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

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




Nor is the influence of the university in Germany exerted in matters
of great national interest only. It pervades the social, literary,
and political organization of the people. The least part of what
characterizes an individual nation ever comes into its books. Here it
finds its way from mouth to mouth to the remotest corners of the land.
When Luther, the Professor of Wittenberg, spoke against indulgences, it
was more than priest or monk that was heard. The voice of the monk would
not have echoed beyond his cell, and the influence of the priest would
have been arrested and checked before it could have been exerted beyond
the limits of his parish or town. But the Professor Luther addressed
himself to a more influential audience. His words were carried before
many years into every part of the Empire.

Setting aside the Austrian universities, which are no longer what they
were formerly, the teaching in these higher schools, whatever the State
restrictions may be, is eminently free,--freer than in France,--freer
than in England,--in many respects even, however it may sound, freer
than in the United States. As a result, the land is a hot-bed of the
boldest philosophical systems and the wildest theological aberrations.
There is no branch of speculation that does not find its representative.
In law, in medicine, in philology, in history, the old methods of study
and research have been revolutionized. But the State stands before the
innovators, firm and conservative in its practice. And in the end it has
been found, that, whatever wild theories may spring up in theology and
in philosophy, the corrective is nigh at hand, and truth will make its
way when the field is open to all.

It must be remembered that the German university is no preparatory
school; those who enter it have gone through studies and a mental
training that have made them capable of judging for themselves. They
hear whom they please. Their chief study, whatever they acquire in the
lecture-room, is done when alone. They attend on an average for three
or four hours a day, spending as much time in the libraries, from which
they have the privilege of taking out books. As a completion to their
lectures, the professors generally have _Seminaren_ once or twice a
week, or _Exercitationes_ in history, philology, etc., in which the
Socratic method of teaching in dialogue is made use of. Museums and
scientific collections are richly provided in the larger institutions.
In some of these lectures are held: thus, Lepsius explains Egyptian
archaeology in the Egyptian halls in Berlin. The libraries provided by
the State, and to which all have access, are often considerable: thus,
Goettingen has 350,000 volumes; Berlin, 600,000; Munich, 800,000.

As for the expenses of study, they are inconsiderable; thirty or
thirty-five dollars the term will cover them, as there are generally
several courses public. The students often attend for months as guests,
_hospitanten_. As they say,--"The _Fox_ pays for more than he hears, and
the _Bursch_ hears more than he pays for." The lecturers take no notice
of those present; and, provided the matriculation-papers have been taken
out, the beadle has nothing to say. There is the fullest liberty of
wandering from room to room, and hearing, if only once or twice, any one
of the professors. As for the expenses of living, they vary. To one who
would be satisfied with German student-fare and comforts, four hundred
dollars a year will answer every purpose, even in the dearest cities:
many do with much less. In Southern Germany, life is simpler and cheaper
than in Northern, and the saying is true in Munich, that a _Gulden_
there will go as far as a _Thaler_ in Prussia. There are poorer
students, who are exempted from college-fees, and support themselves by
_Stipendia,_ whose outlay never exceeds a hundred dollars a year.

When several hundred or thousand young men are thus thrown together,
with their time all their own, and none to whom they are responsible
for their actions, it may easily be supposed that many abuses and
irregularities will occur. Yet the great mass are better than they have
been represented; though regular attendance upon lectures is true
only of those who _ox_ it at home, as the phrase goes, and who by the
rioting, beer-drinking _Burschen_ are styled _Philistines_ or _Camels_.
These same quiet individuals, whom the Samsons affect to despise, will
be found to be by far in preponderance, when the statistics of _Corps,
Landmannschaften_, and all such clubs, are looked into; though the
characteristic of the latter, always to be seen at public places of
amusement with their colored caps, gaudy watch-guards, or cannon-boots,
would lead one to suppose that German student-life was one round of
beer-drinking, sword-slashing, and jolly existence, as represented, or
rather, misrepresented, by William Howitt, in the halo of poetry he
throws around it. No,--the fantastically dressed fellows whom the
tourist may notice at Jena, and the groups of starers who stop every
narrow passageway in front of the confectionery-shops of Heidelberg, or
amuse themselves of summer-afternoons with their trained dogs, diverting
the attention of the temporary guest of "Prince Carl" from the
contemplation of the old ruined castle of the Counts-Palatine,--these
are but a fraction of the German students. From, among them may be
chosen those tight-laced officers who make the court-residences of
Europe look like camps; or, as they are often the sons of noblemen or
rich parents, they may reach some of the sinecures in the State. They
make their student-years but a pretext for a life of rough debauchery,
from which they issue with a bought diploma; and, in many cases,
satiated and disgusted with their own lives, they dwindle down into
the timeserving reactionaries, the worst enemies of free development,
because they themselves have abused in youth the little liberty they
enjoyed.

