Underground Education.--The Best of Moravians and the Best of
Poodles.
Here my story properly begins; the scene lies in Auenthal, or rather at
the mountain-castle of the Falkenbergs, which stood some acres distant
from it. The first child of the Chess-Amazon and the Dying Gladiator
and Captain in Check was _Gustavus_--not the illustrious Swedish hero,
but mine. My greeting to thee, little darling! here on the scene of
this rag-paper and this ragged life! I know thy whole life beforehand,
therefore it is that the wailing voice of thy first minute moves me so
sorely: I see on so many a year of thy life tear-drops hanging, that is
why I am so touched with compassion, as I look at thy eye, which is as
yet tearless because it is merely thy body that pains thee;--man comes
without a smile, without a smile he goes, for a space of three fleeting
minutes he was happy. I have therefore with wise forethought, dear
Gustavus, saved up the fresh May of thy youth, of which I am to print a
landscape-piece upon poor blotting-paper, against the May of the
natural year, in order now, when every day is a creation day of nature,
to make each day of mine such; in order that now, when every breath one
draws is a steel-cure, every step four inches longer and the eye less
curtained by the overhanging eyelid, I may write with a flying hand and
with an elastic bosom full of breath and blood.
Fortunately, from the 2d to the 27th of May, (and that is all my
description covers) we have a steady spell of fine weather; for I am
something of a meteorological clairvoyant and my short leg and my long
face are the best weather cards and hygrometers in this part of the
country.
Since education has far less effect upon the inner man (and far more on
the outer) than tutors imagine, one will be surprised that with
Gustavus exactly the opposite occurred; for his whole life echoed the
choral tone of his superterrestrial, _i. e_., subterranean training.
For the reader must still remember being told in the 1st Section, that
the Moravianly disposed wife of the Head-forester von Knoer refused to
let her daughter Ernestina play herself away at chess except on
consideration that the winning bridegroom should promise in the
marriage contract to educate and conceal their first child for eight
years under the earth, in order to save him from being hardened at once
to the beauties of Nature and the distortions of humanity. In vain did
the Captain protest to Ernestina, that "in this way his mother-in-law
would reduce the soldier to a mere lady's night-cap, and they should
rather wait until a girl came." He, too, like many other men vented his
vexation with the mother-in-law wholly upon his wife. But the old lady
had already, before the baptism, bespoken a young man of heavenly
beauty from Barby. The Captain, like all energetic people, could not
endure the Moravian _Diminuendo_; he talked most about their talking so
little; it even annoyed him that the Moravian inn-keepers did not
overreach him far enough.
But our Genius--this fine name he shall keep for the present on every
page--did not succumb and sicken under those heart-cramping spasms of
Moravianism; he took from it only its softness and simplicity. Above
his dreamy, enthusiastic eye rose a smooth, peaceful, guiltless
forehead, which the fortieth year left as unruled[10] and unmarked as
the fourteenth. He bore a heart which vices, as poisons do precious
stones, would have crumbled to pieces; even another's face ploughed or
sowed with sins oppressed and stifled his breast, and his inner man
turned pale in the presence of filthy souls, as the sapphire on the
finger of an unchaste man is said to lose its azure glow.
Still a sacrifice of so many years' duration for a child must have
weighed hard and heavily even upon so fair a soul as the Moravian's;
but he said: "O what heavenly opportunities it also afforded him,
which, however, he promised only in the future to his Gustavus, who,
surely, with God's help, would bloom up as he hoped, and no one ought
certainly to wonder at his seeming self-sacrifice to a true and
profound _earthly_ life." And I hope, in fact, my more refined readers,
whose thought is far-reaching, will not wonder, but rather will act as
if they counted such an educational heroism simply quite natural. To be
sure, meanwhile the virtue of most men is rather only an extra leaf and
occasional poem in their common-place, newspaper life; only there are
still two, three or more geniuses surely extant, in whose epic life
Virtue is the heroine, and all else only by-play and episode, and whose
upward course the people cannot so much wonder at as gaze upon with
admiration.
