But by day, as well, my imagination was unusually, and perhaps unhealthily, active. Ugly people, for example, whom my brother laughed at and mimicked, filled me with dread. A little hunch-backed tailor—on either side of whose triangular, deathly-pale face, immoderately long ears stood out, ears moreover which were bright red and transparent—could not pass by without my running with screams into the house; and it almost caused my death when he once, in a passion, followed me, scolding and calling me a stupid youngster, and upbraiding my mother because he thought she was making him play the bug-bear in her domestic discipline. I could not endure the sight of a bone and buried even the smallest one that came to light in our garden; nay later, when in Susanna's school, I obliterated with my nails the word "rib" in my catechism, because it always brought before me the disgusting object which it designated as vividly as though the object itself lay there in repulsive decay before my eyes. On the other hand, a rose-leaf, which a breeze blew to me over the hedge, was as much to me as—nay, more than the rose itself was to others, and words like tulip and lily, cherry and apricot, apple and pear, immediately transplanted me into spring, summer, and autumn; so that in the primer I liked to spell aloud the pieces in which they occurred better than any others, and grew angry each time when it was not my turn to do so. Only, unhappily, in the world one needs the diminishing glass much oftener than the magnifying, and this holds good even of the beautiful days of youth, except in very rare cases. For as it is said of horses that they respect man only because, on account of the construction of their eye, they see in him a giant, so the child endowed with imagination stands still before a grain of sand only because it seems to him an insuperable mountain. Things in themselves therefore cannot set the standard here; on the contrary, one must inquire about the shadows which they cast; hence the father can often laugh while the son is enduring the tortures of hell because the scales by which they weigh are fundamentally different.
An incident, comical in itself, belongs in this place because it throws a very clear light precisely on this point, so important for education. I was once sent to get a roll for dinner. The baker's wife handed it to me and good-humoredly gave me at the same time an old nut-cracker, which had probably turned up somewhere when she was cleaning house. I had never seen a nut-cracker before. I was not acquainted with any of its hidden qualities, and took it like any other doll which appealed to me by reason of its red cheeks and staring eyes. Joyously starting on my way home and pressing the nut-cracker, like a newly acquired favorite, tenderly to my breast, I noticed all of a sudden that it opened its jaws and in gratitude for my caresses showed me its cruel white teeth. One may imagine my fright! I shrieked loudly, I ran across the street as though pursued, but I had not sense or courage enough to throw the demon away, and as it naturally sometimes closed its mouth and sometimes opened it again, according to the movements I made while running, I could not help considering it alive, and arrived home half dead. Here I was, of course, laughed at and enlightened as to the truth, at last even scolded. It was all of no avail. It was impossible for me to become reconciled again to the monster although I recognized its innocence, and I did not rest until I had received permission to give it away to another boy. When my father learned of the matter he was of the opinion that there was no other youngster alive to whom such a thing could happen. That was very possible, for there was perhaps no other at whom the cousins of the nut-cracker had made faces from the floor and from the walls in the evening when he was just going to sleep. This very night the activity of my seething imagination culminated in a dream, which was so monstrous and left such an impression upon me that for that very reason it returned seven times in succession. It seemed to me as though the dear Lord, of whom I had already heard so much, had stretched a rope between heaven and earth, had set me upon it, and placed Himself beside it to swing me. Then without rest or pause I flew up and down with dizzy speed; now I was high up among the clouds, my hair fluttering in the wind, and I held on convulsively and closed my eyes; now I was so near the earth again that I could plainly see the yellow sand and the little red and white stones—indeed could even reach them with my toes. I wished to throw myself off; that, however, required resolution, and before I succeeded, I went up in the air again, and there was nothing for me to do but seize the rope once more so as not to fall and be dashed to pieces. The week in which this dream occurred was perhaps the most terrible one of all my childhood, for the memory of it did not leave me the whole day. When, in spite of my struggles, I was put to bed I carried the fear of its return with me, even immediately into my sleep so that it was no wonder the dream continually recurred, until by degrees it faded out.
