Book: Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861

V >> Various >> Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861




The Theological Faculty ranks the highest, and comprises a wide range of
study. We quote from Dr. Schaff:--

"In modern times the field has been greatly enlarged by the addition
of Oriental Philology, Biblical Criticism, Hermeneutics, Antiquities,
Church-History and Doctrine-History, Homiletics, Catechetics, Liturgies,
Pastoral Theology, and Theory of Church-Government. No theological
faculty is considered complete now which has not separate teachers
for the exegetical, historical, systematic, and practical branches of
divinity. The German professors, however, are not confined to their
respective departments, as is the case in our American seminaries,
but may deliver lectures on any other branch, as far as it does not
interfere with their immediate duties. Schleiermacher, for instance,
taught, at different times, almost every branch of theology and
philosophy."

The Law Department, to which the celebrated school of Bologna served as
a first model, extends over a far wider field than similar institutions
elsewhere. Starting from the Roman Law, it embraces lectures on the
History of Jurisprudence, the Pandects, Civil, Criminal, and Common Law,
and Natural Rights, besides History and Philosophy, as applied to legal
studies,--branching into specialities for German Law and Practice, local
and general. To Americans, of course, only the first part of these
studies would be at all desirable. Moreover, the advantages are not all
of a practical nature.

The Medical Faculty embraces all the studies pursued in our medical
colleges, more specialities being treated,--the time required being
scarcely ever less than five years for the course, often more.
Examinations are severe. The faculties of Berlin, Munich, and Wuerzburg
are in especial repute,--Vienna also affording many advantages. In some
of the smaller university towns the means of study are limited for
the advanced student, extensive collections and large hospitals being
wanting. Medical studies are attended with more expense than any other.

The _Cameralistische Facultaet_ is devoted to those preparing themselves
for practical statesmanship. It is new, and established only of late
years in a few of the universities. In others, the branches taught
are still comprehended under the philosophical. Munich is in especial
repute. It comprises lectures on Political Economy in all its branches,
Mining, Engineering,--in fact, whatever is necessary to fit one for
service in the State.

Let no one, from the above comprehensive list of studies, form the idea,
that the outward incarnation of the German intellect, in speech or deed,
corresponds to its inner worth and solidity. The name _Dryasdust_
must cling to many a learned professor more firmly than to the most
chronological of the old historians. Germany is not the land of outward
form. To one accustomed to public speaking, the lecturers will often
appear far below the standard of mediocrity in their manner. Though such
men as Lasaulx in Munich, Haeusser in Heidelberg, Droyson and Werder
in Berlin deliver their lectures in a style that would grace the
lecture-room of any country, yet the great majority are far, very far,
from any eloquence in their delivery. Timid and bashful often to an
extreme, they ascend their rostrum with a shuffling, ambling gait, the
very opposite of manly grace and bearing, and, prefacing their
discourse with the short address, _"Meine Herren"_ keep on in one long,
never-varying, monotonous strain, from beginning to end,--reading wholly
or in part, often so slowly that the hearer can write down _every_ word,
often only the heads and substance of paragraphs, definitions and the
like,--and that so indistinctly, so carelessly of all but the very words
themselves, that it is not only unpleasant, at first, but even repulsive
to many. This dictating of every word, a relic of the times when
printing was yet unknown, is fast dying away. Many, both students and
professors, are loud against it, yet the tedious method is still pursued
in many places. The introductory remark of a celebrated lecturer is
characteristic. Seeing all his hearers, on the first day of the course,
ready with pen and paper, he began,--"Gentlemen, I will not dictate: if
that were necessary, I should send my maid-servant with my manuscript,
and you yours with pen and paper; my servant would dictate, yours would
write, and we in the mean while could enjoy a pleasant walk." This
is, however, not the only point that will be likely to produce an
unfavorable impression. To see a man whose name you have met in your
reading as the highest authority, whose works you have so often admired,
his style energetic, fiery, and impressive,--to see him ascend his
rostrum with every mark of negligence, uncouth and awkward in his
appearance, with every possible mannerism, talking through his nose,
indistinctly and unsteadily mumbling over his sentences, careless of all
outward form and polish, awakens anything but pleasant feelings, as the
preconceived ideal must give way to the living reality. And yet so it is
with many!

