LIBRARY 
 ONIVERSITY OF CA! tod, 
 RIVERSIDE
 
 LEVANA.
 
 LEVANA; 
 
 UB, 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION. 
 
 ( JEAN j PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. 
 
 Crans'Iatea from tfjc (Scrman. 
 
 PRECEDED BY 
 
 A SHORT BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR, 
 
 AND 
 
 HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY, A FRAGMENT. 
 
 LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YORK STREET, 
 COVENT GARDEN. 
 
 1891.
 
 LSI 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 REPRINTED FROM STEREO-PLATES BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED 
 
 STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 TO THE 
 
 OEIGINAL TKANSLATION OF LEV ANA. 
 
 At a time when the public mind is so fully awakened to the 
 importance of education, it appeared to the Translator that the 
 thoughts of one of the greatest Germans on the subject were 
 worthy of deep consideration ; and he offers them with the more 
 satisfaction because he believes it impossible either for the 
 advocates or for the opponents of the government scheme of 
 education to draw offensive weapons from this arsenal. For 
 Levana treats neither of national nor congregational education ; 
 it elevates neither state nor priest into educator ; but it devolves 
 that duty, where the interest ever ought to be, on the parents, 
 and particularly on the mother. 
 
 It is far from the Translator's object to disparage the great 
 efforts now making to improve the state of popular education ; 
 but he believes that, in propounding general systems, it is too 
 much forgotten that real education is the work of individuals on 
 individuals. It may be necessary — it is necessary — to provide 
 instruction, and, as far as possible, education, for the classes who 
 are too ignorant to seek it for themselves. But let us not, in the 
 mania for systems, forget how little these alone can effect. And, 
 farther we would ask, is the education of the upper classes so 
 perfect that they may leave all care for it to watch over only that 
 of the lower ? If there be much of crime — the acknowledged 
 consequence of ignorance — among the masses, is there less of 
 wee— the equally sure accompaniment of bad education — among 
 the higher grades of society ? 
 
 In the belief that Levana may tend much to ameliorate that 
 department of education which is most neglected and needs most 
 care — home training — the Translator makes no apology for 
 clothing it in an English dress. He is, indeed, surprised that it 
 has not previously been presented to the English reader. But
 
 VI TRANSLATOR S PREFACE. 
 
 like all Eicliter's writings, Levana is peculiarly characterised 
 liy that union of qualities called in England — " German." This 
 feature, especially when displayed in a work on so serious a 
 subject as education, and being most strongly marked in the 
 introductory chapters, on which the reception of a book so much 
 depends, may have led to its being considered unsuitable to 
 English taste. The early part indeed, may cause many to close 
 the book who would find much both to interest and instruct in 
 a patient perusal of the whole work, combining as it does, in a 
 remarkable degree, sound practical sense with fanciful and varied 
 illustration. The acknowledged difficulty of Eichter's style has 
 also, doubtless, had a deterring effect. Those who are acquainted 
 with his writings will be able to appreciate the difficulties which 
 have beset the Translator, and will be the least inclined to judge 
 harshly the shortcomings of the translation, as compared with 
 its -great original. For who — save Carlyle — can hope to do 
 justice to the humorous, pathetic, poetic Kichter ; to him whom 
 his countrymen call " Jean Paul, der Einzige " ? 
 
 The Translator thinks it right to add that he has occasionally 
 omitted, or compressed, a few sentences, where the general 
 usefulness of the work was obviously increased by so doing. 
 This discretion has, however, been very sparingly used, and in 
 no case so as to interfere with the scope of the original. 
 
 A. H. 
 
 Liverpool, 1848. 
 
 PREFACE TO THIS EDITION. 
 
 In this edition, the passages alluded to above have been 
 inserted in full, and the whole work has undergone a careful 
 revision under the eye of the original translator. 
 
 The Autobiography is here for the first time published in this 
 country ; as it deals only with the earlier portion of the author's 
 life it has been supplemented by a short memoir condensed from 
 the enthusiastic biography by E. Forster Both these are by 
 another translator.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 PREFACE to the Original Translation of Lbvana 
 PREFACE to this Edition , 
 BIOGRAPHY 
 
 AUTOBIOGKAPHY. 
 
 LECTURE I. Wonsiedel— Birth— Grandfather . 
 
 LECTURE II. Embracing the period from 1st of August 
 1765, to the 9th of January, 1776— Joditz— Village Idyls 
 
 LECTURE III. (with three Supplements). Schwarzenbach 
 on-the-Saale — Kiss — Rector — Lord's Supper 
 
 H 
 
 52 
 
 LEVANA; 
 
 OR, 
 
 THE D CTEINE OF EDUCATION. 
 
 FIRST FRAGMENT. 
 Chap. I. Importance of Education ..... 88 
 
 II. Inaugural Discourse at the Johanneum-Paullinum ; 
 ______ or Proof that Education effects little . . .86 
 
 III. Importance of Education ..... 99
 
 Vlll CONTENTS. 
 
 SECOND FRAGMENT. paob 
 
 Chap. I. Spirit and Principle of Education .... 106 
 II. To discover and to appreciate the Individuality of 
 
 the Ideal Man Ill 
 
 III. On the Spirit of the Age 117 
 
 IV. Religious Education ...... 125 
 
 THIRD FRAGMENT. 
 
 I. The Beginning of Education 
 II. The Joyousness of Children 
 
 III. Games of Children 
 
 IV. Children's Dances 
 V. Music . 
 
 VI. Commands, Prohibitions 
 VII. Punishments 
 VIII. Screaming and Crying of Children 
 IX. On the Trustfulness of Children 
 
 Punishments, and Crying 
 
 137 
 146 
 151 
 162 
 164 
 166 
 173 
 179 
 183 
 
 Appendix to the Third Fragment. On Physical Education . 188 
 Comic Appendix and Epilogue to the First Volume. A 
 dreamed Letter to the late Professor Gellert, in which 
 
 the Author begs for a Tutor ..... 205 
 
 FOURTH FRAGMENT. On Female Education. 
 
 Chap. 1 216 
 
 II. On the Destination of the Female Sex . . . 222 
 
 III. Nature of Girls ... ... 227 
 
 IV. Education of Girls 238 
 
 V. Private Instructions of a Prince to the Governess of 
 
 his Daughter 269 
 
 FIFTH FRAGMENT. 
 
 Chap. I. On the Education of a Prince ..... 281 
 
 SIXTH FRAGMENT. On the Moral Education of Boys. 
 
 Chap. 1 311 
 
 II. Truthfulness 329 
 
 III. Education of the Affections 338 
 
 IV. Supplementary Appendix to Moral Education . . 350
 
 CONTENTS. IX 
 
 SEVENTH FRAGMENT. pagb 
 Chap. I. On the Development of the Desire for Intellectual 
 
 Progress ........ 366 
 
 II. Speech and Writing 369 
 
 III. Attention, and the Power of Adaptive Combination . 375 
 
 IV. Development of Wit 382 
 
 V. Development of Reflection, Abstraction, and Self- 
 
 Knowledge ; together with an extra Paragraph on 
 
 the Powers of Action and Business . . . 387 
 
 VI. On the Education of the Recollection — not of the 
 
 Memory 389 
 
 EIGHTH FRAGMENT. 
 
 Chap. I. Development of the Sense of Beauty . . . 395 
 
 II. Classical Education ...... 400 
 
 NINTH FRAGMENT, or Key-stone 405
 
 BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 § 1. Birth. — Parentage. — Early Years. 
 
 In the spring of the year 1763 Jean Paul Friedrich 
 Richter was born at Wonsiedel, a town of Baireuth, in 
 Bavaria, on the range of hills known as the Fichtelgebirge. 
 His father, Johann Christian Christoph Richter, was the 
 son of a schoolmaster of Neustadt, of whom little is known 
 but that he was " poor and pious in a high degree." 
 Both these characteristics Paul's father appears to have 
 inherited, though perhaps in a somewhat modified 
 measure. He was a man of stern and uncompromising 
 but cheerful and kind disposition, with a vigorous nature 
 which could hold its own against the ills of life. Paul's 
 mother, Sophia Rosina, was the daughter of Johann Paul 
 Kuhn, a cloth-weaver of the neighbouring village of Hof. 
 About two years after Paul's birth his father received a 
 clerical appointment at Joditz, a village not far distant, 
 which gave him a small increase of income. Here he 
 remained for ten years, during which time Paul appears 
 to have enjoyed a happy childhood, or one at any rate to 
 which he looked back with feelings of much pleasure. 
 That he made small progress in book-learning was doubt- 
 lessly owing more to the shortcomings of the teachers 
 than of the taught, since he showed much fondness for 
 books and eagerly read such literature as fell into his hands 
 This consisted mainly of a few theological books of his 
 father's — of which he understood not a word — and some 
 old newspapers. For a short time he went to .school, but
 
 Xll BIOGEAPHY. 
 
 his father soon withdrew him on account of some ill-treat- 
 ment which he had received at the hands of another boy, 
 and he and his brother Adam were in future taught at 
 home. The instruction they received seems to have 
 consisted entirely of learning by heart — either pages of 
 Latin words or grammar, or Scripture texts. With so 
 little intellectual nourishment, it is not surprising that he 
 showed no signs of remarkable mental growth while at 
 Joditz. 
 
 It was in Paul's thirteenth year that his father received 
 what promised to be a better living in Schwarzenbach-on- 
 the-Saale. For the boj r this was a decided gain. Here 
 he had many advantages which had before been wanting, 
 not the least of which was access to a more plentiful 
 supply of books in the library of a friend, a young man 
 named Vogel. The master too of the school seems to 
 have taken pride in his promising pupil, and under his 
 tuition Paul acquired some little knowledge of Latin and 
 Greek, and even made a beginning with Hebrew. Now 
 too he first had some lessons in music, for which he had 
 decided talent, inherited from his father who, Paul tells 
 us, was a composer of church music and had erred in 
 not devoting himself entirely to the Tone Muse. A 
 young curate also took an interest in Paul and obtained 
 his father's permission to have him for two hours in the 
 afternoon to give him instruction in geography, philo- 
 sophy, and theology. For the former of these he appears 
 however to have had little liking, and consequently to 
 have made no progress therein, but in the study of 
 philosophy and theology he was as it were in his natural 
 element. The exercises which he did for the curate were 
 his first attempts at composition.* 
 
 * The reader is here recommended to turn to the Autobiography, 
 where he will find a full account of the first fourteen years of Richter's 
 life,
 
 BIOGRAPHY. xiii 
 
 ? 2. High School, — Friends. — First Literary Efforts. 
 1779—1781. 
 
 In the Easter of the year 1779, Richter, being then 
 sixteen years of age, was sent to the high school at Hof. 
 In Schwarzenbach he had unconsciously acquired know- 
 ledge and developed a power of thought which raised him 
 far above his school-fellows, above the school — certainly 
 not a very remarkable one — and beyond his own years. 
 Werner the kind old Rector* of the school and Viilkel the 
 curate, a younger man of much ability, doubtlessly con- 
 tributed considerably to this precocious development, but 
 perhaps he owed most to Vogel, the pastor of the 
 neighbouring village of Rehau, a man of wit and bene- 
 volence, who took an interest in the clever boy, and gave 
 him the range — though with certain limitations — of a 
 well-stored library. The high school at Hof offered scanty 
 means for intellectual development. Neither the Rector * 
 nor the Conrector evinced any particular talent for 
 teaching, and Richter was thus thrown almost entirely on 
 himself and his former studies, in following up his predilec- 
 tion for philosophy ; the gtudy of history to which he had 
 before been indifferent now became thoroughly distasteful 
 through the dryness and tediousness of the lectures. 
 
 In addition to this intellectual want he had also othei 
 trials, as the following anecdote will show, which though 
 flight and insignificant in themselves were bitter and 
 painful for a sensitive disposition such as his. 
 
 After the entrance examination Richter was pro- 
 nounced fit for the upper Prima * but at the request of 
 his father, who feared the envy of his school-fellows, 
 he was enrolled among the middle Primaners. Even this 
 
 * For the explanation of this and following titles see Autobiography 
 P *.
 
 XIV BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 degree of preference was unheard of and awakened the 
 feelings, which his father had feared, in some of the othe7 
 boys, who resolved in school-boy fashion to have their 
 revenge. This they did by telling him that it was the 
 custom and duty of all new members of the Prima to kiss 
 the hand of the master at the first French lesson, and 
 Eichter, in fulfilment of this supposed duty, innocently 
 and respectfully sought the reluctant hand, but his master, 
 who, being no favourite, supposed it to b« some fresh 
 insult, all the more stinging as coming from a new boy, 
 rushed at the innocent lad in a burst of passion and then 
 left the room with a volley of oaths, whilst the new 
 Primaner stood there outwitted and derided by the 
 companions in whom he had hoped to find friends. One 
 only of them, Christian Otto, took no part in the general 
 uproar, and sowed in that hour the seed of a friendship 
 which lasted throughout their lives. 
 
 An occurrence of a different sort however soon raised 
 Eichter again to his right place among his school-fellows. 
 It was the custom at the school for the boys to hold 
 debates under the presidency of the Eector, who decided 
 on the respective merits of the two parties. When 
 Eichter's turn came to lead the opposition, the Eector 
 had chosen a theological subject. Fartly from natural 
 bent and partly from intercourse with his decidedly 
 rationalistic old friends in Schwarzenbach and Eehau, 
 Eichter already inclined to heterodoxy, and had acquired 
 through his private reading, an amount of knowledge 
 of which no one, least of all the Eector, had any idea 
 and which in the debate — to him no school exercise, 
 but a matter of feeling — he used as weapons against 
 his opponent and against the Eector with his sacred 
 and infallible doctrines. 
 
 His opponent with ordinary schoolboy knowledge was 
 soon reduced to silence, while the Eector himself from
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XV 
 
 lack of means, strove equally vainly against the young 
 lationalist, who, encouraged by his success, proceeded more 
 and more boldly until at last the Eector in despair took 
 refuge in the authority of his office, and commanding 
 silence, left the chair and the room without the 
 usual concluding ceremony. Eichter was thus acknow- 
 ledged victorious by the whole class and respected 
 accordingly. 
 
 The first friendship which Eichter made was with the 
 above-mentioned Christian Otto, who was the son of a 
 well-to-do commercial man and a youth whose thought- 
 fulness and appreciation of right and duty were supple- 
 mented by cordial manners and an affectionate disposition. 
 He afterwards became Eichter's chief confidant in his 
 literary plans and undertakings, and his censor and 
 adviser, as may be seen from their correspondence.* 
 
 The honour of being chosen to speak at the yearly 
 Actus or Speech-day was conferred on Eichter in both the 
 years that he was at school. The speeches recited on 
 these days were the original compositions of the boys 
 who were also allowed to select their own subjects. 
 Those chosen by Eichter, viz., " The Value of the early 
 Study of Philosophy," and " The Importance of the Dis- 
 covery of New Truths "f are characteristic. The peculiar 
 tendency of his mind, — an enthusiasm for knowledge, a 
 keenness of thought and tenderness of feeling are very 
 apparent in both, but in the latter is especially seen a 
 maturity of mind in his zeal for universal culture and 
 progress which even in his sixteenth year he lainly 
 distinguished from the superficial and transitory desire 
 for radical destruction. 
 
 * Jean Paul's Briefwechsel mit seinem Freunde Otto. Berlin, 1829. 
 Otto outlived his friend some years, and is the editor of one of his 
 biographies. (Wahrheit aus Jean Paul's Leben.) 
 
 t The former is printed in Jean Paul's Sammtliche Werke, 1st ed. 
 yo). lxiii. ; the hist named appears to be the earlier in date.
 
 XVI BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 In addition to his school classes and school work, 
 Eichter employed himself in a manner which, although 
 he was still quite unconscious of it himself, decidedly 
 foreshadowed his future vocation and which laid the 
 foundation both of a comprehensive knowledge and of an 
 unexampled wealth of thought. He made a library — a 
 double one we may say — with his own hand. First he 
 took copious extracts from all the books that he read, the 
 contents of which he thought of any importance, and 
 entered them carefully in note books, providing each 
 with two indexes, one of the writings from which he took 
 the extracts, and one of the subjects of the extracts. At 
 Schwarzenbach-on-the-Saale, when still a lad, he had 
 already begun this work, and in the year 1778, he had 
 filled two quarto books of above two hundred closely 
 written pages. At the commencement of the year 1779 
 he completed another in Schwarzenbach and two more in 
 Hof ; in 1780 five more, and so on, with un tiling zeal. 
 Throughout his life he continued this method of retaining 
 in his memory all that he read, but in later years he 
 did it more briefly. He himself says, in one of the 
 books of a later period, "To have my life's history, I 
 need only open my extract books ; with each one is 
 connected a portion of my life." The extracts treat 
 chiefly of such subjects as the Eternity of Hell Punish- 
 ment — the Works of the Devil — the Connection 
 Natural and Christian Eeligions — Love towards Enemies 
 — the Atonement — Faith — Original Sin — and so on ; also 
 epigrams and poems, comic and sentimental. In the 
 second volume are : Connexion of the Body and Soul — 
 the Diversity of the Senses — What is Beauty? — Blind 
 religious Zeal — Eating and Drinking — What would 
 Man be, if he were not immortal ? — Spinoza's Divinity. 
 It would require too great a space to give these in de- 
 tail : each book contained on an average several hundred
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XV 11 
 
 subjects; it is enough that we comprehend what a mass 
 of knowledge he acquired in his earliest youth, how he 
 selected it in accordance with the bent of his mind, and 
 arranged it for study and future use. Not less important 
 to him, and to us more significant, was the second part of 
 his MS. library — the records of his own thoughts and 
 researches. With the same order and neatness he com- 
 menced the^e books for " Exercises in Thinking," in which 
 he wrote down his philosophical speculations and religious 
 reflections. These he kept with the same care as his 
 extracts, although he expressly denied that they had 
 any value for other people. The first volume begins in 
 November 1780. Besides a number of disconnected notes 
 it contains seven treatises with such titles as, " The Nature 
 of our Conception of God," "A Thing without Force is 
 an Impossibility," " Is the World a perpetuum mobile ? " 
 A second volume, with similar contents, was added in 
 December of the same year, and many others followed. 
 The following extracts will serve as specimens : 
 
 Fools and Wise Men, Blockheads and Geniuses. 
 
 " These appellations do not indicate the same things, 
 though they are often confounded. Their difference is 
 easily detected. 
 
 " The Blockhead is a being to be pitied ; one whose 
 intellect never grasps more than a small number of ideas ; 
 and who, enshrouded in deep darkness, is never illumined 
 by the beams of truth ; the Blockhead is the polypus 
 between manrand the animals. The Fool is not so at all. 
 Most are fools became they know too much or more than 
 is good for them. They know much, but become fools 
 just because they apply it all badly. The Blockhead is 
 born, the Fool made. The Blockhead creeps along like 
 the snail for slowness, for he is far behind on the road of 
 truth and incapable of advancing. He is on the right 
 
 i. b
 
 XY111 BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 road perhaps, but is it to be wondered at, that be who 
 has gone only a few steps from the gate has not yet lost 
 his way? The Fool is on in front, but he has left the 
 right road and wanders without guidance. The Block- 
 head is not recognised at once, for in common with the 
 Wise Man, he says little and does not betray himself. 
 Often, too, he adopts the mask of the Wise Man, as the 
 donkey assumes the lion's skin — the dress is not becoming 
 to either, but only the sharpsighted can unmask them. 
 The Fool, on the contrary, is apparent at once ; for he 
 bears a mark of his own, which distinguishes him from 
 others, as the uniform does the soldier. In fact he is not 
 as others are. The Fool says all that he thinks — and this 
 betrays him at once. We should find more Blockheads in 
 the world if more people were open enough to give 
 utterance to their thoughts. The Blockhead is a Block- 
 head for this reason, that he is not one of the animals; 
 among them he would pass for a Genius. The Fool is a 
 Fool for this reason, that he does not live in a particular 
 ■"rorld which is not the real one, namely, in that one 
 which exists in his own head, where he would be con- 
 sidered clever. The Blockhead cannot be cured, because 
 he is born one — he is a feeble creature, whose powers 
 cannot be increased. The Fool can be rendered better 
 just becau-e he is able to become worse. He is a strong 
 man, whose powers are badly employed ; nothing is 
 necessary but to turn them in another direction. Mad- 
 ness is the highest degree of foolishness— and this is cured 
 now-a-days. In sleep we are all Fools, and this because 
 we have lost our guides, the senses. The Blockhead is 
 not one when in sleep — he is then an embijo— he does not 
 think at all. The fault in the Blockhead is that he has 
 no imagination ; the Fool, on the c ntrary, is one because 
 he has too much imagination. Thus is the poet in danger 
 of becoming a Fool. Hence ci. mes the much praised fu. v ,
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XIX 
 
 fx>eticus. The Blockhead lias his counterpart among the 
 animals ; not so the Fool. This indicates that the latter 
 is more nearly allied to man than the former. All men 
 are suhject at times to foolishness and the greatest 
 oftenest of any; but only a small number are stupid. 
 One is stupid continually, but one is a fool for a short 
 lime only. The heart of the Blockhead is little capable 
 of noble emotions; that of the Fool is open to all, pro- 
 vided only that they do not touch the whims which 
 render him a fool. Fools are confined or put in fetters ; 
 but Blockheads are allowed full liberty. They often till 
 the lecturer's chair, or the pulpit — they sit on thrones. 
 Often nothing more is necessary in order to obtain au 
 office than to be a Blockhead ; for he who has to bestow it 
 has sympathy for those who resemble himself — he appre- 
 ciates in others that which he values in himself. Fools 
 and Blockheads are alike only in this, that neither of 
 them thinks he is what he is." 
 
 From the " Inquiry into the various Beligions of the 
 World," we will give only the conclusion. " And what 
 then is the result of all ? This ! that all religions are 
 good — and for the places where they are — the best. They 
 are different means to the same end. Any religion to 
 which I cleave with conviction is the best for me. For 
 another it is not so, because he is not convinced by it. 
 Christianity is so little spread through the world because 
 excellence is more rare than mediocrity. Bidicule then 
 no religion which thou pronouncest false— thou wilt 
 ridicule Him who suffered that religion to arise. Let 
 lis be tolerant towards those whom we may surpass in 
 intellect, but whose hearts are perhaps better, kinder, and 
 more loving than ours. Let us not as formerly, murder 
 our brethren in order to please a Preserver of Life — not 
 by stakes and inquisitions propagate a religion which is 
 
 b 2
 
 XX BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 ruled by Love. How glorious are these prospects ! All 
 are our brethren — all our relations in faith — all are called 
 to one Heaven — all loved by one Father !" 
 
 The following " Observations " from the first two books 
 may be added to the foregoing " Inquiries." 
 
 "Many a one thinks himself pious when he calls the 
 world a ' vale of misery.' But I think he would be 
 more so if he called it a ' valley of joy.' God will be 
 better pleased with him who finds everything good in 
 the world, than with him who is content with nothing. 
 With so many thousand joys in the world — is it not black 
 ingratitude to call it a place of sorrow and affliction ? 
 I could the sooner forgive such an expression in a child 
 of misfortune who in the gloomy hours of melancholy 
 relieves his oppressed heart in lamentations, but in a 
 fat-bellied abbot who spends his days luxuriously on the 
 soft sofa, who knows no other burden than that of having 
 a restless soul which interrupts the sweetness of his rest 
 by feelings of ennui — to hear such an expression from 
 him is insufferable, it is mocking the Creator, and re- 
 paying His kindness with ingratitude. 
 
 " Our Creator has employed every means to awaken and 
 to nourish in us a love towards one another — the love 
 which makes life so sweet to us, which enables us to bear 
 each suffering with double strength. A flame burns 
 unceasingly in our bosom, kindling joy in us when we see 
 others jo}*ous and filling our hearts with sadness when 
 others weep — we call it love of mankind. I see one 
 means thereto in that attraction in faces which we call 
 ' beauty.' This external charm which so attracts our 
 souls, this power which melts our hearts in melancholy 
 and draws soft tears from our eyes, this divinity in the 
 human face knits more firmly and closely the bond which 
 an ever active impulse ties. 0, rather would I fall down 
 before the Maker of all that is beautiful and perfect and
 
 BIOGRAI>HY. XXI 
 
 weep before Him, when I see a touching beauty, than 
 cherish a voluptuous thought." 
 
 What must strike us particularly in these earliest 
 utterances of Jean Faul, is that no trace of that quality 
 which was afterwards so prominent in his writings, 
 namely satiric humour, is yet to be found in them. 
 Eeligious reflections, philosophical researches, observations 
 of nature and human life, form the chief substance of his 
 thoughts and productions, the keynote of which is love 
 and joy. That tenderness of feeling peculiar in so high 
 a degree to our author sought expression in a story written 
 at this time which, with an allusion easily seen, he 
 named " Abelard and Heloise." This novel, in the form 
 of a series of letters, was found among his papers after his 
 death, neatly written with his own hand and dated 
 January 1781. The tone of the book is sufficiently 
 shown by the motto prefixed to it : " The sensitive man 
 is too good for this earth, on which are vain scoffers ; 
 ■ — only in yonder world where are sympathising angels 
 does he find the reward for his tears." The following 
 note written on the reverse side of the title-page will tell 
 us in what estimation he himself held the book a few 
 months after it was written, and show also that he had 
 already commenced the healthful practice of self-criticism. 
 
 " Faults : This story is wholly without plan. The plot 
 is a complete failure ; it is commonplace and uninteresting. 
 The characters are not so much badly described as wholly 
 undescribed. Of Abelard and Heloise one sees nothing but 
 the hearts, none of their thoughts ; none of their charac- 
 teristics are painted ; their love itself is not even correctly 
 represented ; besides this, the whole is exaggerated ; in 
 many passages one feels nothing just because it is meant 
 to be exceedingly touching. It is also contrary to pro- 
 bability, it is v'ery shallow, etc., etc. The language is not 
 Goethesian, but a bad imitation of it.
 
 XXI 1 BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 " Beauties : The language of the feelings is not every- 
 where misrepresented, the descriptions of natural scenes 
 are not a complete failure. The German is not quite 
 pitiable, it is not at any rate like that, which the Force- 
 Geniuses (Kraft-Genies) of the present time write. There 
 are also a few isolated good remarks to be found, and I 
 should have made more, if I had striven less after senti- 
 ment. Finally this booklet has for me the beauty, that 
 it represents a certain condition of my heart at a par- 
 ticular time, which I now consider as folly, because I 
 have not the happiness to be the same fool still." 
 
 In spite of these indications of diligence on Bichter's 
 part, his external life at this time was far from favourable 
 to the pursuit of his studies. Shortly after their arrival 
 in Hof in 1779, he had lost his father, who left their 
 mother with her five children entirely destitute. Their 
 grandparents with whom Paul was living, and on whose 
 support his mother was entirely dependent, died soon 
 afterwards within a short time of one another. About 
 the heritage, itself insignificant, there arose a lawsuit 
 among the relations, who thought themselves badly 
 treated, and almost the whole of it was swallowed up. 
 Eichter then began first to feel the pressure of poveity 
 and want, and it was only by his unceasing mental 
 activity and the cheerfulness with which he resigned 
 himself to circumstances that he preserved himself free 
 from their fatal effects. 
 
 §. III. University Life. — " Greenland Lawsuits." 
 1781—1784. 
 
