shooting, and never to kill an animal. And I have kept my
word, though I was much laughed at. It may be that later in life and
after my grandfather’s death I had little opportunity of shooting, but
the cry of the doe and the whimpering of the young ones who tried to
get suck from their dead mother have remained with me for life.
My grandfather, though he aged early, remained in harness as Prime
Minister to the end of his life, and it was his great desire to
benefit his country by new institutions. It was he who, at the time
when people hardly knew yet what railroads meant, succeeded in getting
the line from Berlin to Halle and Leipzig to pass by Dessau. He
offered to build the bridge across the Elbe and to give the land and
the wood for the sleepers gratis, and what seemed at the time a far
too generous offer has proved a blessing to the duchy, making it as it
were the centre of the great railway connecting Berlin, Leipzig,
Magdeburg, the Elbe, Hanover, Bremen, nay, Cologne also, the Rhine,
and Western Europe. He was in his way a good statesman, though we are
too apt to measure a man’s real greatness by the circumstances in
which he moves.
As far back as I can remember I was a martyr to headaches. No doctor
could help me, no one seemed to know the cause. It was a migraine, and
though I watched it carefully I could not trace it to any fault of
mine. The idea that it came from overwork was certainly untrue. It
came and went, and if it was one day on the right side it was always
the next time on the left, even though I was free from it sometimes
for a week or a fortnight, or even longer. It was strange also that it
seldom lasted beyond one day, and that I always felt particularly
strong and well the day after I had been prostrate. For prostrate I
was, and generally quite unable to do anything. I had to lie down and
try to sleep. After a good sleep I was well, but when the pain had
been very bad I found that sometimes the very skin of my forehead had
peeled off. In this way I often lost two or three days in a week, and
as my work had to be done somehow, it was often done anyhow, and I was
scolded and punished, really without any fault of my own. After all
remedies had failed which the doctor and nurses prescribed (and I well
remember my grandmother using massage on my neck, which must have
been about 1833 to 1835) I was handed over to Hahnemann, the founder
of homeopathy. Hahnemann (born 1755) had been practising as doctor at
Dessau as early as 1780—that is somewhat before my time—but had left
it, and when in 1820 he had been prohibited by the Government from
practising and lecturing at Leipzig, he took refuge once more in the
neighbouring town of Coethen. From there he paid visits to Dessau as
consulting physician, and after I had explained to him as well as I
could all the symptoms of my chronic headache, he assured my mother
that he would cure it at once. He was an imposing personality—a
powerful man with a gigantic head and strong eyes and a most
persuasive voice. I can quite understand that his personal influence
would have gone far to effect a cure of many diseases. People forget
too much how strong a curative power resides in the patient’s faith in
his doctor, in fact how much the mind can do in depressing and in
reinvigorating the body. I shall never forget in later years
consulting Sir Andrew Clarke, and telling him of ever so many, to my
mind, most serious symptoms. I had lost sleep and appetite, and
imagined myself in a very bad state indeed. He examined me and knocked
me about for full three quarters of an hour, and instead of
pronouncing my doom as I fully expected, he told me with a bright look
and most convincing voice that he had examined many men who had worked
their brains too much, but had never seen a man at my time of life so
perfectly sound in every organ. I felt young and strong at once, and
meeting my old friend Morier on my way home, we ate some dozens of
oysters together and drank some pints of porter without the slightest
bad effect. In fact I was cured without a pill or a drop of medicine.
And who does not know how, if one makes up one’s mind at last to have
a tooth pulled out, the pain seems to cease as soon as we pull the
bell at the dentist’s?
