To which last question we must answer: Beware O Teufelsdröckh, of spiritual pride!

CHAPTER III.

PEDAGOGY.

HITHERTO We see young Gneschen, in his indivisible case of yellow serge, borne forward mostly on the arms of kind nature alone; seated, indeed, and much to his mind, in the terrestrial workshop; but (except his soft hazel eyes, which we doubt not already gleamed with a still intelligence) called upon for little voluntary movement there. Hitherto, accordingly, his aspect is rather generic, that of an incipient philosopher and poet in the abstract. Perhaps it would puzzle Herr Heuschrecke himself to say wherein the special Doctrine of Clothes is as yet foreshadowed or betokened. For with Gneschen, as with others, the man may indeed stand pictured in the boy (at least, all the pigments are there); yet only some half of the man stands in the child, or young boy, namely, his passive endowment, not his active. The more impatient are we to discover what figure he cuts in this latter capacity; how, when, to use his own words, "he understands the tools a little, and can handle this or that," he will proceed to handle it.

Here, however, may be the place to state that, in much of our Philosopher's history, there is something of an almost Hindoo character; nay, perhaps in that

so well fostered and every-way-excellent "passivity" of his, which, with no free development of the antagonist activity, distinguished his childhood, we may detect the rudiments of much that, in after-days, and still in these present days, astonishes the world. For the shallow-sighted, Teufelsdröckh is oftenest a man without activity of any kind, a No-man; for the deepsighted, again, a man with activity almost superabundant, yet so spiritual, close-hidden, enigmatic, that no mortal can foresee its explosions, or, even when it has exploded, so much as ascertain its significance. Α dangerous, difficult temper for the modern European; above all, disadvantageous in the hero of a biography! Now, as heretofore, it will behove the Editor of these pages, were it never so unsuccessfully, to do his endeavour.

Among the earliest tools of any complicacy which a man, especially a man of letters, gets to handle, are his class-books. On this portion of his history Teufelsdröckh looks down professedly as indifferent. Reading he "cannot remember ever to have learned;" so perhaps had it by nature. He says generally; "Of the insignificant portion of my education which depended on schools, there need almost no notice be taken. I learned what others learn; and kept it stored by in a corner of my head, seeing as yet no manner of use in it. My schoolmaster, a downbent, brokenhearted, underfoot martyr, as others of that guild are, did little for me, except discover that he could do little. He, good soul, pronouced me a genius, fit for the learned professions; and that I

must be sent to the gymnasium, and one day to the university. Meanwhile, what printed thing soever I could meet with I read. My very copper pocketmoney I laid out on stall-literature; which, as it accumulated, I with my own hands sewed into volumes. By this means was the young head furnished with a considerable miscellany of things and shadows of things. History in authentic fragments lay mingled with fabulous chimeras, wherein also was reality; and the whole, not as dead stuff, but as living pabulum, tolerably nutritive for a mind as yet so peptic."

That the Entepfuhl schoolmaster judged well we now know. Indeed, already in the youthful Gneschen, with all his outward stillness, there may have been manifest an inward vivacity that promised much; symptoms of a spirit singularly open, thoughtful, almost poetical. Thus, to say nothing of his suppers on the orchard-wall, and other phenomena of that earlier period, have many readers of these pages stumbled, in their twelfth year, on such reflections as the following? "It struck me much, as I sat by the Kuhbach, one silent noontide, and watched its flowing, gurgling, to think how this same streamlet had flowed and gurgled, through all changes of weather and of fortune, from beyond the earliest date of history. Yes, probably on the morning when Joshua forded Jordan; even as at the mid-day when Cæsar, doubtless with difficulty, swam the Nile, yet kept his Commentaries dry, - this little Kuhbach, assiduous as Tiber, Eurotas, or Siloa, was murmuring on across the wilderness, as yet unnamed, unseen. Here, too, as in the Euphrates and the Ganges, is a vein or veinlet

of the grand world-circulation of waters, which, with its atmospheric arteries, has lasted and lasts simply with the world. Thou fool! Nature alone is antique, and the oldest art a mushroom; that idle crag thou sittest on is six thousand years of age." In which little thought, as in a little fountain, may there not lie the beginning of those well-nigh unutterable meditations on the grandeur and the mystery of TIME, and its relation to ETERNITY, which play such a part in this Philosophy of Clothes?

Over his gymnasic and academic years the Professor by no means lingers so lyrical and joyful as over his childhood. Green, sunny tracts there are still; but intersected by bitter rivulets of tears, here and there stagnating into sour marshes of discontent. "With my first view of the Hinterschlag gymnasium," writes he, "my evil days began. Well do I still remember the red, sunny, Whitsuntide morning, when, trotting full of hope by the side of Father Andreas, I entered the main street of the place, and saw its steeple-clock (then striking eight), and Schuldthurm (Jail), and the aproned or disaproned burghers moving in to breakfast. A little dog, in mad terror, was rushing past; for some human imps had tied a tin kettle to its tail; thus did the agonized creature, loud-jingling, career through the whole length of the borough, and became notable enough. Fit emblem of many a conquering hero, to whom Fate (wedding fantasy to sense, as it often elsewhere does) has malignantly appended a tin kettle of ambition, to chase him on; which, the faster he runs, urges him the faster, the more loudly and more foolishly! Fit em

blem also of much that awaited myself in that mischievous den; as in the world, whereof it was a portion and epitome!

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cuted him.

'Alas, the kind beech-rows of Entepfuhl were hidden in the distance. I was among strangers, harshly, at best indifferently, disposed towards me; the young heart felt, for the first time, quite orphaned and alone." His school-fellows, as is usual, perse"They were boys," he says, "mostly rude boys, and obeyed the impulse of rude nature, which bids the deer-herd fall upon any stricken hart, the duck flock put to death any broken-winged brother or sister, and on all hands the strong tyrannize over the weak." He admits that, though "perhaps in an unusual degree morally courageous," he succeeded ill in battle, and would fain have avoided it; a result, as would appear, owing less to his small personal stature (for in passionate seasons he was "incredibly nimble"), than to his virtuous principles." "If it was disgraceful to be beaten," says he, "it was only a shade less disgraceful to have so much as fought; thus was I drawn two ways at once, and in this important element of school history, the war-element, had little but sorrow." On the whole, that same excellent "passivity," so notably in Teufelsdröckh's childhood, is here visibly enough again getting nourishment. "He wept often; indeed to such a degree, that he was nicknamed Der Weinende (the Tearful), which epithet, till towards his thirteenth year, was indeed not quite unmerited. Only at rare intervals did the young soul burst forth into fire-eyed rage, and, with a stormfulness (Ungestüm) under which the boldest