 In the spring of the year 1781, Eichter left the high 
 school and went to Baireuth for his matriculation 
 examination. A humorous description of his ride thither 
 is given in the " Flegeljahre " (Wildoats). After passing 
 his examination successfully, he started on the 11th May
 
 BIOGKArHY. XX111 
 
 1781, on his journey to the University of Leipzig. 
 Here turning to his father's profession, more because 
 he was the eldest son of a clergyman, than from his 
 own choice, Kichter at first attended the theological 
 lectures at Leipzig, but also at the same time in pursuance 
 of his natural taste he attended those on philosophy and 
 mathematics. The following extracts from his letters at 
 this time may help to show us his impression of Leipzig 
 and university life. 
 
 " 1 have arrived here safely. It is a fine town, if a 
 town with large houses and long streets is called fine. 
 For my part I think it monotonous. And the beautiful 
 neighbourhood too, which you promised me, I do not 
 find anywhere round about Leipzig. Everywhere a per- 
 petual sameness, — no valleys and hills — wanting in all 
 the charms which have always rendered the neighbour- 
 hood where you still live so pleading to me. In many 
 respects things here are as you told me, in others they 
 are different. I get a dinner for 18 pfennigs.* And 
 besides this, I have got the Inscription] with Rector 
 Clodius gratis, and the lectures too. I have only to pay 
 16 thalersj for a nice room in the Three Roses Inn in 
 Reterstrasse No. 2, on the second floor, but this is under 
 the condition that I turn out during Fair times. The 
 students too are as polite and polished as you told me. 
 But in the following matter your prophecy does not seem 
 as if it would be realised. Private tutorships (Infor- 
 mazionen) are scarce here and the crowd of applicants is 
 innumerable. In large houses those students only are 
 taken who have recommendations. An Information is 
 thus not such a common thing, and a good one is rare. I 
 have this myself from the lips of several professors. All 
 have told me that not very consolatory proverb of 
 Leipzig : Lipsia vult expectari. And the expectari is so 
 
 * About twopence. f College fees. J About 21. 8a.
 
 XXIV BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 indefinite that when one has been fifty years and has not 
 got a place after all, they still continue to say, ' He has 
 only to wait, something will be sure to turn up ! ' 
 
 " Herr Kirsch* of Hof travelled with us to Leipzig. His 
 presence has been of great assistance to me. He has 
 recommended me most favourably to several people, and 
 he has also written me a very good Testimonium pauper talis. 
 I need only to show this in order to get all my lectures 
 free." 
 
 Later he writes : 
 
 " My supposition about the expect ari has not been dis- 
 proved so far, it has rather been confirmed. I still have 
 no pupils here, no table to dine at ;j" no acquaintance among 
 the students, no anything at all. It is by no means easy 
 to get access to the professors. Those who are really 
 celebrated and whose favour would satisfy me, are sur- 
 rounded by the amount of work and besieged by a crowd 
 of other distinguished persons and a swarm of base 
 flatterers, so that any one who is not recommended by 
 his coat or his rank can only with difficulty become 
 acquainted with them. If anyone should want to speak 
 with a professor without having a special request to 
 make, he would lay himself open to the suspicion of 
 vanity. When I consider the crowd of students who 
 deceive the professors and embitter them against the 
 better ones, then I am able to explain to myself the whole 
 phenomenon. But I do not on this account give up hope. 
 I shall overcome all these difficulties — I can already do so 
 partly, but after all, I do not need it. I come now to the 
 mystery, the explanation of which you have so eagerly 
 awaited, and which I only vaguely stated to my mother. 
 
 * The Eector of las school. 
 
 * Einen Tisch haben , lit. to have a table, i.e. to have a free dinner. 
 It is customary for families to invite poor students with whom they 
 are acquainted, to dine with them on a fixed day in each week during 
 their residence at the University.
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XXV 
 
 But it is just as little solved now as then, only tins I can 
 tell you, that it has nothing to do with a Stipendium, or 
 a Tiscli, an Informazion or anything else of the kind. It 
 concerns something of which you have no suspicion, of 
 which I cannot tell you until the result answers my 
 expectation. So much for that. 
 
 " Fashion is here the tyrant before whom everybody 
 bows, though it is never consistent with itself. Dandies 
 swarm in the streets : in fine weather they flit about like 
 butterflies. One is as bad as the other : tliey are like dolls 
 in the Marionette show, and not one has the courage to 
 be himself. The puppy flits from lady to lady, from 
 party to party, carries off a few follies everywhere with 
 him, laughs and cries as the others desire, and feeds ono 
 party with the indigestible scraps which he has picked up 
 at another ; and employs his body in eating, and his soul 
 in doing nothing until he falls asleep. He who is not 
 compelled by poverty to be wise, at Leipzig becomes the 
 fool whom I have here described. Most of the rich 
 students are like this. 
 
 " The information which you ask for, about the religious 
 opinions in Leipzig, may be given in a few words. Almost 
 all students lean to the side of heterodoxy. If there are 
 not so many among them who are actually unorthodox 
 there are all the more who are indifferent to religion, 
 who are naturalists or even atheists. The reason of this 
 is probably that it is less trouble and requires less know- 
 ledge to be the latter than the former. The greater 
 number are no longer orthodox, but only a few are 
 Socinians in the real meaning of the word. I myself 
 have heard a lecturer who was in orders, inveighing 
 incessantly against the systematic mystical interpretation 
 of the Bible, the allegory -mania, the adherence to all 
 untrue evidence, the want of Hebrew knowledge in the 
 interpretation of the New Testament, etc., etc. But in
 
 XXVI BIOGRAPIIY. 
 
 spite of this he does not dare freely to deny any dogma, 
 he can only speak of the difficulties in the way of be- 
 lieving it and leave the decision of its value to his hearers. 
 The chief cause which hinders freedom of thought in 
 Saxony, is that the great men are still unenlightened. 
 An outspoken book is at once confiscated. I am attending 
 expository lectures on St. John by Weber; and on the 
 Acts by Morus ; on Logic and Metaphysics by Platner ; 
 on ^Esthetics by the same ; on Moral Philosophy by 
 "Wieland ; on Geometry and Trigonometry by Gehler ; on 
 Pluto's Legatio ad imperatorem Caium by Morus ; and on 
 English by M. Eogler. I have made it a rule in my 
 studies only to follow those which I find most agreeable 
 and for which I am the least unfitted, and which I already 
 find useful or think will be so. I have often been led 
 into error through following this rule but have never 
 repented of my mistakes. Studying that for which one 
 has no love is a struggle against weariness, tedium and 
 disgust to attain a good which one does not desire, and 
 this implies wasting one's powers, which feel themselves 
 to be created for another end, on a subject with which 
 one makes no progress and withdrawing them from that 
 in which one would have been successful. ' But it is 
 just by this that you earn your bread' is the pitiable 
 olijecti n raised in reply. I know nothing in the world 
 by which one could not earn one's bread. I will pass over 
 the fact that he who makes the mere gaining of necessities 
 the sole aim of his studies — by one more by another less — 
 never makes much progress. This being admitted, I do 
 not know if I would earn my bread by that, for which 
 I feel I have no capacity, in whk-h I experience no 
 pleasure and in which, consequently, I cannot possibly 
 make progress, or by that, in which my pleasure spurs 
 me on and my powers help me forward. One must live 
 entirely for cne branch of knowledge, sacrificing every
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XXVI 1 
 
 power, every pleasure, every moment to it and occupying 
 oneself with the others only in so far as they act as a 
 foil to this one. And if by the strange complication of 
 external circumstances I lose the paltry gain which is the 
 object with all small intellects, this is certainly made good 
 to me tenfold, when I enjoy that deep delight in following 
 my object, widch springs from the pursuit of truth ; when 
 I feel the charm which the expression of each of my 
 powers has for me and when perhaps I enjoy the honour 
 also, which sooner or later may fall to their lot. This is 
 my defence. Hitherto I have read only philosophical 
 works, now I prefer only witty and eloquent writings, 
 rich in metaphor. I used not to study French, now I 
 read French books in preference to German. The wit 
 of a Voltaire, the eloquence of a Rousseau, the splendid 
 style of a Helvetius, the acute remarks of a Toussaint — 
 all these urge me to the study of the French language. 
 I do not consider that I am learning anything, but only 
 that I am amusing myself; yet with the impression of 
 the beautiful passages or the witty thoughts, there remains 
 behind also the manner in which they were expressed. 
 I am reading Pope and am delighted with him, as also with 
 Young. He must undoubtedly be still grander in the 
 original. I am now learning English, primarily in order to 
 read the excellent weekly paper, the " Spectator " of which 
 our translation is miserable. The eloquence of Rousseau 
 delights me, I find it again in Cicero and Seneca ; these 
 two I like above all others, and I would not give up their 
 writings for the best of German books. Pope's satires 
 carry me away ; I found him, like Horace, more beautiful 
 in the original. His criticism of reason is a masterpiece, 
 as is Horace's " De Arte poetica." I now like the Latin 
 authors and have dropped that foolish prejudice with 
 which on very slight grounds I was infected by the bail 
 instruction of Latin schoolmasters."
 
 XXV111 BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Partly through external circumstances and partly 
 through the growth of his powers, Richter was soon 
 guided to the choice of his calling. In addition to his 
 regular university studies he continued the self-imposed 
 task which he had begun at Hof. Eleven large quarto 
 volumes of Extracts from the most recent works, went 
 with him to Leipzig. The way he continued these 
 private studies, strengthening thereby the foundation and 
 framework of his whole literary power, not only indicates 
 a though tfulness almost unexampled in one so young, 
 but also evinces a physical energy which it is almost in- 
 comprehensible that his body could endure, even if his 
 mind could sustain it. Besides diligently attending his 
 lectures, to which he added private lessons in English, 
 and continuing his daily exercises in writing, which 
 filled numerous volumes, and carrying on an animated 
 correspondence for which he had special bouks, writing a 
 duplicate copy of every letter, he still found time enough 
 not only for the most extensive reading, but also for the 
 continuance of his ample extract books. He even com- 
 menced various new ones, " Extraits de livres f ran pais," 
 then a succession of excerpts, " From recent works relating 
 to Natural Philosophy and History," and others for 
 " Theology," also a book for " Witty Ideas, Remarks, etc., 
 from Ancient and Modern Authors ;" and all these he 
 wrote with his own hand with the greatest exactness and 
 neatness. At the same time too, he began a dictionary of 
 Varieties and Liberties of expression in which, under the 
 several words and expressions, he collected and compared 
 as many others as possible with similar meanings. 
 
 From the first-mentioned extracts, we see that he read 
 the writings of Lessing with special zest, and among 
 English authors those of Pope, among the French, those 
 of Pousseau, Helvetius, Voltaire. Of the poets, he 
 admired Shakspeare most, then Wieland, Hippel, Young,
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XXIX 
 
 tnd Swift. He was not however contented with reading 
 and copying, but soon proceeded to original compositions. 
 Among these was (in 1781) "The Praise of Stupidity." 
 In this piece (imprinted) Stupidity is introduced speaking; 
 extols itself as being the foster-nurse of body and soul, 
 the benefactress of women, dandies, potentates, courtiers, 
 and noblemen, of theologians, philosophers, poets, etc., 
 and concludes with an exhortation for the enlargement of 
 her empire. The train of thought is firmer, and the ex- 
 pression more decided than hitherto, and the satire of the 
 " Greenland Lawsuits " can already be traced. 
 
 At the same period or shortly afterwards, he wrote a 
 considerable number of treatises, some shorter, S'»me 
 longer, mostly of a satirical nature, though some of them 
 are also philosophical. Several are to be found in his 
 literary remains.* Among others are " Atheism and 
 Fanaticisms Compared;" "Stray Thoughts on Great 
 Men;" "Full Information about the Bad, Foolish, Un- 
 true, and Superfluous Passages which I have struck out 
 in my still unprinted satiric Organon out of respect to 
 good taste and the public." " The Different Points of 
 View from which the Devil, Death and the Painter view 
 Life." 
 
 With reference to the " Praise of Stupidity," he thus 
 writes to Vogel : 
 
 "You probably know that I am poor; but this you 
 probably do not know, that my poverty is not alleviated 
 by anyone. One must first by means of money give one's 
 , atron to understand that one is in want of it, that is, 
 one must not be poor if one wishes to become rich. This 
 does not suit my case, and no dispenser of benefits 
 considers me needy enough for him to «^ve me the 
 charities of others because I cannot give hiui uf my own. 
 And God has also denied me four feet whereon to crawl 
 
 * Jean Paul's S«mmtliche WerJce, 1st ed. vola. lxii.-lxv.
 
 XXX BIOGEAPHT. 
 
 and gain the gracious look of a patron and a few crumbs 
 from his abundance. I can be neither a false flatterer 
 nor a fool of fashion, nor can I win my friends by the 
 flexibility of my tongue or of my spine. Add to this that 
 most of the professors have neither time nor oppor- 
 tunity, neither will nor means to help one ; that access 
 to them is rendered impossible through the crowd of 
 flatterers and impostors to all those who are neither the 
 one nor the other ; that it would betray pride if one were 
 to catch at opportunities of showing them one's best side. 
 Put all this together, and you will know my position. 
 But you do not yet know how I am going to better it. It 
 occurred to me one day, ' I will write books in order to 
 be able to buy books. I will teach the public (permit 
 this expression for the sake of the antithesis) that I may 
 myself be able to learn. I will make the end the means, and 
 harness the horses behind the cart to get, out of this horrid 
 pass. I then made an alteration in the nature of my 
 studies ; I read good authors — Seneca, Ovid, Pope, Swift, 
 Young, Voltaire, Eousseau, Boileau, and I know not whom 
 else. Erasmus' Encomium Moriae suggested to me the 
 idea of praising stupidity. I began, I improved, I found 
 difficulties where I did not expect, and found none where 
 I awaited them, and I finished on the day on which I 
 received your valuable letter. You will think ' Strange ' 
 if you do not think ' Foolish.' " 
 
 " The Praise of Stupidity," as already mentioned, did not 
 reach its goal, the press. But Eichter did not suffer him- 
 self to be discouraged by this, and soon produced the 
 " Greenland Lawsuits," which was published anonymously 
 at Berlin in 1783. 
 
 It contained satires on Authors, Theologians, on the 
 Pride of Birth, on Women and Dandies, etc., which with- 
 out doubt he adorned with an abundance of wit and 
 metaphor, but to which with his very limited knowledge
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XXXI 
 
 of the world, drawn mostly from books, he could supply 
 only an incomplete foundation of reality. The bitterness 
 of tone in which the book is written is very sti iking. 
 According to his oavii confession not one line of love is to 
 be found in the whole of the two volumes. 
 
 But what concerns us most in it is the free and liberal 
 spirit displayed throughout. The author places himself 
 with decision on the liberal side, and appears as the 
 declared adversary of blind faith in theological matters. 
 of the prerogative of birth, the surveillance of the press, 
 and the many evils arising therefrom. That in personal 
 matters too he was aide to have and maintain his own 
 opinions, is shown by the pigtail episode, which in a 
 few words is as follows : 
 
 For reasons of Ids own Eichter chose to dispense with 
 the discomfort and expense of collar and cravat, as also of 
 the queue which according to the fashion of that time was 
 indispensable. Society considered the matter of so much 
 importance that it appears to have allowed him little 
 peace at Leipzig or among his friends at Hof. So irate 
 was a certain Magister at Leipzig, a fellow lodger in the 
 house with Richter, at having to walk in the same garden 
 with the queueless student that he prevailed on the land- 
 lord to relieve him of the nuisance. Jn spite of re- 
 monstrance-from friends and enemies Richter held firm 
 to his fancy for seven years. " I hold," said he, " the 
 constant regard that we pay in all actions to the judg- 
 ments of others as the poison of onr peace, our reason and 
 our virtue. Ar, this slave-chain I have long filed, but I 
 scarcely hope ever to break it." The following circular 
 addressed to his fritnds and the public was a fitting end 
 of this characteristic episode : 
 
 " The Undersigned begs to announce publicly that, 
 whereas short hair has as many enemies as red, whereas 
 6aid enemies are at the same time enemies of the person
 
 XXX11 BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 on whom the hair grows ; and further, whereas such a 
 fashion is in no respect Christian, for were it so Christian 
 people would adopt it, and whereas moreover the Tinder- 
 signed has suffered as much injury from his hair as 
 Absoloui from his, though from opposite reasons ; and 
 whereas he has been privately informed that people have 
 endeavoured to bring him to his grave, because there the 
 hair would grow without scissors, he here makes known 
 that he will not willingly wait so long. It is hereby 
 announced therefore to a gracious and highborn public, 
 that the Undersigned purposes on Sunday next to appear 
 in several of the important streets of Hof, with a short 
 pigtail of false hair, and with this pigtail, as with a 
 magnet and cord of love and magic wand, to obtain by 
 force the love of every one let his name be what it will. 
 
 " J. P. F. R." 
 
 But to return to Leipzig. Though the " Greenland 
 Lawsuits " had found a publisher, it did not meet with a 
 warm reception from the public; and his expectations 
 raised so high had now gradually to lower their pitch 
 until, little by little, they completely died away. 
 We find him however busy with a new book, and 
 that again a satirical one, the " Selections from the 
 Devil's Papers," but his life now at Leipzig was fast 
 becoming unendurable. Even the hope of becc: ing 
 known by his book and of forming connexions with men 
 of name and note had deceived him. Direct offers to 
 booksellers, attempts at mediation through others had 
 all miscarried entirely. For a long time he had not 
 received anything from home and had even grieved 
 his good mother, who always hoped that he would go 
 into the Church, in being unable to do anything to help 
 her; assistance from his friends could not be asked to an 
 unlimited extent, and he was now reduced to the choice
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XXXI II 
 
 between debts and hunger. One evening, accompanied by 
 a friend, be went at dusk to tbe town-gate to await the 
 stage-coach which took him back to Hof, and thus in 
 November 1784 brought his university career to an end. 
 
 " A gladdening and enchanting time was that of my 
 youth and one to which I ever look back with yearning, 
 though not the external life, the barrenest that a youth 
 ever endured, but the internal which bore a complete 
 spring-time with blossoms and flowers under the deep 
 snow of the external." 
 
 § IV. TUTORSHIP. "THE INVISIBLE LODGE." 1784 — 1792. 
 
 Poverty had driven Eichter from Leipzig and poverty 
 awaited him in Hof. There, in a little room with his 
 mother and younger brothers, he continued his work amid 
 a variety of annoyances and privations. But those things 
 which would have reduced another to despair — the 
 washing and scouring, the cooking, the ironing, and the 
 continual buzzing of the spinning-wheel, by the aid of 
 which his mother gained their scanty livelihood — to him 
 these all became materials for poetry and study, with 
 which he afterwards characterised the " Good Lenette ;" 
 and the privations through which they passed, whether 
 serious or comic, he hoarded up for " Siebenkas," his 
 Advocate of the Poor. Like him, Eichter was employed 
 while under the pressure of wants from all sides in 
 elaborating his " Devil's Papers." With this work when 
 complete he applied to several publishers, but in vain; 
 and after numerous other equally fruitless efforts to obtain 
 literary work of any kind, he was at length glad to 
 accept the first offer which promised him freedom from 
 absolute want. This came from the father of one of his 
 friends named von Oertel, who asked him to come to Topen, 
 and undertake the instruction of his youngest son. 
 l e
 
 XXXIV BIOGEAPHT. 
 
 With the new year of 1787, Eichter entered on his 
 office with hopes of better times than he had hitherto 
 enjoyed. But though he may well have breathed freely 
 on quitting Hof, it was no paradise to which he came. 
 Herr von Oertel was far from being a genial man, nor 
 did Eichter ever succeed in gaining the confidence or 
 affection of his pupil. He felt too the want of his Hof 
 friends, since there was hardly anyone at Topen with 
 whom he could associate ; and he missed the library of 
 his old friend Vogel. Had it not been for the kindness 
 of the Frau von Oertel, which he always remembered 
 with gratitude, his new life would hardly have been more 
 endurable than the old. 
 
 In May of this year, Eichter at length succeeded in 
 getting a publisher for the "Devil's Papers," but the 
 honorarium which he received was a mere nothing, and 
 the book seems to have been carelessly and badly printed 
 and remained unnoticed. 
 
 After the lapse of two years his engagement at Topen 
 came to an end, in what seems to have been not quite a 
 friendly manner, and he returned to his mother at Hof in 
 the summer of 1789. Necessity, however, forced him again 
 to accept the office of tutor. Seven childen of both sexes 
 and diverse ages and abilities were intrusted to his care, 
 and we now see the author of the " Invisible Lodge " as 
 the teacher of the multiplication table and the rudiments 
 of grammar. At the same time, however, we may see 
 him sketching the outline of his "Levana," while bringing 
 these young plants to a fruitful maturity. 
 
 His energy and activity at this time are truly astonish- 
 ing. Besides instructing these seven children in ele- 
 mentary knowledge of all kinds, and superintending their 
 work out of school hours which at times was no easy 
 task — one of the boys once did a voluntary composition 
 of 135 pages — he still found time and strength for his
 
 BIOGRArHY. XXXV 
 
 own development. He continued reading the most im- 
 portant and, as far as possible, the most recent works of 
 all kinds, and, in accordance with his usual custom, made 
 copious extracts from them in his note-hooks. Of these 
 note hooks, to which there seems to be no end, he now 
 began several fresh ones, on all kinds of subjects — philo- 
 sophical, historical, sesthetical, geographical, satirical, 
 humorous, etc. By this means he kept himself in 
 constant practice in writing ; but these books do not 
 appear to have had an}- further use, for he seldom or never 
 referred to them afterwards in composing his works. 
 
 In June 1790, he sent Otto a list of thirty-two subjects 
 which he intended to work up. Most of them were 
 finished in the course of this and the following year. 
 We here give a few to show of what kind they were. 
 
 "Description of the Public and Private Libraries" 
 (comic appendix to " Titan"). " Devilocracy, instead of 
 Theocracy " (imprinted). " Critique of the Opera of the 
 holy Kingdomcome." " That Women are our Popes " 
 ("Invisible Lodge"). "Grimaces" (unprinted). "Law- 
 courts of Love." "Description of my Epitaph" (un- 
 printed). " Female Fainting Fits " (" Invisible Lodge "). 
 
 In the same year, 1790, he also wrote the "Bavarian 
 Kreuzer Comedy," which strangely enough remained un- 
 printed, and eventually found place in " The Paper Kite," 
 Frankfort, 1845. But it must not be supposed that he 
 wrote his works off-hand. For the smallest of them he 
 kept special books, and carefully worked out the plans, 
 characters, and descriptions beforehand, so that each 
 separate work occupied at least as much time in prepara- 
 tion as in execution. 
 
 When we see that with all these many and various 
 occupations Eichter found time to keep a written account 
 in his diary of his daily life, and to enter with his own 
 hand all his letters in a correspondence book ; it in 
 
 2
 
 XXXVI BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 difficult to imagine where his material life, with its 
 necessities, can have found a place. 
 
 His productions still met with no success, but in spite 
 of all difficulties he worked on with obstinate perseverance 
 and in February 1792, after eleven months' labour, he 
 completed his first novel, the " Invisible Lodge." This 
 he sent to one Moritz, at Berlin, in whose work, " Anton 
 Eeisser," he had recognised a kindred spirit, with a letter, 
 from which the following is an extract : — 
 
 " I would that you had already read this sheet, that I 
 might not blush under your astonishment on seeing this 
 volume. The black oilskin contains, like life, a man's 
 character, his joys and griefs; a half-broken plan; in 
 short a novel — I had almost written a man. ' Why,' I 
 ask myself, ' dost thou send a German novel — for this 
 species of literary spawn, begotten by generatio (Bquivoca, 
 is repulsive to a man of taste — to one whom thou 
 lovest ; who has so often made thee sad by showing thee 
 what life is, and what man, who casts his leaves therein, 
 what the pointed moment of time is on which we stand ; 
 and how a world lies between our short sleep and dream, and 
 a little earth between those who are sleeping and dreaming 
 somewhat longer.' One is sad when one finishes a book, 
 for one thinks of all other things which one will finish — 
 1 am not now in good enough spirits to be clear. 
 
 " As I send you the book, I should in vain endeavour to 
 hide from you the opinion which 1 have of it, and which 
 has not allowed me to put it in circulation, like a 
 defaced Louis d'or, on the book exchange and to offer 
 it to the unfeeling touch of intellectual slave-dealers, who 
 are unknown to me. It is sweet to me to know that I 
 send, it to a heart which— excepting its superiority — is 
 like the one under which it has been born and nourished, 
 if after reading it you should think it worthy to be read 
 by the few who are like you, I beg you, either through
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XXXVll 
 
 ycnr opinion, or by a few pages or the whole, to procure 
 for it a commercial hand who will conduct it from the 
 written into the printed world. " T P F K " 
 
 After so many vain attempts, Eichter's hopes for the 
 success of this despatch were not very high ; and the 
 greater, therefore, was his surprise when Moritz at once 
 wrote, heartily congratulating him on his work and 
 desiring to make the acquaint! nee of the author without 
 delay. A publisher was found in Matzdorff, the brother- 
 in-law of Moritz, and Eichter before long had the grati- 
 fication of laying a sum of 100 ducats in the lap of his 
 poor and much astonished mother. 
 
 End of the Tutorship. — Weimar. — Illness. — Death. 
 1792—1824. 
 
 In the autumn of 1792 Jean Paul began his second 
 important work, the " Hesperus." He still, however, 
 retained his post as tutor until the spring of 1794, 
 when the eldest of his pupils entered the high school at 
 Baireuth, and he returned to his mother's little room at 
 Hof. To make the life of this good woman happier, was 
 now his first object. 
 
 With the "Invisible Lodge" he had entered on his 
 proper path. For though he could not entirely renounce 
 either jesting or sarcasm, he never again wrote a book 
 wholly of satires like the " Devil's Paper" or the " Green- 
 land Lawsuits." A number of fresh projects now arose 
 in his mind, to all of which he made a beginning. The 
 "Hesperus,'' begun in September 1792, was finished in 
 June 1794. "Siebenkas" was commenced in the mean- 
 time, and the groundwork to "Titan" was also laid. 
 " Quintus Fixlein," with its jocular and touching ap- 
 pendices was now written and at the end of a year it 
 passed into a second edition together with the " History
 
 XXXmi BIOGEAPTTl. 
 
 of its Prefaces," and the " Annihilation." A.t the same 
 time too appeared the "Biographical Diversions." 
 
 His rising fame brought him many invitations to vii-it 
 Weimar, the centre of German literature and when, in 
 June 1796, he made a journey thither, he appears to have 
 been welcomed with enthusiasm. He there became per- 
 sonally acquainted with Herder, Knebel, Einsiedel and 
 Frau von Kalb. Wieland who at that time was absent 
 in Switzerland wrote to express his pleasure in the 
 prospect of making Richter's acquaintance. By Schiller 
 and Goethe, who had already expressed unfavourable 
 opinions about his writings, he was not so cordially 
 welcomed, but his presence seems so far to have had an 
 effect, that Goethe declared himself, " favourably disposed 
 towards him on account of his love of truth and desire of 
 improvement," while Schiller not only invited him to 
 become a contributor to the " Horen," but even wished 
 him to settle down permanently at Jena. He also became 
 acquainted with the Duchess Amalie, at whose castle at 
 Tieffurth near Weimar he was a frequent visitor. 
 