It may have contributed not a little to the reputation of Goettingen and
Heidelberg with foreigners, that a good and clear German is spoken in
both places by the professors. In Tuebingen, on the contrary, even in
Munich, to a great extent, the local dialect prevails to such a degree,
that students from Northern Germany, many of whom frequent these cities
in the summer session, find it difficult, nay, almost impossible, to
understand at first, especially the broad Suabian of Tuebingen. Here,
however, as the system of dictation prevails, the slowness of utterance
compensates in a measure for its indistinctness and incorrectness.

In some places, where academic freedom, as the students style it, exists
to a high degree, a general scraping of the feet admonishes the lecturer
to repeat his words or be more distinct and clear in his enunciation.
This pedal language, though often disregarded, still does not fail in
the end in producing the desired effect.

With such characteristics, it cannot be a matter of wonder, if some
time be required to be spent in hearing lectures daily before the full
benefit can be fairly appreciated. Many will appear slow in the extreme;
and the constant recourse to notes, and the tedious manner, will create
a feeling of weariness hard to overcome. However, these peculiarities
are soon forgotten in the excellence of the matter, and their
disagreeableness is scarcely noticed after a few weeks, except in
extreme cases. The mannerism fades away, and the hearer learns to follow
from thought to thought under the guidance of an experienced leader,
whose living words he hears, whose thought he feels as it is
communicated directly to him.

Not so much from the actual things heard, the actual facts mastered, is
the lecture-system valuable to the student, as for the method of
study which he derives from it. He is no longer like an automaton, a
school-boy guided by his teacher and text-book, but is spoken to as an
independent thinker. Authorities are quoted, which he may consult at his
leisure. No subject is exhausted,--it is only touched upon. He learns to
teach himself.

Far different is the mental training thus acquired from that gained in
the same amount of time spent in mere reading. Thought is stimulated to
a far greater degree. The lecture-room becomes a laboratory, where the
mind of the hearer, in immediate contact with that of a man mature in
the ways of study, of one whose whole life seems to have prepared him
for the present hour, assimilates to itself more than knowledge. The
lecturer gives what no books can give, his own force to impel his own
words. His mind is ever active while he speaks. The hearer feels its
workings, and his own is stirred into action by the contact. It is
not given to all to enjoy the conversation and intercourse of the
master-minds of the age: in the lecture-room they speak to us
immediately; we feel the current of their life-blood; it pulsates
through all they say.

That seeming exceptions may occur, as in the case of professors who year
after year deliver the same written course, can have no weight against
the system. The tone and gesture, the very look, must animate the
whole;--and these very written lectures, read and delivered so often,
are no dead stalk, but a living stem, which puts forth new leaves and
blossoms every spring.

Nor is the hearer himself without his corresponding influence. His
attention and eager desire for knowledge stimulate new thought in the
speaker day by day, hour by hour; and many a German scholar must have
felt with Friedrich August Wolf, when he says,--"I am one who has been
long accustomed to the gentle charm which lies in the momentaneous
unfolding of thought in the presence of attentive hearers, to that
living reaction softly felt by the teacher, whereby a perennial mental
harmony is awakened in his soul, which far surpasses the labors in the
study, before blank walls and the feelingless paper."


THE STUDIES.