The first dark years Gustavus spent as yet with his guardian-angel in a
chamber above ground, merely keeping him away from those unwholesome
coin-clippers of childhood, whom we have to thank for as many
lame limbs as lame hearts--maids and nurses. I would rather these
(dis-)Graces should educate us in the second decade than in the second
year.
After that the Genius repaired with his Gustavus down into an old
walled-up cavern in the castle garden, which the Captain only regretted
he had not long ago had demolished. A cellar stairway led down, on the
left hand, into the rocky cellar, and on the right into this vault,
where stood a Carthusian Monastery with three chambers, which, on
account of an old tradition, they called the Monastery of the Three
Brothers; on its floor lay three stone monks, with their hewn hands
crossed forever on their breasts; and perhaps under the effiges the
mute originals themselves lay sleeping with their long-sunk and
smothered sighs over a fleeting world. Here the fair Genius alone
governed his little charge and bent every budding twig upward to the
lofty stature of manhood.
Such miserable circumstantialities as, _e. g_., the purveying of the
wash and matters of bed and board, my female readers will gladly spare
me; but they will be more curious to know how the Genius educated. Very
well--I say; he did not command, but simply _accustomed_ and
_narrated_. He never _contradicted_ either himself or the child; nay,
he had the greatest arcanum for making him good--he was so himself.
Without this arcanum one might as well hire the Devil for a preceptor
as be one himself, as the daughters of bad mothers prove. For the rest,
the Genius was convinced the education of the heart began at the first
sacrament (Baptism), that of the head at the second (Communion).
To hear of good men is as much as to live among them, and Plutarch's
Lives make a deeper impression than the best text-books of moral
philosophy for the use of academic teachers. For children especially
there is no other moral teaching than example, related or witnessed;
and it is an educational folly to think that in giving children
reasons, one gives them anything more than these reasons, namely, the
will and the power to follow these reasons. Oh! a thousand times
happier than I beside my Tertius and Conrector wast thou, Gustavus,
lying in the bosom, in the arms and under the lips of thy precious
Genius, like a thirsty Alpine flower under its trickling cloud,
drinking in nourishment to thy heart from the stories of good men, whom
the Genius called uniformly Gustavuses and _Blessed_ ones, of whom we
shall soon see why this designation of them is printed in Italic type!
As he was a good draughtsman, he gave him, as Chodowiecky does the
romance writer, a drawing of every piece of history, and built around
the little one this _Orbis Pictus_ of good men, as the Almighty Genius
builds around us the world of great Nature. Only he never gave him the
drawing _before_, but only _after_ the description, because hearing
attracts children to seeing more strongly than seeing does to hearing.
Another would have taken for this pedagogic lever, instead of the
drawing-pen, the fiddle-bow or the piano-key; but not so the Genius;
the feeling for painting develops itself, like the taste, very late,
and needs, therefore, the help of education. It deserves the earliest
unfolding, because it takes away the grating which sunders us from
Nature, because it drives the phantasying soul out again among external
things, and because it turns the German eye to the difficult art of
_apprehending_ beautiful forms. Music, on the contrary, finds already
in the youngest hearts (as with the rudest peoples) responsive chords:
nay, its omnipotence is impaired rather by practice and years. Gustavus
learned, therefore, as a deaf mute in his deaf and dumb cavern, to draw
so well that even in his 13th year, his tutor sat to him, a beautiful
man, who must make his appearance further on in this book.
And so, with both, did life glide softly along in the catacomb like a
rill. The little one was happy; for his wishes did not reach out beyond
his acquisitions of knowledge, and neither a fear nor a murmur
distracted his peaceful soul. The Genius was happy; for the execution
of this ten years' building plan was easier for him than the resolving
upon it; the resolution conjures up at once all difficulties and
deprivations before the soul. But the execution puts them far asunder
and gives us the first real interest in it through the peculiar
pleasure without which, in a thousand things, one's patience would be
exhausted--that of seeing something daily growing under one's hands.