 His increasing fame and the appreciation which he met 
 with wherever he went, began to make him dissatisfied 
 with the limited life in the village of Hof, and on the 
 death of his mother which occurred at this time, he 
 removed to Leipzig. He did not however remain there 
 long, and in 1798 removed to Weimar. Here, through the 
 influence of Jacobi and Herder whose " Metakritik" he read 
 over with him in manuscript, his interest in philosophy 
 was again roused. The negative doctrines of Kant and 
 the idealism of Fichte found no favour with him. His 
 nature demanded a belief in God, and a faith in the im- 
 -oiortality of the soul, and he appears to have had a much 
 greater sympathy with Herder and Jacobi. In the Letters 
 to his future son Hans Paul he opposed the critical school 
 with much philosophical acuteness and also with his own
 
 BIOGRAPHY. XXXIX 
 
 peculiar weapons of humour and satire ; against Fichte 
 he directed his " Claws Fichtina." 
 
 While at Weimar he appears to have been a frequent 
 visitor at the court of Hildburghausen. " Imagine," he 
 v rites to Otto, " the angelic duchess with her beautiful 
 childlike eyes, her whole face tilled with love and youth 
 and grace, with a nightingale's voice and a mother's 
 heart, then her sister, the Princess of Solms, still more 
 beautiful and just as good, and the third, the Princess of 
 Thurn and Taxis, both of whom arrived with their 
 healthy, happy children the same day as I did. The>-e 
 people love me and read my books most heartily and wish 
 only that I would remain another week, to see the fourth 
 noble and beautiful sister, the Queen of Prussia. I am 
 always invited to dinner and supper. Yesterday I 
 improvised on the piano before the court." 
 
 One result of the visit to Hildburghausen was that the 
 Duke conferred on him the title and privileges of a 
 Legazionsratli ( Councillor of Legation), and another that he 
 dedicated his "Titan," upon which he was now engaged, to 
 the "four sisters upon the throne," and a third that he 
 became engaged to one of the court ladies, Frkulein 
 Caroline von Feuchtersleben. This engagement however, 
 like a former one, appears to have been amicably broken off, 
 both parties recognising that the difference in their posi- 
 tions and lives threw difficulties in the way of their union. 
 
