Now he had three historical courses open before him. He could strike into the geographical road, which begins with the wretchedest history in the world,—the history of countries. But only the British and the French, at most, can begin history as an epic, and a description of the earth backward; on the contrary, a Haarhaar, Baireuth, or Mecklenberg princely patristic gives hollow teeth hollow nuts to crack, without meat for head and heart. And does not one magnify thereby a twig of history, on which the accident of birth has deposited the young barkchafer, most disproportionately into a tree of consanguinity? And what cares one in Berlin, for instance, to inquire after a lineage of Margraves, or in Hof, after the pedigree of the Regents of Hohenzollern?
The second method is the chronological, or that which tackles the horses in front; this starts with the birthday of the world, which, according to Petavius and the Rabbins, came into the world on the forenoon of the 22d October,[35] hastens on to the 28th of October as the first clown's and blunderhead's day of the young Adam, then marches away over the 29th, the first Sunday, Fast-day, and Bankruptcy-day, and so on down to the Bankruptcy- and Fast-day of the latest child of Adam, who is compelled to listen to the case.
This milky-way was, for our Magister, too long, too dreary, too strange. He steered the middle track between the foregoing, which leads to the rich two Indies of history, Greece and Rome. The ancients work upon us more through their deeds than through their writings, more upon the heart than upon the taste; one fallen century after another receives from them the double history as the two sacraments and means of grace for moral confirmation, and their writings, to which their stone works of art attach every after age, are the eternal Bible-institute against every failure of a Kanstein's. But let us now, on a fine summer morning, walk along several times before the Rectorate-residence, and listen, ourselves also, outside, to hear with what voice the Magister within, although in old-fashioned applications, cites out of Plutarch,—the biographical Shakespeare of Universal History,—not the shadowy world of states, but the angels of the churches who shine therein, the holy family of great men, and cast a passing glance at the sparkling eye with which the inspired boy hangs upon the moral antiques which the teacher, as in a foundery, assembles around him. O, when the mighty storm-clouds of the heroic past thus hung around Zesara's soul as on a mountain, and descended upon it with still lightnings and drops, was not then the whole mountain charged with heavenly fire, and every green thing that blossomed thereupon fertilized, quickened, and called forth? And could he, then, so beautifully beclouded, haply look down into low reality? Nay, did not teacher as well as scholar, amid the market-din of the Roman and Athenian forums, where they went round in the train of Cato and Socrates, remain entirely ignorant that the busy mistress was cooking, bed-making, scolding, and scouring close beside them? Of the eight screaming children, on account of the very multitude, they heard nothing; for a single buzzing fly a man cannot bear, without a terrible effort, in his chamber, while he could easily a whole swarm. Even so, from their eyes, the school-room, on whose floor nothing was wanting which is thrown into canary-cages for nest-building,—hair, moss, roe's-hair, pulled flannel, and finger-lengths of yarn,—was hidden by the floor of the (geographical and historical) Old World, which, like the pavement of St. Paul's church in Rome, consists of marble ruins full of broken inscriptions.
18. CYCLE.
The reader is now curious about the afternoon, when the élève is sent into the polishing-mill of the Viennite, in order to know what sort of a polishing he gets there. It cannot but make him still more curious, when I repeat that Wehmeier, who, like other literati, resembled the elephant in clumsiness and sagacity, found nothing more agreeable to think of—and, therefore, to describe—in ancient history, than a great man, who had on little, as, for instance, Diogenes, or went barefoot, like Cato, or unshaven, like the philosophers; nay, he hit the very Mittel-Mark, and drew out for himself Frederick the Second's clothes, whereby he gained as much as Mr. Pagé in Paris, and carried his shirts, like the noble Saladin's, and with similar proclamations, on poles for show, and sketched, as a second Scheiner, the best map we have of the sun-spots of snuff on Frederick. Then he took these naked, rough colossi, and piled them together into one scale, and threw into the other the light, wainscoted figures, like Falterle and the nice Nuremberg Kinder-gärten of modern courts, and besought the scholar to take notice which way the swaying tongue of the balance would incline....
I am not wholly on thy side here, Magister, since vigorous youths too easily, without any prompting, tear in pieces the thin plate of the ceremonial law, and often the platers, the head masters of ceremonies, into the bargain. For weaklings, the method is good.
