The Student-Life of Germany

by William Howitt

Peace to our brother's silent tomb.

We weep, and wish that peace may dwell

In our dear brother's silent cell.

"What becomes then of the student at the last?" the reader will ask--"of him whom we have to this point followed in silent observation through all his ways, and along his whole course?"

If, as has often been the case, we were to consider the Student-life as a disease, we should say with the Pathologist:--"Every disease can, by possibility, have, only one of three terminations: the first, in health; the second, in some other disease; and the last, in death." But we are far from looking upon it in this light. Yet we can, regarding the Student-life in its great outlines as a state of health, assign it the same issues, with the exception that we hold the Philisterium, to use the student's own language, to be the natural sequence of the natural university life.

It is truly a sorrowful reflection, that of the numbers who seek the university at the same time, it is only the smaller portion of them who reach that goal after which they strive, or should strive. Not that we mean to say that death snatches away so many from the midst of them. No; the mortality in general, and especially in Heidelberg, amongst the student youth, is very small indeed. But what we now have in our eye will be more clearly shown, if we explain ourselves on the nature of the object to be attained by the student. Has he, indeed, attained that object, when he has piled up in his head laboriously and without order, a store of things worthy to be known in his peculiar profession? No, that is not it; although people who are destitute of an enlightened grasp of mind, are accustomed to see great perfection in the education of a young man who, returning from a learned institution, is found to have gathered up all facts like a schoolboy with amazing diligence, so that when any one says A to him, he can immediately say B and C. We believe, for our part, the fruit of inquiry to be this: that the young man learns to perceive that the individual study to which he especially devotes himself, is only one branch of the great tree of knowledge; that no science, sundered entirely from the rest, can proceed prosperously to its own completion; that a science pursued alone and in an isolated manner, cannot be properly called a science; but that all the sciences stretch forth their sisterly hands to each other, and form themselves into a beautiful circle, out of which they will not suffer themselves to be torn by an unskilful person.

He will perceive, that a well-grounded study of professional science even, can only base itself on a philosophical foundation; and that he who, on the contrary, falls into one-sidedness, must become merely a clever plodder, or a charlatan. He will perceive that the arts and sciences are as intimately connected, as the capacity for the true, the good, and the beautiful is united in the spirit of man with the understanding. But is there one who has acquired no single perception of all this; has he only crammed into his head the dusty chaff of learning; has he, in the acquisition of this false learning, lost the taste for all that is good and beautiful!--it had been better that he had never entered on this field, which for him has had no result but that of drying up his brain with the heat of a confused and unfruitful knowledge.

Truly, there are yet other results of student-life than such as these: namely, those of a spurious erudition; results which for the quondam student, are yet more sorrowful, and which fill the heart of the spectator with pity and abhorrence. We mean the consequences which habits of drinking, and of other wild practices--such as the miserable passion for play, draw after them. It is true that we see many wretched creatures glide trembling about, who have laid the first foundations of their aberrations at their university. But we see equally many, or more such miserables, who never visited such an institution: and if we find many sorrowful histories in the university city, of the students who had taken their own lives because they had plunged themselves into inextricable debt; if we hear many a one at the end of his academical career lament bitterly over his lost and misspent time; we may be seized with a horror of such places as strong, as when we read what Jean Paul has depicted in such fearful colours of a similar unfortunate:--"And he brought out of the whole rich life nothing but errors, sins and diseases; a wasted body and a weary soul; a breast full of poison and an age full of remorse. His beautiful youthful days now changed themselves into spectres, and dragged him back to that sweet morning where his father had first placed him, at the point of the diverging paths of life, the right hand of which leads into the sun-path of virtue, into a wide quiet land, full of light and of harvest-fields, and of angels; and that of the left conducts down through the mole-burrowings of crime, into a black cavern full of down-dropping poison, of darting snakes, and of a damp and sultry vapour. Ah! the snakes hang on his bosom, and the poison drops on his tongue, and--he knew where he was. Wild, and with inexpressible horror and anguish, he cried to heaven--'Give me my youth again! O Father! place me again on the diverging path that I may choose differently!'"

I say, we, and more especially the foreigner, hearing and seeing such things, should regard those places with horror. But let the latter think, how many young people here are collected together; and that amongst them must of a certainty be many very thoughtless, and no few of them decidedly bad characters. Let him recollect that these numbers, who have just escaped from the strict bondage of the schools, now suddenly stand free, torn loose from all family bonds, to act without restraint, and at their own pleasure. Let him reflect that they are in a place where opportunities for every species of extravagance are so freely offered; where, if their purses are exhausted, so many are at hand ready to lend. Let him again reflect, that the student is exposed to all those temptations at an age at which the passions rage often with a fearful strength; at an age which causes him to stagger between its extremes. Let him, and let us, weigh all this, and then we cannot wonder, if many a one in this contest goes down; if many a one fails to accomplish the aim of his ideal activity; and we shall even rejoice that so many honourably pass through the ordeal, and choose the right. Goethe's Wahrheit und Dichtung presents us with a passage which is particularly applicable to this subject.

"All men of good disposition feel, in the progress of their education, that they have a double part to play in the world--an actual and an ideal one,--and in this feeling is to be sought the ground of every thing that is noble. What of the actual is allotted to us, we find only too clear; what concerns the ideal, we can seldom come into a distinct conception of. The man may seek his higher destiny on the earth or in heaven, in the present or in the future; but on that account he remains exposed to a constant wavering from within, and to a constantly disturbing influence from without, till he once for all takes the resolution to declare that is the right which is conformable to his individual condition and character."