 It was in the following year, when in Berlin, that 
 ~~~~he met the lady who was to be his wife. This was Caro- 
 line, the second daughter of the Obertribunalrath Maier. 
 Their marriage was celebrated in May 1801. 
 
 While at Meiningen where they first settled, and after- 
 wards at Coburg, Kichter devoted himself diligently to 
 reading and working. The six volumes of the " Titan," 
 of which two had already appeared, were completed. 
 Between the second and third he wrote a few small ei
 
 Xl BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 works. "The secret Complaint of Men of the present 
 Time," and "Strange Company on New Year's Night," and 
 also the second comic appendix to "Titan." Ai>out this 
 time too he was working at the " Wildoats " which he at 
 first intended to publish with the title "History of my 
 Brother," and the " Death in the other World. ' Kequests 
 from all sides for small contributions for albums and 
 periodicals threatened to overwhelm him ; howt-ver much 
 he might desire to withstand these, he could not return a 
 negative to all the demands, and we owe many valuable 
 essays to these applications. In February 1802, he wrote 
 to Otto that, after the " Wildoats," he would finish 
 the "Biographical Diversions," and then write "Sieben- 
 kas' Marriage with Natalie," and after that nothing but 
 critical and philosophical works. The " Biographical 
 Diversions " was intended as a companion novel to " Titan," 
 and Richter made preparations for it with this inten- 
 tion; for " Siebenkas' Second Marriage" also the plan 
 and many studies still exist, but neither of these works 
 was completed, though many a humorous and elevating 
 work followed besides the critical and philosophical ones. 
 
 While at Coburg, Jean Paul suffered a severe loss in the 
 death of Herder. To his grief for his friend is probably 
 due the change which we notice at this time in his 
 writings. The " Wildoats," which he had been working 
 at with great pleasure, was now laid aside, and with it all 
 imaginative writing. He turned to the "Introduction to 
 ^Esthetics," and after the completion of that, commenced 
 preparations for the " Levana." In 1804 he removed to 
 Baireuth, where he devoted himself, if possible, with more 
 energy than ever to his work. After the completion of 
 the "Levana," we find him next writing on political 
 subjects. 
 
 His admiration for Napoleon's greatness struggled for 
 some time with h s patriotism. For humanity he would
 
 BIOGRAPHY. xli 
 
 have sacrificed his nationality ; but when the conqueror 
 showed himself the enemy of both, Eichter no longer 
 hesitated on which side to place himself. But he 
 sympathised as little in the dirge of the despondent as 
 in the cry of hatred against the enemy, and least of all 
 did he share in the fear of Germany's annihilation. Hope 
 seems to have been the keynote of his compositions, and 
 in the midst of the din of war he cheered his countrymen 
 with " The Chicken-hearted Attila Schmelzle," " Fibel the 
 Coxcomb," and " The Droll Cynic Katzenberger." While 
 with the more serious " Twilight " and the " Peace " and 
 " Lent Sermons " he warned, admonished and soothed 
 them. 
 
 The following letter to Otto in May 1808 gives one a 
 glimpse of his feelings and opinions at this time : 
 
 " My heart is now rigid, barren and cold. The spring 
 with all its starry heavens is nothing to me. I shall 
 remain rigid and cold until the great world-game has 
 been won. This however does not withhold me — it spura 
 me on — from working zealously with my individual 
 powers for the general good. Let him whom the time 
 strikes down, first raise himself again, and then it with 
 him. If the plurality of devils has some power, that of 
 angels has still more. Still more, I say, for human nature 
 gives ten angels the balance against one hundred devils. . . 
 If this were not so, humanity instead of rising would long 
 since have sunk under the preponderance of the weak, the 
 stupid and the bad." 
 
 While his opinions strengthened the love of many of 
 his old friends and also gained him many new ones, they 
 did not fail, on the other hand, to estrange many from 
 him. Among these latter was the Duke Emil August of 
 Gotha, who had formerly been one of his great admirers. 
 The loss of his favour, however, was comper sated for by
 
 Xlii BIOGEAPHT. 
 
 the friendship of another German Prince, namely, Carl 
 von Dalberg, Prince of Primas. He was the first who 
 remembered the princely privilege of showing gratitude 
 in the name of his people to their benefactor, and not 
 content with admiring Eichter's genius and praising his 
 powers, he thought also of the conditions necessary for the 
 development of these powers and granted him a yearly 
 pension of 1000 guldens. Such assistance was the more wel- 
 come as the King of Prussia had withdrawn a promise, given 
 some years before, that he would grant him a prebendary. 
 
 The "Autumn Flowers," published in 1810, is a collection 
 of essays and short pieces on political and other subjects, 
 which had first appeared in magazines and which he now 
 collected into a volume. Two years later, after the 
 termination of the war, he commenced " Xicolaus Margraf "' 
 (The Comet), a comic novel. He appears to have made 
 more extensive preparations for this than for any other 
 of his books, and worked at it with much pleasure. " I 
 am now boiling and roasting over a large comic work," 
 he writes in July 1813. " But in it I have vowed I will 
 not again do as I have done hitherto, for in all my 
 comic works, like a child born ball-shape and straightway 
 crucified on a pillow, I have yielded to the strict rules of 
 art, and have, alas ! been only too proper ; now I will give 
 myself the reins and go where I will — up, down, in 
 flights and springs— with real boldness. My friend, I 
 will retrieve and postscript my youth in age." 
 
 Too much work and anxiety began about this time 
 to tell on Eichter's robust health, and we find him 
 making frequent little tours for the sake of change of 
 scene. On one of these trips in 1812, he met with 
 F. H. Jacobi in Niirnberg, with whom he had long corres- 
 ponded but not met personally. Four years later, when 
 visiting Eegensburg, he made the acquaintance of Prince 
 Primas Carl von Dalberg, whom we have already men-
 
 BIOGRAPHY. xliil 
 
 tioned. With him Richter seems to have been on good 
 terms. He writes to Otto, " I have never in so short 
 a time become one-eighth part so fond of a prince. Cf an 
 evening we often sit until dusk before the half-emptied 
 bottle and talk of religion, philosophy and scientific topics 
 of all kinds." The following year (1817), Richter -visited 
 Heidelberg, where he made the acquaintance of such men 
 as Voss, Paulus, Hegel, Schwarz. He here received his 
 doctor's degree, and was feted by professors and students 
 as he had never been before. To his wife he writes, 
 " I have passed hours here such as I have never ex- 
 perienced under the brightest heaven of my life, in 
 particular the water-party, the students' Vivats and the 
 songs from the old Italian music, but I thank the Allgood 
 as well as I can by gentleness, modesty, love and justice 
 to all." The piece called " The Evergreen of our Feelings " 
 which is a memorial of this visit, was written soon after 
 his return home. Besides new editions of some of his other 
 works, he now at the request of his friends began the Auto- 
 biography, for which however he appears to have had no 
 zest. In 1818 he wrote to Voss, " At present I am writing 
 my life, though I would rather write that of any one else, 
 yet I must do it for no one knows my inner life but God 
 and the devil ; the form however of the Biography will 
 be different from that of all former ones." And again, " I 
 have little pleasure in the Biography because there is no 
 scope for imagination in it, and I have never even in 
 novels liked to let the bare history flow on without the two 
 banks of jest and feeling, and also because I care for no 
 one less than myself. I wish I could relate my life to 
 you, and you could put it in proper shape ; but I doubt 
 not I shall find or make the right vehicle for it." In this 
 frame of mind he attempted to weave his life into the 
 story, "Nicolaus Margraf," already mentioned, which he 
 was now writing, or to bring it in wine other way in con-
 
 xliv BIOGRAPHY. 
 
 nexion with the store of thoughts and ideas which he nad 
 hoarded in his brain. But the work does not appear 
 to have become less distasteful, and he laid it aside before 
 he had proceeded far and devoted himself with more 
 energy to the " Comet." 
 
 We now fast approach the end. In 1821, he received 
 a blow from which he never recovered, in the death of his 
 son Max, a promising young man, who died while at the 
 university, of a nervous fever brought on by overwork, 
 and aggravated by a despondent state of mind induced 
 by the study of philosophy. After his son's death, Eichter 
 appears to have lost his taste for satirical humorous 
 writing. The Autobiography and " Comet " were laid 
 aside and he began immediately the " Selina," a work 
 on the immortality of the soul, which however he did not 
 live to finish. In the spring following his son's death 
 while he was staying at Dresden whither he had gone 
 to- recruit his health, he found that he was fast losing the 
 sight of one of his eyes. Doctors and opticians were 
 unable to help him, and symptons of dropsy which showed 
 themselves necessitated a course of treatment which 
 increased the malady in his eyes. The last weeks of his 
 life were spent with his nephew, Otto Spazier, in revising 
 his works for a complete edition. He does not appear 
 to have thought that his end was so near, and looked 
 forward with much pleasure to completing the work 
 he had already begun. But towards the last his strength 
 failed him rapidly, and on the 14th of November, 1824, his 
 spirit found its rest.
 
 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER, 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 
 
 i. 
 C 
 J
 
 AUTOBIOGKAPHY. 
 
 FIRST LECTURE. 
 
 WONSIEDEL — BIRTH — GRANDFATHER. 
 
 My dear Friends, — It was in the year 1763, on February 
 15th, that the peace of Hubertsbnrg came to this world, 
 and after it the present Professor of the history of him- 
 self; and this in the month in which the yellow and 
 grey wagtails, the redbreasts, the cranes, and other 
 snipes and waders, arrived with him, namely, in the 
 month of March,— and this, too, on that day of the month 
 on which the spoonwort and the trembling poplar the 
 speedwell and the henbit, just come opportunely into 
 blossom for anyone who may wish to strew flowers on the 
 cradle, namely, on the 21st of March, — and this, too, in the 
 earliest, freshest time of day, namely, at 1.30 a.m.; but 
 what crowns all, is, that the beginning of his life was at 
 the same time the beginning of that Spring. 
 
 This last idea, that I, the Professor, and the Spring- 
 were born together, has been introduced by me in conver- 
 sation, I suppose, a hundred times already ; but I inten- 
 tionally discharge it here, like a cannon-shot, for the 101st 
 time, in order that by the discharge I may be incapaci- 
 tated from offering again as a bonmot-bonbon that which 
 has already been handed round to the whole world through 
 the printer's devil. It is a misfortune when Fate herself 
 has laid a pun, like a nest-egg, in the history of anyone, 
 be he the wittiest of men, and let him hatch new ideas 
 by bushels; for on this egg he sits and broods a whole 
 lifetime, in hopes of hatching something. For instance, I 
 
 b 2
 
 ■4 JEAN PAUL FRiEDElCH RICHTEK. 
 
 once knew a barber and a coachman, both of whom, on 
 being asked what they were called, invariably answered, 
 neither differently, nor more simply or less wittily, than, 
 Tlir gehorsamer Diener (Your humble servant) ; or else, 
 Uir Diener Diener (Your servant Diener) ; now the cause 
 was that each had the misfortune to be called Diener 
 (servant), and thus the indelible mark (character indebilis) 
 of a standard joke was, as it were, tonsured on their heads, 
 or they were both condemned to one perpetual idea ; the 
 trade wind of their wit blew continually in one direction. 
 And still less, my honoured friends, let us hope to sur- 
 prise a man who bears a name, common and proper at the 
 same time, such as Ochs (Ox) and Bapinat (Plunder) both 
 formerly in Switzerland — Wolf—Schlegel (Mallet) — Bichter 
 (judge) — to surprise, I say, such a double-named man with 
 a pun, be it ever so brilliant ; for he has lived long enough 
 with his name for any pun to be quite stale to him, which, 
 to his new acquaintance, appears new, fresh and witty. 
 Milliner, now, was more successful with his pun on Schotten 
 (Scotchmen) and Scliatten (shadows); for no Schotten ever 
 considered themselves Schatten, and no Scliatten Schotten : 
 they are eternally separated by two vowels. 
 
 I return to my story, and find myself among the dead ; for 
 all are now out of the world who saw my entrance into it. 
 My father, J ohann Christian Christoph Bichter, was Terzius * 
 and organist in Wonsiedel ; my mother, Sophia Eosina, was 
 the daughter of a cloth- weaver, J ohann Paul Kuhn, in Hof. 
 On the day following my birth, I was baptized by the 
 senior Apel. One godfather was the above-mentioned 
 .] ohann Paul; the other was Johann Friedrich Thieme, 
 a bookbinder, who did not know at that time on what a 
 Maecenas of his handicraft he bestowed his name ; from 
 these two sprang the compound name Johann Paul 
 Friedrich, the grandfather's half of which I translated 
 into French, and thus made of it one complete name — Jean 
 
 * To understand this title and others occurring afterwards, the 
 reader must know that a German gymnasium, or high school, has 
 eight masters — the Rector, or headmaster, Conrector, Subrector, Quintus, 
 Quartus, Tertius, Secundum, Primus. The classes are arranged 
 in the inverse order ; the first class, or Prima, being the highest. 
 Boys in the Prinia are called Primaners, in the Secunda Secunda- 
 uere, and so on. — Tr.
 
 ATITOBIOGKAI'HY. 
 
 Paul, for reasons which will he fully explained in later 
 lectures of this winter season. 
 
 But for the present we will let the hero and subject oi 
 these historical lectures lie unheeded in the cradle and on 
 the mother's breast, and sleep long enough — from the long 
 morning-sleep of life there is little of general historical in- 
 terest to be learned — sleep long enough for me to speak, if 
 only shortly and insufficiently, of those towards whom 
 my heart inclines itself and my pen — of my relations, my 
 father, mother, and grandparents. 
 
 My father was the son of the Eector,* Johann Eichter, 
 in Neustadt at Culm. Little is known of him except 
 that he was poor and pious in the highest degree. When 
 either of his surviving grandchildren goes to Neustadt, 
 he is still received with grateful love and joy by the in- 
 habitants ; the old ones tell how conscientious and strict 
 were his life and his tuition, and yet how cheerful. A 
 little beach behind the organ is still shown where he 
 knelt every Sunday in prayer, and a cave, too, made by 
 himself in the so-called Culm, wherein to pray, which 
 still remained until the time when his fiery son — although 
 only for him too fiery — played with the Muses and Penia. 
 
 The evening twilight was a daily autumn to him, in 
 which pacing up and down the scantily furnished school- 
 room, he would reap the harvest of the day and prayer- 
 fully think over the sowing for the morrow. His sch< ol- 
 house was a prison, not with bread-and-water, but with 
 bread-and-beer fare ; more than this — with perhaps a little 
 pious contentment thrown in — was not allowed by a 
 rectorate, though united with the offices of Cantor] and 
 Organist ; for, in spite of this lion-society of three offices, 
 it did not yield more than 150 guldens per annum. At 
 this hunger- well, not uncommon for Baireuth schoolmen, 
 jstood the man who had formerly been Cantor at Behau, 
 for five-and-thirty long years, — and drew. Me might 
 assuredly have got a few more scraps and halfpennies if 
 he had been promoted, say, to the post of country clergy- 
 man. Whenever the schoolmasters change their clothes — 
 when they exchange the school-gown for the priest's gown, 
 — they receive better victuals, j list as tbe silkworms, at eacb 
 * See note above. t The leader of the choir. — TV.
 
 6 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEE. 
 
 fresh skinning, get better food ; and in this manner such 
 a man, by increase of his work, may increase his income 
 to such an extent, that he may come up with those state 
 officials with their pensions and gratuities, whose five- 
 note lines of prizes are carried through the complete score 
 of the cabinet, in spite of all pauses of the instrument. 
 
 "When my grandfather called on the boys' parents, 
 which he did occasionally, more for the pupils' than the 
 parents' sake, he would take of the above-mentioned beer 
 and bread, at which he remained all his life, a piece of 
 the latter in his pocket, and expect only a tankard of beer 
 from his host. At length, in the year 1763 — just the year 
 of my birth — it fell out that he was elected, probably 
 through special connexions with some Higher Powers, to 
 an important position, one for which the rectorate, the town, 
 and the Cuhnberg were very readily given up. He was 
 exactly seventy-six years four months and eight days of 
 age when he actually received the said place in the Neustadt 
 -—graveyard ; his wife had already gone twenty years 
 before to her place beside him. My parents were called with 
 me to his death-bed when I was a child of five months old. 
 
 He was dying, when a clergyman (as my father has 
 often told me) said to my parents : " Let the old Jacob 
 lay his hand on the child's head and bless him ;" and thus 
 I was put on his death-bed, and he laid his hand on my 
 head. pious grandfather ! Often have I thought of thy 
 hand blessing me while already growing cold in death, 
 ■when fate has led me out of dark hours into brighter ; and 
 I can, too, hold firm to my belief in thy blessing in a 
 world permeated and animated by Miracles and Spirits. 
 
 My father was born in Xeustadt on the 16th of December, 
 1727 — born, I might say, rather for the winter of life than, 
 like me, for a spring, had not his vigorous nature been 
 able to carve a safe haven for him even among the icebergs. 
 He could only afford to enjoy, or rather endure, the 
 Lyceum at Wonsiedel, as Luther did his school in Eisen- 
 ach, as a so-called Alumnus (poor scholar) ; for when a 
 yearly income of 150 guldens had to be divided between 
 father, mother, and several sisters, nothing at all, or at 
 best only Alumnus-hread., could fall to his share. Later he 
 entered the Gymnasium poeticum at Eegensbnrg in order, not
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 7 
 
 only to hungerin a larger town, but also to cultivate the 
 real blossom of bis nature instead of the leaves, — which 
 blossom was music. In the chapel of the Prince of Thurn 
 and Taxis — the well-known connoisseur and patron of 
 ruusic — he could do homage to the saint for whose service 
 he was born ; and twenty years later he became a favourite 
 composer of church music in the principality of Baireuth. 
 On the eve of Good Friday he would perform, to the delight 
 of us children as well as of himself, the heilige Allmacht, with 
 which the Catholics edified and purified their souls at that 
 time. To my grief, 1 must confess that when some years 
 ago I was in Eegensburg, amongst all its antiquities and 
 remembrances — not excepting even the Imperial Diet — my 
 father's hard life was the most important of all to me ; and 
 often in the palace of Thurn and Taxis, and in the narrow 
 streets, where a couple of stout fellows would have hard 
 work to get by each other, I have thought of the confined 
 wjvvs and narrow paths of his youthful days. 
 
 Later, at Jena and Erlangen, he studied, not music, but 
 tbeology r , perhaps merely for the sake of worrying himself 
 for a time, namely, until his thirty -second year, as a private 
 tutor at Baireuth, in which town his son has collected the 
 whole of this information. For by the year 1760 he had 
 already wrested from the state the post of Organist and 
 Ttrzius in the town of Wonsiedel, and thus in this matter 
 had more and earlier good-luck, under the Markgraf of 
 Baireuth, than that candidate in Hanover (of whom we 
 read), who, being seventy years old, received no other posi- 
 tion in the church than the one close by in the churchyard. 
 
 But now, I pray, let not any of my audience fear, from 
 what has been already said, that they are going to be 
 introduced to a pitiable object of a father, who, like many 
 a modern hypocrite, goes about swaddled in tear-soaked 
 handkerchiefs ; he lived on wings, and was sought in the 
 families of Brandenburg, and Schbpf as the pleasantest and 
 most amusing companion. This power of social humour 
 accompanied him throughout his life, though in his minis- 
 terial duties he was known as one of the strictest of divines, 
 and in the pulpit as a so-called law-preacher. He won 
 the hearts of his relations in his native town hy his 
 enthusiastic sermons, and in Hof in the Voigtland he won
 
 8 JEAN PAUL FR1EDRICII RICHTER. 
 
 something still more important — a bride, and, what was 
 yet more difficult, her rich parents into the bargain. 
 When a citizen, who has become wealthy by cloth-making 
 and veil-selling, does not refuse the prettiest, and most loved 
 of his two delicately nurtured daughters to a needy Terzius, 
 who, together with his creditors, lives within a day's 
 journey of him, — then, I say, this Terzius on the one hand 
 can only have overcome daughter and parents by much 
 merit of his personal attractions, and by the fame and im- 
 pressiveness of his great pulpit gifts ; and on the other hand 
 there must have dwelt in the cloth-weaver a soul above 
 his cloth and money, for which talent and clerical worth 
 shone with more lustre than did the glittering silver of an 
 ordinary being. On the 13th of October, 1761, the beloved 
 went as bride with her treasures to the cramped little 
 school-house, which luckily was not made any smaller by 
 house-furniture. His cheerful disposition, his indifference 
 to money, united with his confidence in his housekeeper, 
 left abundance of superfluous empty room in the Terzius 
 conch-shell for all moveable possessions from Hof which 
 might wish to take up their abode with him ; but my 
 mother — in those days married people were so, and a few 
 are still — minded the bareness throughout her married life 
 as little as my father himself did. The strong man should 
 have courage to wed either the rich landowner, or, just as 
 well, the poor housekeeper. 
 
 In my historical lectures, I warn you, hunger will occur 
 with ever-increasing power — in the case of the hero it 
 reaches a very high pitch — and as often, I daresay, as the 
 feasting in Thiimmel's " Travels," and the tea-drinking in 
 Richardson's " Clarissa ; " yet I cannot help saying to 
 poverty, " Be welcome ! provided only that thou comest 
 not quite too late in life." Eiches fetter talent more than 
 poverty : many an intellectual giant ruay lie stifled under 
 thrones and golden mountains. When the oil of wealth 
 is poured on the flames of youth, and especially of the 
 more ardent, stronger youth, then will little more be left 
 of the Phoenix than the ashes ; only a Goethe has the power 
 to keep his Phoenix wings unsinged in the sun of pros- 
 perity. The poor historical Professor would not, for much 
 money, have had much money in his youth. Fate does with
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 9 
 
 poets, as we do with birds — it darkens the warbler's cage 
 until he has caught the oft-played air that he is to sing. 
 
 But spare, just Fate, the old man from want, for he 
 it is who ought not — must not — be without. The heavy- 
 years have bent his back too much already, he can no 
 more erect himself as the youth, and carry his burdens 
 lightly on his head. The old man, while still on the earth, 
 already needs the rest within it ; of the world he can use only 
 the present and but little future, for now he has no more 
 the planting, blooming future as foil for his present. Two 
 steps from the last and lowest bed, with no other curtains 
 than the flowers, he wishes still to rest and to slumber 
 a little in the old grandfather's chair ; and, half asleep, to 
 open his eyes once more, and gaze on the old stars and 
 meadows of youth. And I have little objection — for he 
 has done the most important part for the next as well as 
 this world — if, in the evening, he looks forward to his 
 breakfast next morning, and in the morning to his bed, 
 and if the world lets him depart, in his second childhood, 
 amid those harmless pleasures of the senses, with which 
 she received him in his first. 
 
 Only one single error on my father's part may be laid 
 to the charge of poverty, namely, that he sacrificed 
 himself like a monk to his ministerial office, instead of 
 devoting himself with his whole musical soul to the tone- 
 muse ; that he suffered his genius to be buried in a village 
 church. The Church-ship was in those days, it is true- 
 particularly in the opinion of Burger parents-in-law— the 
 Provision-ship or Air-ship, and the needy son of music 
 i strove to run into the haven of the pulpit. But whoever 
 ) feels in himself a declination and inclination of his 
 ' magnet- needle, not urged on him by wants or education, 
 but growing up with him, let him follow its pointing 
 with confidence, as that of a compass through the desert. 
 Had the present Professor of history imitated his father, 
 as the latter wished, he now, instead of giving these 
 lectures, would be delivering sacred official discourses and 
 speeches, both casual and otherwise ; and would probably 
 be enrolled in the universal " Magazine for Preachers," 
 only, alas, to swell it more immoderately. 
 
 But my father was not in reality unfaithful either to
 
 10 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH FJCHTER. 
 
 himself or his muse ; for did she not visit him, as his Old 
 love, in the cloister attire of the Blessed Virgin, bringing 
 him the church music every week to the lonely, toneless 
 parish of Joditz ? And, on the other hand, there dwelt in 
 him also another power besides his musical talent, which 
 sought play-room in the pulpit ; for although, as the old 
 saying tells us, great musicians are generally given to 
 the sensual pleasure of drinking, and, as Lavater says, to 
 that of eating, and in this way the Kapellmeister* may 
 appear as his own cellar-master and steward, yet one does 
 not hear that they were particularly good pulpit orators in 
 addition to this. Eloquence, the prosaic wall-and-door 
 neighbour to poetry, dwelt in my father's ministerial 
 heart; and the same sunbeams of genius, which in the 
 morning of his life awakened melodious strains, as in a 
 Memnon's statue, united afterwards in the pulpit a genial 
 light with the thunder of the law. 
 
 I am quite aware, my friends, that I am talking a long 
 time of my relations and praising them highly ; but I will 
 immediately begin, I assure you, to speak of myself, and 
 then I shall with difficulty stop again. This very praise 
 which I bestow on my father would appear to him, if he 
 was still living, just as important as it appears vain to 
 me, when I picture him to myself in Eternity, where he 
 will not be particularly proud, amongst the blessed, that 
 in the year 1818 he was again announced from my 
 lecturing chair as a composer of church music in the 
 principality of Baireuth — and just this and a similar 
 coldness must my son expect of me, if ever on some future 
 day, after I have become a spirit, he shall eagerly tell to 
 the world the universal applause which my works have 
 won, — but let him on this account paint them, as little as 
 I have done, either more coldly or more shortly. 
 
 The fact is, most honoured sirs, I would ten times 
 rather give you historical lectures on my forefathers than 
 on myself. What a different form does the past take, 
 which otherwise were so unfamiliar to us, when our 
 relations pass through it and link it in brotherly alliance 
 with our present ! That man is to be envied whose 
 
 * The Kapellmeister, or Capellmeister, is the director of the royaJ 
 orchestral band.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 1 1 
 
 history accompanies lain: back from his forefathers to their 
 forefathers, and thus colours a grey time with, green. For 
 we cannot paint the times in which our grandparents and 
 great-grandparents lived, even when they themselves 
 were old, otherwise than in the brightness and freshness 
 of youth ; just as in reality we compose our future world 
 of old men and not of youths. 
 
 1 return at length to the hero and subject of our 
 lectures, and call particular attention to the fact that 
 I was born in Wonsiedel (wrongly called Wunsiedel), a 
 town on the Fichtelgebirge. The Fichtelgebirge, one of 
 the highest regions of Germany, gives health to its 
 inhabitants (they would be the first to dispense with the 
 Alexanderbad), and strong, tall figures ; and the Professor 
 leaves it to his audience to decide whether he appears in 
 his chair of office as a confirmation of, or an exception to 
 this. It is vexatious, I may add, for a man who would 
 best like to make himself a name in his native town, that 
 the Wonsiedlers swallow the r at the beginning and 
 end of the words with which, as every one knows, the 
 name " Richter " must commence and finish. The an- 
 cestors of the Wonsiedlers, moreover, have been crowned 
 from all times with laurel wreaths for their bravery in 
 war, which is what I must wish for them as my village 
 ancestors ; and from history* it is sufficiently well known 
 how they withstood and defeated the Hussites ; and if for 
 "Hussites" we put "critics," anyone who will count my 
 victories over the enemies from Hussite Nikolai to Hussite 
 Merkel, will perhaps think that the race has not de- 
 generated in bravery. 
 
 In Wonsiedel, the sixth town of the six so-called Con- 
 federate States, there was always, at any rate for Patriotisn 
 and for societies for help and justice, a sixth creation day, 
 and German love, fidelity, and strength took up thdir 
 abode there. I am glad to have been born in thee, ttou 
 little town under the long and lofty mountain-range, 
 
 * According to the detailed account of the Fichtel-berg (Lei jzig, 
 1716), p. 52, the Hussites had laid waste the whole of the land above 
 the mountain range ; but on the Friday before Pentecost the 
 Wonsiedlers repulsed 18,000 of the Bohemians, who had stcrmed their 
 town three times.
 
 12 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. 
 
 whose tops look down on us like eagle-heads. Thou hast 
 adorned thy mountain throne by the steps thereto, and 
 thy healing spring gives strength — not to thee — but to 
 the sick, to climb to the canopy above him and to the 
 command of the distant villages and plains. I am glad 
 to have been born in thee, thou little but good and bright 
 town. 
 
 It has often been remarked that the first-born are 
 generally of the female sex. To this observation the 
 subject of our history is no exception, in spite of his 
 right of primogeniture ; for as his parents were married 
 in October, 1761, and he was born in March, 1763, another 
 little being (as he has heard), for this world only a 
 shadow, had gone before him and begun its existence in 
 the light of another world, perhaps without having seen 
 the light of this one. 
 
 The far-reaching memories of childhood bring joy to 
 the tottering man, striving in this wave-existence to get a 
 firm hold anywhere ; yes, they elevate him more than one 
 can say — much more than the memories of his later and 
 more busy life ; and this perhaps for these two reasons, 
 — firstly, that he thinks, by thus 'ooking back, to force his 
 way nearer to the gates of life guarded by spirits and 
 darkuess ; and, secondly, he hopes in the mental power of 
 early consciousness to find, as it were, an independence 
 of this contemptible little mortal b<>dy. I am glad that 
 I am still able to recall a dim, faint recollection of the 
 time when I was twelve or at, most fourteen months old, 
 like the first mental snowdrop out of the dark soil of 
 childhood. I still remember that one of the poor scholars 
 was very fond of me, and that he used always to carry me 
 about in his arms — whi'h is more pleasant than being 
 carried on the hands* in later life — and used to give me 
 milk to drink in the large gloomy room of the Alumni. 
 His distant fading picture and his love for me hovered 
 over many years. Now alas ! I know his name no more ; 
 but yet it is possible that he is still living, far on towards 
 his seventieth year, and the wide-read scholar may meet 
 
 * The German expression, auf den Handen tragen (to carry on the 
 hands), means "to treat with great affection" or "regard." Eichter 
 was more ?ousrht after in later l.fe than he cared to be.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 13 
 
 with these lectures, and may then call to mind a little 
 Professor whom he carried about and kissed. Ah ! if it 
 should be so, and he should write — or if to the old man 
 the older man should come! This little morning-star of 
 earliest memory still shone brightly in the low heaven of 
 boyhood, but has grown more and more pale the higher 
 the daylight of life has risen ; and now in reality I 
 remember only this one thing clearly, that I formerly 
 remembered all more clearly. 
 
 As my father had already received his appointment as 
 pastor at Joditz in the year 1765, 1 can the more exactly 
 separate the reliquary of my Wonsiedler childhood from 
 the early remembrances and reliques of Joditz. 
 
 This village is the second scene of this little historical 
 melodrama; where, most honoured ladies and gentlemen, 
 you will meet the hero of the piece under entirely new 
 circumstances in our second lecture ; for each lecture is 
 laid in a new place of residence. Indeed, the whole history 
 of these lectures, or the lectures of this history, are 
 so skilfully and successfully arranged, that of the three 
 usual unities of an historical drama, besides the first one 
 of place — for of course I must make my appearance in the 
 various places where I sojourned — besides this one, I say, 
 no other unity but that of time is transgressed, for the 
 hero from his entrance into life to his entrance on his 
 professorship, must always be passing from one time to 
 another; not to mention that while representing and 
 acting the piece he must offend the unity of time by him- 
 self growing older ; but in return for this he holds firmly 
 the unity of interest running throughout, which can hardly 
 be imagined greater than it is. But our hero's upward 
 ascent has already begun, and we have the pleasure in our 
 second lecture of meeting again, after two years, as the 
 pastor's son, the historical personage whom in the first 
 we left as the son of a Terzius only ; for in 1765 my father 
 was called to Joditz by the Baroness von Plotho (a 
 Bodenhausen by birth) of Zedtwitz, the wife of the same 
 Plotho who was ambassador to Frederic the Only at the 
 Imperial Diet of Kegensburg, in the beginning of the Seven 
 Years' War.
 
 14 JEAN PAUL FPJEDRICH EICHTER. 
 
 SECOND LECTUEE. 
 
 EMBRACING THE PERIOD FROM THE 1ST OF AUGUST, 1765, TO 
 THE 9TH OF JANUARY, 1776 — JODITZ — VILLAGE IDYLS. 
 
 Much honoured Ladies and Gentlemen, — You now meet 
 the Professor of his Autobiographical History in the village 
 of Joditz, "whither he accompanied his parents in woman's 
 hood and girl's frock. The Saale, which took its rise, like 
 myself, in the Fichtelgebirge, had followed me thither, just 
 as in later years it flowed past Hof when I went to live 
 there. This river is the most beautiful, or at any rate the 
 longest, river in Joditz, flowing round the town by the 
 mountain side. The village itself is crossed by a little 
 brook, with a wooden bridge. A commonplace castle and 
 parsonage might well be the most important buildings 
 here. The suburbs were not more than twice the size of 
 the village itself, if one did not climb the mountain side ; 
 and yet to the Professor of his own history that village is 
 of yet more importance than the town of his birth, for in 
 it he passed the most important time of his life, namely, the 
 boy-Olympiads. 
 
 I never could give my sympathy to those nineteen towns 
 which quarrelled (according to Suidas) for the honour of 
 being the birthplace of Homer, just as little as with those 
 Dutch places, all of which would wish (according to Bayle) 
 to have given birth to Erasmus. What can there be of 
 such importance in the first day before or after nine months. 
 