However, Hahnemann did not succeed with me. I swallowed a number of
his silver and gold globules, but the migraine kept its regular
course, right to left and left to right, and this went on till about
the year 1860. Then my doctor, the late Mr. Symonds of Oxford, told me
exactly what Hahnemann had told me—that he would cure me, if I would
go on taking some medicine regularly for six months or a year. He told
me that he and his brother had made a special study of headaches, and
that there were ever so many kinds of headache, each requiring its own
peculiar treatment. When I asked him to what category of headaches
mine belonged, I was not a little abashed on being told that my
headache was what they called the Alderman’s headache. “Surely,” I
said, “I don’t overeat, or overdrink.” I had thought that mine was a
mysterious nervous headache, arising from the brain. But no, it seemed
to be due to turtle soup and port wine. However, the doctor, seeing my
surprise, comforted me by telling me that it was the nerves of the
head which affected the stomach, and thus produced indirectly the same
disturbance in my digestion as an aldermanic diet. Whether this was
true or was only meant as a _solatium_ I do not know. But what I do
know is, that by taking the medicine regularly for about half a year,
the frequency and violence of my headaches were considerably reduced,
while after about a year they vanished completely. I was a new being,
and my working time was doubled.
One lesson may be learnt from this, namely, that the English system of
doctoring is very imperfect. In England we wait till we are ill, then
go to a doctor, describe our symptoms as well as we can, pay one
guinea, or two, get our prescription, take drastic medicine for a
month and expect to be well. My German doctor, when he saw the
prescription of my English doctor, told me that he would not give it
to a horse. If after a month we are not better we go again; he
possibly changes our medicine, and we take it more or less regularly
for another month. The doctor cannot watch the effect of his medicine,
he is not sure even whether his prescriptions have been carefully
followed; and he knows but too well that anything like a chronic
complaint requires a chronic treatment. The important thing, however,
was that my headaches yielded gradually to the continued use of
medicine; it would hardly have produced the desired effect if I had
taken it by fits and starts. All this seems to me quite natural; but
though my English doctor cured me, and my German doctors did not, I
still hold that the German system is better. Most families have their
doctor in Germany, who calls from time to time to watch the health of
the old and young members of the family, particularly when under
medical treatment, and receives his stipulated annual payment, which
secures him a safe income that can be raised, of course, by attendance
on occasional patients. Perhaps the Chinese system is the best; they
pay their doctor while they are well, and stop payment as long as they
are ill. I know the unanswerable argument which is always thrown at my
head whenever I suggest to my friends that there are some things which
are possibly managed better in Germany than in England. If my remarks
refer to the study and practice of medicine I am asked whether more
men are killed in England than in Germany; if I refer to the study and
practice of law I am assured that quite as many murderers are hanged
in England as in Germany; and if I venture to hint that the study of
theology might on certain points be improved at Oxford, I am told that
quite as many souls are saved in England as in Germany, nay, a good
many more. As I cannot ascertain the facts from trustworthy
statistics, I have nothing to reply; all I feel is that most nations,
like most individuals, are perfect in their own eyes, but that those
are most perfect who are willing to admit that there is something to
be learnt from their neighbours.
But to return to Hahnemann. He was very kind to me, and I looked up to
him as a giant both in body and in mind. But he could not deliver me
from my enemy, the ever recurrent migraine. The cures, however, both
at Dessau and at Coethen, where he had been made a _Hofrath_ by the
reigning Duke, were very extraordinary. Hahnemann remained in Coethen
till 1835, and in that year, when he was eighty, he married a young
French lady, Melanie d’Hervilly, and was carried off by her to Paris,
where he soon gained a large practice, and died in 1843, that is at
the age of eighty-eight. Much of his success, I feel sure, was due to
his presence and to the confidence which he inspired. How do I know
that Sir Andrew Clarke, seeing that I was in low spirits about my
health, did not think it right to encourage me, and by encouraging me
did certainly make me feel confident about myself, and thus raised my
vitality, my spirits, or whatever we like to call it? “Thy faith hath
made thee whole” is a lesson which doctors ought not to neglect.
How little we know the effect of the environment in which we grow up.
