Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

As to relaxation, in the sense of the word in which I used to employ it at home,—meaning the hours I lounged so happily away when the weariness of the evening came, on your sofa, and the time I used to pass with my friends in general, I know not how or why, but always gayly and thoughtlessly,—of this sort of relaxation I know nothing here but the end of an evening which I occasionally permit myself to spend with Cogswell, whose residence here has in this respect changed the whole color of my life. During the last semester, I used to visit occasionally at about twenty houses in Göttingen, chiefly as a means of learning to speak the language. As the population here is so changeable, and as every man is left to live exactly as he chooses, it is customary for all those who wish to continue their intercourse with the persons resident here to make a call at the beginning of each semester, which is considered a notice that they are still here and still mean to go into society. I, however, feel no longer the necessity of visiting for the purpose of learning German, and now that Cogswell is here cannot desire it for any other purpose; have made visits only to three or four of the professors, and shall, therefore, not go abroad at all. As to exercise, however, I have enough. Three times a day I must cross the city entirely to get my lessons. I go out twice besides, a shorter distance for dinner and a fourth lesson; and four times a week I take an hour’s exercise for conscience’ sake and my mother’s in the riding-school. Four times a week I make Cogswell a visit of half an hour after dinner, and three times I spend from nine to ten in the evening with him, so that I feel I am doing quite right and quite as little as I ought to do in giving up the remaining thirteen hours of the day to study, especially as I gave fourteen to it last winter without injury.

The journey we have lately taken was for the express purpose of seeing all the universities or schools of any considerable name in the country. This in a couple of months we easily accomplished, and of course saw professors, directors, and schoolmasters—men of great learning and men of little learning, and men of no learning at all—in shoals.

This is from Cogswell again, and is certainly a clarion appeal as to the need of thoroughness in teaching and learning:—

Göttingen, July 13, 1817.

I hope that you and every other person interested in the College are reconciled to Mr. Everett’s plan of remaining longer in Europe than was at first intended, as I am sure you would be do you know the use he makes of his time, and the benefit you are all to derive from his learning. Before I came to Göttingen I used to wonder why it was that he wished to remain here so long; I now wonder he can consent to leave so soon. The truth is, you all mistake the cause of your impatience: you believe that it comes from a desire of seeing him at work for and giving celebrity to the College, but it arises from a wish to have him in your society, at your dinner-tables, at your suppers, your clubs, and your ladies, at your tea-parties (you perceive I am aiming at Boston folks): however, all who have formed such expectations must be disappointed; he will find that most of these gratifications must be sacrificed to attain the objects of a scholar’s ambition. What can men think when they say that two years are sufficient to make a Greek scholar? Does not everybody know that it is the labor of half a common life to learn to read the language with tolerable facility? I remember to have heard little Drisen say, a few days after I came here, that he had been spending eighteen years, at least sixteen hours a day, exclusively upon Greek, and that he could not now read a page of the tragedians without a dictionary. When I went home I struck Greek from the list of my studies; I now think no more of attaining it than I do of becoming an astrologer. In fact, the most heart-breaking circumstance attending upon human knowledge is that a man can never go any farther than “to know how little’s to be known”; it fills, then, the mind of scholars with despair to look upon the map of science, as it does that of the traveler to look upon the map of the earth, for both see what a mere speck can be traveled over, and of that speck how imperfect is the knowledge which is acquired. Let any one who believes that he has penetrated the mysteries of all science, and learnt the powers and properties of whatever is contained in the kingdoms of air, earth, fire, and water, but just bring his knowledge to the test; let him, for example, begin with what seems the simplest of all inquiries, and enumerate the plants which grow upon the surface of the globe, and call them by their names, and, when he finds that this is beyond his limits, let him descend to a single class and bring within it all that the unfathomed caves of ocean and the unclimbed mountains bear; and as this is also higher than he can reach, let him go still lower and include only one family, or a particular species, or an individual plant, and mark his points of ignorance upon each, and then, if his pride of knowledge is not humbled enough, let him take but a leaf or the smallest part of the most common flower, and give a satisfactory solution for many of the phenomena they exhibit. But, you will ask, is Göttingen the only place for the acquisition of such learning? No, not the only, but I believe far the best for such learning as it is necessary for Mr. E. to fit him to make Cambridge in some degree a Göttingen, and render it no longer requisite to depend upon the latter for the formation of their scholars: it is true that very few of what the Germans call scholars are needed in America; if there would only be one thorough one to begin with, the number would soon be sufficient for all the uses which could be made of them, and for the literary character of the country. This one, I say, could never be formed there, because, in the first place, there is no one who knows how it is to be done; secondly, there are no books, and then, by the habits of desultory study practiced there, are wholly incompatible with it. A man as a scholar must be completely upset, to use a blacksmith’s phrase; he must have learnt to give up his love of society and of social pleasures, his interest in the common occurrences of life, in the political and religious contentions of the country, and in everything not directly connected with his single aim. Is there any one willing to make such a sacrifice? This I cannot answer, but I do assure you that it is the sacrifice made by almost every man of classical learning in Germany, though to be sure the sacrifice of the enjoyments of friendly intercourse with mankind to letters is paying much less dear for fame here than the same thing would be in America. For my own part I am sorry I came here, because I was too old to be upset; like a horseshoe worn thin, I shall break as soon as I begin to wear on the other side: it makes me very restless at this period of my life to find that I know nothing. I would not have wished to have made the discovery unless I could at the same time have been allowed to remain in some place where I could get rid of my ignorance; and, now that I must go from Göttingen, I have no hope of doing that.