 At the place of the grave the inhabitants might have 
 more share in the merit — and also in the blame — than at 
 the place of the cradle. Although, on the whole, many 
 princes are l)orn in capital towns, yet London, Paris, 
 Berlin and Vienna are not proud of this ; for if they were, 
 then, by converse reasoning, would all those towns and 
 villages where great rogues have been born have to be 
 ashamed. The birth-lands might, at the most, be allowed 
 to presume on the honour of the birth-towns in them, if
 
 AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 15 
 
 any favourable judgment could be formed of their climate 
 or inhabitants on account of their number of notable births ; 
 but one Pindar in Bceotia does not make a swallow-summer 
 of it. 
 
 The real native town, namely, the mental one, is the 
 place where the education begins and continues longest ; 
 and if it is so for world-renowned men, who seldom need 
 education and seldom make use of it, how much more is 
 it so for village- and town-renowned, mediocre men, like 
 my hero, who gained so much his from bringing-up and 
 spoiling, and who, by means of both, combined with his 
 readings (which is only a more extensive educating and 
 spoiling institution), has really become that which he 
 now is — a Councillor-of-Embassy of Hildburghausen, a 
 Heidelburg Doctor of Philosophy, a threefold Member of 
 various Societies, and the present unworthy Possessor of 
 this Autohistorical Professorship. 
 
 Let no poet, I pray, get himself born and reared in a 
 Capital ; but rather, if possible, in a village, or, at most, in 
 a small town. The super-abundance and over-fascination 
 of a large town are to the delicate, excitable, young soul 
 a feasting at dessert, a drinking of burning spirits, a 
 bathing in glowing wine. Life is exhausted in him during 
 boyhood ; and after the greatest he has nothing left for 
 which to wish, but that which at any rate is smaller, 
 namely, the village. One does not gain or acquire so much in 
 coming from the town to the village, as vice versa, — from 
 Joditz to Hof. Consider, too, that most important element 
 for poets — Love. In the town he must draw around the 
 torrid zone of his parents, friends, and acquaintance, the 
 larger temperate and frigid zones of unloved men, who 
 pass by him unknown, and for whom he is as little able to 
 kind 1 a and warm his love as is a ship's crew in meeting 
 anr. passing another vessel. 
 
 But in a village one loves the whole population : no 
 babe is buried but each one knows its name, its illness, 
 and the mourning it has called forth. The inhabitants of 
 Joditz thus lived and grew into one another ; and this 
 glorious sympathy for every one in the form of a man, 
 which thus extends even to the stranger and the beggar, 
 gives birth to a solid love for mankind and to the right
 
 16 JEAN PAUL FPJEDRICH EICHTER. 
 
 pulsation of the heart. And then, when the poet wanders 
 forth from his village, he brings to each whom he meets 
 a portion of his heart, and he will have far to travel 
 ere he has thus spent the whole of it among the streets 
 and alleys. 
 
 Undoubtedly, there is a still greater misfortune than 
 that of being reared in a metropolis ; namely, the being 
 reared on the road, like a child of the aristocracy, which 
 journeys for years amid strange towns and people, and 
 knows no other home than the travelling-coach. 
 
 We now come again to the pastor's son, whose life in 
 Joditz, I think, I shall best represent to you if I pass it 
 before you by-and-by, in one complete year of Idyls. But 
 first, like mist, let that precede which does not belong to 
 the bright days ; the mist is the instruction I received, 
 which, however, was not till after ten years. Learning of 
 all sorts was life to me, and I would gladly have submitted 
 myself, prince-like, to the instruction of half-a-dozen tutors ; 
 but I scarcely had one proper one. Still do I remember 
 the delight of that winter-evening when I received intomy 
 hand the A, B, C book from the town, with the pencil to 
 serve as pointer attached to it, on the cover of which were 
 written (not without right) in real gold letters, the contents 
 of the first page, which consisted of alternate red and black 
 letters : a gambler derives less ecstacy before his gold and 
 rouge et noir than I did before mine from that book whose 
 pencil even I did not once stake. 
 
 After this, — when I had taken enough private instruc- 
 tion, with my inner Privatissima as master, to pass 
 through the lowest classes of the school,— I was taken in 
 a green taffeta cap, but already in short trousers (for 
 which the schoolmistress openly supjolemented my weak 
 little fingers) to the high school that is, the school 
 which stood opposite the parsonage, and there with the 
 pencil I recited my letters to them all. As usual, I became 
 fond of every living thing in the school, and, most of all, 
 of the thin, consumptive, but cheerful schoolmaster ; whose 
 anxiety I always shared when on the watch for an unwary 
 goldfinch behind the finch-trap which stood outside his 
 window, or when he was about to throw the draw-net 
 over the yellow-hammers on the fowling-floor out in the
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY 17 
 
 snow. In the Greenland winter-closeness of the crowded 
 schoolroom. I remember still, with pleasure, the long linen 
 stoppe s which were st lifted into small air-holes bored in 
 the wall, and which one only needed to draw out to receive 
 into the open mouth a refreshing stream of frosty air from 
 outside. 
 
 Each fresh letter which the schoolmaster gave me 
 t<> write reinvigorated me — as a picture would others — 
 and I envied the rest for reciting their lessons, for I would 
 fain have enjoyed the bliss of spelling as well as of singing 
 in chorus. 
 
 Was it twelve o'clock and dinner not yet ready, there 
 was then nothing left to be wished for by me and my 
 brother Adam (who is now dead). For although he was 
 much fonder of a bird's nest than of a whole colony of 
 muses, we flew to the schoolroom, carrying our hunger 
 with us — putting off the appeasing of it until later — in 
 order not to lose a minute. People made much of this 
 knowledge-craving self-sacrifice, but I remember very well 
 that the common childish inclination to es ape from the 
 regular daily round had most of all to do with it. We 
 wanted to have our dinners a few hours later, just as on 
 fast-days and repentance-days we always looked forward 
 to the late dinners. When all in the house is in a state 
 of confusion on account of white-washing, for example, 
 or perhaps from moving to another house, or from the 
 arrival of several guests, then the little human fools are 
 at their zenith of delight. 
 
 Unluckily I shut to myself for ever the schoolroom door, 
 by an untimely complaint to my father about a big peasant 
 lad (Zah was his name — that posterity may know it), who 
 had struck me on the knuckles with his clasp-knife. In 
 proud anger, my father henceforth gave my brothers and 
 myself our instruction alone, and every winter I had to 
 seethe children over the way sailing into the harbour which 
 was closed to me. But still I had left to me the little by- 
 pleasure of carrying over to the schoolmaster the frequent 
 bulls and decrees of his village pope, and the Christmas 
 gifts or presents from the newly-killed pig, or any other 
 little plateful of eatables in place of the Romish Agnus Dei 
 or the consecrated roses and baby-napkins. 
 
 I. c
 
 18 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH RICHTER. 
 
 Four hours before and three hours after dinner our 
 father used to give us our lessons, which consisted 
 entirely of learning by rote — verses, catechism, Latin 
 words, and Lange's grammar. We had to learn the long 
 rules of the genders for each declension, together with 
 the exceptions and the adjoined Latin examples, without 
 understanding a word of it all. If on a bright summer 
 day my father went into the country, we got some such 
 confounded exceptions as panis and piscis to learn for the 
 next morning ; but my brother Adam, for whom the whole 
 day hardly sufficed for his frolics and games of all kinds, 
 seldom had an eighth part of them left in his head, fo- 
 it was not often that he was lucky enough to get such 
 delightful words to decline as scamnum, or, better still, 
 cornu, in the singular, of which he could at any rate say 
 the Latin half. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, it was 
 no easy matter, on a bright June day, when the all- 
 powerful ruler was not at home, to arrest and imprison 
 oneself in a corner, there to stamp and impress two or 
 three pages of words into one's head ; on a bright summer- 
 day, I say, it was no easy matter — but it was harder still 
 on a short, snowy one in December ; and you must not be 
 •surprised that my brother on this account always carried 
 away a few stripes after such days. The Professor of his 
 own history can, however, make this general declaration, — 
 that never throughout his whole school-life was he flogged 
 either in part or completely ; the Professor always knew 
 his part. 
 
 But let not this rote-learning system throw a false 
 light on my indefatigable and loving father, who would 
 sacrifice the whole day in writing out and committing to 
 memory the sermons for his country parishioners, merely 
 from overstrict conscientiousness, as several times he had 
 had proofs of his extempore eloquence; my good father, 
 who, in his weekly visits to the schoolroom and in his 
 doubling the public instruction for children, and in all 
 other things exceeded his duty by self-sacrifice, and who 
 gave his tender, warm, fatherly heart chiefly to me, 
 and who would break out into joyful tears over any little 
 signs of talent and progress in me. In the whole of his 
 Hlucational system he committed no other faults, however
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 19 
 
 strange are some which may occur, than those of the head 
 — none of the will. 
 
 This method is to he recommended to the regular school- 
 master, for hy no other is so much time and trouble 
 spared as by this really convenient one, by which the 
 pupil gains in his book a vicarius or adjunctus of the 
 teacher, or his curator absentis, and magnetises himself like 
 a powerful clairvoyant. Yes, this mental self-nourishing 
 of children is capable of such extension, that I myself 
 would undertake to superintend, through the letter-post, 
 a whole school in North America, or fifty days' journey 
 distant in the old world, merely by writing to my school- 
 children what they were to learn each day, and keeping- 
 some or other insignificant person there to whom they 
 should repeat it, while I myself would enjoy the con- 
 sciousness of their beautiful intellectual reminiscere* Lenten 
 Sunday. 
 
 In Speccius I translated, by order, a good deal at the 
 begining into Latin with that pleasure with which I 
 climbed onto and stripped each fresh branch of learning. 
 I turned the latter half into Latin by myself, but was 
 unable to find anyone to correct the mistakes. I divined 
 the meaning of the Colloquia (conversations) in Lange's 
 grammar from longing to know what they were about, 
 but in Joditz my fatner did not allow me to translate 
 anything. The Greek alphabet I studied hungrily and 
 thirstily, in a Greek grammar written in Latin, and at the 
 end I wrote Greek fairly— that is, as far as the handwriting 
 was concerned. How willingly would I have learned 
 more, and how easily. If the body did not, yet the spirit 
 of a language easily entered into me, as the third lecture 
 of this winter half-year will, I daresay, best show to the 
 world. 
 
 Once only, on a winter's afternoon — I might be from 
 eight to nine years old — when my father was going to 
 study a little La + in vocabulary book with me, that is, was 
 going to set me to learn it by heart, and I had to read the 
 first page over to him; — I read the word lingua, in spite of 
 
 * The reminiscere Sunday is the second Sunday in Lent. As people 
 on that day are to recall the sufferings of Christ, so here the pupils aw 
 U> icoali to their memories the lessons which they hate learned. — Tit. 
 
 c 2
 
 20 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH KICHTEH. 
 
 Lis corrections, not lingwa, but always lin-gua ; and repeated 
 the same mistake, regardless of all corrections, so often, that 
 he became infuriated, and in angry impatience deprived 
 me of the vocabulary book and its instruction for ever. I 
 am still unable to this day to get to the bottom of this 
 obstinate stupidity ; but my heart was not influenced—- 
 this it has always said to me throughout my life — by any 
 ill-temper, as, indeed, it never was and certainly would not 
 have been in this case, towards the father, who by a new 
 lesson-book had just offered me a fresh boyish pleasure. 
 This historical feature has, however, been intentionally 
 related in this hall, in order that the impartiality of the 
 historical researcher and Professor may be proved by those 
 diadows which he points out, while acknowledging a hero 
 whom he otherwise likes to display in the brightest light. 
 Rut how often is it in life that poor innocent men, not 
 understood and misunderstood, say lin-gua instead of the 
 more correct lingwa, and that, too, with the tongue (lingua) 
 which at the same time means language (lingua). 
 
 With history, too, — both ancient and modern — natural 
 history, besides the most important facts of geography, 
 arithmetic, astronomy, and orthography — with all these 
 branches of knowledge I became quite sufficiently ac- 
 quamted; but not in Joditz — where 1 got on very well 
 for twelve years without a word of them — but many years 
 afterwards, when I acquired them piecemeal from the 
 AH'jenieine Biblintheh. All the more ardent w*»s my thirst 
 for books in this intellectual Sahara. Each one was 
 a fresh green oasis, especially the Orbis Pictus and the 
 Gebprache im Beiche der Tot I ten ; but my father's library, 
 like many another open one, was seldom open ; except when 
 lie was not at home and in it. At any rate, I often lay on 
 the flat top of a wooden grating (like a magnified wild- 
 beast cage;, and crept upon books, like the great jurist 
 Baldus, in order to get one for m; self. Let any one only 
 consider: in a village destitute of people, in a solitary 
 parsonage, for such a listening soul books must have been 
 speaking beings, wealthy foreign guests, Maecenases, tra- 
 velling princes, and inhabitants of the new world or the 
 first Americans for a, European. 
 
 It is true that I, as an A-B-C-historian, did not in the least
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 21 
 
 understand the quarto volume of Gespraohe im Beiclie dt r 
 Todten. but I read it as I also did the newspaper, though 
 wily an A-R-C-geogi apher also, and could retail much in- 
 furmation from both of them. 1 used to relate portions of 
 the firmer to my father -one evening, the love-story 
 of Roxana and the Turkish emperor, which I had 1 ead 
 during his absence, — without his disapprobation, and I 
 did the same for my newspaper extracts with an old 
 Baroness whom we knew. My father used to have the 
 Baireuth paper given him by his patroness, the Baroness 
 Plotho of Zedtwitz ; every month or quarter — as often as 
 he went to Zedtwitz — he brought the monthly or quarterly 
 numbers h me altogether, and he and I read this huge 
 pile with profit, just because we got them more as volumes 
 than as single sheets. A political paper supplies one with 
 true information, when it is read, not in separate sheets, 
 but in monthly numbers or in volumes ; because, in the 
 compass of a complete part, it has collected a sufficient 
 number of sheets to counteract each other ; like the air, 
 it cannot at once show its colour in single puffs and 
 blows, but only in its whole extent, as the said air, 
 shows its sky-blue colour only when in a large mass. Of a 
 morning I usually carried my news-atlas over to the casle 
 to the old Frau von Heitzenstein, and expounded at the 
 coffee-table this or that portion of news which I had 
 brought with me, and listened to mv own praises. 1 still 
 remember a plural word, " Confoderirte," which occurred 
 frequently at that time. Most probably this plural was 
 in Poland, but I cannot recollect that I took the slightest 
 interest in it, probably because I understood nothing about 
 the matter. Thus calmly and impartially were the Polish 
 a lairs judged in our village, as well by me as by the old 
 Frau von heitzenstein, my audi tress. 
 
 The fibres of our hero's mind, thirsting for knowledge, 
 forced and curved themselves about in all directions to 
 get a hold and suck in nourishment. He manufactured 
 clocks, of which the faces were the most successful part, 
 and which had a pendulum, one wheel, and a weight, and 
 which stood well. A sun-dial too he devised, by marking 
 a dial-face in ink on a wooden plate, and then setting the 
 dial-pin v y the church clock, and fixing it there ; thus ho
 
 22 JEAN PAUL FRIEDE1CH EICHTEE. 
 
 frequently knew what time it was. He liked best tc 
 make the figures, — as many States do. — on the clock faces, 
 and that, too, beforehand ; and like Lichtenberg, who made 
 the title before the book. The present author showed 
 in miniature a cardboard box, in which he arranged a 
 liminutive library of lGmo books made from the margins 
 of his father's 8vo sermons, which he sewed together and 
 cut into shape. The contents were theological and pro- 
 testant, and consisted in every case of short explanatory 
 notes on verses copied from Luther's Bible ; the verses 
 themselves he omitted in his little book. Thus in our 
 Friedrich Eichter, there already lay a little Friedrich 
 von Schlegel, who, in just the same way in his extract 
 " Lessing's Geist," picked out Lessing's opinion on cer- 
 tain authors, but was not particular to state the passages 
 themselves. 
 
 In the same way our hero threw himself into the art of 
 painting also ; many a mounted Potentate sat, or rather 
 lay, to him while he traced round his features with a fork 
 in such a way that a piece of paper underneath, covered 
 with grease and soot, and with the reverse side down- 
 wards, left striking likenesses of them printed on a sheet 
 of white paper under it. That, under sunnier circumstances, 
 he might have unfolded into a second Eaphael Mengs, 
 who, unlike the first one, had to be whipped from his 
 painting, not to it, I hardly think at present, however 
 brightly coloured the first white and red balls, the square 
 red bricks, the rounded slate pencil, and the splendid 
 colour-shells in the paint-box, and the green rose-beetles 
 may still shine in my memory ; and though something 
 may be inferred from the fact that on the receipt of a 
 paint-box, he coloured the whole of the Oibis Pidus after 
 life ; the supposition would only be a little more correct, 
 than if one should predict a great financial correspondent 
 from his skill in making herrings in- winter. This art of 
 his, of supplying herrings on the land at such a distance 
 from the sea-coast, was as follows : when he had to go for 
 the bread, he would wade in the brook and would there 
 gently raise one of the stones under which a grundel, or 
 any other still smaller fish, was to be caught. He then put 
 these into a hollow cabbage-stalk (this represented the
 
 AUTCiBIOUR APHY 23 
 
 herring-tun), anil duly salted them ; and as soon as the 
 little tun was full, he would have had herrings to eat, 
 had not they all smelt so badly. Not more suitable, but 
 rather less so, when considered as precursors of a youthful 
 financial correspondent, would be such surrogate con- 
 trivances as the following, viz., that he served up the 
 halves of dried pears for little hams, and pigeons' feet, cut 
 off and roasted in a potsherd, for a complete dinner, 01 
 that he drove snails to pasture. In fact, any future 
 historical investigator of the present historical investiga- 
 tor, would be cousidered by me to be in the highest 
 degree ridiculous, who should wish to deduce anything 
 extraordinary by selecting such fragmentary pieces as 
 are scattered throughout the childhood of anyone else ; 
 the foolish man would seem to me just like that Parisian 
 quack, who, with the assistance of a Jesuit, fitted together 
 some elephant bones, and sold them as the true skeleton 
 of the German giant, Teutobach. The beard does not 
 make a philosopher, though it may make a sailor or a 
 malefactor, when they come from the ship or prison 
 with it, because, while there, they do not come under tho 
 barber's razor. 
 
 As the boundless activity of our hero threw itself more 
 into intellectual than bodily exercises — all of which, 
 however, he followed with indescribable avidity, he 
 invented, not new languages, but new letters. He took 
 the symbols of the calendar, or geometrical signs from an 
 old book, and chemical ones or the latest ones out of his 
 own head, and, by putting them together, made himself a 
 new alphabet out of them. When this was done, the next 
 thing was to make some use of his alphabetical solitaire, 
 by clothing in it a few pages of copied matter. In this 
 way he was his own secret writer, and a player at hide- 
 and-seek with himself; but he could, too, without peeping 
 into Biittner's Comparative Tables of Written Characters, 
 read off his new ones on the spot as easily as 01 dinarv 
 ones, because he had placed the latter, like a warrant of 
 apprehension, letter for letter, ui der the secret ones, and 
 only needed to refer to them. This time one could 
 perhaps blame the so-called hi>torical investigator less, 
 if he would see the foundation of a Council lor- of- Em
 
 24 JEAN PAUL FR1EDRICH RICHTER. 
 
 bassy, or of an ambassador himself, in this ciphering and 
 deciphering, which, so early as this, sought merit less in 
 the contents than in the external clothing of them. I have, 
 in fact, since then acquired the character of a Councillor- 
 f-Embassy, and I could do a bit of ciphering to this day. 
 My soul, perhaps taking after that of my father, was 
 thoroughly open to music, and for it I had a hundred 
 Argus-ears. When the schoolmaster pla\ ed the church- 
 goers out with his final cadenzas, my whole little being 
 laughed and skipped with joy, as in the spring-time ; or 
 on the morning after the night dancing at the Kirchweihe 
 (at which my father used to send loud thunders of ex- 
 communication on the Sunday following), when, to his 
 vexation, the foreign musicians, together with the be- 
 ribboned village youths drew up in front of the parsonage 
 with their shawms and fiddles, then I would climb on to 
 the yard wall, and a world of jubilation sounded through 
 my yet small breast and the spring time of pleasure 
 played therein with the spring, and I thought not a word 
 of my father's sermons. I devoted hours, on an old untuned 
 piano, whose only tuning-hammer and tuning-master 
 was the weather, to my fantasias, which certainly were 
 freer than the most daring in the whole of Europe, as I 
 knew neither note nor chord nor anything else ; for my 
 father, though such a finished player, had shown me 
 neither note nor key. 
 
 But when by chance I hit at times on a short melody or 
 harmony of three to six notes — like some good modern 
 composer of tunes for rope-dancing, witch-dancing, or 
 finger-dancing on the piano strings -then I was indeed a 
 happy being, and repeated my finger-hit as everlastingly 
 as any good modern German poet repeats the brain-hit with 
 wLieb. he gained his first applause. Heliogabalus con- 
 demned the cook who made him some bad broth to eat 
 nothing else but it until he had discovered a better one ; 
 but the poet, on the other hand, acting more generously, 
 treats the reading world to an excellent broth at so many 
 a Leipzig book-fair, that at last it tastes as stale as the 
 bad broth of the emperor's cook. 
 
 In the future literary history of our hero, it will become 
 doubtful whether he was not perhaps born for philosophy
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 25 
 
 lather than poetry. In earliest times the Avord " philo- 
 sophy' — though there was also a second word, " orient ' — - 
 was to me an open Heaven's gate, through which I looked 
 onto long, long gardens of joy. Never shall I forget the 
 inner sensation, hitherto untold to any, when I was 
 present at the birth of my self consciousness, of which I 
 can specify both time and place. ( )ne morning, when still 
 quite a young child, I was standing under the doorway, 
 and looking towards the woodstack on the left, when 
 suddenly the internal vision, "I am an e#o," passed before 
 me like a lightning flash from heaven, and has remained 
 with me shining brightly ever since, ; my ego had seen 
 itself then for the first time and for ever. Deceptions of 
 the memory are here hardly conceivable, since no story 
 related to me could mingle its additions with an occur- 
 rence, which took place in the shrouded Holy-of-Holies of 
 a human being, and whose strangeness alone has <:iven per- 
 manence to such everyday circumstances as those which 
 accompanied it. 
 
 In order to represent most truthfully the Jo'litz life of 
 our Hans Paul (for so we will call him for a time, alwa\ s 
 however subject to change with other names), we shall do 
 best, I think, if we conduct it through a complete } r ear of 
 Idyls, breaking up the normal year into four seasons, like 
 80 many Idylic quarters : four Idyls exhaust his happiness. 
 Let none wonder at an Idylic kingdom and an Arcadian 
 world in a little hamlet and its parsonage. In the 
 smallest flower-bed one can rear a tulip-tree which will 
 stretch its flowery branches over the whole garden ; and 
 the life-giving air can be inhaled as well at the window 
 as in the wide wood under the open sky. Nay, is not the 
 man's spirit itself (with all its infinite heavenfy courts) con- 
 fined in a body five feet high, with membranes, Malpighian 
 glands and capillaries, and having only the five narrow 
 windows of the senses to open on that immense round-eyed, 
 round-sunned — All ? — and yet it sees and reproduces an All. 
 I hardlv know with which of the four Idylic quarters 
 to begin ; for each is a little fore-heaven of the next ; but, 
 I think, on the whole, the progression of happiness will 
 bast appear if we begin with Winter and January. 
 
 In the cold weather my father, like the Swiss flocks.
 
 20 JEAN PAUL FK1EDRICH KICHTEIi. 
 
 was brought down from the heights of his study upstairs, 
 and, to the joy of the children, sojourned in the plain ot 
 the parlour. In the morning he sat in the window- 
 corner, committing his Sunday sermon to memory, while 
 his three sons — Fritz, that is myself, Adam, and Gottlieb 
 (for Heinrich did not come until near the end of the 
 Joditz Idylic life), carried the full coffee-cup to him by 
 turns, in order to enjoy the greater pleasure of bringing 
 back the empty one, as the bearer was allowed to take 
 out the unmelted candy-sugar which he used as a remedy 
 for his cough. Out of doors truly all was wrapped in 
 silence : the brook by the ice, the village by the snow; but 
 in our room there was life — a dovecote under the stove, 
 siskin and goldfinch cages at the windows, the invincible 
 bull-dog, our Bonne and night-watcher of the parsonage, 
 on the floor, besides a Spitzbergen dog and the pretty 
 Scharniantel, a present from the Frau von Plotho — and. 
 next door to us, the kitchen with two maids in it ; and in 
 addition to these, at the farther end of the house, the 
 stable, with all possible kinds of cattle, pigs and feathered 
 things, with their accompanying noises ; the threshers 
 too, with their flails, at work in the courtyard, I might add 
 to the number. Thus surrounded by noisy society, the 
 whole masculine portion of the parlour passed the morning 
 in learning, in close proximity to the cooking of the 
 feminine portion. 
 
 No business in the world is without its holidays, and 
 so I too had the fresh-air holidays — like mineral spring 
 holidays— of being allowed to go out in the snow into the 
 yard, and to the threshing-floor. And when, too, any im- 
 portant verbal business had to be transacted in the village, 
 at the schoolmaster's, for instance, or the tailor's, I was 
 sent off in the midst of my lessons, and thus got out into 
 the free and cold air and could measure in y self with the 
 newly fallen snow. At noon, too, before our dinner-time, 
 we children had the hungry satisfaction of seeing the 
 threshers fall-to and devour theirs in the kitchen. 
 
 The afternoon again was still more important and richer 
 in joys. Winter shortened and sweetened the lesson hours. 
 In the long twilight our father walked to and fro, and 
 we children, holding his hand, trotted as well as we could
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 27 
 
 under his di'essing-gown. At the tolling of the vesper 
 bell all arranged themselves in a circle, and with one voice 
 sang the hymn, Diefinstre Nacht bricht stark herein. Only 
 in villages — not in towns, where there is in reality more 
 night- than day-work — is there a meaning and beauty in 
 this evening tolling, this swan-song of the dying day ; 
 the vesper bell is, as it were, a muffler to our over-loud 
 hearts, and, like the Ranz des Vaches of the plain, it calls 
 men from their toils and troubles to the land of quiet and 
 dreams. After a pleasant watching for the moonrise of 
 the tallow candle under the kitchen-door, our large room 
 was at once lighted up and barricaded, that is, the shutters 
 were put in and bolted, and the children felt themselves 
 safe behind these window breastworks and ramparts, and 
 secured against the Knecht Ruprecht, who could not now get 
 in, but could only grumble harmlessly outside. 
 
 This, too, "was the time when we children were allowed 
 to undress and hop about in our long, trailing night-gowns. 
 Idylic joys of all sorts alternated with one another. 
 
 My father either entered in an interleaved quarto Bible, 
 opposite to each verse, the reference to any book in which 
 he had read anything concerning it, or else, as was more 
 frequently the case, he had his ruled folio copying book 
 before him. and composed complete oratorios of church- 
 music in full score, undisturbed by the children's din : in 
 both cases, but in the latter with most pleasure, I watched 
 the writing and was particularly delighted when whole 
 pages were quickly tilled by the pausing of several of the 
 instruments. He composed his internal melodies quite 
 without help from external notes — as Eeichard recom- 
 mended — and in harmony undisturbed by the noise of the 
 children. We all sat playing at the long writing and 
 dining table — and also under it. Among the pleasures 
 which sink for ever with the beautiful time of childhood 
 is this one, that sometimes, when a severe frost set in, 
 the long table was pushed up to the bench by the stove 
 for the sake of the warmth ; we children were on the 
 watch for this joyful event the whole winter. Now, round 
 the ill-shaped coach-like stove were two wooden benches, 
 and our gain was that we could sit or run on them, and 
 that we had stove-summer close to us even at meal times.
 
 28 JEAN PAUL FRIEDPJCU RICH TEE. 
 
 But what a climax of worth did the winter evenings 
 reach once a week, when the old errand- woman arrived in 
 the kitchen covered with snow, and carrying her basket of 
 meat, fruit, and other provisions from the town ; and we 
 all had the distant town in miniature before our eyes in 
 the room, and before our noses by means of the butter- 
 cakes. 
 
 In the earlier part of childhood a pleasure-dessert was 
 allowed by our father of a winter evening, after the early 
 suppers. The farm-maid served it up at her distaff in the 
 kitchen, with as much illumination as the pine-splinters 
 could give, which from time to time we stuck lighted into 
 the pine-stick, as they did in Westphalia. Un this dessert- 
 table stood — besides many other plates of sweetmeats and 
 folk-lore ice-glasses, such as Cinderella — the pine-apple oi 
 a story of the maid's own forcing, about a shepherd and his 
 combats with the wolves, in which at one time the danger 
 was on the increase, and at another his resources. I still 
 feel the success of that shepherd, as if it was my own, and 
 in this I see, from my own experience, that children are 
 much more affected in stories by the progression of pro- 
 sperity than of adversity, and that they wish the heavenly 
 path to lead upwards to infinity, but the other one only 
 so far downwards as is necessary for the exaltation and 
 glorification of the heavenly throne. These children's 
 wishes become men's wishes, and we would more strongly 
 demand their fulfilment from the poet, if a new heaven 
 were as easy to create as a new hell. But any tyrant can 
 give unheard-of pains, while for the discovery of unheard- 
 of joys he himself must offer prizes. The skin is the 
 foundation of this ; upon it, inch by inch, a hundred hells 
 can pitch their camps, but the five sense-heavens hover airy 
 and uniform above us. 
 
 Only the end of the winter evening contained a horrid 
 wasp sting, or vampire tongue, for our hero. The children, 
 you must know, had to betake themselves at nine o'clock 
 to the guest-room, in the second floor ; my brothers were 
 together in one room, and I shared the guest-room with 
 my father. Until he had finished his reading downstairs, 
 which lasted for two hours, I lay up above, with my head 
 under the bedclothes, in a perspiration for fear of ghosts.
 
 AUTOBIOGKAPHY. 2U 
 
 and in the darkness I saw the lightning in the cloudy 
 Spirit-heaven, and it seemed to me as if man himself was 
 spun of Spirit-caterpillars. Every night I helplessly 
 suffered thus for two hours, until my father at length came 
 upstairs and drove away the ghosts, like a morning sun 
 chasing away the dreams. The next morning all fear was 
 quite forgotten, as if it had been a dream, though it always 
 returned again in the evening. Vet I have never said a 
 word about this, — except to the world this day. 
 
 This terror of ghosts was certainly — if not created, yet — 
 fostered by my father. He spared ns not one of all the 
 ghostly apparitions and tricks of which he had heard, and 
 even on some occasions believed himself to have ex- 
 perienced ; but, like the old theologians, to a firm belief in 
 them he joined a firm courage against them, and Christ 
 and the Cross were his shield against the whole ghostly 
 universe. Many a child, physically very timid, displays at 
 the same time great spiritual bravery, but merely from 
 lack of imagination ;* while a second child, on the other 
 hand — like myself — trembles at the invisible world, because 
 the imagination gives it a visible form, but easily takes 
 courage against the visible, as that never reaches the depth 
 and height of the other. Thus any sudden appearance of 
 physical danger — for example, a horse running away, a 
 thunder-clap, war, or the fire alarm — made me only 
 collected and calm, because I fear only with the imagina- 
 tion, not with the senses ; and to me, even a ghostly form 
 would at once congeal to an ordinary earthly body, if I 
 had once got over the first shudder, so long as it did not 
 drive me again, by grimaces and noises, into the endh>s 
 realm of fancy. But how, then, is the instructor to guard 
 against the preponderance of the tragic spirit-invoking 
 imagination? Not by refutation or Hiesterian and Wag- 
 nerian resolutions of the supernatural into the com- 
 monplace — for the possibility of unresolved exceptions 
 still remains firmly grasped by the deepest feelings — but 
 partly by prosaically leading up to, quartering on, and 
 familiarizing with the times and places, which otherwise 
 kindle the bewitching flames of the imagination, and 
 
 * Into many prosaic souls one ought to instil a little spiritual fear, 
 from religion or poetry.
 
 30 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTER. 
 
 partly by arming the fancy against fancy, by opposing th€ 
 spirit to the spirit, and to the devil— God. 
 
 Even in the day-time, on particular occasions, this 
 ghostly dread would sometimes come over me. At a 
 burial, I always had to carry my father's Bible through the 
 church into the sacristy, before the procession with pastor, 
 schoolmaster, children, cross and myself, set out amid 
 psalms from the church to the cemetery near the village. 
 Willing and courageous enough did I gallop through 
 the gloomy silently-hearkening church into the little 
 sacristy ; but which of us can picture to himself i he fear- 
 ful, trembling flight-leaps with the whole spirit world 
 pursuing at my heels, and that frightful shoot from the 
 church-duor ? And if one did describe it, who would not 
 laugh ? And still I always accepted the office of Bible- 
 bearer without a word, and silently kept my fear to myself. 
 