If the numbers be counted of those who lead the life so much extolled
by William Howitt,--who, by the way, has left out some of its roughest
traits,--they will be found, even where most numerous, as in the smaller
towns, never to exceed one-fourth of those inscribed as students.
The linguists and philosophers of Germany, her historians and men of
letters, her professors and _savans_, have come from the ranks of that
stiller and more numerous class whom the stranger will never notice:
for their triennium is spent mostly in the lecture-room or at home; and
their conviviality--for there are neither disciples nor apostles of
temperance in this beer-drinking land--is of a nature not to divert them
from their earnest pursuits.

Truth and earnestness are the distinguishing traits of the German
character; and these qualities show no less strongly in the youth who
frequent the universities than in the professors themselves. The latter,
conscientious to a nicety in exposing the fullest fruits of their
laborious researches, are ever faithful to the trust reposed in them.
Placed by the State in a position beyond ordinary ambition and above
pecuniary cares, they can devote themselves exclusively to their
calling, concentrating their powers in one channel,--to raise, to
ennoble, to educate. It contributes not a little to their success, that
their hearers are permeated, whatever wild and unbridled freaks they may
fall into at times, with the fullest sense of honor and manly worth,
with an ardent love for knowledge and science for their own sake, not
for future utility. Their sympathies are awake for the good everywhere,
their minds receptive of the highest teachings. Their loves and likes
are great and strong,--as it behooves, when the first bubblings of
mental and physical activity are manifested in action. They abandon
themselves, body and soul, to the occupation of the moment, be it study,
be it pleasure. Their gatherings and feasts and excursions are ennobled
by vocal music from the rich store of healthy, vigorous German song,--
from which they learn, in the words of one of their most popular
melodies, to honor "woman's love, man's strength, the free word, the
bold deed, and the FATHERLAND!"

* * * * *


THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.


CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE SECRET IS WHISPERED.


The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather's congregation was not large, but
select. The lines of social cleavage run through religious creeds as
if they were of a piece with position and fortune. It is expected of
persons of a certain breeding, in some parts of New England, that they
shall be either Episcopalians or Unitarians. The mansion-house gentry of
Rockland were pretty fairly divided between the little chapel with the
stained window and the trained rector, and the meeting-house where the
Reverend Mr. Fairweather officiated.

It was in the latter that Dudley Venner worshipped, when he attended
service anywhere,--which depended very much on the caprice of Elsie. He
saw plainly enough that a generous and liberally cultivated nature might
find a refuge and congenial souls in either of these two persuasions,
but he objected to some points of the formal creed of the older church,
and especially to the mechanism which renders it hard to get free
from its outworn and offensive formulae,--remembering how Archbishop
Tillotson wished in vain that it could be "well rid of" the Athanasian
Creed. This, and the fact that the meeting-house was nearer than the
chapel, determined him, when the new, rector, who was not quite up to
his mark in education, was appointed, to take a pew in the "liberal"
worshippers' edifice.

Elsie was very uncertain in her feeling about going to church. In
summer, she loved rather to stroll over The Mountain on Sundays. There
was even a story, that she had one of the caves before mentioned fitted
up as an oratory, and that she had her own wild way of worshipping the
God whom she sought in the dark chasms of the dreaded cliffs. Mere
fables, doubtless; but they showed the common belief, that Elsie, with
all her strange and dangerous elements of character, had yet strong
religions feeling mingled with them. The hymn-book which Dick had found,
in his midnight invasion of her chamber, opened to favorite hymns,
especially some of the Methodist and Quietist character. Many had
noticed, that certain tunes, as sung by the choir, seemed to impress her
deeply; and some said, that at such times her whole expression would
change, and her stormy look would soften so as to remind them of her
poor, sweet mother.