The first entrance into a German auditorium or _Hoersaal_, as the
lecture-rooms in the universities are called, will show much that is
characteristic. But little care is bestowed on the decoration of the
apartment. Whatever aesthetic culture the nation may have, it finds
little manifestation in the things of daily life, and elegance seems
little less than banished from the precincts of the learned world. The
academic halls present to the view nothing but dingy walls, rough floors
coated with the dust and mud of days or weeks, and, winter and summer,
the huge porcelain stove in one corner,--that immovable article of
cheerless German furniture, where wood is put in by the pound, and no
bright glow ever discloses the presence of that warmest friend of man,
a good fire. For the students there are coarse, long wooden desks and
benches, with places all numbered, cut up and disfigured to an extent
which will soon convince one that whittling is not a trait of American
destructiveness exclusively. Here are carved names and intertwined
lettering, arabesque masterpieces of penknife-ingenuity, with a general
preponderance of feminine appellatives, bold incisures, at times, of
some worthy professor in profile,--the whole besmutched with ink, and
dotted with countless punctures, the result of the sharp spike with
which every student's ink-horn is armed, that he may steady it upon the
slanting board. The preceding lecture ended when the university-clock
struck the hour; the next should begin within ten or fifteen minutes.
One by one the students drop in and take their places,--high and low,
rich and poor, all on the same straight-backed pine benches. The days
fire over, even in title-loving Germany, though not long since, when
the young counts and barons sat foremost, on a privileged, raised, and
cushioned seat, and were addressed by their title.

As the hearers thus assemble, they present a motley appearance,--being,
in the larger cities especially, from all lands, all ranks of society,
and of every age. Side by side with the young freshman in his first
semester, the _Fat Fox_, as he is called, who has just made a leap from
the strict discipline of the gymnasium to the unbounded freedom of the
university, will be a gray-haired man, to whom the academic title of
_Juvenis Studiosus_ will no longer apply. Here sits, with his gaudy
watch-guard, the colors of his corps, one of those students by
profession who have been inscribed year after year so long that they
have acquired the name of _Bemossed Heads_. Were his scientific
attainments measured by his capacities for beer-drinking and
sword-slashing, he would long ago have been dubbed a Doctor in all the
faculties. He hears a lecture now and then for form's sake, though it is
rather an unusual thing for him. By his side, but retiring and earnest,
may be one of the younger professors, who the hour before stood as a
teacher, and now sits among some of his former hearers to profit by the
experience of his older professional brother. Where the court resides
and many officers are garrisoned, the hall presents a spangled
appearance of bright epaulettes and glittering uniforms. It is no
unusual thing for young men during their years of service to attend the
courses regularly. The uncomfortable sword is laid on the knee, where it
may not dangle and clink with every motion of the wearer,--no easy
task in the very narrow space left between desk and desk. In the last
century, it was a universal custom for all students to wear the sword;
but this academic privilege, as it was considered, leading to numerous
abuses, laws were enacted against it, as well as other eccentricities in
dress.

The regular students are provided with portfolios, or rather, soft
leathern pouches, which they can fold and pocket, containing the _heft_
or quire of paper on which the lecture is transcribed by them wholly or
in part. These _hefts_ are often the object of much care and labor. Each
plants his ink-horn firmly in front of him. As the time approaches,
and all are in readiness with pen in hand, there is a universal buzz
throughout the room. Though, when the auditory is large, many nations
are represented, as well as the various provinces of the Confederation,
still the language heard is predominantly that of the country. Though
Poles and Greeks, English and Russians, may be in abundance, still they
rarely congregate in nationalities,--save the Poles, who speak their own
language at all times and places, and cling the more fondly to their own
idiom since they have been robbed of everything else. After some fifteen
minutes of expectation the professor enters. All is still in an instant.
He advances with hasty strides and bent-down head to his rostrum, an
elevated platform, on which stands a plain, high, pine desk. He unfolds
his notes, looks over the rim of his spectacles at the attentive
hearers, who sit ready to write down the words of wisdom he is about to
utter, and begins with the short address, "_Meine Herren._" There is
then an uninterrupted gliding of pens for three-quarters of an hour,
until, above the monotony, rarely the eloquence, of the speaker, the
great clock in the centre of the building gives the significant sound of
relief to busy fingers and rest to ear and brain unaccustomed to such
slow, entangled, lisping, laborious, in rare instances manly delivery.
The lecture is at an end, and each prepares to enter another auditorium,
or wends his way home, to study out the notes taken, consult the
authorities quoted, complete or even copy his work anew. In the study of
these _hefts_ consists the main preparation for future examinations, as
text-books are rarely used, save in Austria, and the examiners are the
professors themselves, who will not ask the candidate much beyond what
they have embraced in their own lesson.