The following from Edward Everett carries the war yet farther into Africa, and criticises not merely American colleges, but also secondary schools:—

Göttingen, September 17, 1817.

You must not laugh at me for proceeding to business the first thing, and informing you in some sort as an argument, that, if I have been unreasonable in prolonging my stay here, I have at least passed my time not wholly to disadvantage,—that I received this morning my diploma as Doctor of Philosophy of this University, the first American, and as far as I know, Englishman, on whom it has ever been conferred. You will perhaps have heard that it was my intention to have passed from this University to that of Oxford, and to have spent this winter there. I have altered this determination for the sake of joining forces with Theodore Lyman at Paris this winter; and as he proposes to pass the ensuing summer in traveling in the South of France, I shall take that opportunity of going to England. It is true I should have liked to have gone directly from Göttingen to Oxford, to have kept the thread as it were unbroken, and gone on with my studies without any interruption. But I find, even at Paris, that I have no object there but study; and Professor Gaisford, at Oxford, writes me that it is every way better that I should be there in summer, as the Library is open a greater part of the day. Meanwhile, I try to feel duly grateful to Providence and my friends at home to whom I owe the opportunity of resorting to the famous fountains of European wisdom. The only painful feeling I carry with me is that I may not have health, or strength, or ability to fulfill the demands which such an opportunity will create and justify. More is apt to be expected in such cases than it is possible to perform; besides that, after the schoolmaster is prepared for his duty, all depends upon whether the schoolboy is also prepared for his. You must not allow any report to the contrary to shake your faith in my good-will in the cause. Some remarks which I committed to paper at the request of my brother upon the subject of a National University,—an institution which by exciting an emulation in our quarter would be the best thing that could happen to Cambridge,—have, I hear, led some good men to believe that I was for deserting the service at Cambridge still more promptly than I had done at Boston,—a suggestion certainly too absurd to have been made, or to need to have been contradicted. However, still more important than all which national or state universities can do themselves immediately, is the necessity we must impose on the schools of reforming and improving themselves, or, rather, are the steps we must take to create good schools. All we have are bad, the common reading and writing ones not excepted; but of schools which we have to fit boys for college, I think the Boston Latin School and the Andover Academy are the only ones that deserve the name, and much I doubt if they deserve it. There is much truth in the remark so constantly made that we are not old enough for European perfection, but we are old enough to do well all it is worth while to do at all; and if a child here in eight years can read and speak Latin fluently, there is no reason why our youth, after spending the same time on it, should know little or nothing about it. Professional education with us commences little or no earlier than it does here, and yet we approach it in all departments with a quarter part of the previous qualification which is here possessed. But also it is the weakness of mankind to do more than he is obliged to. The sort of obligation, to be sure, which is felt, differs with different spirits, and one is content to be the first man in his ward, one in his town, one in his county, another in his state. To all these degrees of dignity the present education is adequate; and we turn out reputable ministers, doctors, lawyers, professors, and schoolmasters,—men who get to be as wise at ye (sic) age of threescore as their fathers were at sixty, and who transmit the concern of life to their children in as good condition as they took it themselves. Meanwhile, the physical and commercial progress of ye (sic) country goes on, and more numerous doctors and more ministers are turned out, not more learned ones, to meet it. I blushed burning red to the ears the other day as a friend here laid his hand upon a newspaper containing the address of the students at Baltimore to Mr. Monroe, with the translation of it. It was less matter that the translation was not English; my German friend could not detect that. But that the original was not Latin I could not, alas! conceal. It was, unfortunately, just like enough to very bad Latin to make it impossible to pass it off for Kickapoo or Pottawattamy, which I was at first inclined to attempt. My German persisted in it that it was meant for Latin, and I wished in my heart that the Baltimore lads would stick to the example of their fathers and mob the Federalists, so they would give over this inhuman violence on the poor old Romans. I say nothing of ye (sic) address, for like all [illegible] it seems to have been ye (sic) object, in the majority of those productions, for those who made them to compliment, not the President, but themselves. It is a pity Dr. Kirkland’s could not have been published first, to serve as a model how they might speak to the President without coldness on one side and adulation on the other, and of themselves without intrusion or forwardness.

The following letter transfers Edward Everett to Oxford, and gives in a somewhat trenchant way his unfavorable criticisms on the English universities of that day. He subsequently sent his son to Cambridge, England, but it was forty years later:—