VIII
I remained in Susanna's school until my sixth year and learned there to read fluently. I was not permitted to learn to write yet on account of my youth, as it was said; it was the last thing that Susanna had to teach and therefore she prudently held it in reserve. But I had already started with the first necessary exercises in memory; for as soon as the youngster had been promoted from the sexless frock to trousers, and from the primer to the catechism, he had to learn by heart the ten commandments and the chief articles of the Christian Faith as Doctor Martin Luther, the great reformer, formulated them three hundred years ago for the guidance of the Protestant Church. Memorizing went no farther and the tremendous dogmas, which without explanation or elucidation passed from the book into the undeveloped childish brain, became transformed into wonderful and in part grotesque pictures. These, however, did the young mind no manner of harm, but gave it a healthy impetus and stirred it up to prophetic activity. For what does it matter if the child, when it hears of original sin, or of death and the devil, forms a conception or a fantastic image of those profound symbols? To fathom them is the task of our whole lifetime, but the developing man is warned at the very beginning of an all-disposing higher power, and I doubt if the same end could be reached by early initiation into the mysteries of the rule of three or into the wisdom of Æsop's fables. The remarkable part of it was, to be sure, that in my imagination Luther came to stand almost directly beside Moses and Jesus Christ, but without doubt the reason was that his thundering "What is that?" always resounded immediately after the majestic laconic utterances of Jehovah, and that moreover his rough, expressive face, out of which the spirit speaks all the more forcibly because it must manifestly first gain the victory over the thick resisting flesh, was reproduced in the front of the catechism in heavy black ink. But so far as I know that had no more injurious consequences for me than my belief in the real horns and claws of the devil, or in the scythe of death, and I learned, as soon as there was any necessity for it, to distinguish perfectly between the Saviour and the reformer.
For the rest the modest acquisitions that I had made at Susanna's sufficed to procure for me a certain respect at home. To Master Ohl it was immensely impressive that I soon knew better than he himself all that the true Christian believes, and my mother was almost moved to tears when for the first time I read the evening blessing aloud by lamp-light, without faltering or stammering. Indeed she felt so edified that she gave over to me forever the office of reader, the duties of which I hereafter performed for a considerable length of time with much zeal and not without self-complacency.
Toward the end of my sixth year a great change, nay a complete transformation, took place in the school-system in Holstein, and consequently in that of my own little fatherland. Up to that time the State had not interfered at all in primary instruction and but little in the secondary. Parents could send their children wherever they wished and the primary schools were purely private institutions, about which even the ministers scarcely troubled themselves, and which often sprang up in the most curious manner. Thus Susanna had arrived in Wesselburen one stormy autumn evening, in wooden shoes, without a penny, and an entire stranger. She had been given a night's lodging, for sweet charity's sake, by the compassionate widow of a pastor. The latter discovers that the pilgrim can read and write and also knows quite a little about the Bible and thereupon makes her on the spot the proposition to remain in the town, in her very house, and teach. The youth of the place, or at least the crawling part of the same, had, as it happened, just been orphaned. The former teacher, for a long time highly praised on account of his strict discipline, had undressed a saucy little girl and set her upon a hot stove in punishment for some naughtiness, perhaps in order to procure still greater praise thereby, and that had been too much for even the most unqualified reverers of the rod. Susanna was quite alone in the world, and did not know where she should turn or what she should take up. She therefore gladly, although according to her own words not without misgivings, exchanged the accustomed labor with her hands for the difficult labor with her head, and the speculation succeeded perfectly, and in the shortest space of time imaginable.
To the boys and girls of more advanced age severe, sombre gymnasiums and grammar-schools did indeed open their doors. These were under a sort of supervision and in case of necessity were recruited by the secular arm, if new comers did not enlist of their own accord. But in these institutions too, only the merest manual training was given, in spite of the pompous sounding names which they flaunted, and which to this hour have remained a mystery to me. A brother of my mother's, universally admired on account of his talents—whom the principal, though by no means over modest, had dismissed with the solemn declaration that he could teach him nothing further because he knew as much as he himself—was indeed a mighty calligrapher, and decorated his New Year's cards with tints and flourishes in India ink as the old printers Fust and Schöffer did their incunabula, but nevertheless he could not achieve a single grammatical sentence.
These conditions, undeniably defective and much in need of improvement, were now once and for all to be brought to an end. The people were to be educated from the cradle up, superstition was to be exterminated root and branch. Whether thorough consideration was given to that which should have been considered above everything else must remain in doubt; for the conception of culture is extremely relative, and just as the most disgusting intoxication follows the nipping from every bottle, so superficial encyclopedical knowledge, which at the most can be made broad, engenders precisely the most repulsive kind of arrogance. It will no longer bow to any authority and yet never penetrates to the depths in which the multifarious logical inconsistencies and contradictions find their own solution.
Probably the right method was adopted when they founded normal schools on the one hand and primary schools on the other, so that the essence which had been distilled in the former and poured into the empty schoolmaster heads in the form of rationalism, could from the latter spread itself immediately over the whole land. The result was that a somewhat superstitious generation was followed by an excessively overwise one; for it is astonishing how the grandchild feels when he knows that a nocturnal fiery meteor is composed merely of inflammable gases, while his grandfather sees in it the devil trying to enter some chimney or other with his shining money bags.
But however the matter may have stood in general,—and I repeat my conviction that in this case the happy medium is hard to find,—to me the reform was a great blessing. For Wesselburen, like the other towns, acquired an elementary school and a man was chosen as teacher of it whose name I cannot write down without a feeling of the deepest gratitude, because in spite of his modest position, he exercised an immeasurable influence on my development. He was called Franz Christian Detlefsen and came to us from the neighboring town of Eiderstedt, where he had already held a small official position.