My old granny has drawn deeper furrows through my young soul than all
my teachers and preachers put together. I am not going to add a
chapter to that most unsatisfactory of all studies, child-psychology.
It is an impossible subject. The victim—the child—cannot be
interrogated till it is too late. The influences that work on the
child’s senses and mind cannot be determined; they are too many, and
too intangible. The observers of babies, mostly young fathers proud of
their first offspring, remind me always of a very learned friend of
mine, who presented to the Royal Society most laborious pages
containing his lifelong observations on certain deviations of the
magnetic needle, and who had forgotten that in making these
observations he always had a pair of steel spectacles on his nose.
However, I have nothing to say against these observations, nor against
their more or less successful interpretations. But the real harm
begins when people imagine that in studying the ways of infants they
can discover what man was like in his original condition, whether as a
hairy or a hairless creature. To imagine that we can learn from the
way in which children begin to use our old words, how the primitive
language of mankind was formed, seems to me like imagining that
children playing with counters would teach us how and for what purpose
the first money was coined. There is no doubt a grain of truth in this
infantile psychology, but it requires as many caveats as that which is
called ethnological psychology, which makes us see in the savages of
the present day the representation of the first ancestors of our race,
and would teach us to discover in their superstitions the antecedents
of the mythology and religion of the Aryan or Semitic races. The same
philosophers who constantly fall back on heredity and atavism in
order to explain what seems inexplicable in the beliefs and customs
of the Brahmans, Greeks, or Romans, seem quite unconscious of the many
centuries that must needs have passed over the heads of the
Patagonians of the present day as well as of the Greeks at the time of
Homer. They look upon the Patagonians as the _tabula rasa_ of
humanity, and they forget that even if we admitted that the ancestors
of the Aryan race had once been more savage than the Patagonians, it
would not follow that their savagery was identical with that of the
people of Tierra del Fuego. Why should not the distance between
Patagonian and Vedic Rishis have been at least as great as that
between Vedic Rishis and Homeric bards? If there are ever so many
kinds of civilized life, was there only one and the same savagery?
To take, for instance, the feeling of fear; is it likely that we shall
find out whether it is innate in human nature or acquired and
intensified in each generation, by shaking our fists in the face of a
little baby, to see whether it will wink or shrink or shriek? Some
children may be more fearless than others, but whether that
fearlessness arises from ignorance or from stolidity is again by no
means easy to determine. A burnt child fears the fire, an unburnt
child might boldly grasp a glowing coal, but all this would not help
us to determine whether fear is an innate or an acquired tendency or
habit.
All I can say for myself is that my young life and even my later years
were often rendered miserable by the foolish stories of one of my
grandmothers, and that I had to make a strong effort of will before I
could bring myself to walk across a churchyard in the dark. This shows
how much our character is shaped by circumstances, even when we are
least aware of it. I did not believe in ghosts and I was not a coward,
but I felt through life a kind of shiver in dark passages and at the
sound of mysterious noises, and the mere fact that I had to make an
effort to overcome these feelings shows that something had found its
way into my mental constitution that ought never to have been there,
and that caused me, particularly in my younger days, many a moment of
discomfort.
All such experiences constitute what may be called the background of
our life. My first ideas of men and women, and of the world at large,
that is of the unknown world, were formed within the narrow walls of
Dessau, for Dessau was still surrounded by walls, and the gates of the
city were closed every night, though the fears of a foreign enemy were
but small. Of course the views of life prevailing at Dessau were very
narrow, but they were wide enough for our purposes. Though we heard of
large towns like Dresden or Berlin, and of large countries like France
and Italy, my real world was Dessau and its neighbourhood. We had no
interests outside the walls of our town or the frontiers of our
duchy. If we heard of things that had happened at Leipzig or Berlin,
in Paris or London, they had no more reality for us than what we had
read about Abraham, or Romulus and Remus, or Alexander the Great. To
us the pulse of the world seemed to beat in the _Haupt- und
Residenzstadt_ of Dessau, though we knew perfectly well how small it
was in comparison with other towns.