On the Sunday morning after the talk recorded in the last chapter, Elsie
made herself ready to go to meeting. She was dressed much as usual,
excepting that she wore a thick veil, turned aside, but ready to conceal
her features. It was natural enough that she should not wish to be
looked in the face by curious persons who would be staring to see what
effect the occurrence of the past week had had on her spirits. Her
father attended her willingly; and they took their seats in the pew,
somewhat to the surprise of many, who had hardly expected to see them,
after so humiliating a family development as the attempted crime of
their kinsman had just been furnishing for the astonishment of the
public.

The Reverend Mr. Fairweather was now in his coldest mood. He had passed
through the period of feverish excitement which marks a change of
religious opinion. At first, when he had begun to doubt his own
theological positions, he had defended them against himself with more
ingenuity and interest, perhaps, than he could have done against
another; because men rarely take the trouble to understand anybody's
difficulties in a question but their own. After this, as he began
to draw off from different points of his old belief, the cautious
disentangling of himself from one mesh after another gave sharpness to
his intellect, and the tremulous eagerness with which he seized upon the
doctrine which, piece by piece, under various pretexts and with various
disguises, he was appropriating, gave interest and something like
passion to his words. But when he had gradually accustomed his people
to his new phraseology, and was really adjusting his sermons and his
service to disguise his thoughts, he lost at once all his intellectual
acuteness and all his spiritual fervor.

Elsie sat quietly through the first part of the service, which was
conducted in the cold, mechanical way to be expected. Her face was
bidden by her veil; but her father knew her state of feeling, as well by
her movements and attitudes as by the expression of her features. The
hymn had been sung, the short prayer offered, the Bible read, and the
long prayer was about to begin. This was the time at which the "notes"
of any who were in affliction from loss of friends, the sick who
were doubtful of recovery, those who had cause to be grateful for
preservation of life or other signal blessing, were wont to be read.

Just then it was that Dudley Venner noticed that his daughter was
trembling,--a thing so rare, so unaccountable, indeed, under the
circumstances, that he watched her closely, and began to fear that some
nervous paroxysm, or other malady, might have just begun to show itself
in this way upon her.

The minister had in his pocket two notes. One, in the handwriting of
Deacon Soper, was from a member of this congregation, returning thanks
for his preservation through a season of great peril,--supposed to
be the exposure which he had shared with others, when standing in the
circle around Dick Venner. The other was the anonymous one, in a female
hand, which he had received the evening before. He forgot them both. His
thoughts were altogether too much taken up with more important matters.
He prayed through all the frozen petitions of his expurgated form of
supplication, and not a single heart was soothed or lifted, or reminded
that its sorrows were struggling their way up to heaven, borne on the
breath from a human soul that was warm with love.

The people sat down as if relieved when the dreary prayer was finished.
Elsie alone remained standing until her father touched her. Then she sat
down, lifted her veil, and looked at him with a blank, sad look, as if
she had suffered some pain or wrong, but could not give any name or
expression to her vague trouble. She did not tremble any longer, but
remained ominously still, as if she had been frozen where she sat.

--Can a man love his own soul too well? Who, on the whole, constitute
the nobler class of human beings? those who have lived mainly to make
sure of their own personal welfare in another and future condition of
existence, or they who have worked with all their might for their race,
for their country, for the advancement of the kingdom of God, and left
all personal arrangements concerning themselves to the sole charge of
Him who made them and is responsible to Himself for their safe-keeping?
Is an anchorite, who has worn the stone floor of his cell into basins
with his knees bent in prayer, more acceptable than the soldier who
gives his life for the maintenance of any sacred right or truth, without
thinking what will specially become of him in a world where there are
two or three million colonists a month, from this one planet, to be
cared for? These are grave questions, which must suggest themselves to
those who know that there are many profoundly selfish persons who are
sincerely devout and perpetually occupied with their own future, while
there are others who are perfectly ready to sacrifice themselves for any
worthy object in this world, but are really too little occupied with
their exclusive personality to think so much as many do about what is to
become of them in another.