Now, when Albano came to the accomplishing master, he could but faintly, on account of the loud resonance of the previous lesson,—for children of a certain depth, like buildings of a certain size, give an echo,—apprehend what Falterle commanded; and only when he remained some days without the historical sensation was he more widely open to the lesser instructions, as gilded things cannot be silvered over till the gold is worn off. The misfortune was, too, that he had to go through his task-dances in the very next room to the study of the Director, who was there occupied with his own. It often happened that Wehrfritz, when Alban was as distrait and inattentive in the Anglaise as a partner in love, would cry out, while he was dictating in there, "In the name of the three devils, chassez!" Quite as many cases might one reckon in which, when the music-master, like a bass-drum, with everlasting exhortations glided away through adagio into piano, the man had to call out in there, with the strongest imaginable fortissimo, "Pianissimo, Satan! pianissimo!" Sometimes he was obliged to rise from his labors, when, in the fencing-lesson, all admonitions to "quart!" availed nothing, and open the door, and, grim with fury, say to him of Vienna, "For God's sake, sir, don't be a hare! Prick his leather soundly, if he doesn't mind!" Whereupon the courtly fencing-master would only gently encourage him to "quart thrust."
Nevertheless, he learned much. In such early years one cannot rise above the finery nor the fine arts of a Falterle, who, besides, was reinforced with the magical advantage of having shone and taught in the forbidden metropolis. Only the loud stride and the boots were not to be taken from the pupil; but the shoulders soon grew horizontal, and the head perpendicular; and the oscillating fingers, together with the restless body, were steadied with Stahl's eye-holder. In general, men with a liberal soul in a finely-built body have already, without Falterle's espalier-wall and scissors, an agreeable shape and stature. Moreover, he felt toward the neat, friendly Falterle that holy first love for men wherewith a child's heart twines round all inmates of his home and village; and simply for this reason, that a lady could wind the Viennite about her ring-finger,—yes, inside of the gold ring itself,—and because he spoke and lied about the Knight of the Golden Fleece as about a king, and because he was the most agreeable creature that ever trod the earth.
As I mean in my biographies to teach tolerance and even-handed justice toward all characters, I must here lead the way with a pattern of toleration, by remarking of Falterle, that his poor, thin soul had not the power to develop itself under the stone table of the laws of etiquette, and under the wooden yoke of an imposing station. To whom did the poor devil ever do any harm? Not even to ladies, for whom indeed he was always laboring before the looking-glass, like a copperplate engraver, upon his dear self, but only, like other sculptors, by this artistic work, to display pure beauties, not to mislead them. The sea-water of his life—for he is neither a millionnaire, nor even the greatest savant of the age, although he has read about among many circulating libraries—is sweetened by the water of beauty, wherein he hourly bathes. He swills and gormandizes scarcely at all. If he curses and swears, he does it in foreign languages, as the Papist makes his prayers, and flatters very few except himself.
The vain man, and still more the vain woman, hate vain persons much too violently; for such persons, after all, are more diseased in the head than in the will. I can here cheerfully appeal to every thinking reader, whether he ever, even when he was going about with an uncommonly vain feeling, remembers to have detected any deep qualms of conscience or discords in himself, which, however, were never wanting, when he lied very much or was too hard. Much rather has he, on such occasions, experienced an uncommonly agreeable rocking of his inner man in the cradle of state. Hence a vain man is as hard to cure as a gambler; but for this further reason,—most sins are occasional sermons and occasional poems, and must frequently be set aside, from the third to the tenth commandment inclusive. Marriage, the Sabbath, a man's word, cannot be broken at any given hour. One cannot bear false witness against himself, any more than he can play ninepins or fight a duel with himself. Many considerable sins can only be committed on Easter-Fair or New-Year's Day, or in the Palais Royal, or in the Vatican. Many royal, margravely, princely crimes are possible only once in a whole life; many never at all,—for instance, the sin against the Holy Ghost. On the contrary, one can praise and crown himself inwardly day and night, summer and winter, in every place,—in the pulpit, in the Prater, in the general's tent, on the back seat of a sleigh, in the princely chair, in any part of Germany,—for instance, in Weimar. What! and must one let this perennial balsam-plant, which continually perfumes the inner man, be plucked up or lopped off?