25. CYCLE.
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?"