With a remarkable degree of skill, the practised German student can take
down, even when the delivery is by no means slow, the pith and essence
of a whole lecture. Yet there is much abuse in this; and it has called
forth, ever since the invention of printing has made the multiplication
of books by transcription unnecessary, much just, though at times unjust
criticism. A German writer has said, that the man of genius takes his
notes on a slip of paper, he of good abilities on a half-page, while the
dunce must fill a whole sheet. Now the reverse would be quite as true
in many cases. For though thoughtless writing may be little more than
wasted labor, yet there is nothing that can fix more steadily thoughts
and facts in the mind than the precision and constant attention required
in following a lecture with the pen, especially when the words of the
professor are not taken down with slavish exactitude, but when, as is
most generally the case, merely the thoughts are noted in the hearer's
own language. The ideas thus gained have been assimilated and become the
listener's own property. There is thus generated a steady transfusion,
the surest remedy against flagging mental activity. Many a foreigner
writes down the lecture in his own tongue, and values highly this
training of constant translation, though, before many months, the mere
transposition from one language into the other must become purely
mechanical. It is amusing to see the puzzled expression of countenance
of some Swiss student who takes his notes in French, when one of those
long German compounds, involving some bold figure of speech, is uttered.
What circumlocutions must he not use, if he wish to give the full force
of the idea!

A real abuse, however, is the perpetual dictation-system still used by
some. For these, the three worthies in profile on the title-page of old
Elzevir editions are as if they had never existed; they teach as they
have been taught, perpetuating the methods in use in the days of
Abelard, when books were dearer than time. All that has been said and
written against the custom will do less towards abolishing it than the
recent introduction of lessons in phonography, or stenography rather,
which is now taught in several universities. The question is agitated
of introducing this study into the preparatory schools. The system is
different from the English or American, being based on the etymological
nature of the language. It is fast coming into use, though as yet not
general. The old slow delivery seems little better than spelling
to those that have mastered it. The students have usually special
abbreviations of their own, and so find no difficulty in taking down all
the important points, even when the utterance is rapid.

Not all, by any means, go through this labor of transcription. Many of
the wealthier and high-titled attend but irregularly, and when they do,
are impatient listeners. In Berlin may be seen many a youth who, from
the exquisite fit and finish of his dress, if he be not an American just
from Paris, must at least be a German count The young _Graf_ plays
with his lips on the ivory head of his bamboo, as he holds it with his
kid-gloved hand, sitting carefully the while, lest the elbow of his
French coat should be soiled by contact with a desk ignorant of duster
for many a month. He is condemned, however, to hear, day by day, over
and over, many a truth that will scarcely flatter his noble ears. The
_heft_ and the toil of writing down a lecture are unknown to him. He
pays a reasonable sum to some poor scholar who sits behind and copies
it all afterwards, while he takes his afternoon-ride towards
Charlottenburg, or saunters along Unter-den-Linden, ogling the pretty
English girls, and spying every chance of saluting, whenever a royal
equipage, preceded by a monkey-looking lackey, rolls by. These are, of
course, exceptions, rarer in the present than formerly. In Padua, in the
sixteenth century, it became notorious that the richer students never
attended in person, but always sent one of their servants who wrote a
good hand. Laws were enacted to prevent the evil, yet long after this
there were still many promotions of these paper-doctors.

Many, in taking their notes, abandon the German script as too illegible,
and make use of the Latin letters. A word or two on this subject, as
connected with general education. The German script, which any one may
learn in a few hours, is a constant source of vexation to a foreigner.
To write, and write fast, too, is easy enough; but then to read one's
own handwriting, not to mention the crumpled notices of the professors
tacked on the blackboard in the _Aula_, is almost impossible without
much practice. Why the Germans should have kept their Gothic lettering
and peculiar script, when all other European nations, save the Russian,
have adopted the Roman, it is difficult to say, unless it be with them
a matter of national pride. And they have been unnational in so many
things! That the Russians should have their own alphabet is natural
enough; they have sounds and letters and combinations--which neither the
Germanic nor the Romanic group of languages possess. And yet both in
Polish and Zechish, where the same sounds exist to a great extent, the
deficiencies are made up by accented and dotted letters. So, though
we have a universal standard of spelling for names and places on the
Continent, we find in our most popular histories and geographies a
divergence in the lesser known Russian names, not far removed from that
we daily meet in the nomenclature of the gods of Hindoo mythology.