For both of them it was a good thing that down below there in this
moral forcing-house dwelt also a schoolmate of Gustavus's, who was at
the same time a half collaborator and adjutant of the Genius, who,
however, by reason of certain defects of his heart derived from the
whole education but a slim advantage, although he, as well as Gustavus,
belonged to the class of animals with two heart-chambers and with warm
blood. If I say that the greatest fault of the fellow-laborer was, that
he would not drink brandy, one sees plainly that he had to be, not like
Gustavus, trained _up_, but trained _down_,[11] because he was the
neatest, blackest of--poodles that ever sprang round over the earth
with a white breast. This intelligent dog and assistant teacher often
relieved and released the head-master in play hours; besides, most of
the virtues could be less well practised _by_ him than by Gustavus
_upon_ him, and he kept for that purpose the necessary _heteronymous_
vices ready:--in sleep the school-colleague easily snapped about him at
living legs, in his waking hours at those which had been plucked off.
In this subterranean America, the three Antipodes had their day, _i.
e_., a lamp lighted, when with us overhead it was night--their night,
_i. e_., sleep, they had when with us the sun shone. The fair Genius
had so arranged it on account of external noises and for the sake of
his daily excursions. At that time, while his teacher enjoyed air and
society, the little one lay down there in his monastery, with
_bandaged_ eyes, for chance and the cellar-door were not to be trusted.
Sometimes he carried the sleeping veiled angel up into the fresh air
and into the inspiring sunshine, as ants submit their larvae to the
brooding wings of the sun. Verily, were I a second or third
Chodowiecky, I would at this moment stand up and engrave the scene for
my own book in Swedish copper, not merely to depict how our pale red
darling brought out into the open air slumbers under his bandage in a
latticed rose-shadow, and like a dead angel lies before us in the
infinite Temple of Nature, peacefully reposing with little dreams of
his little cavern--there is something still more beautiful--thou still
hast thy parents, Gustavus, and dost not see them; thy father, who
stands beside thee, his eye bedimmed with love, and rejoices over the
pure breathing that heaves thy little breast, and forgets in his joy at
that how thou art being educated--and thy mother, who presses to thy
face, on which lies the two-fold innocence of solitude and childhood,
the love-hungering eyes which remain unsatisfied because they must not
speak nor fondle. But she is pressing thee out of thy slumber, and thou
must after a short time go down again to thy Plato's Cave.
The Genius had long been preparing him for the resurrection from his
holy sepulchre. He said to him: "If thou art very good and not
impatient, and lovest me and the poodle right well, then thou mayest
die. When thou hast died, then I will die too, and we will go to
heaven" (by which he meant the surface of the earth); "there it is
right beautiful and magnificent. There they kindle no light in the day
time, but one as large as my head stands in the air above thee and
moves all day around thee beautifully--the roof of the great room is
blue, and so high that no man can reach it with a thousand ladders--and
the floor is soft and green, and, what is finer still, the poodles are
there as large as our chamber. In heaven all is full of blessed ones,
and there are all the good people, of whom I have so often told thee,
and thy parents" (whose likenesses he had long since given him), "to
whom thou art as dear as thou art to me, and who will give thee
everything. But thou must be very good." "Ah! when, then, are we going,
at last, to die?" said the little one, and his glowing fancy labored
within him, and at every such description he ran up to a landscape
painting and touched and interrogated every spear of grass.
Nothing acts so feebly upon children as a threat or a hope which is not
fulfilled before evening. Only so long as one talks to them beforehand
of a future examination or of their mature age, is it of any avail;
hence many repeat this prefatory talk so often that it no longer leaves
even a momentary impression. The Genius therefore constructed the long
way to the greatest reward out of lesser ones, all which strengthened
the impression and the certainty of the great one, and which will be
found in the following section.
Apropos! I must repeat, that of all evils as regards education
and children, in comparison with which the so much decried
spelling-and-whipping-system is golden, there is none more poisonous,
no more unwholesome mispickel, (or arsenical pyrite), and no more
consuming pedagogical tape-worm than a French nurse.