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Underground Education.--The Best of Moravians and the Best of Poodles
Here my story properly begins; the scene lies in Auenthal, or rather at the mountain-castle of the Falkenbergs, which stood some acres distant from it. The first child of the Chess-Amazon and the Dying Gladiator and Captain in Check was Gustavus--not the illustrious Swedish hero, but mine. My greeting to thee, little darling! here on the scene of this rag-paper and this ragged life! I know thy whole life beforehand, therefore it is that the wailing voice of thy first minute moves me so sorely: I see on so many a year of thy life tear-drops hanging, that is why I am so touched with compassion, as I look at thy eye, which is as yet tearless because it is merely thy body that pains thee;--man comes without a smile, without a smile he goes, for a space of three fleeting minutes he was happy. I have therefore with wise forethought, dear Gustavus, saved up the fresh May of thy youth, of which I am to print a landscape-piece upon poor blotting-paper, against the May of the natural year, in order now, when every day is a creation day of nature, to make each day of mine such; in order that now, when every breath one draws is a steel-cure, every step four inches longer and the eye less curtained by the overhanging eyelid, I may write with a flying hand and with an elastic bosom full of breath and blood.
Fortunately, from the 2d to the 27th of May, (and that is all my description covers) we have a steady spell of fine weather; for I am something of a meteorological clairvoyant and my short leg and my long face are the best weather cards and hygrometers in this part of the country.
Since education has far less effect upon the inner man (and far more on the outer) than tutors imagine, one will be surprised that with Gustavus exactly the opposite occurred; for his whole life echoed the choral tone of his superterrestrial, i. e., subterranean training. For the reader must still remember being told in the 1st Section, that the Moravianly disposed wife of the Head-forester von Knör refused to let her daughter Ernestina play herself away at chess except on consideration that the winning bridegroom should promise in the marriage contract to educate and conceal their first child for eight years under the earth, in order to save him from being hardened at once to the beauties of Nature and the distortions of humanity. In vain did the Captain protest to Ernestina, that "in this way his mother-in-law would reduce the soldier to a mere lady's night-cap, and they should rather wait until a girl came." He, too, like many other men vented his vexation with the mother-in-law wholly upon his wife. But the old lady had already, before the baptism, bespoken a young man of heavenly beauty from Barby. The Captain, like all energetic people, could not endure the Moravian Diminuendo; he talked most about their talking so little; it even annoyed him that the Moravian inn-keepers did not overreach him far enough.
But our Genius--this fine name he shall keep for the present on every page--did not succumb and sicken under those heart-cramping spasms of Moravianism; he took from it only its softness and simplicity. Above his dreamy, enthusiastic eye rose a smooth, peaceful, guiltless forehead, which the fortieth year left as unruled[10] and unmarked as the fourteenth. He bore a heart which vices, as poisons do precious stones, would have crumbled to pieces; even another's face ploughed or sowed with sins oppressed and stifled his breast, and his inner man turned pale in the presence of filthy souls, as the sapphire on the finger of an unchaste man is said to lose its azure glow.
Still a sacrifice of so many years' duration for a child must have weighed hard and heavily even upon so fair a soul as the Moravian's; but he said: "O what heavenly opportunities it also afforded him, which, however, he promised only in the future to his Gustavus, who, surely, with God's help, would bloom up as he hoped, and no one ought certainly to wonder at his seeming self-sacrifice to a true and profound earthly life." And I hope, in fact, my more refined readers, whose thought is far-reaching, will not wonder, but rather will act as if they counted such an educational heroism simply quite natural. To be sure, meanwhile the virtue of most men is rather only an extra leaf and occasional poem in their common-place, newspaper life; only there are still two, three or more geniuses surely extant, in whose epic life Virtue is the heroine, and all else only by-play and episode, and whose upward course the people cannot so much wonder at as gaze upon with admiration.
The first dark years Gustavus spent as yet with his guardian-angel in a chamber above ground, merely keeping him away from those unwholesome coin-clippers of childhood, whom we have to thank for as many lame limbs as lame hearts--maids and nurses. I would rather these (dis-)Graces should educate us in the second decade than in the second year.
After that the Genius repaired with his Gustavus down into an old walled-up cavern in the castle garden, which the Captain only regretted he had not long ago had demolished. A cellar stairway led down, on the left hand, into the rocky cellar, and on the right into this vault, where stood a Carthusian Monastery with three chambers, which, on account of an old tradition, they called the Monastery of the Three Brothers; on its floor lay three stone monks, with their hewn hands crossed forever on their breasts; and perhaps under the effiges the mute originals themselves lay sleeping with their long-sunk and smothered sighs over a fleeting world. Here the fair Genius alone governed his little charge and bent every budding twig upward to the lofty stature of manhood.
Such miserable circumstantialities as, e. g., the purveying of the wash and matters of bed and board, my female readers will gladly spare me; but they will be more curious to know how the Genius educated. Very well--I say; he did not command, but simply accustomed and narrated. He never contradicted either himself or the child; nay, he had the greatest arcanum for making him good--he was so himself. Without this arcanum one might as well hire the Devil for a preceptor as be one himself, as the daughters of bad mothers prove. For the rest, the Genius was convinced the education of the heart began at the first sacrament (Baptism), that of the head at the second (Communion).
To hear of good men is as much as to live among them, and Plutarch's Lives make a deeper impression than the best text-books of moral philosophy for the use of academic teachers. For children especially there is no other moral teaching than example, related or witnessed; and it is an educational folly to think that in giving children reasons, one gives them anything more than these reasons, namely, the will and the power to follow these reasons. Oh! a thousand times happier than I beside my Tertius and Conrector wast thou, Gustavus, lying in the bosom, in the arms and under the lips of thy precious Genius, like a thirsty Alpine flower under its trickling cloud, drinking in nourishment to thy heart from the stories of good men, whom the Genius called uniformly Gustavuses and Blessed ones, of whom we shall soon see why this designation of them is printed in Italic type! As he was a good draughtsman, he gave him, as Chodowiecky does the romance writer, a drawing of every piece of history, and built around the little one this Orbis Pictus of good men, as the Almighty Genius builds around us the world of great Nature. Only he never gave him the drawing before, but only after the description, because hearing attracts children to seeing more strongly than seeing does to hearing. Another would have taken for this pedagogic lever, instead of the drawing-pen, the fiddle-bow or the piano-key; but not so the Genius; the feeling for painting develops itself, like the taste, very late, and needs, therefore, the help of education. It deserves the earliest unfolding, because it takes away the grating which sunders us from Nature, because it drives the phantasying soul out again among external things, and because it turns the German eye to the difficult art of apprehending beautiful forms. Music, on the contrary, finds already in the youngest hearts (as with the rudest peoples) responsive chords: nay, its omnipotence is impaired rather by practice and years. Gustavus learned, therefore, as a deaf mute in his deaf and dumb cavern, to draw so well that even in his 13th year, his tutor sat to him, a beautiful man, who must make his appearance further on in this book.
And so, with both, did life glide softly along in the catacomb like a rill. The little one was happy; for his wishes