 We come now to a larger Idylic period, to the Joditz 
 spring and summer. The two seasons, particularly in 
 the country, fall for various reasons into one Idyl. The 
 spring (in reality) dwells only in the mind; outside in 
 the fields there is only summer, which everywhere is con- 
 trived onl}- fur the fruits and the present. The snow is 
 the curtain which merely requires to be drawn up from 
 the stage, or the eartn, that the summer pleasures may 
 begin in the village — the town takes its pleasures only in 
 the winter — for ploughing and sowing are themselves a 
 spring harvest to the countryman, and for a part>on who 
 farms his own fields, and for his cooped-up sons they 
 bring fresh scenes upon the stage. We poor children, shut 
 up in the parsonage by our gaoler and the winter, were 
 then freed by the heaven-sent angel of spring, and let out 
 into the open fields, and meadows and gardens. Then 
 there was ploughing, sowing, planting, mowing, hay- 
 making, corn-cutting, and harvesting ever3 r where. Our 
 father was there and helped, and the children helped him, 
 I particularly, as the eldest. You should only know, my 
 friends, what it is to escape suddenly, — not from town 
 walls, which enclose many a field within them, but — from 
 parsonage walls, out over the whole village, and beyond 
 it, into tin un walled space and to look down from above 
 into the village, which one has never seen into from below.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 31 
 
 My father did not superintend the field-labours as an 
 overseer or taskmaster (although they were carried on by 
 socmen), but as a kindly pastor, who wished to take 
 part alike with nature and his flock. When I see other 
 ecclesiastics, land possessors and avaricious men, equipped 
 so plentifully from head to foot with sucking-trunks, 
 sucking-stings, and all kinds of sucking appliances, i find 
 in my father's case, on the other hand, that the sucking-in 
 system was in altogether a too languishing and weak 
 condition; ten times a day he would think of giving, — he 
 had but little to do it with,— but hardly once of taking, 
 by which, however he himself might have been enabled to 
 give ; since then, I have had cause to admire the good food- 
 forceps of "many a human insect, but my father held 
 nothing in his hand but the birth-forceps, which bring 
 and preserve the life of others. Heavens ! how different 
 — and how is it that people do not understand this better ? 
 — are the regular commercial, clerical, and noble men, who, 
 although they know what is fitting, use their hands as good 
 bird-traps, which open and shut only to catch something, 
 and who only open their hands in order to shut them. 
 
 Now began our life in, that is under, the heavens. Those 
 mornings still twinkle with fresh-fallen dew on which I 
 used to carry my father's coffee to him in the parsonage 
 garden, beyond the village, where he was learning his 
 sermon in the little summerhouse, with windows opening 
 on all sides, just as we children used afterwards to learn 
 our Lange in the grass. The evening took us a second 
 time into the garden among the currant and gooseberry 
 bushes, to gather the salad with our mother. Being able 
 to have supper without candles is one of the unrecognised 
 pleasures of the country. When we had enjoyed this, my 
 father used to take his pipe out of doors, that is, into the 
 walled court of the parsonage, while 1 and my brothers 
 sprang about in our long night-gowns in the fresh evening 
 air, and behaved like the swallows, still crossing each 
 other, above our heads, and flew nimbly hither and 
 thither, just as though collecting for our nests. 
 
 The most lovely of summer birds (a delicate blu3 butter- 
 fly) fluttered around our hero in this beautiful season ; 
 it was his first love. She was a blue-eyed peasant girl of 
 his own age, with slim figure, oval face, slightly marked
 
 32 JEAN PAUL FEIEDPJCH RIOHTER. 
 
 with small-pox, but with a thousand looks which take 
 captive the heart as in a magic-circle. Augusta, or 
 Augustina, lived with her bro her Romer, a fine young 
 fellow, known as a choral singer and reckoner. It did 
 not indeed come to a declaration on the part of Paul, — - 
 unless this lecture shall fall into her hands, — but he played 
 out his love story with spirit at a distance, she in the 
 women's seats in church, and he in the vicar's pew, by 
 looking at her closely enough, and not growing tired of it. 
 But this was the beginning only ! for when of an evening 
 she drove her milch cows home, which he always knew b\ 
 the unforgetable bell, he used to climb on the wall to see 
 and beckon to her, and then ran again to the door, to the 
 speaking-grating. — she the nun without, he the monk 
 within, — in order to screw his hand through a chink, (no 
 more than this was allowed outside.) and to drop something 
 eatable into her hand, sugar-almonds, or some other 
 dainty, which he had brought from the town. Many a 
 summer, alas! he did not three times attain to such 
 happiness, — generally he had to consume all the good things 
 himself, and the vexation into the bargain. Yet when 
 for once his almonds did fall, not on stony ground, but in 
 the Eden of his eyes, then these grew from them in hie 
 imagination a whole blossoming garden full of fragrance, 
 wherein he would walk for weeks. For pure love wishes 
 only to give and to become happy by making so ; and if 
 there was an eternity of perpetually-increasing capability 
 of giving happiness, what would be more blissful than 
 love ? 
 
 The cow-bells remained for a lonjr time the Banz de» 
 Vaches of the high and distant Alps of his childhood, and 
 still his old heart's-blood would stir and boil if these sounds 
 were again wafted to him. " They are tones," he would 
 say, " brought by an iEolian harp out of the far, far 
 beautiful distance, and I almost could cry with longing 
 when I hear them." For let one associate with love even 
 the smallest tone, if a cow even is the bell-ringer, and it 
 redoubles its Orphic power of edifying and enchanting, 
 and its invisible waves cradle his heart and bear it along 
 to infinity ; he knows not whether he is at home or far 
 away, and the man weeps for joy as well for what he haa 
 as for what b*> Wkx.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 33 
 
 In this focus of love Augustine remained towards Paul, 
 and never during many years did he live to see the time 
 when he so much as pressed her hand. Of a kiss we will 
 not think. Even when he sometimes flew shamefaced and 
 hastily to the lips of a plain servant girl of his parents, 
 whom he did not love a bit, both body and soul boiled up 
 unconsciously and innocently in the kiss ; but the actual 
 lips of a beloved one, who shone down just at the hottest, 
 in the aphelion, on his deepest, most spiritual love would 
 have immersed him in burning heavens, and melted and 
 volatilized him therein into a glowing tether. And I 
 could wish that he had been volatilized once or a few 
 times while still at Joditz. When in his thirteenth )'ear, 
 he, or much more, his eye, was driven eight miles from the 
 beloved one, as his father had received a better living, he 
 burdened a young Joditz tailor, whom his father had taken 
 with him, for love of the dear village he had left, and had 
 kept for some weeks in the new and capacious parsonage, 
 with a number of petty potentates, whom he had drawn 
 from painted life, with grease and soot, and had coloured 
 with deceptive exactness, with the help of his paint-box ; 
 these he commissioned the tailor to deliver to Augustine 
 with the message that the knights and princes were from 
 him, and he gave them as an everlasting keepsake. 
 
 Another love affair of the same period, which did not 
 last longer than a dinner, was spun by him — the young 
 lady did not know a word about it— quite secretly in the 
 depth of his bosom. Once at Kciditz he sat at a table of 
 grown-up people, opposite the said lady and stared at her 
 incessantly. There sprang up in him a love unutterable 
 in sweetness, inexhaustible to the gazer, a fermentation of 
 the heart, a heavenly annihilation and dissolution of the 
 whole being into the eye only. She did not say a word 
 to the bewitched boy, and much less did he to her ; but 
 had she stooped, and it might be kissed the poor youth, he 
 would have gone straight to heaven for very bliss. 
 
 He retained the feeling however more than the face, of 
 which nothing remained but the small-pox marks. lSow 
 as this beauty is already the second one marked with the 
 smail-pox— in future lectures others will follow — the 
 Professor thinks it his duty to explain to all fair, vaccin- 
 
 I- D
 
 34 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEE. 
 
 ated hearers, that he knows how to appreciate them just 
 as much and as well as anyone else, but that at that time 
 there was a different fashion in faces. Paul has this pecu- 
 liarity—and he pledges himself to-day in this assemblage 
 of beauty — that he can make any female face — whose so- 
 called Tigliness must only not be moral ugliness — in the 
 highest degree charming and enchanting, without all 
 cosmetic artifices, without rouge-pots and salve-boxes, 
 without starch or soapy water, and without night-masks, 
 if he is allowed for the purpose, a few evenings — songs — 
 heart-words, and that no one shall appear more beautiful 
 than the person in question — naturally only in his own 
 eyes ; for who can speak for others ? 
 
 The lady just mentioned is a strong confirmation of 
 this ; for when he met her again at Hof twenty years 
 afterwards, as she was living opposite to him, he found 
 only the marks left, nothing else ; she herself was plain 
 and crooked, and I will not tell her name. 
 
 Pure love has such unlimited power to create and elevate 
 — just as low love has to destroy and suppress — that the 
 representation of it would have more influence on us, had 
 it not been described to us so often ; but it is for this 
 reason alone that it has been able to bear the many 
 thousand volumes which paint it. Let anyone deprive a 
 man, who in the time of love looks on the landscapes — th© 
 stars — the flowers and mountains — the tones, the songs — 
 the pictures and poems — yes, and humanity and death — 
 Avith poetic enjoyment — deprive this man, I say, of love, 
 and he will have lost the tenth Muse, or rather the 
 mother of the Muses ; each one feels in after years when 
 this sacred intoxication is forbidden, that to all the Muses 
 the tenth one is lacking. 
 
 We come now to our hero's Sundays, on which days 
 the Idyls visibly make progress. Sundays seem made 
 for pastors and pastors' children. A good lot of Trinity 
 Sundays, or the greatest number of them, twenty-seven, 
 gave special delight to our Paul, although by the whole 
 twenty-seven not a single summer day more came to the 
 world or the church than in other years. In towns the 
 birthdays of princes and magistrates and fair-days are 
 the true Trinity Sundays. On a bright Sunday morning
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 3J 
 
 Paul commenced his enjoyment by walking through the 
 village before church-time with a bunch of keys, — he 
 used to jingle them on the way to show the village that 
 he was there — and unlocking the parsonage garden with 
 one of them to get some roses for the pulpit desk. In the 
 church all was bright enough, for the long windows inter- 
 sected the cold floor and the women's pews with broad 
 bands of light, and the sunshine fell around the enchant- 
 ress Augustina. A pleasure, too, not to be despised \\ as 
 the being allowed (with his colleagues in office) after 
 church-time and before dinner to carry the regular half- 
 pound of bread and the money to the labourers of the week , 
 particularly as his father always liked to send the 
 peasants an extra large piece of bread, and thus give them 
 a pleasure, which children always like to carry, and Paul 
 in particular. Sometimes, too, he had to carry the slice of 
 bread to Eomer, and then he used to look around him for 
 the saint of his church and his heart — but always in vain. 
 
 For in his perspective love-painting ten steps more or 
 less were of some consequence ; and granted that through 
 the intervention of some particularly favourable goddess, 
 he had stood only half a step from her — but at such un 
 realized bliss I will not so much as hint, for he would 
 sat then have been content without audible speech. 
 
 I maintain that no occupant of the sheriffs, prince's, 
 lecturer's, pontiff's, or any other chair has any idea how 
 pastors' children enjoy a Sunday evening (only a member 
 of the clergy himself can know it), when, with the two 
 services over, they, as it were, celebrate with their father 
 the late Sabbath rest after the church-trouble and the 
 exchange of the surplice for the light dressing-gown — 
 particularly in the villages where in the summer the whole 
 population feasts and enjoys the pleasures of the eye. 
 
 I should perhaps be accused of remissness if I neglected 
 to mention another Trinity pleasure merely because it 
 was a rare one ; on this account it was so much the more a 
 pleasure when Hagen, the pastor of Koditz appeared with 
 his family at the sermon to hear my father and pay him a 
 call, and Paul's playmate, his little sen, showed himself at 
 the church door. When Paul and his brother caught 
 sight of him at a distance through the grating of the choir 
 
 d 2
 
 36 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH PJCHTER. 
 
 seats, there began on both sides a fidgetting and sh .iffling, 
 heart-leaping and signalling, and any attention to the 
 sermon was now quite out of the question, even had pro- 
 paganda, ten chief court-preachers and pastores primarii 
 stationed themselves in the pulpit and talked them- 
 selves hoarse. The present fore-Sabbath, the fore-land of 
 brightest hopes, the luncheon of the day, must now alone 
 be enjoyed at a distance and in church. But he who now 
 demands a description of the holy zephyrs and calm of the 
 evening after the first joyous storm of youthful and parental 
 preparations, forgets that I have not unlimited powers. I 
 should, however, like to add that late in the evening the 
 Joditz parsonage accompanied the Koditz far beyond the vil- 
 lage, and that consequently this tour over the village into 
 the distance, enhanced by the parents and the little friends, 
 especially at such a late hour, must have conferred and 
 left behind it many blessings, of which more in the future. 
 We now come, ladies and gentlemen, to those Joditz 
 Idyls which were enjoyed by Paul, more without Joditz 
 than within, and which will perhaps be most conveniently 
 divided into those when he himself was not at home and 
 those when his father was not. I will begin with the 
 latter, as I reckon the absence of fathers on journeys 
 among the unrecognized pleasures of childhood ; for at 
 these times the mothers dispense a glorious academic 
 freedom from reports and a full liberty of action. Paul 
 and his brother could slip out behind their mother's back 
 while she was deep in her business and get over the yard 
 door (to which was attached a bell) to hunt some of the 
 forbidden game of the village, i.e., butterflies, grundels, 
 and birch-juice, or reeds for whistles ; or they would fetch 
 a new playmate, the schoolmaster's Fritz, or help to toll 
 the midday bell for the pleasure of being swung into the 
 air by the rope. There was also another pleasure of con- 
 siderable importance within the court-yard — only Paul 
 might easily have broken his neck at it, and so put an end 
 beforehand to my whole professorship. It consisted in 
 this : Paul climbed on to the cross-beam in the barn with 
 a ladder and then sprang into the hay lying down below 
 to the height of a storey and a half for the pleasure of 
 the flight through the air.
 
 AUTOBIOGEAPHY. 37 
 
 Sometimes he would place his harpsichord at the open 
 window in an upper storey and thump violently on it that 
 the passers-by might hear him. To make the tones 
 louder down below, he would draw a quill sharply with 
 the right hand across the strings, which he held down at 
 the same time with the left on the key board. Some 
 strokes of the quill, too, he tried on the strings beyond the 
 bridge, but there was not much melody to be got out of 
 that. 
 
 The Joditz summer Idyls naturally occur still oftener 
 when one entirely leaves that village and goes to another 
 or into the town. Is there a more blessed order on a 
 bright summer day after the repetition of the Lange's 
 Grammar than this : " Get yourself ready to go with me 
 to Koditz after dinner " ? Never was the dinner more 
 tasteless. Paul had to run to keep up with his father's 
 long strides. 
 
 After an hour he had his out-door games with the play- 
 mate and his mother — whose voice still sounds from the 
 distance like the strains of a lute or like harmonic bells — 
 and sometimes, too, one or another laurel wreath, large 
 enough for his little head. His father, in paternal delight 
 at the way in which Paul caught up and retained h>s 
 sermons, of which on Sunday evening he would repeat the 
 subject and the different headings straight off, used to tell 
 him to repeat them again to their friends ; — and the little 
 fellow, may I say it, stood the test firmly. In a boy who 
 all his life had seen nothing greater — not. a count — 
 not a general — not a superintendent — and very seldom a 
 nobleman, at the most, twice in a year (the Herr von 
 Eeitztein, who was living in concealment having been 
 a long time under arrest) — in such a boy, it displayed 
 courage to speak so publicly before the pastor's f unily. 
 But fire and courage always came to him when he beg in 
 speaking, however shy he might be when silent. Yes, 
 did he not venture once during his father's absence, on 
 something still more bold? Did he not one afternoon, 
 when his father was out, take his hymn book and go forth 
 with it to an old woman, who for years had been bedridden, 
 and there place himself by the bedside, as if he were a 
 full-grown pastor making a sick visit, and begin to read
 
 38 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTEE. 
 
 such of the hymns as were appropriate ? But he was soon 
 interrupted by the weeping and sobbing with which, not 
 the old woman — she remained coldly indifferent to every- 
 thing — but he himself, listened to the hymns. 
 
 One day, his father took our hero with him to the Court 
 at Versailles, as one may call Zedtwitz without exagger- 
 ation, (since it was the residence of the patron of the Joditz 
 pastors. Whenever he had been at Court, which often 
 happened twice in a month during the summer, he aroused 
 the provincial astonishment of his wife and child in the 
 evening to the utmost, by tales about great people and 
 their court ceremonies, and the court feasts, and ice-cellars, 
 and Swiss cows, and how he himself was quickly taken 
 from the " domestics' " room to the old Herr von Plotho, 
 then to the young lady, to whom he gave a few preliminary 
 exercises on the piano, and finally to the Baroness von 
 Plotho, born a Bodenhausen, and how on account of his 
 vivacity he was always invited to the dinner table, even 
 when (this made no difference) the most distinguished 
 landowners of the Voigtland were dining there. But, like 
 an old Lutheran court preacher, he acknowledged the 
 illimitable greatness of rank, as he did the apparitions, 
 without trembling before either. And yet, I say, how 
 much happier are ye, children of the present time, 
 who are brought up so self-dependently, who are taught 
 no prostration before rank, and are strengthened from 
 within against the external glitter ! That mile-distant 
 prostration of the Joditz pastor's sons before the Zedtwitz 
 throne was strengthened each year by a magnificent 
 carriage which came always on Maundy Thursday to fetch 
 my father, in the capacity of Confessor, to administer the 
 sacrament to the family. The children can talk of the 
 carriage, for they always had the delight of a drive round 
 the village in it before starting home in the evening. 
 
 You will now perhaps have some idea of our hero's 
 undertaking when he accompanied the Court Confessor — 
 who had talked of him among the great people with too 
 much love and praise — to Zedtwitz to be introduced to 
 the reigning house. After he had walked to and fro for a 
 long time before the ancestral pictures down below in the 
 castle, the Baroness von Plotho received him on the staira
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 39 
 
 as in a reception room ; Paul immediately darting up, 
 grasped her dress according to court regulations and 
 imprinted the ceremonial kiss upon it. And thus the 
 audience was happily got over without either Knights or 
 Courtmarshalls and the lad was free to run about again. 
 
 And this he did in the magnificent garden. Scarcely 
 has any other Ambassador than our little Hildburghausen 
 Councillor of Legation ever inhaled and imbibed such 
 romantic hours immediately after the stiff formal audience, 
 as those avenues, springs, hot-beds, and arbours must have 
 afforded to a village child, more internally than externally 
 imaginative, who wandered alone for the first time amid 
 these splendours with oppressed and expanding breast. 
 What brought the soaring Paul down again to vulgar reality 
 was a wooden bird on a string with an iron beak, which he 
 could shoot into the black of a target. A delicious fruit 
 cake sent down from the castle preserved the happy 
 medium between flying and standing ; the sweet flavour 
 of it still remains in the reliquary of our hero. ye 
 lovely, lonely hours and walks for that hungering village 
 child, whose heart would so fain have filled itself with — 
 nay, even have longed for — the outer world. 
 
 With less of court glitter come now, under the summer 
 Idyls, those frequent errands which Paul, with fitting 
 wallet on his back, had to make to his grandparents 
 at Hof, to fetch meat and coffee and all the other things 
 which either were not to be had at all in the village or at 
 any rate not at the very lowest town prices. His mother 
 supplied him with a few little coins to take with him — it 
 must not seem as if the whole was given, — so that his 
 grandmother, generous to her daughter and son-in-law, and 
 stingy only to the rest of the world, might fill his wallet 
 with anything that might then be on the bill of fare. 
 
 The two hours' road led him over a commonplace, 
 uninteresting country, through a wood, and therein over a 
 foaming stony river, till at last from a hill-slope, the 
 view of the town down below in the plain, with its two 
 united towers and the Saale, filled to overflowing the heart 
 of the little messenger who was easily satisfied. With 
 childish dread of all times of war and tribulation, he passed 
 the mouth of a cave on the outskirts of the town, where,
 
 40 JEAN PAUL FPJEDRICH lilCHTER. 
 
 according to the legend, the people of Hof had hidden 
 themselves in the thirty years' war ; the neighbouring 
 fulling-mill with its ceaseless thunderstrokes and pon- 
 derous beams expanded his little village soul sufficiently 
 for it to take in the town more comfortably. 
 
 When now he had kissed the hand of this tall serious 
 grandfather, sitting behind his loom, and of the joyous 
 little grandmother, and had delivered his mother's official 
 letter — his father was too proud to ask for anything — the 
 scanty money was publicly handed over and the secret 
 articles of petition were delivered up behind the door in 
 the passage ; and in the afternoon he trotted back home 
 with his knapsack full, and with some sugar almonds foi 
 Augustine, in high delight over the parental provision 
 ship on his back. 
 
 fie still remembers one summer-day, when on bis home- 
 ward journey, about two o'clock, as he was looking down 
 on the sunlit mountain-slopes, the gliding waves of the 
 corn-fields, and the hastening shadows of the clouds, an 
 unknown indefinite longing came over him, with more of 
 grief in it. than of pleasure, a longing for something he 
 had never known. It was the whole being yearning for 
 the heavenly goods of life, which still lay undefined and 
 colourless in the dark depths of the heart, and which 
 brightened momentarily under the penetrating sunbeams. 
 There is a time of longing when the object as yet bears no 
 name, the longing knows only its own name. In later 
 life, too, the power of this painful, searching longing has 
 been asserted less by the moons I line whose silvery sea 
 6oftly melts the heart and thus gently leads it to the 
 Infinite, than by the afternoon sum shining over a broad 
 landscape ; in Paul's works this is several times introduced 
 and described. 
 
 In the winter's snow also, Taul had frequently to make 
 a journey as Hof and Holland* messenger in times of 
 pecuniary want ; at these times he had to use his wit in 
 ne^ociating loans with his grandfather ; so, too, in the 
 coldest weather he was allowed to accompany his father 
 to the hospitable parsonages in the neighbourhood. To 
 
 * Holland at this time had become proverbial for its pecuniary 
 ombarra tegmenta — Tr.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 41 
 
 these weekly gymnastic exercises he ow,2s much of hia 
 tenacious strength in after-life, and they certainly were 
 the best antidote for his absurd physical training, which, 
 like others at that time, with the fur caps, purgatives, and 
 air preventers, the muffling, shutting up, and coddling, did 
 not prevent, but rather prepared, an unhappy future. The 
 village children and the poor are fortunate in this, that 
 the summer, with its spring and autumn on right and 
 left, happily extirpates the weeds of winter ; the plants 
 which have faded in the winter hot-house recover im- 
 mediately when gambolling about bare-head and bare-foot 
 in the open air and regain their strength on the cool and 
 fresh fare. Only the good princesses are unhelped by any 
 season. Yet people do not believe that the summer repairs 
 the evil of winter, but rather the reverse, that this indoor 
 season is the doctor of the out-door one. 
 
 I will now give you the last and greatest never-failing 
 summer Idyl, which occurred regularly on the Monday 
 after St. James' day. On that day his grandfather always 
 sent a coach to take Paul's tender mother to the yearly 
 fair at Hof, and he always had a place in it with them. 
 Not to hurt the cold historian, I here remark quietly and 
 simply, that if a mere common town is more to a village 
 child than a Kirmess village,* surely a Jahrmarkt town 
 must be a many-times-multiplied double-town, and conse- 
 quently must excel in splendour all that a village young- 
 ster has ever pictured to himself. And thus it was with 
 Paul, who, in addition to this, was a boy not without imagi- 
 nation. As formerly drink-offerings were sent to emperors, 
 so our mother was always received by her parents with 
 sweet wine, and her son went with some of it in his head 
 to Silberer, the hair-dresser. Here he had his head cooled 
 from outside with the curling tongs, and the tight screwing 
 of the curl-papers ; and came back the cooler, fresher, and 
 whiter with curls and crest, fresh out of the powder 
 
 * Kirmess, Kirchrue3.-e, or Kirchweihe, was originally the festivity 
 at the consecration of a church. It took its origin from the Jewish 
 festivity at tlie consecration of the temples, which always took place 
 in November, and it is thus held in that month. In the ninth century 
 it became an annual festivity to commemorate the anniversaries of the 
 consecration. — Tb
 
 42 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. 
 
 shower to dinner, which cannot have been a meal of much 
 importance, as his grandfather had to hasten off very soon 
 to sell his cloth bales in the townhall. At the evening 
 meal, there was all the more time and abundance, as 
 among the ancient Romans. The afternoon now offered 
 excellent fun for Paul, who was freed from restraint, 
 deafened and dazzled amid the variegated and noisy con- 
 fusion of men and goods. Paul had his penny-piece of 
 fair money from his grandmother in his pocket and 
 could buy everything — -he could carry his purchases home 
 to the comfortless empty house, for all were out ; gloomy 
 and lonely, one was forced to go into the crowd again. 
 The most, distinguished and beautiful ladies up at the 
 windows were gratis, and he fell in love on all sides, in 
 walking past down below, and embraced them, as they did 
 not know him, in the street ; but not one of all these ladies, 
 elevated by storeys or head - dresses, did he select as 
 favourite sultana, but bought his almonds and raisins for 
 the cow-maiden, Augustine. From six to half-past the 
 noise and excitement grew greater under the evening 
 rays, which gilded and beautified ever more and more 
 both themselves and the people ; but then I had to go 
 home, there was no help for it, for our grandfather supped 
 at seven o'clock after the market, and we all assembled 
 then. 
 
 The supper we will not mention, for Paul tasted little 
 of it —he had already eaten enough — but all the more 
 gladly do I follow him again into the streets after the 
 second grace, where he was as happy as any young soul 
 escaped from a parsonage could be. 
 
 Pambling about in late twilight or early night in- 
 toxicates and inspires youth. It was at this hour that 
 the Janisary band marched through the principal streets 
 on market days, and the people and children swarmed 
 after them, deafened and deafening ; then for the first time 
 the village boy heard the drums, fifes and cymbals. " In 
 me" — these are his own words, — "who had a ceaseless 
 yearning for the sound of music, it produced a complete 
 music-intoxication, and I heard the world as the drunken 
 man sees it— double and in motion. The fifes made the 
 most impression on me with their high-pitched shrill
 
 AUTOBIOGKAPHY. 43 
 
 melody. How often have not I tried to recall these tones 
 before falling to sleep, at which time the imagination most 
 easily finds the keys of lost tones, and how happy am I now 
 when I hear them again; as deeply happy as if my old child- 
 hood, like a Tithonns, had become immortal in the tone, and 
 spoke to me through it. Ah the small, faint, invisible 
 tones contain whole worlds for the heart, they are souls 
 for the soul." The notes of the higher octaves, perhaps 
 strike more deeply. Engel affirms that all really har- 
 monious tones lie between the low and the high, but 
 poetical music may be said to lie beyond them. Down 
 in the dark depths of the lowest bass notes slowly 
 vibrates the dead past ; the high pitch of the treble notes, 
 on the other notes, cries out and pierces into the future, or 
 calls to it by the sharpness and confinedness expressed in 
 its tones. Thus in the Eussian field-music, the high sharp 
 whistling of the small fifes sounded almost dreadful ; like 
 a Bothmaus whistle calling to the slaughter, like a cruel 
 preliminary Te Deum of coming bloodshed. 
 
 I fear people will talk in Germany and elsewhere, 
 because I have reserved the autumn, as the highest Joditz 
 Idyl ; just the autumn which can lead to nothing else but 
 snowy paths. But an imaginative being like Paul enjoys 
 in autumn, not only the season itself, but also in anticipa- 
 tion, the winter with its homeliness, and the spring with 
 its poetical pictures ; while the spring, when it has come, 
 passes immediately into the summer, and the summer is a 
 centre, or halting point of the imagination, too near to the 
 autumn and too far from the spring. Still, to this day he 
 sees in autumn time, through the half-denuded trees, the 
 snowy blossom-mountains far on in the coming year and 
 visits them like a bee searching for honey ; those moun- 
 tains which melt on our approach ; and in the autumn, too, 
 are sketched out and enjoyed those plans for the yet distant 
 spring-journeys and spring-pleasures : in the spring itself 
 the chief part is already over. As the landscape painter 
 prefers the autumn, so does the spiritual painter, the poet, 
 at least in his old age. 
 
 But our hero had also a special reverse side in his cha- 
 racter, which he turned towards the autumn, and this was 
 that he had always had a singular liking for homely
 
 44 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH FJCHTER. 
 
 retired life and intellectual nest-making. He is a do- 
 mestic snail, which, loves to withdraw and make itself 
 comfortable in the smallest corners of its dwelling, only he 
 must always have his shell wide open, in order, not to 
 raise his four feelers into the air like four butterfly wings, 
 but to thrust them ten times farther up towards heaven, 
 reaching at any rate with each feeler one of the four 
 satellites of Jupiter. Of this foolish mingled longing for 
 the near and the distant — like a telescope which by a turn 
 magnifies either that which is near or far away — more will 
 occur in our lectures than either I desire or the autumn 
 alone can supply. 
 
 This domesticity showed itself already in the fancies of 
 the boy ; he thought the swallows happy because they could 
 sit so snugly all night in their walled nests. When he 
 climbed on the roof up to the large pigeon -house, he was 
 quite at home in the room full of little rooms or pigeon 
 holes, and the front was a miniature Louvre or Escurial to 
 him. I fear that I shall hardly be forgiven, if I introduce 
 the following childish triviality into my lecture ; namely, 
 that he made a complete flies' house, a country residence, 
 properly speaking, out of clay. It was about as long and 
 broad as a man's fist, and a little higher, and the whole 
 was painted red, and divided into brick squares with ink ; 
 inside it was provided with two floors, and many stairs, 
 landings, and rooms, and a spacious garret, while outside 
 there were low windows and eaves, and a chimney, covered 
 over at the top with a piece of glass, in order that the flies 
 might not get out — instead of the smoke. Windows were 
 nowhere spared and one might say, that the castle con- 
 sisted more of window than of wall. Now when Paul saw 
 his numberless flies running upstairs and downstairs, 
 into all the large rooms of this vast castle, and into the 
 tiny little windows, he pictured their domestic life to 
 himself, and wished that he could walk with them on the 
 windows, and fancied himself in the position of the in- 
 habitants who, from the largest rooms could betake 
 themselves to the prettiest and tiniest of parlours, and 
 bow-windows. How small and insignificant must the 
 parsonage have appeared to him in comparison 
 
 In later years, too, as author, he showed in "Vutz,
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 45 
 
 Fixlem, and Fibel, this house-and-corner-loving disposi- 
 tion, and still, as man, he looks with longing eyes at 
 every little slate-covered house with two stories and 
 flowers before the windows, and a little garden in front 
 which one can water from the window ; the good domes- 
 tic fool can sit quite contentedly in a close carriage and 
 look round at the side-pockets and say, "A beautiful quiet 
 little fireproof room, this ! and out there are the big 
 villages and gardens driving past." So much is certain, 
 that he could write just as little as he could live in a 
 baron's hall or a St. Peter's Church — to him it would be 
 a market-place covered with a roof, while on the other 
 hand he would be quite capable of living and writing 
 continually on Mont Blanc or iEtna, if the wherewithal 
 was provided for him there ; only the limited and human 
 can never be small enough for him, the greatness of 
 Nature cannot be too much enlarged ; the smallness of 
 man's works is made smaller by enlargement. 
 
 By what I have now said the Joditz autumn Idyl is 
 pretty well painted. The autumn leads people home- 
 wards, and there leaves them its horn of plenty for the 
 winter's nest, which they build, like the crossbill, who 
 makes her nest and hatches her young in the month of 
 ice. It must be on account of that time that Taul still 
 hears with pleasure the first threshing, or the noisy flocks 
 of crows in the woods, and the calling and signalling of 
 the birds of passage before their departure, as the preludes 
 to a cosy homely winter nesting ; and I am sorry for his 
 sake that in the autumn, when the geese are flying in 
 flocks, he hears them with real pleasure cackling as the 
 foretellers of the winter-time. By this homely and 
 wintery disposition I have always accounted for the 
 unusual enjoyment with which he read all descriptions 
 of travels in wintry countries, as Spitzbergen or Green- 
 land, for the representation on paper merely of distress 
 can scarcely be an explanation of his pleasure, because if 
 it were so, he would have bad the same feelings on 
 reading of the distresses in the hot countries. The well- 
 known pleasure, on the other hand, which one feels over 