The like plea of necessity cannot be urged in regard to the Teutonic or
Scandinavian languages. Within the last quarter of a century, the chief
scientific works issued in Northern Germany, and many even in Southern,
have been printed in the Roman character. Were there no other argument
in favor of its universal adoption, it has been found less trying to the
eyes. It can be read by all nations; and the other is at best but an
additional difficulty for the learner, even in the case of native
children, who are plagued with two alphabets and two diametrically
opposite systems of penmanship in their earliest years. The result is
evident: a good hand is a rare thing In Germany. It is a good sign, that
of late years public acts and records, works of learning, all the higher
literature, in fact, not purely national, as poetry and romance, are all
printed in the Roman character. Nor will any look upon this as a servile
imitation. Some of the most national of German writers and scholars, as
the brothers Grimm, have pronounced themselves loudly in favor of the
change. The tendency of the age is towards universality. It will occur
to none to talk of French imitation because chemists make use of the
excellent and universally applicable system of the decimal French
weights and measures.

What has been said above is not altogether irrelevant as characterizing
the tendency of the higher institutions of learning. Every movement in
Germany, even the least, since the Reformation, whose chief
propagators were professors in the universities,--Luther, Reuchlin,
Melancthon,--every permanent and pervading conquest of the new and good
over the old and worn-out, has issued from the lecture-room. Whatever
sticklers for old forms and crab-like progress may be found, there is
always an overbalancing power. The unity of Germany as one nation has
never stood a better chance of being realized than now, when the very
men who were students and flocked as volunteers when the iron hand of
Napoleon I. weighed heavily on their Fatherland stand as lecturers in
the days of Napoleon III., warning of the past, and preaching louder
than Schiller or Koerner or Arndt for the brotherhood of Prussian and
Bavarian, of those that dwell on the Rhine and those that inhabit the
regions of the Danube.

Thanks, not to her statesmen, not to her nobility, not to her princes
even, that Germany has at last fairly shaken off the self-imposed yoke
of servile French imitation, but thanks to her scholars who centre in
her twenty-six universities! There was a time, and that not a century
ago, when the German language was considered to be of too limited
circulation for works of general scientific interest. Lectures were
all delivered in Latin, until Thomasius broke open a new path, and now
lessons otherwise than in the vernacular tongue are exceptions. French
was long the universal medium. Even Humboldt wrote most of his works
in that language; and it is not two years since one of the most
distinguished Egyptian scholars of Prussia published his History of
Egypt in French. The last representatives of this tendency are dying
off. The days are over, when every petty German prince must create in
his domains a servile imitation of the stiff parks of Versailles,--the
days of powdered wigs and long cues,--when French ballet-dancers gave
the tone, and French actors strutted on every stage,--when Boileau was
the great canon of criticism, and Racine and Moliere perpetuated in
tragedy and comedy a pseudo-classicism. They are far, those times when
Frederick the Great wrote French at which Voltaire laughed, and could
find no better occupation for his leisure hours at Sans-Souci than the
discussion of the materialistic philosophy of the Encyclopedists, while
he affected to despise his own tongue, rejecting every effort towards
the popularization of a national literature. Well is it for Germany that
other ideas now prevail,--well, that Goethe in his old age overcame the
Gallomania, which for a while possessed him, of translating all his
works, and thenceforth writing only in French. The iron hand of Goetz of
Berlichingen would burst the seams of a Paris kid-glove. The bold lyric
and dramatic poesy of a language whose figures well up in each word
with primitive freshness can ill be contained in an idiom _blase_ by
conventionality and frozen into crystal rigidity by the academy of the
illustrious forty,--in an idiom in which an unfortunate pun or allusion
can destroy the effect of a whole piece. We need but call to mind that
Shakspeare's "Othello" was laughed off the stage of the Odeon, owing to
the ridiculous ideas the word "napkin" or "handkerchief" called up in
the auditory.

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