My Autobiography: A Fragment

by F. Max Müller

CHAPTER II

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.

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.