 each quarter of an hour by which the days are diminished 
 in autumn may, I think, be attributed more to the liking
 
 46 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. 
 
 for superlatives — even though they be the antipodes of 
 one another — the liking for what is infinitely great or 
 infinitely small, in short for the Maxima and Minima, and 
 this the more so, as he had just as much pleasure when 
 the days were increasing in length ; then he had no other 
 wish than for long Swedish days. One sees from all with 
 what economy and skill God has armed and equipped man 
 for the path of life, on which there is little to be found 
 either on the right or left, so that however black it may 
 be around him, he can always find some white in it, and 
 with an amphibious instinct for land and water can 
 neither drown nor thirst. 
 
 It is just these autobiographical features, gentlemen, 
 which a future biographer will easily work up into a life 
 and for which he will perhaps thank me. I know besides 
 of nothing but this home-and-winter-loving disposition 
 which can make intelligible to me why Paid tastes again 
 with so much relish another autumn pleasure, very insipid 
 in itself. In the autumn evenings (the gloomy ones, too), 
 my father, in dressing gown, used to take Paul and Adam 
 to the potato field, lying above the Saale. One youngster 
 carried the hoe and the other a hand basket. When we 
 arrived on the field our father dug up as many new potatoes 
 as were wanted for supper, Paul picking them up and 
 throwing them into the basket, while Adam was allowed to 
 climb the hazel bushes after the nuts. After a little time 
 he had to come down to the potato-bed, and Paul in his turn 
 climbed up. And then they went happily home with 
 potatoes and nuts, — and I will let each one paint for 
 himself as brilliantly as the partaker himself, the joy of 
 a quarter of a mile walk, and an hour's run in the open 
 air, and of the return home and celebration of the harvest 
 festival by candlelight. 
 
 Two other autumn flowers of joy which have been 
 preserved in the store-room of his memory are still 
 particularly fresh and green, and they are both trees. 
 The one is a thick tall muscatel pear-tree in the parsonage 
 yard, the fall of whose fruit we children endeavoured to 
 hasten all the autumn by artificial means, until at length 
 on the most important day of the season our father himself 
 climbed by a ladder into the forbidden tree, and brought
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 47 
 
 down a sweet paradise for the whole house and for the 
 oven. The other tree, always green and always blooming 
 more beautifully still than the former, is, however, smaller 
 than it. It is the felled birch-tree which every year, on 
 St. Andrew's Eve, was dragged trunk first into the room 
 by the old woodcutter, and planted in a large flower-pot 
 in lime-and-water, so that the green leaves might be 
 ready just at Christmas-time, when the golden fruits were 
 hung upon it. This birch-tree (it was no mourning but 
 a rejoicing birch) had the peculiarity that it strewed the 
 dark December road up to Christmas with flowers of joy, 
 namely with the little forceii leaves, each fresh oue of 
 which pointed like a watch-hand to another day left 
 behind ; and that each child could celebrate (under this 
 winter May-tree) its Tabernacle feast of hope. 
 
 All will willingly exempt me from a description of 
 Paul's Christmas Festival who have met with pictures of 
 it in his works, which I least of anyone am able to surpass. 
 Two additions only may here be made to the picture. 
 When Paul on Christinas morning stood before the 
 lighted tree, and the new world of gold, glitter, and gifts 
 lay in front of him, and he found and received one new and 
 costly present after another, — not a tear — namely, of joy, 
 but a sigh,— namely, over life — was what first arose in 
 him ; in one word the step, or spring, or flight, out of the 
 swelling, sporting, boundless sea of imagination on to the 
 limited, limiting, immoveable shore expressed itself in the 
 boy by a sigh for a larger, more beautiful land. But ere 
 this sigh was breathed forth and the happy reality 
 had asserted its strength, Paul felt that out of gratitude 
 he must show himself happy before his mother, and so 
 put on the appearance ; only for a short time however, for 
 the rays of the breaking morning of reality immediately 
 extinguished and dispersed the moonlight of fancy. 
 
 Here, too, may be mentioned a peculiarity of my father's 
 which was shown just at the same time. It was this. My 
 father, who took part so joyfully in everything, permitting 
 and giving every pleasure so willingly, came down from 
 his room on Christmas morning into the gaily lighted 
 parlour, as if decked in mourning crape. Our mother 
 assured us of her own ignorance of the cause of this annual
 
 48 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEB. 
 
 melancholy, and no one had the courage to ask. To car 
 mother, too, he left the whole of the trouble and pleasure 
 of decking the table on Christmas Eve, and in this respect 
 perhaps he remained consideiably behind his son Paul, 
 who always helped his wife, — if it was not she who only 
 helped him, — at the children's Christmas play ; for in 
 fact — particularly in their earlier years, when they were 
 more foolish — for many months before the performance 
 of this fairy play, he had acted the False Informer, the 
 Playwriter, and the Scene Painter on the sofa, and at 
 length on the evening had appeared as complete Opera 
 Director and practical Manager — and for each of his three 
 children he had carefully marked off a portion of the table 
 by lights, the presents for the maid being placed on a side 
 table, in fact he had laid out and arranged everything on 
 table and tree so brightly and with such judgment that 
 the whole scene sparkled, as did his own eyes. 
 
 In spite of this, the father and the father's sadness are 
 to be explained from the son, and in this way ; the latter 
 himself with all his outward activity has had for many 
 years to veil a similar feeling. In both cases it is only a 
 melancholy feeling, tender from church chants and novels, 
 which comes with the cou.narison of the mature autumn 
 of reality with the spring of childhood before one's eyes, 
 in which the blossoms of the ideal grow directly on the 
 stem of the real without the intervention of leaves and 
 branches. 
 
 The wine and honey of childish joy required then even 
 the ideal, ethereal addition of a belief in the Holy Child 
 who gave them. For as soon as Paul had seen with his 
 own eyes that they were only people, not supernatural 
 beings, who had gathered the flowers and fruits and placed 
 them on the table ; the Eden fragrance and Eden splendour 
 were gone, brushed away, and the every-day flower bed 
 was there. It is too incredible how, like all children, he 
 defended himself against every assaulter of his heavenly 
 faith, and how long he held to his supernatural revelations 
 against all the enlightenment of his increasing years, 
 against all the hints of fortune, until at last he saw and 
 conquered, less than he was conquered. So difficult is it 
 for people of all religions to bring down to humanity those
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 49 
 
 who, in their fancied heaven, play the part of beneficent 
 deities to them. 
 
 Thus far the Joditz Idyls extend ; they lasted long- 
 enough for parents and children, namely, as long as the 
 Trojan War. The expenses for the four sons were in- 
 creasing and the promised school became more and more 
 necessary for them. At times, too, a feeling of dis- 
 satisfaction came over our father that he was exhausting 
 and using up his best years and best strength in such a 
 small village church. At length Barnikel, the pastor ot 
 Schwarzenbach-on-the-Saale, a small city or large market 
 town, died. Death is the real play director and manager 
 of the world. He takes a man like a cipher from the row 
 of figures, from the beginning, the middle or the end, and, 
 lo, the whole row closes up with new positions and values. 
 The living, which was in the gift of the Count von 
 Schonburg-Waldenburg and the Baroness von Plotho by 
 turns, fell this time to Bichter's patroness, who had long 
 and openly looked forward to this opportunity of helping 
 and rewarding the good, cheerful, disinterested, and im- 
 poverished pastor. 
 
 But he went not more but rather less often to Zedtwitz 
 on this account. To send a written petition or even so 
 much as a verbal request for a pastorship would have 
 stained him as an act of simony, believing orthodoxly as 
 he did that the Holy Ghost alone must call one to a sacred 
 office. And thus the birth-proud patroness had to give 
 way to the firm, poor, and office-proud Blackcoat without 
 request or solicitation. I am letting you into a secret of 
 the Joditz Court — which it has itself long since forgotten 
 — when I relate from the lips of the old pastor that which 
 happened on the day of his appointment. He was as usual 
 shown in at first to the old Herr von Plotho, and he for 
 love and joy could not keep back from my father the news 
 of his good fortune, but told him straight out, and even 
 gave him the presentation, while properly his wife as the 
 real patroness was alone able to do so. Afterwards, when 
 the newly created pastor came to her to present his thanks 
 there was a little ill-temper on the part of the baioness 
 towards her husband which she could not wholly conceal 
 from the Court. Both with similar intention had wished, 
 
 I. L
 
 50 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTEE. 
 
 by delivering the presentation personally, to spare their 
 moneyless friend all the various gratuities and douceurs — 
 fatal words for one party concerned — of the messengers. 
 
 As I know so well your benevolent disposition towards 
 father and son, I would guess that you are now inwardly 
 exclaiming with joy, "Th'i is indeed glorious, that the 
 moon-change of the parsonages at last brings him finer 
 weather, and we now see the glad musician duly leaving 
 the company earlier than usual (he would gladly have 
 talked longer with them out of gratitude) and hurrying 
 home with his bulldog, to tell and share his own delight 
 as soon as possible with all his family, and particularly 
 with his poor wife, who of a truth, has already endured 
 enough in the ear-gleaning and tithe-collecting on the 
 paternal fields." 
 
 I have nothing to say against this, except that you are 
 all very wide of the mark and I am surprized at your 
 mistake. He brought the glad tidings seriously and sadly 
 not only because on the flower-and-fruit-wreath of good 
 fortune, as on the bridal wreath, a few dew-drops always 
 hang, looking like tears, but also because the departure 
 from his loved and loving parish, which for many years 
 had been his second family in the larger family hall of 
 the church began to shed tears, and lastly, too, because 
 now the quiet, peaceful, sequestered, simple village-life 
 would hang in his memory only as a distant picture. 
 Country-life, like sea-life, is indeed monotonous, without 
 variety of small or great events ; but there is a kind of 
 uniform joy, which strengthens, just as the monotonous sea 
 air strengthens the consumptive patient because there are 
 no dust clouds to inhale, and no insects which torment. 
 
 I think that I have now so far fulfilled my obligations 
 as my own historical Professor, in all that concerns Joditz, 
 the village of my education, that in my next lecture I may 
 move with my hero and his family to Schwarzenbach-on- 
 the-Saale, where undoubtedly the curtain goes up a few 
 feet higher, and rather more of the chief actor comes in 
 view than merely the child's shoes, as hitherto. For indeed 
 we send him from to-day's lecture into the next, as a 
 human being of upwards of twelve years of age with ten 
 times less knowledge than the five-year-old Christian
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 51 
 
 Heinrich Heineke von Liibeck,* whose nurse laid him 
 again to her breast after his examination, — so ignorant 
 of all natural, or geographical, or world history, except 
 of that little part which he himself was — so ignorant of 
 French and music ; in Latin provided with just a little bit 
 of Lange and Speccius — in short, such an empty, trans- 
 parent skeleton or framework, with no nourishment or 
 flesh of learning, that, with you all, I can hardly await the 
 place and time when, in Schwarzenbach-on-the-Saale, he 
 must at length begin to know something, and clothe 
 his skeleton with flesh. 
 
 With him we now leave that unknown little village ; 
 although it has not, like many another village, put on a 
 laurel crown won in war, yet still, I think, he can give 
 it a high place in his heart and say, even to-day, as if he 
 was just leaving it—" Loved little village, thou art still 
 dear and precious to me. Two little sisters have I left 
 in thy bosom. My father contentedly spent in thee his 
 fairest Sundays; and in the morning of life 1 have seen 
 the radiance of thy meadows. Truly thy well-known in- 
 habitants, whom I will now thank, are long since gone like 
 my father, but for their unknown children and grand- 
 children, my heart's wish is that they may be prosperous 
 and that warfare may pass by them at a distance." 
 
 * Christian von Schoneich, the tutor and biographer of this prodigy 
 who was born February 6th, 1721, tells us (1726), in his ' Life, Deeds, 
 Journeys, and Death,' that he understood Latin, French, History, 
 Geography, and the Institutions of the lloman Law. that he was well- 
 informed in Theology and Anatomy, was witty and acute in mind, 
 and was nourished entirely by the milk of his nurse. 
 
 k 2
 
 52 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. 
 
 THIED LECTUEE (WITH THEEE SUPPLEMENTS). 
 
 SCHWAR2EXBACH-0N-THE-SAALE KISS — RECTOR 
 
 lord's SUPPER. 
 
 Would you believe, my friends, that Paul retained nothing 
 in his memory of all the packing-up, moving, and leaving ; 
 no parting either of parents or children ; no object on the 
 two-miles journey, excepting only the above-mentioned 
 tailor's son, to whose pocket he intrusted his six drawings 
 of the kings for his beloved ? But so it is in childhood 
 and boyhood ; the most trivial is retained, the most 
 important forgotten ; one knows not why, in either case. 
 Childhood, too, ever restless and impatient, remembers the 
 departure less tnan the arrival ; a child leaves ten times 
 more easily the long-accustomed surroundings than the 
 more recent ones ; only in manhood does the exact 
 opposite become the case. For children there are no 
 partings, for they acknowledge no past, but only a present 
 filled with the future. 
 
 Schwarzenbach-on-the-Saale was indeed in the pos- 
 session of many things. A pastor and a curate ; a rector 
 and a cantor; and a parsonage with many little rooms 
 and two big ones. Opposite were two large bridges and the 
 accompanying Saale, and close by was the schoolhouse, as 
 big as (if not bigger than) the whole Joditz parsonage, and 
 among the houses was also a townhall — not to mention 
 the large empty castle. 
 
 A new rector entered on his office just at the same time 
 as my father ; Werner from Merseburg, a handsome man 
 with broad brow and high nose ; full of fire, and with 
 much feeling ; of overwhelming natural eloquence, replete 
 with questions, allegories and harangues, like Father 
 Abraham, but quite without depth either in languages or 
 other branches of knowledge. He helped out the poverty 
 of this reverse side, however, by a heart full of enthusiasm 
 and zeal ; his tongue was the lever of our childish mindei
 
 AtTOBIOGRAPHY. 53 
 
 His plan of teaching was to let one learn from the 
 grammar only the most necessary forms of inflexion — by 
 this he understood only the declensions and conjugations 
 — and then to spring at once to the reading of some 
 author. 
 
 Paul had to make the spring at once, far over Lange's 
 1 Colloquia,' into ' Cornelius ' and it was successful. 
 
 The schoolroom, or much more the school-ark, contained 
 A, B, C students, young spellers, Latin learners, big and 
 little girls — who sat in tiers from the floor up to the 
 wall, as if on the shelves of a greenhouse or in an old 
 Roman theatre — and the rector and cantor, together with all 
 the ace >mpanying crying, buzzing, reading and whipping, 
 The Latin learners formed, as it were, a school within the 
 school. Soon after Latin, the Greek grammar also was 
 commenced, by learning the declensions and the most 
 necessary verbs, and then without further delay we were 
 translated to the translation of the New Testament. 
 Werner, who often in the warmth of speaking praised 
 himself so much that he was astonished at his own great- 
 ness, thought this faulty method of his was original, but 
 in reality it was only that of Basedow. Paul's winged 
 progress was a fresh proof to him of its success. About 
 a year later a few declensions and verbs from Ddnze's 
 Hebrew Grammar, written in Latin, were put together to 
 form a boat-bridge to the First Book of Moses, the be- 
 ginning of which — just the exegesis threshold of young 
 Hebraists — was not permitted to be read by the un- 
 cultivated Jews. 
 
 1 will immediately proceed chronologically with the 
 life of our hero when I have cast a cursory view forward, 
 just for one moment, and have shown you how much he 
 suddenly could and had to do. 
 
 I will then become statary again immediately. 
 
 He had to translate the Greek and Hebrew Testaments 
 viva voce into Latin like a Vulgate maker. During his 
 translation lesson (he was the only Hebrew scholar in the 
 school), the rector had a printed translation lying by his 
 side. When our hero was not successful in the analysis 
 of the words, a second misfortune often occurred, namely, 
 the master was no better oft'.
 
 54 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICK EICHTER. 
 
 The present writer of novels was regularly in love with 
 the Hebrew grammatical and analytical trash and trifling 
 — this too was in reality a secret indication of his love of 
 domesticity — and borrowed Hebrew grammars from all 
 corners of Schwarzenbach, in order to hoard up all the in- 
 formation on diacritical points, vowels, accents, and so 
 on, which could be served up in the analysis of each single 
 word. Then he sewed himself a quarto book together, 
 and began in it with the first word of the first verse of the 
 First Book of Moses, and wrote several pages of such copious 
 information from all the borrowed grammars about its 
 few letters, its vowels and the first Dagesh and Sheva, 
 that at the first words "In the beginning," (he intended 
 to continue thus from chapter to chapter), he also made 
 an end, unless indeed it was with the next. What has 
 been written (in the first Letter-box), about Quintus 
 Fixlein's chase in a folio Hebrew Bible after larger, 
 smaller, and reversed letters applies literally in all par- 
 ticulars to Paul's own life. 
 
 In just as droll a fashion he treated the now superan- 
 nuated Hofmann, who. with the German translation sen- 
 tences or Latin-rule examples was a great cross Speccius 
 for the scholars, by winding his way like a screw, — the 
 man going deeper and deeper into Syntaxis Ornata, — into 
 such endless participial straits that the good rector had to 
 think more about understanding than correcting him. 
 
 Immediately after coming to Schwarzenbach- — I am still 
 in the cursory — I had pianoforte lessons from Gressel the 
 Cantor ; and here, too, when he had learnt a few dance 
 tunes and the usual choral chords and General Bass nota- 
 tion, — would God but give the poor boy for once a thorough 
 teacher, is my wish, however little prospect there appears 
 to be anywhere of that, — he fell into his self-absolution 
 from instruction, into extemporizing on the piano and 
 collecting and playing off all the pieces which were to be 
 found anywhere in the place. Thorough bass, the grammar 
 of music, he acquired by continual extemporizing and 
 jnaying from sight, in much the same way as we acquire 
 the German grammar by talking. 
 
 At this time, too, he applied himself to the reading of 
 German literature, but as there was none other to be had
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 55 
 
 in Schwarzenbach than the romantic type, and of this 
 only the worthless novels of the first half of the last 
 century, he built himself a small Babylonian tower out of 
 these bricks, chough he could only extract from it one brick 
 at a time to read. But of all histories standing on book- 
 shelves, not one — for Schiller's ' Armenians ' later produced 
 only half the impression — poured such oil of joy and 
 nectar through all the veins of his being, — even to bodily 
 ecstacy — as old ' Robinson Crusoe ;' he still remembers hour 
 and spot, (it was evening, by the window, looking on to the 
 bridge) when the ecstasy occurred; and only after some 
 time did a second novel, ' Veit Rosenstock,' by Otto — read 
 and forbidden by my father — repeat the half of this 
 enthusiasm. Only as plagiarist and book-thief did he 
 enjoy it from his father's study so long as his father was 
 not there — once he read it lying on his stomach in the 
 empty gallery during one of his father's week-day sermons. 
 I little envy children now-a-days, to whom the first im- 
 pression of the childlike and childish Robinson is denied 
 and compensated for by the modern remodellers of the man, 
 who metamorphose the quiet island into a lecture room or a 
 worn-out snipe valley, and send the shipwrecked Robinson 
 about with a precept book in his hand and their own 
 dictata in his mouth, that in every nook he may found 
 a private academy for the young, although he has so much 
 to do for himself that it is only with the greatest difficulty 
 that he can keep his own life. 
 
 At this time, that is, just after this, the young curate 
 Volkel begged the lad's father to let him come for two 
 hours every day after dinner in order to instil into him a 
 little of all sorts from philosophy and geography. By 
 what means I, with my village awkwardness, became of 
 such value to him, who was not fired with any particular 
 pedagogic talent, that he sacrificed his napping hour for 
 me, I do not know. 
 
 In philosophy, he read, or more properly I read to him, 
 that of Gottsched, which, with all its dryness and barren- 
 ness, refreshed me like fresh water with its novelty. 
 Then he showed me a number of towns and frontiers on a 
 map — of Germany I believe ; but how much of this I 
 retained I do not know, and search in vain for it in my
 
 56 JEAN PATJL FRIEDRICH KICHTER. 
 
 memory to this day ; I dare aver — what of a truth sounds 
 Btrong — that I, of all living authors am perhaps the one 
 who knows the least about geographical maps. An atlas 
 of maps would hear for me a hell instead of the mytholo- 
 gical heaven, if 1 had to carry them in my head. Whatever 
 of the geography of towns and countries may by chance 
 remain hanging in it (the head) is the little which has 
 flown against it on the way, on the geographical instruc- 
 tion courses, which, to express myself in good high-school 
 German, partly the post-chaises staterically, and partly 
 the Hauderer (coachman) cursorily, have taken with me. 
 
 All the more do I thank the good curate for his instruc- 
 tion in German composition, which consisted of nothing 
 but instruction in so-called theology. He set me for 
 instance to give the evidence without a Bible, of the 
 existence of a God or a Providence, &c. To do this I 
 received an octavo sheet, on which were written the 
 proofs and suggestions taken from INosselt, ' Jerusalem,' and 
 others, in incomplete sentences, even in single words 
 separated by clashes. The disguised suggestions were 
 then explained to me, and from this leaf, in accordance 
 with Goethe's botanical theory, were my leaves developed. 
 I began each composition with warmth, and finished it in 
 a glow, for at the end there came always the end of the 
 world, of life, the joys of heaven, and all that super- 
 abundance which bursts from the young vine-shoots in 
 the warmth of spring, and which only in autumn attains 
 any intellectual value. To whom belong the praise and 
 merit that these writing hours were not hours of toil, but 
 of pleasure and freedom, if not to him who chose the right 
 blossoming and fruit-bearing themes? For, let anyone 
 consider a moment and compare these suggestive and 
 satisfying exercises with those ordinarily set by school- 
 masters, which are so wide and undefined, so uncongenial to 
 the young heart, or which reach so far beyond the sphere of 
 youthful life — in jest I should like to give you a thousand 
 in a note * — that I wish seriously that some man with 
 
 * Out of such universal, cold, empty subjects, demanding everything 
 and nothing,— for example, " Praise of industry," " Importance of 
 Youth," the richest, maturest head could hardly hatch anything living. 
 Other subjects again, too broad, as " Comparison of the Heroes of
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 57 
 
 leisure and a knowledge of youth would sit himself down, 
 in spite of all the beautiful thoughts and elaborations 
 which he might otherwise produce, and would write 
 nothing for the present but a small volume of prize 
 subjects, arranged after the pattern of the innumerable 
 dissertations on the Sunday texts, for teachers, whose so]e 
 work would be to choose among them those which they 
 would give to their pupils. 
 
 Better perhaps than all subjects are none at all. Let the 
 youth choose each time that subject, as a mistress, for 
 which his heart is warm and full, and with which alone he 
 is able to create that which has life. Leave the young 
 spirit free with a few hours and a few sheets of paper — 
 which maturer writers require too — that he may freely 
 give forth his tones undisturbed by your hand, otherwise 
 he is a bell standing firmly on the ground and unable to 
 sound until hung freely in the air. 
 
 But men are thus throughout all offices up from the lowest ; 
 they find the greater glory in making servile machines 
 out of free spirits, thus showing their creating, governing, 
 and producing powers ; they think to give proof of this, if 
 they are able to bring into the same track and couple on 
 to the intellectual machine next above them an intermediate 
 midway machine, and to the intermediate one to couple 
 another, until at length there appears a mother Marion- 
 ette leading a Marionette daughter, who again in her turn 
 is able to carry a poodle — all is only a coupling together 
 by the same machine master — God ; the free will only rear 
 the free ; the devil, the unfree, will rear only his like. 
 
 I would not exchange my weekly exercises for any of 
 those of the present time, how much soever these may 
 enlighten the world, particularly as the subjects opened 
 the lists to my philosophizing tendency and let it have its 
 run out ; a tendency which had already sought to overflow 
 from my small head into a thin octavo booklet in which 
 
 Antiquity," "Weighing of the Old Forms of Religion," are ostrich- 
 eggs on which the pupil with t;>o short wings sits and broods in vain, 
 making nune warm but himself. Between these two kinds are the 
 better one-, rich in sensuous and historical material, such as " Descrip- 
 tion of a Conflagration, of the Last Day, of the Deluge ; Proof of ita 
 Nun-universality."
 
 5S JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. 
 
 Seeing and Hearing endeavoured and thought to give a 
 logical account of themselves, and of which 1 related a part 
 to my father, who blamed and misunderstood me jxist as 
 little as I did myself. Can one, then, repeat too often to 
 the teacher of youth — very often must I have said it 
 already — that all hearing and reading does not strengthen 
 and stimulate the spirit half so much as writing and 
 speaking, because the former, like conception in the female, 
 exercises only the receptive faculties, while the latter like 
 begetting in the male, demands and brings into action the 
 creative powers. Do not the translators of the most 
 learned and pithy writers, — for example, Ebert, the trans- 
 lator of Young, — keep on all their lives writing their pre- 
 faces, notes and poems with inborn washiness, when one 
 might have expected a little improvement, since of all 
 reading translating is the most repeated as well as the 
 most accurate and penetrating, and thus the translator of 
 a work of merit enjoys it more and gets at the kernel 
 better than any other reader. 
 
 Beading is like collecting for the school money-box or 
 the poor-bag ; writing is the founding of a mint, the 
 stamping die enriches one more than the bell-bag. 
 Writing, like a Socratic midwifery which one practises 
 on oneself, is to reading as speaking is to hearing. In 
 England and among people of the court and world, talking 
 is a means of education, and helps out the paucity of the 
 reading. 
 
 Finally I staked these lessons with the curate on a gaaae 
 at chess and lost, because— we did not play. To explain ; 
 the curate would sometimes conclude the lesson in geo- 
 graphy with one in chess, still to this day my favourite 
 game, though in it and all games I have remained the 
 beginner that I was when I first made my debut. Once I 
 went to my lesson in spite of a headache, because a game 
 at chess had been promised, and as, through forgetfulness, 
 the game never came, so I also never came again. That 
 my father silently allowed this desertion of mine unoc- 
 casioned by one single word, is more difficult of compre- 
 hension to me than the other natural circumstance that I 
 was a fool and fled from the curate at the same time that 
 I continued to love him. 1 was still very pleased to act
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 50 
 
 the little foot-messenger between him and my father, and 
 with glances of love and joyfully beating pulses would see 
 him turn into our house after almost all the baptisms (for 
 this reason the baptism bell tolled a joyous mass on my 
 ears) to chat away a half or the whole of the evening 
 while I read or worked at the table ; but, as I have said, I 
 had got the chessboard in my head, and kept away. 
 Heavens ! who is it that gathers into the best honey cells 
 of mine and of many another poetical and feminine nature 
 such a summer honey (if not honey vinegar) of love and ill- 
 will, such a conflicting mish-mash, which often poisons 
 and cankers the most beautiful days, yes, and the most beau- 
 tiful hearts, perhaps ? Truly, could one often but add an 
 additional half grain of brain-aether or reason to the 
 warmest hearts, I should know of nothing better than the 
 hottest love, but, as it is, the sweetness congeals to bitter 
 lees and its own reverse. 
 
 Kiss. 
 
 As I lost my heart before in a churcn pew, so now I 
 could not do otherwise than fall in love up the raised 
 school benches — for she sat quite up at the top, Katherine 
 Barin — with her dainty, round, red, little, small-pox- 
 marked face and sparkling eyes, and the pretty haste with 
 which she spoke and ran off. At the school carnival, 
 which occupied the whole of the forenoon of Shrove 
 Tuesday, and consisted in dancing and playing, I had 
 the pleasure of dancing the irregular hop- dance and thus, 
 as it were, of practising and dancing beforehand the 
 regular dance. Yes, too, at the game of " How do you like 
 your neighbour?" where, on a favourable answer one is 
 ordered to kiss, and on an unfavourable one to run off, 
 amid accollades from the knotted handkerchief, and make 
 place for others, I carried off plenty of the latter ; a gold- 
 beating, by which my love, like pure gold, increased, and 
 an entertaining variety always prevailed, as she invariably 
 forbad me the court, and I always called her to it. 
 
 All these malicious desertions (desertiones malitiosce) 
 could not deprive me of the bliss of seeing her every day, 
 as, with little white apron and cap, she ran over the long 
 bridge towards the parsonage, where I was at the window
 
 60 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. 
 
 looking out. To catch her and not so much to say as to 
 give to her something sweet, a mouthful of truit for example, 
 this, as far as I know I was never- able to do, let me run 
 as quickly as I would through the yard and down the few 
 steps to receive her in her flight past. But I enjoyed 
 enough in being able to love her on the bridge from the 
 window, which, I think, was near enough for me who 
 usually stood with heart and mouth behind long seeing- 
 and hearing-trumpets. Distance is less harmful to true 
 love than proximity ; if I had got a sight of Venus in the 
 planet Venus, 1 should have loved the heavenly being 
 ardently, particularly as at such a distance she would be 
 very bewitching with her charms, and I would have 
 chosen it without hesitation to be revered as my morning 
 and evening star. 
 
 I now have the pleasure of freeing from their error all 
 those who expect a mere repetition of the Joditz love affair 
 in the Schwarzenbach one ; and of announcing to them 
 that 1 brought it to something. One winter evening when 
 I had already provided my princess-tax of sweet gifts, 
 which usually lacked only the recipient, the pastor's son, 
 who was the worst boy among all my school companions, 
 persuaded me to a forbidden deed of daring. While a 
 call from the curate occupied my father, I left the parson- 
 age in the dark, crossed the bridge (which I had never 
 dared before) went straight up to the house where the 
 beloved one lived with her poor mother in a little corner- 
 room, and there made my way into a kind of tap-room 
 down below. Whether Katherine was down there by 
 chance and was going upstairs again, or whether the 
 rogue with his officious planning had enticed her half-way 
 down under some pretence or other, in short, how it 
 happened that I found her on the stairs, has all become a 
 dreamy recollection to me, for a Present, which flashes 
 forth suddenly, renders dim in the memory all that has 
 preceded it. Hurriedly as a thief, I first gave her my 
 food-presents, and then I, who never in Joditz could come 
 to the heaven of a first kiss, and never dared to touch the 
 beloved hand, for the first time pressed a long-loved being 
 to my heart and lips. I know not what more to say ; it 
 was a single pearly minute, which had never been before,
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 61 
 
 and never came again ; a whole longing past and a future 
 dream were compressed into one moment : and in the 
 darkness behind my closed eyes the firework of life was 
 displayed for one moment and then was gone. 
 
 Like a clairvoyant, I return from heaven back again to 
 earth, remarking only that the Euprecht followed, since he 
 had not preceded, this second Christmas festivity, for on 
 my way home, I already found the messenger, and was 
 soundly scolded when I got there for running out. Such 
 a hailstorm and dross-stream fall usually with the hot silver 
 beams of the sun of happiness. What did it matter to 
 me ? The stream of words could not mar my paradise, for 
 does it not bloom to this very day, even to this pen and 
 forth from it ? 
 
 It was, as I have said, the first kiss, and at the same 
 time, I believe, the last, unless, — for she still lives, — I 
 purposely make a journey to Schwarzenbach and give her 
 a second. As usual, I contented myself throughout my 
 Schwarzenbach life with my telegraphic love, which, too, 
 had to sustain and reply to itself without an answering 
 telegraph. 
 
 But truly none blames the good maiden less than I do 
 that she then kept silence and does so still — after her 
 husband's death ; for in later life I have always had to 
 find my way slowly to the unknown heart and its love ; 
 it was of no use that I immediately stood there with 
 ready face and exterior ; afterwards I always had to 
 underlay these bodily charms with the intellectual for 
 them sufficiently to glitter, dazzle, and kindle the 
 fire. 
 
 But this was just the defect in my innocent love time, 
 that, without intercourse with the loved one, without 
 conversation or prelude, I suddenly, with barren exterior, 
 showed the whole of my love bursting forth, in short, 
 that I stood before her like the Judas-tree which produces 
 its blossoms without the intervention of branches and 
 leaves.
 
 62 JEAN TAUL FKIEDRICH KICHTER. 
 
 Joke with the Eector. 
 
 As the Joke-playing Society* knew that the rector 
 read the newspaper in school, and introduced the current 
 events in his school sermons, they sent him an old 
 number of the Erlanger Bealzeitung, which he took in, 
 containing an account of the horrors of the terrible 
 famine in Italy, particularly in Naples. The date they 
 had covered up well enough by dropping an ink blot on 