And this, too, has left its impression on my thoughts all through
life, if only by making everything that I saw in later life in such
towns as Leipzig, Berlin, Paris, and London, appear quite
overwhelmingly grand. Boys brought up in any of these large towns
start with a different view of the world, and with a different measure
for what they see in later life. I do not know that they are to be
envied for that, for there is pleasure in admiration, pleasure even in
being stunned by the first sight of the life in the streets of Paris
or London. I certainly have been a great admirer all my life, and I
ascribe this disposition to the small surroundings of my early years
at Dessau.
And so it was with everything else. Having admired our
Cavalier-Strasse, I could admire all the more the Boulevards in Paris,
and Regent Street in London. Having enjoyed our small theatre, I stood
aghast at the Grand Opera, and at Drury Lane. This power of admiration
and enjoyment extended even to dinners and other domestic amusements.
Having been brought up on very simple fare, I fully enjoyed the
dinners which the Old East India Company gave, when we sat down about
400 people, and, as I was told, four pounds was paid for each guest. I
mention this because I feel that not only has the Spartan diet of my
early years given me a relish all through life for convivial
entertainments, even if not quite at four pounds a head, but that the
general self-denial which I had to exercise in my youth has made me
feel a constant gratitude and sincere appreciation for the small
comforts of my later years.
I remember the time when I woke with my breath frozen on my bedclothes
into a thin sheet of ice. We were expected to wash and dress in an
attic where the windows were so thickly frozen as to admit hardly any
light in the morning, and where, when we tried to break the ice in the
jug, there were only a few drops of water left at the bottom with
which to wash. No wonder that the ablutions were expeditious. After
they were performed we had our speedy breakfast, consisting of a cup
of coffee and a _semmel_ or roll, and then we rushed to school, often
through the snow that had not yet been swept away from the pavement.
We sat in school from eight to eleven or twelve, rushed home again,
had our very simple dinner, and then back to school, from two to four.
How we lived through it I sometimes wonder, for we were thinly clad
and often wet with rain or snow; and yet we enjoyed our life as boys
only can enjoy it, and had no time to be ill. One blessing this early
roughing has left me for life—a power of enjoying many things which
to most of my friends are matters of course or of no consequence. The
background of my life at Dessau and at Leipzig may seem dark, but it
has only served to make the later years of my life all the brighter
and warmer.
The more I think about that distant, now very distant past, the more I
feel how, without being aware of it, my whole character was formed by
it. The unspoiled primitiveness of life at Dessau as it was when I was
at school there till the age of twelve, would be extremely difficult
to describe in all its details. Everybody seemed to know everybody and
everything about everybody. Everybody knew that he was watched, and
gossip, in the best sense of the word, ruled supreme in the little
town. Gossip was, in fact, public opinion with all its good and all
its bad features. Still the result was that no one could afford to
lose caste, and that everybody behaved as well as he could. I really
believe that the private life of the people of Dessau at the beginning
of the century was blameless. The great evils of society did not
exist, and if now and then there was a black sheep, his or her life
became a burden to them. Everybody knew what had happened, and society
being on the whole so blameless, was all the more merciless on the
sinners, whether their sins were great or small. So from the very
first my idea was that there were only two classes—one class quite
perfect and pure as angels, the other black sheep, and altogether
unspeakable. There was no transition, no intermediate links, no
shading of light and dark. A man was either black or white, and this
rigid rule applied not only to moral character, but intellectual
excellence also was measured by the same standard. A work of art was
either superlatively beautiful, or it was contemptible. A man of
science was either a giant or a humbug. Some people spoke of Goethe as
the greatest of all poets and philosophers the world had ever known;
others called him a wicked man and an overvalued poet.[7]
[7] That this was not only the case at Dessau, may be seen by a
number of contemporary reviews of Goethe’s works republished
some years ago and the exact title of which I cannot find.