The Reverend Chauncy Fairweather did not, most certainly, belong to this
latter class. There are several kinds of believers, whose history we
find among the early converts to Christianity.

There was the magistrate, whose social position was such that he
preferred private interview in the evening with the Teacher to following
him with the street-crowd. He had seen extraordinary facts which had
satisfied him that the young Galilean had a divine commission. But still
he cross-questioned the Teacher himself. He was not ready to accept
statements without explanation. That was the right kind of man. See how
he stood up for the legal rights of his Master, when the people were for
laying hands on him!

And again, there was the government official, intrusted with public
money, which, in those days, implied that he was supposed to be honest.
A single look of that heavenly countenance, and two words of gentle
command, were enough for him. Neither of these men, the early disciple
nor the evangelist, seems to have been thinking primarily about his own
personal safety.

But now look at the poor, miserable turnkey, whose occupation shows
what he was like to be, and who had just been thrusting two respectable
strangers, taken from the hands of a mob, covered with stripes and
stripped of clothing, into the inner prison, and making their feet fast
in the stocks. His thought, in the moment of terror, is for himself:
first, suicide; then, what he shall do,--not to save his household,--not
to fulfil his duty to his office,--not to repair the outrage he has been
committing,--but to secure his own personal safety. Truly, character
shows itself as much in a man's way of becoming a Christian as in any
other!

----Elsie sat, statue-like, through the sermon. It would not be fair to
the reader to give an abstract of that. When a man who has been bred to
free thought and free speech suddenly finds himself stepping about, like
a dancer amidst his eggs, among the old addled majority-votes which he
must not tread upon, he is a spectacle for men and angels. Submission to
intellectual precedent and authority does very well for those who have
been bred to it; we know that the under-ground courses of their minds
are laid in the Roman cement of tradition, and that stately and splendid
structures may be reared on such a foundation. But to see one laying a
platform over heretical quicksands, thirty or forty or fifty years deep,
and then beginning to build upon it, is a sorry sight. A new convert
from the reformed to the ancient faith may be very strong in the arms,
but he will always have weak legs and shaky knees. He may use his hands
well, and hit hard with his fists, but he will never stand on his legs
in the way the man does who inherits his belief.

The services were over at last, and Dudley Venner and his daughter
walked home together in silence. He always respected her moods, and saw
clearly enough that some inward trouble was weighing upon her. There
was nothing to be said in such cases, for Elsie could never talk of her
griefs. An hour, or a day, or a week of brooding, with perhaps a sudden
flash of violence: this was the way in which the impressions which make
other women weep, and tell their griefs by word or letter, showed their
effects in her mind and acts.

She wandered off up into the remoter parts of The Mountain, that day,
after their return. No one saw just where she went,--indeed, no one
knew its forest-recesses and rocky fastnesses as she did. She was gone
until late at night; and when Old Sophy, who had watched for her, bound
up her long hair for her sleep, it was damp with the cold dews.

The old black woman looked at her without speaking, but questioning her
with every feature as to the sorrow that was weighing on her.

Suddenly she turned to Old Sophy.

"You want to know what there is troubling me," she said. "Nobody loves
me. I cannot love anybody. What is love, Sophy?"

"It's what poor ol' Sophy's got for her Elsie," the old woman answered.
"Tell me, darlin',--don' you love somebody?--don' you love----? you
know,--oh, tell me, darlin', don' you love to see the gen'l'man
that keeps up at the school where you go? They say he's the pootiest
gen'l'man that was ever in the town here. Don' be 'fraid of poor Ol'
Sophy, darlin',--she loved a man once,--see here! Oh, I've showed you
this often enough!"

She took from her pocket a half of one of the old Spanish silver coins,
such as were current in the earlier part of this century. The other half
of it had been lying in the deep sea-sand for more than fifty years.

