At first, it must be said, Karl’s mother had scant sympathy with her husband’s enthusiasm. She felt that he was mistaken, that the child was “too stupid” to be educated, and that nothing would come of the pains taken with him. This was the general belief of the neighbourhood, but it gave place to a feeling of astonished incredulity upon the discovery that in reality the youngster was making extraordinary progress, and was displaying not only intelligence but a love of knowledge rarely seen in boys of any age. Before he was six all who talked with him were amazed at the proofs he gave of the great extent to which he had profited from his early training.
Most impressive was the accuracy and fulness of the information he even then possessed regarding a variety of subjects, and his linguistic proficiency. His study of foreign languages began with French, while he still was very young, and was conducted in a novel way, his father giving him French translations of books with which he was already familiar in German, and telling him to read them for a certain time each day. No attempt was made to teach him the grammar of the language as it is commonly taught in the schools, his father’s belief being that the boy could best pick up the grammar for himself in the course of his reading, and that he would be able to master the French translations with comparatively little trouble by reason of his previous training in the art of observation, analysis, and synthesis. This expectation was realised so fully that, according to his father’s statement, Karl within a year was reading French with ease.
Meantime he had begun the study of Italian, and from Italian passed to Latin. Chance played some part in introducing him to this language. His father had taken him to a concert in Leipzig, and during an intermission handed him the libretto. He looked at it casually, then with some intentness, and exclaimed:
“Why, father, this is not French, nor is it Italian. It must be Latin!”
“Let it be what it may,” said Witte, “if only you can make out what it means. Try at least.”
The boy, already grounded in two languages derived from Latin, puzzled out the meaning with considerable success, and declared enthusiastically:
“Father, if Latin is such an easy language as this, I should like to learn it.”
English came next, and then the study of Greek, a language regarding which the boy’s curiosity was whetted by tales from Homer and Xenophon told to him by his father. Again the process was chiefly one of self-education, the father answering—when he could—the questions put to him by Karl, but always insisting to the latter that the proper way to learn anything is to overcome its difficulties for oneself. He was now studying and reading French, Italian, Latin, English, and Greek, in all of which he made such progress that, we are told, by the time he was nine he had read Homer, Plutarch, Virgil, Cicero, Fénelon, Florian, and Metastasio in the original, besides Schiller and other classical German writers.
Naturally the fame of the boy spread abroad, and with its spreading his father came in for some sharp criticism. Formerly he had been laughed at as a man who was essaying the impossible in striving to impart intelligence to a mentally subnormal child. Now that he had succeeded so well in his undertaking people asserted that he was fanatically endeavouring to convert the child into a weird thinking machine, and endangering his health and sanity. Precisely the same objections, in short, were raised to his educational experiment that were later raised in the case of the Thomson boys and John Stuart Mill, and that have recently been raised against the educational methods of the fathers of the three youths now in Harvard.