It is dangerous, no doubt, to go through life with so imperfect a
measure, and I have for a long time suffered from it, particularly in
cases where I ought to have been able to make allowance for small
failings. But as I had been brought up to approach people with a
complete trust in their rectitude, and with an unlimited admiration of
their genius, it took me many years before I learnt to make allowance
for human weaknesses or temporary failures. I have lost many a
charming companion and excellent friend in my journey through life,
because I weighed them with my rusty Dessau balance. I had to learn by
long experience that there may be a spot, nay, several spots on the
soft skin of a peach, and yet the whole fruit may be perfect. I acted
very much like the merchant who tested a whole field of rice by the
first handful of grains, and who, if he found one or two bad grains,
would have nothing to do with the whole field. I had to learn what
was, perhaps, the most difficult lesson of all, that a trusted friend
could not always be trusted, and yet need not therefore be altogether
a reprobate. What was most difficult for me to digest was an untruth:
finding out that one who professed to be a friend had said and done
most unfriendly things behind one’s back. Still, in a long life one
finds out that even that may not be a deadly sin, and that if we are
so loth to forgive it, it is partly because the falsehood affected our
own interests. Thus only can we explain how a man whom we know to have
been guilty of falsehoods towards ourselves may be looked upon as
perfectly honest, straightforward, and trustworthy, by a large number
of his own friends. We see this over and over again with men occupying
eminent positions in Church and State. We see how a prime minister or
an archbishop is represented by men who know him as a liar and a
hypocrite, while by others he is spoken of as a paragon of honour and
honesty, and a true Christian. My narrow Dessau views became a little
widened when I went to school at Leipzig; still more when I spent two
years and a half at the University of Leipzig, and afterwards at
Berlin. Still, during all this time I saw but little of what is called
society, I only knew of people whom I loved and of people whom I
disliked. There was no room as yet for indifferent people, whom one
tolerates and is civil to without caring whether one sees them again
or not. Of the simplest duties of society also I was completely
ignorant. No one ever told me what to say and what to do, or what not
to say and what not to do. What I felt I said, what I thought right I
did. There was, in fact, in my small native town very little that
could be called society. One lived in one’s family and with one’s
intimate friends without any ceremony. It is a pity that children are
not taught a few rules of life-wisdom by their seniors. I know that
the Jews do not neglect that duty, and I remember being surprised at
my young Jewish friends at Dessau coming out with some very wise saws
which evidently had not been grown in their own hot-houses, but had
been planted out full grown by their seniors. The only rules of
worldly wisdom which I remember, came to me through proverbs and
little verses which we had either to copy or to learn by heart, such
as:
“Wer einmal lügt, dem glaubt man nicht
Und wenn er auch die Wahrheit spricht.”
“Morgenstunde hat Gold im Munde.”
“Kein Faden ist so fein gesponnen,
Er kommt doch endlich an die Sonnen.”
“Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied.”
Some lines which hung over my bed I have carried with me all through
life, and I still think they are very true and very terse:
“Im Glück nicht jubeln und im Sturm nicht zagen,
Das Unvermeidliche mit Würde tragen,
Das Rechte thun, am Schönen sich erfreuen,
Das Leben lieben und den Tod nicht scheuen,
Und fest an Gott und bessere Zukunft glauben,
Heisst leben, heisst dem Tod sein Bitteres rauben.”
Still, all this formed a very small viaticum for a journey through
life, and I often thought that a few more hints might have preserved
me from the painful process of what was called rubbing off one’s
horns. Again and again I had to say to myself, “That would have done
very well at home, but it was a mistake for all that.” My social
rawness and simplicity stuck to me for many years, just as the Dessau
dialect remained with me for life; at least I was assured by my
friends that though I had spoken French and English for so many years,
they could always detect in my German that I came from Dessau or
Leipzig.