Elsie looked her in the face, but did not answer in words. What strange
intelligence was that which passed between them through the diamond
eyes and the little beady black ones?--what subtile intercommunication,
penetrating so much deeper than articulate speech? This was the nearest
approach to sympathetic relations that Elsie ever had: a kind of dumb
intercourse of feeling, such as one sees in the eyes of brute mothers
looking on their young. But, subtile as it was, it was narrow and
individual; whereas an emotion which can shape itself in language opens
the gate for itself into the great community of human affections; for
every word we speak is the medal of a dead thought or feeling, struck in
the die of some human experience, worn smooth by innumerable contacts,
and always transferred warm from one to another. By words we share the
common consciousness of the race, which has shaped itself in these
symbols. By music we reach those special states of consciousness
which, being without _form_, cannot be shaped with the mosaics of the
vocabulary. The language of the eyes runs deeper into the personal
nature, but it is purely individual, and perishes in the expression. If
we consider them all as growing out of the consciousness as their root,
language is the leaf, music is the flower; but when the eyes meet and
search each other, it is the uncovering of the blanched stem through
which the whole life runs, but which has never taken color or form from
the sunlight.

For three days Elsie did not return to the school. Much of the time she
was among the woods and rocks. The season was now beginning to wane, and
the forest to put on its autumnal glory. The dreamy haze was beginning
to soften the landscape, and the most delicious days of the year were
lending their attraction to the scenery of The Mountain. It was not very
singular that Elsie should be lingering in her old haunts, from which
the change of season must soon drive her. But Old Sophy saw clearly
enough that some internal conflict was going on, and knew very well that
it must have its own way and work itself out as it best could. As much
as looks could tell Elsie had told her. She had said in words, to be
sure, that she could not love. Something warped and thwarted the emotion
which would have been love in another, no doubt; but that such an
emotion was striving with her against all malign influences which
interfered with it the old woman had a perfect certainty in her own
mind.

Everybody who has observed the working of emotions in persons of various
temperaments knows well enough that they have periods of _incubation_,
which differ with the individual, and with the particular cause and
degree of excitement, yet evidently go through a strictly self-limited
series of evolutions, at the end of which, their result--an act of
violence, a paroxysm of tears, a gradual subsidence into repose, or
whatever it may be--declares itself, like the last stage of an attack of
fever and ague. No one can observe children without noticing that there
is a _personal equation_, to use the astronomer's language, in their
tempers, so that one sulks an hour over an offence which makes another a
fury for five minutes, and leaves him or her an angel when it is over.

At the end of three days, Elsie braided her long, glossy, black hair,
and shot a golden arrow through it. She dressed herself with more than
usual care, and came down in the morning superb in her stormy beauty.
The brooding paroxysm was over, or at least her passion had changed its
phase. Her father saw it with great relief; he had always many fears for
her in her hours and days of gloom, but, for reasons before assigned,
had felt that she must be trusted to herself, without appealing to
actual restraint, or any other supervision than such as Old Sophy could
exercise without offence.

She went off at the accustomed hour to the school. All the girls had
their eyes on her. None so keen as these young misses to know an inward
movement by an outward sign of adornment: if they have not as many
signals as the ships that sail the great seas, there is not an end of
ribbon or a turn of a ringlet which is not a hieroglyphic with a hidden
meaning to these little cruisers over the ocean of sentiment.

The girls all looked at Elsie with a new thought; for she was more
sumptuously arrayed than perhaps ever before at the school; and they
said to themselves that she had come meaning to draw the young master's
eyes upon her. That was it; what else could it be? The beautiful, cold
girl with the diamond eyes meant to dazzle the handsome young gentleman.
He would be afraid to love her; it couldn't be true, that which some
people had said in the village; she wasn't the kind of young lady to
make Mr. Langdon happy. Those dark people are never safe: so one of the
young blondes said to herself. Elsie was not literary enough for such
a scholar: so thought Miss Charlotte Ann Wood, the young poetess. She
couldn't have a good temper, with those scowling eyebrows: this was the
opinion of several broad-faced, smiling girls, who thought, each in her
own snug little mental _sanctum_, that, if, etc., etc. she could make
him _so_ happy!

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