 it. All heard into their rooms how, inflamed by the 
 Fidibus paperf (scarcely could he await the withdrawal 
 of the organist), he burst forth with his exposition, and 
 how vividly he brought before the eyes of the Schwar- 
 zenbach youth in fire colours — the Erlanger writer gave 
 only the water colours — the begging, shrieking, fainting, 
 and starving in all the streets, until it became doubtful 
 whether they would return home with more burning 
 tears or hunger. And in reality in such descriptions one 
 hardly believes that there is still anything left to eat on 
 the .earth. Each one may imagine for himself under 
 what kind of triumphal gates (or on what triumphal 
 beds) the good herald of hunger was taken that evening 
 by the Joke-playing Society for his touching and warning 
 words, when they bad seen the children and questioned 
 them about it. I can give no account, for I heard only 
 dimly and some time afterwards of the recall of the paper. 
 Good, well-meaning old rector ! be not much ashamed or 
 angry with birds of joke or prey, who wish to pounco 
 down on your pulpit-doves! The holy dove had still 
 hovered and brooded over our hearts with warm wings. 
 For the warmed heart it is just the same whether it has 
 trembled with the pulses of compassion for a near or a 
 distant famine. 
 
 * This society consisted of the friends of the rector who permitted 
 such jokes between themselves a3 the one here related. 
 
 f Properly a small strip of paper used for lighting cigars, &n.
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY. 63 
 
 The Lord's Supper. 
 
 The Lord's Supper is considered in the country, or more 
 properly among good Christians, not merely as a Christian 
 moral toga virilis ; not as in towns amongst girls, less as 
 the putting on the nun's clothing, than the young lady's ; 
 but it is the highest and first spiritual act, the entrance on 
 citizenship in God's city. It is only now that the former 
 water-baptism becomes a real fire-baptism, the first 
 sacrament rises again in the second glorified and more 
 living. The children of a pastor, who have been eye- and 
 ear-witnesses of the preparation of others so often for this 
 Sunday approach it with the greater reverence. This 
 reverence rose still higher in me on account of the post- 
 ponement of the ceremony for a year, as my father did 
 not consider that the legal age of twelve years had com- 
 pletely elapsed by the 21st of March. 
 
 Add now to these days of religious warmth, a fire- 
 preacher, as was our rector, who presented to our souls 
 the awful conditions peculiar to this religious act, that 
 the unrepentant who partakes of the sacrament, like a 
 perjurer, eats his Hell instead of Heaven, and that when 
 a Eedeemer and Saint enters into the impure sinner, the 
 saving power of his presence must be turned into a 
 poisoning power. Warm tears, which he, too, shed with 
 us, were the least which his heartfelt words drew forth 
 from myself and the rest ; burning repentance for the 
 past and passionate vows for a blameless future filled our 
 breasts and continued their work there after he had 
 ceased to speak. How often did I go to the garret before 
 the Confession Saturday, and kneel down to repent and 
 atone. And how sweet it was on the Confession day 
 itself to ask forgiveness with stammering lips and over- 
 flowing heart for one's faults from all the dear ones, 
 parents, and teachers, and thus to atone for them and 
 absolve oneself. 
 
 On this evening there came, too, a mild, light, clear heaven 
 of peace over my soul, an unutterable never-returning 
 blessedness in feeling myself quite clean, purified and freed 
 from sin ; in having made with God and man a joyful
 
 64: JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTEE. 
 
 far-reaching peace, and still, from these evening hours of 
 mild and warm soul-rest, I looked onward to the heavenly 
 enthusiasm and rapture at the altar next morning. 
 
 O blessed time ! when one has stripped off the unclean 
 past, and stands pure and white, free and fresh in the 
 present, and thus steps forth courageously into the future. 
 But to whom but children can this time return ? In the 
 happy time of childhood this complete peace of soul is 
 more easy to gain, because the circle of sacrifices which it 
 demands is smaller and the sacrifices themselves less im- 
 portant, while the complicated and widened circumstances 
 of later years, either through deficiencies or delay in 
 complete resignation, admit the heavenly rainbow of peace 
 only incomplete and not rounded to a perfect circle, as in 
 the time of youth. In the twelfth year enthusiasm can 
 render one perfectly pure, but not so in age. The youth, 
 too, and the maiden with all their fiery impulses have less 
 to overcome in their circle, and have an easier and shorter 
 way to the highest moral purity, than that which the man 
 or woman have to traverse with their colder and more 
 selfish strivings, through the wilderness of troubles, cares, 
 and toils. The true man is, at some period in his earliest 
 time, a diamond of the first water, crystal clear, and 
 without colour, then he becomes one of second quality and 
 glitters with many colours, until at last he darkens into a 
 coloured stone. 
 
 On Sunday morning the boys and girls, adorned for the 
 sacrificial altar, met at the parsonage for the solemn 
 entrance into the church amid singing and bell-ringing. 
 All this, together with the festive attire and the nosegays, 
 and the darkened fragrant birch- trees, both at home and 
 in the church, became for the young soul a powerful 
 breeze in its outspread wings, which were already raised 
 and in motion. Even during the long sermon the heart 
 expanded with its fire, and inward struggles were carried 
 on against all thoughts which were worldly or not 
 sufficiently holy. 
 
 At length I received the bread from my father and the 
 cup from my purely loved teacher, but the ceremony did 
 not receive any additional value from the thought of 
 what these two were to me ; my heart and mind and soul
 
 AUTOBIOGEAPHY 05 
 
 were devoted alone to heaven, to happiness, and to the re- 
 ception of the Most Holy, which was to unite itself with 
 my being, and my rapture rose to a physical lightning- 
 feeling of miraculous union. 
 
 I thus left the altar with a clear blue infinite heaven 
 in my heart ; this heaven revealed itself to me by an un- 
 limited, stainless tender love which I now felt for all, all 
 mankind. To this day I have preserved within my heart 
 with loving and youthful freshness the remembrance of 
 the happiness when I looked on the church members with 
 love, and took them all to my innermost heart. The 
 maiden companions at the holy altar with their bridal 
 wreaths became not only dearer, but also more holv, to me 
 as the brides of Christ, and I included them all in such a 
 wide, pure love, that even my beloved Katharina as far as 
 I can remember was not otherwise loved than the rest. 
 
 The whole earth remained for me throughout the day 
 an unlimited love-repast, and the whole tissue and web 
 of life appeared to me to be an iEolian or setherial harp 
 played by the breath of love. When even the misanthrope 
 can extract an artificial delight from his universal dislike, 
 of what indescribably sweet happiness must be a universal 
 love for all hearts in the beautiful time of youth, untram- 
 melled and untainted by circumstances, the horizon of 
 which is still limited, the arms short but the ardour so 
 much the more intense. And shall we not allow ourselves 
 the joy of dreaming out the dream of this overflowing 
 heaven, which would receive us if, in a higher and hotter 
 focus of a second youth, we should grasp a larger spiritual 
 world, loving with higher poAver, and should widen the 
 heart from life to life for the All. 
 
 But in inconstant man all else remains more easily on 
 the surface than the purest and the best, as in quicksilver 
 all metals remain at the top — the gold alone sinks. Life, 
 like the sun (according to Goethe), admits no white. After 
 a few days this precious consciousness of innocence deserted 
 me, for I thought that I had sinned in throwing a stone 
 and wrestling with a schoolfellow, though I did neither 
 out of ill-feeling, but in harmless love of play. But eternal 
 thanks are due for ever to the all-kind spirit. 
 
 Every holiday is followed by working days, but we go 
 
 I " F
 
 66 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. 
 
 into them newly-clad, and the past holiday leads us on 
 over them to a fresh one. This spring festivity of the 
 heari, returned later in the years of youth, but only as a 
 quiet, serene sabbath, when for the first time the great old 
 stoical spirits of Plutarch, Epictetus, and Antoninus arose 
 and appeared before me, and freed me from all the pains of 
 this earth and all anger; but from this oneSabbaih I hope 
 I have gathered together a whole year of Sabbaths, or am 
 able to make up that which may still be wanting.
 
 LEVANA; 
 
 OK, 
 
 THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION. 
 
 F 2
 
 TO HER MAJESTY), 
 
 CAROLINE, QUEEN OF BAVARIA, 
 
 WITH 
 
 THE PROFOUNDEST RESPECT OF 
 THE AUTHOR. 
 
 Most Gracious Queen ! 
 
 The author would consecrate Lev an a to mothers by your 
 royal name— as the banners which a princess has worked 
 receive fresh victorious power. 
 
 Your Majesty will graciously pardon the dedication of a 
 work which Germany, by the approbation expressed in the 
 demand for a new, improved edition, has already dedicated 
 to a Princess, who, in its best parts, will but find her own 
 recollections. 
 
 If, even in the lowest ranks, a mother's heart 1 »e 
 woman's honour, — the sun which gently warms and dries 
 the dewdrops of early tears, — this sun delights the beholder 
 most when it stands highest and cherishes the distant 
 future, and when a noble mother multiplies her heart as 
 well as her beauty, and blesses distant ages and countries 
 with her image.
 
 70 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICH EICHTER. 
 
 This delight becomes still greater if the mother be also 
 the mother of her country, and raise her sceptre like a 
 magic wand which converts tears of sorrow into tears of 
 joy ere it dries them. 
 
 Should the profound respect of a subject forbid him to 
 express this joy in a dedication ? 
 
 With most profound respect, 
 
 Your Majesty's 
 Most obedient, humble servant, 
 
 Jean Paul i'n. Eichter.
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE. 
 
 NoVERRt only required from a good director of the ballet 
 — besides the art of dancing — geometry, music, poetry, 
 painting, and anatomy. But to write upon education, 
 means to write upon almost everything at once ; for it 
 has to care for and watch over the development of an 
 entire, though miniature, world in little — a microcosm of 
 the microcosm. All the energies with which nations have 
 laboured and signalized themselves once existed as germs 
 in the hand of the educator. If we carried the subject, 
 still farther every century, every nation, and even every 
 boy and every girl, would require a distinct system of 
 education, a diiferent primer, and domestic French 
 governess, &c. 
 
 If, consequently, on a subject like this, only acta 
 sanctorum, or more correctly, sanctificandorum (acts less of 
 saints than of those to be made saints) can be written, and 
 if a folio be nothing more than a fragment, there cannot 
 be, on such an inexhaustible subject, one book too much, 
 even after the best, except the worst ; and where frag- 
 ments alone are possible, all that are possible complete 
 the whole. 
 
 The Author trusts thus to excuse his boldness as well 
 as his poverty ; for both, as in the state, are nearly 
 connected. He has not read every thing which has been 
 written upon education, but here and there something. 
 First and last he names Rousseau's Emile. No preceding 
 work can be compared with his ; the succeeding imitators 
 and transcribers seem to resemble him more. Not Rous- 
 seau's individual rules, many of which may be erroneous 
 without injury to the whole, but the spirit of education 
 which fills and animates the work has shaken to their 
 foundations and purified all the school-rooms and even the
 
 72 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [PREFACE, 
 
 nurseries in Europe. In no previous work on education 
 was the ideal so richly and beautifully combined with 
 actual observation as in his. He was a man, could 
 therefore easily become a child, and so he manifested and 
 saved the nature of children. Basedow was his intelligent 
 translator and publisher in Germany — this land of peda- 
 gogopajdists (of education of children's educators) and of 
 love ot children — and Pestalozzi is now confirming Rousseau 
 among the people. 
 
 Individual rules, without the spirit of education, 
 resemble a dictionary without a grammar of the language. 
 A book of rules is not merely incapable of exhausting and 
 distinguishing the infinite variety of individual dis- 
 positions and circumstances ; but, even granting it were 
 perfect itself and able to make others perfect, it yet would 
 but be like a system of remedies labouring to counteract 
 some one symptom of a disease ; recommending, for instance, 
 something of a reducing nature to be taken before faint- 
 ing, and to prevent tingling in the ears and unnatural 
 brilliancy of eye ; a tonic to cure paleness and coldness 
 of the face ; an aperient for nausea. But this is worthless ' 
 Do not, like common cultivators, water the individual 
 branches, but the roots, and they will moisten and unfold 
 the rest. Wisdom and morality are no ants' colonies of 
 separate, co-operating workmen, but organic parents of the 
 mental future which only require life-giving nourishment. 
 We merely reverse the ignorance of the savages, who 
 sowed gunpowder instead of making it, when we attempt 
 to compound what can only be developed. 
 
 But although the spirit of education, always watching 
 over the whole, is nothing more than an endeavour tc 
 liberate, by means of a free man, the ideal human being 
 which lies concealed in every child ; and though, in the 
 application of the divine to the child's nature, it must 
 scorn some useful things, some seasonable, individual, 
 or immediate ends ; yet it must incorporate itself in the 
 most definite applications, in order to be clearly mani- 
 fested. 
 
 Here the Author differs — but to his philosophical dis- 
 advantage — from those transcendental superintendents of 
 the school-room slates, who write thereon with so round
 
 FIRST ED.] LEVANA. 73 
 
 a piece of chalk that one may find in their broad strokes 
 whatever one desires, and who lay down a complete 
 Brownian system of education in the two words — strong, 
 weak ; though, indeed, Brown's disciple, Schmidt, only 
 uttered one word — strong. Dr. Tamponet declared that 
 he would trace heresies in the Lord's Prayer, if any one 
 desired it ; our age, on the contrary, knows how to find 
 a Lord's Prayer in every heresy. A mother who has a 
 particular child to educate can certainly extract no advan- 
 tage from such philosophical indifferentism; although that 
 class of fine, high-sounding compilations always bears 
 witness to a certain amount of artistic talent in their 
 sonorousness and their theft; hence, Gall justly found 
 for this sense a place between the organs of music and 
 stealing. 
 
 But this language does not belong to the Preface, and 
 the object of this work has forbidden it to find a place in 
 the book itself; wherefore, this may be regarded in form 
 as my most serious production, to which only a short, 
 occasional, comic Appendix shall be added. 
 
 The reader will please to take it patiently if he find 
 what has been already printed again printed here. What 
 has been printed is necessary as the bond and bast-matting 
 of what has not been printed ; but the bast-matting must 
 not cover the whole garden instead of merely tying up the 
 trees. But there are two still better excuses. Known 
 rules in education gain new force if new experience verify 
 them. The Author has three times been in the position 
 of trying them upon different children of all ages and 
 talents ; and he now enjoys with his own the pedagogic 
 jus trium liber orum (law of three children) ; and every other 
 person's experience, related in this book, has been made 
 his own. Secondly, printing ink now is like sympathetic 
 ink, it becomes as quickly invisible as visible ; wherefore 
 it is good to repeat old thoughts in the newest books, 
 because the old works in which they stand are net read. 
 New translations of many truths, as of foreign standard 
 works, must be given forth every half century. And, 
 indeed, I wish that even old German standard books were 
 turned into new German from time to time, and so could 
 find their way into the circulating libraries.
 
 74 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [PREFACE, 
 
 Why are there flower and weed gleanings of every thing, 
 but no wine or corn gleanings of the innumerable works 
 on education? Why should one single good observation 
 or rule be lost because it is imprisoned in some monstrous 
 folio, or blown away in some single sheet? For dwarfs 
 and giants, even in books, do not live long. Our age, 
 this balloon, or air-ship, which, by simultaneous lighting 
 of new lamps and throwing out of old ballast, has constantly 
 mounted higher and higher, might now, I should think, 
 cease to throw out and rather lovingly endeavour to collect 
 than to disperse the old. 
 
 Ho"« ever little so disjointed a collection of thoughts 
 could teach rules, it would yet arouse and sharpen the 
 educational serise from which they originally sprung. 
 Therefore every mother — still better every bride — ought 
 to read the many-volumed and, in another sense, many- 
 sided revision of education to which no nation can oppose 
 any thing similar ; she should read it, and cut and polish 
 herself, like a precious stone, by it on every side, so that 
 her individuality of character may all the more readily 
 discover, protect, revere and cherish the dim manifesta* 
 tions of it in her child. 
 
 Something very different from such a progressive 
 cabinet of noble thoughts, or even from my weak Levana, 
 with her fragments in her arms, is the usual kind of com- 
 plete system of education which one person after another 
 has written, and will write. It is difficult — I mean the 
 end, not the means. For it is very easy to proceed with 
 bookbinder's and bookmaker's paste, and fasten together a 
 thousand selected thoughts with five of your own, espe- 
 cially if you conscientiously remark in the preface that 
 you have availed yourself of the labours of your prede- 
 cessors, yet make no mention of one in the work itself, 
 but sell such a miniature library in one volume to the 
 reader as a mental facsimile of yourself. How much 
 better in this case were a hole-maker than a hole-hider I 
 How much better were it if associated authors (I mean 
 those friendly hundreds who move along one path uttering 
 precisely the same sound) entirely died out, — as Humboldt 
 tells us that in the tropical regions there are none of those 
 sociable plants which make our forests monotonous, but
 
 FIRST ED.] LKVANA, 75 
 
 next each tree a perfectly different one grows. A diary 
 about an ordinary child would be much better than a book 
 upon children by an ordinary writer. Yes, every man's 
 opinions about education would be valuable if he only 
 wrote what he did not copy. The author, unlike a partner, 
 ^nould always only say " I," and no other word. 
 
 The first part of this work treats at large of the budding, 
 the second and third of the blossoming, season of 
 childhood. In the first, the three early years, like the 
 academic triennium, after which the gate of the soul, 
 language, is opened, are the object of care and observation. 
 Here, educators are the Hours who open or close the gates 
 of heaven. Here, true education, the developing, is yet 
 possible ; by whose means the long second, the curative, 
 may be spared. For the child — yet in native innocence, 
 before his parents have become his serpents on the tree — 
 speechless, still unsusceptible of verbal empoisonment — 
 led by customs, not by words and reasons, therefore all 
 the more easily moved on the narrow and small pinnacle 
 of sensuous experience ; — for the child, I say, on this 
 boundary line between the monkey and the man, the most 
 important era of life is contained in the years which 
 immediately follow his non-existence, in which, for the 
 first time, he colours and moulds himself by companionship 
 with others. The parent's hand may cover and shelter 
 the germinating seed, but not the luxuriant tree; con- 
 sequently, first faults are the greatest; and mental 
 maladies, unlike the small-pox, are the more dangerous 
 the earlier they are taken. Every new educator effects 
 less than his predecessor ; until at last, if we regard all 
 life as an educational institution, a circumnavigator of 
 the world is less influenced by all tha nations he has seen 
 than by his nurse. 
 
 At least this book has been composed with warmest 
 love for the little beings, the delicate flower-gods of a 
 soon fading Eden. May Levana, the motherly goddess 
 who was formerly entreated to give a father's heart to 
 fathers, hear the prayer which the title of this book 
 addresses to her, and, in doing so, justify both it and this. 
 The demands of the state or of learning, unfortunately, 
 rob the child of half its father. The education of mos - *
 
 76 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICtfTER. [PREFACE, 
 
 fathers is but a system of rules to keep the child at a 
 respectful distance from them, and to form him more 
 with regard to their quiet than Ms powers ; or at most, 
 under a tornado of wrath, to impart as much meal of 
 instruction as he can scatter. But I would ask men of 
 business what education of souls rewards more delight- 
 fully and more immediately than that of the innocent, 
 who resemble rosewood which imparts its odour even 
 while being carved and shaped ? Or what now remains 
 to the decaying world — among so many ruins of what is 
 noblest and ancientest — except children, the pure beings 
 yet unfalsified by the age and the world ? Only they, 
 with a higher object than that for which they were 
 formerly used, can behold futurity and truth in the magic 
 mirror, and with bandaged eyes draw the precious lot 
 from the wheel of chance. The words that the father 
 speaks to his children in the privacy of home are not 
 heard by the world ; but, as in whispering galleries, they 
 are clearly heard at the end and by posterity. 
 
 It would be my greatest reward if, at the end of twenty 
 years, some reader as many years old should return 
 thanks to me that the book which he is then reading was 
 read by his parents. 
 
 Jean Paul Fb. Kichter. 
 
 Baibeuth, Muv2, 1806.
 
 SECOND ED.J ( 77 ) 
 
 AUTHOR'S PREFACE TO SECOND 
 EDITION. 
 
 The second edition of a work on education is presented 
 with love and respect to readers of both sexes : for the 
 complete sale of the first is regarded as a proof that whilst 
 the warlike Vesuvius and Etna were playing fire and 
 thunder against each other, yet still the German fatherly 
 and motherly heart was sufficiently endued with peace- 
 fulness, solicitude and love to attend to the mental re- 
 quirements of the child-world, even in like manner as the 
 parents take these children in their arms when saving 
 them as best may be from flames and water. 
 
 May only Levana be right worthy of this participation 
 in parental love ! 
 
 This edition includes — besides small corrections, and 
 besides the large local interpolations of certain contri- 
 butions in education scattered throughout two journals, 
 and also others not printed — many more exact conclusions 
 to which I found myself urged by the opinion of one or 
 another friendly critic, more especially those of Jena 
 and Halle. 
 
 For perhaps no reproof is more to be considered 
 than that of the well-disposed and like-minded : the ap- 
 probation of enemies is nothing to it in point of weight, 
 since it may just as often be a snare as a safeguard ; and 
 before a friendly critic, too, one wishes to defend neither 
 the yes nor no of one's self, but only the matter itself. 
 
 To only one critical reviewer have I nothing to say, 
 because he himself has said nothing : although this ex- 
 pression would do him too much honour, had ho not 
 interspersed his criticisms amongst the literary news of 
 Gottingen, of which such as is scholarly continues to 
 preserve its reputation for thoroughness, no less than that
 
 78 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH RICHTER. [p DEFACE, 
 
 which is aesthetic and philosophical has continued to 
 furnish the successive instalments of the " Kicolai- 
 Library " * (which after long lullings has now sunk 
 into slumber) so artfully that a limited intellect may 
 already have had enough of these universal German- 
 library filibusters. 
 
 For the rest, the author of this gains in maturity less 
 through other writers than through his own children. 
 Life enlivens life, and children train us into trainers 
 better than all trainers. Long before the first Levana, 
 children (that is, experiences) were in fact his teachers, 
 and books occasionally his " reminders." Yet experiences, 
 since they can never be gained in sufficient number to 
 amount to the strength of universal demonstration, can 
 express anything only through a disposition of mind which 
 imputes to them, from out of itself, and leai-ns from them 
 what is spiritual and universal. Hence educational 
 writings, on account of the inexhaustible number of 
 rules and the difficulty of choosing between them in 
 each case, can only successfully and practically help by 
 means of the stimulus and fostering of parental love and 
 by a peculiar strength : all real strength, be it of the heart 
 or head, can, if accompanied with love for children, educate 
 with success even at the distance of ordinary methods. 
 
 The large number and sale of writings on education is 
 explained from the circumstance that of all vocations that 
 of education is most thickly beset with followers : amongst 
 them all are both sexes at once, parents, yes, even those 
 who have never been parents; so that consequently the 
 instructor writes, not for one case, like one learned in 
 theology, law or such- like, but for all cases of all people. 
 But we Germans especially, partly from abundance of 
 philanthropy, partly from want of money, partly from 
 want of members mutually assisting, do spiritually lor 
 children by writing on paper that which the hospital for 
 children in Paris, les en/ants malades, and the " Club-of- 
 Help " in Madrid try to do physically for the vagabond 
 
 * Nicolai was a publisher and second-rate writer of Berlin. The 
 " Library " was a periodical which contiuued to appear during a 
 of twenty-seven years. — Tb.
 
 SECOND ED.] LEVANA. 79 
 
 children of the streets — we wish to cure and teach their 
 souls. 
 
 The author allows himself only to mention four im- 
 portant works on education which he has read since the 
 publication of his own. The teaching of the general 
 apart from the particular is, just as much as the teaching 
 of the particular apart from the general, a departure from 
 the correct instruction which comprises both : but this 
 fruitful combination is found in Schwarz's " Erziehungs- 
 lehre " (lessons in education) especially in the copious 
 classification of the different species of dispositions (vol. 
 iii. part i.). Of such flower-catalogues of child-souls we 
 cannot have too many ; they are, as it were, the little 
 Linnasan labels on the seedlings of a tree and flower 
 nursery. All our partitioned-cases for the characters of 
 children are, however, as comprehensive and therefore as 
 little classifying as a high book-case with only two shelves 
 in it might be. The bud-indications of future genius, 
 for example, we have scarcely at all, except only from 
 themselves when they have already borne flowers and 
 fruit ; but the early watching of them by another would 
 give a richer and purer return than their own after- 
 recollection : it is a pity only that the teachers seldom 
 know beforehand which child will be greater than them- 
 selves. It is true that through this ignorance on the part 
 of the teachers the powers of the spirit of not even one 
 genius will run wild, grow deformed, or become weakened 
 — for such a one (for example Winckelmann) breaks like 
 the moth from its chrysalis through the hard earth of all 
 restraints without damage to the tender wings — but the 
 powers of the heart, which often it little knows itself how 
 to rule, can easily by unskilful hands be contorted into 
 lasting errors. Thus it would be best that a father should 
 always look upon his children as endowed with genius if 
 at all possible (and this is easy, since he desires it only 
 too much), and therefore keep, upon chance, a harvest 
 register of their developing power. 
 
 Whilst Schwarz in his "Lessons," by a detailed 
 treatment of the subject, and by a noble kindliness of 
 disposition appeals more to the mothers, Niethammer 
 in the " Streite des Philanthropismus und Humanismus "
 
 80 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. | PREFACE, 
 
 (Conflict of Philanthropism and Humanism), addresses 
 himself more to the fathers ; inasmuch as he recommends 
 and prefers the formal education by means of languages 
 as being the education of the whole correctly, rather than 
 the material instruction through objects, as being piece- 
 meal education ; and would strengthen and steel the inner 
 man more by intellectual labour than by intellectual feed- 
 ing. With his pleasing enmity towards the present time — 
 which by natural histories, Bertuchian picture-books, and 
 other apparatus for the eye, transforms school-rooms into 
 alps, where the plant is forced till it is meagre and small 
 and its blossom over-large — I sympathized joyfully, 
 as early as the first and second chapters of the seventh 
 section, and I do so still. The educational power of 
 philology becomes its own proof by means of his masterly 
 logical demonstration. He is only wrong, as it seems, in 
 excluding from the fellow-workers in the vineyard of 
 formal education the deep-planting Pestalozzi, who, it 
 may be, belongs even to its pioneers. As Pestalozzi's 
 earliest harvests are invisible, that is to say, are only roots 
 which cannot be disclosed to view, so his formal plan 
 of education by means of mathematics differs from that 
 of " Humanism " through philology only in respect to 
 the tool employed. Both teachers are driven in their 
 harvest-wagon towards the same point, but as they sit 
 opposite to each other they look only at each other and 
 at contrary roads. 
 
 Graser in his work "Divinitiit der Menschenbildung" 
 (Divineness of Human Education), sets out the four great 
 means of advance towards Divinity (like the four gospels), 
 Justice, Love, Truth, and Art or Beauty, as the four edu- 
 cational elements. Certainly, instead of the word " Di- 
 vinitiit " (divineness), as unusual as it is supermundane, 
 he might with more conformity to language and life have 
 said " Gottiihnlichkeit " (likeness to God), seeing that the 
 best education, as a second after-creation of the God-like 
 image in man, can only leave us all as vapoury cold mock- 
 suns to the primeval Sun of the world, standing no higher 
 than the clouds of earth. In truth, the educational 
 principle of Divineness existed already in the earlier one 
 of Humanity, since only as God-Man do we find and know
 
 SECOND ED. J LE7ANA. SI 
 
 divinity in mankind ; but the radiance of the Ideal dwell- 
 ing in pure eternity throws us the light upon our path 
 more clearly than the human-reality dimmed by time 
 For the rest, the author, who has not so much woven-in as 
 woven-on the definite to the most general, surprises us 
 pleasantly at the conclusion with definite embodyings, 
 in fact, with hints so practical that one would willingly 
 have given them a good deal more space and room for 
 play, by clearing away earlier sheets of transcendentalism. 
 But can he not take some ordinary white sheets, and give 
 us upon them as long a continuation of his Education- 
 praxis as we have already desired to have in our hands? 
 
 In the " Allgemeine Padagogik " (Universal-Pedagogic) 
 of Herbart the beautiful language beguiling with bril- 
 liancy and charms cannot, however, divert the wish that 
 he had not used the title-privilege " universal " so univer- 
 sally, and carried it throughout, so that the reader is 
 obliged to fill in the too spacious forms with supplementary 
 contents. In a philosopher, if he be a teacher, one finds 
 often enough, to be sure, only the polar star which, it is 
 true, serves well for a long voyage round the world, but 
 not for a short one in the world : even as philosophers in 
 general resemble the Jewish prophets (or even weather- 
 prophets ) r who predict more easily of a century than their 
 own approaching death-day, just as in history (if I may 
 allow myself a too ponderous comparison) even Providence 
 unveils itself not in years, but in centuiies — and scarcely 
 in them, since the revealing century becomes again the veil 
 of the next. But when Herbart wishes to strengthen 
 and to stretch the muscle-strings and bowstrings of the 
 character, then he enters powerfully into the special and 
 definite, and with good reason, since the drift of his words 
 and thoughts bear witness that he possesses one himself. 
 Certainly for education, the character is the true elemental- 
 fire : if only the instructor has it, it will, if not enkindle 
 at any rate give warmth and bring out abilities. The 
 present century — a volcanic isle that glows, works, 
 trembles, and heaves — should at length have learnt and 
 discovered from the political colossus who is now stand- 
 ing on the borders of two centuries, through the victories* 
 over his sea-fishers toiling hither and thither, the con 
 
 i- o
 
 82 JEAN PAUL TEIEDltlCH PJCHTER. [PREFACE. 
 
 tents and worth of a character : for a character is a rock 
 on which stranded sailors land, and the headstrong are 
 wrecked. No happy future for a nation was ever yet to 
 .he built up but by hands of which the first and second 
 fingers could, intellectually, clench themselves into fists. 
 So says hoary History to this very day, but she speaks 
 as a chattering woman and sibyl more and more year by 
 year, and knows not how to stop. 
 
 This most recent, computed wealth of educational works, 
 even with the omission of many other sources of profit, 
 elevates the German, amongst European nations, to the 
 position of the teaching one ; and German schools, like 
 several towns in France, ought to bear the honourable 
 title of " the good." Even as Lessing called the insignifi- 
 cant-seeming Jews the educators of the human race, so in 
 the Germans perhaps we may be promised the educators 
 of the future. Love and strength, or inner harmony and 
 courage, are the poles of education : so Achilles learnt 
 from the centaur to play the lyre and at the same time 
 to draw the bow. 
 
 Yet let us above all consider, before we invert the delu- 
 sion of sailors — who often take ice-fields for land — and 
 take the land of the future for an ice-field, that to all 
 nations of the earth, even the more servile (to say nothing 
 of those more free), the nursery of education has remained 
 as a sunny spot and a refuge for freedom undestroyed by 
 time and circumstance. 
 
 Amongst all secret societies and clubs which the State 
 in critical times often prohibits, the family-clubs of as 
 many children as one has had baptized are yet endured 
 without hesitation. Let us then, with the short child- 
 arm — that is to say with the long arm of the lever — build 
 and move the future, and unweariedly and bravely help 
 to work out the good of the present, and to bury-in the 
 bad. Yes, even he, whose children's fruit-harvest may 
 tarry too long, let him say to himself, " my grandchildren 
 too are human beings," and let him continue to sow. 
 
 Jean Paul Fe Eichtek. 
 Baireuth, 2\»t November, 1811.
 
 ( 83 ) 
 
 LEVANA; 
 
 OR, 
 
 THE DOCTBINE OF EDUCATION. 
 
 FIKST FBAGMENT. 
 
 Chap. I. Importance of Education, § 1—3. Chap. II. Discourse 
 against its Influence, § 4 — 15. Chap. III. Discourse for the same, 
 § 16—20. 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 IMPORTANCE OE EDUCATION. 
 §1. 
 
 When Antipater demanded fifty children as hostages from 
 the Spartans, they offered him, in their stead, a hundred 
 men of distinction ; unlike ordinary educators, who pre- 
 cisely reverse the offering. The Spartans thought rightly 
 and nobly. In the world of childhood all posterity stands 
 before us, upon which we, like Moses upon the promised 
 land, may only gaze, but not enter; and at the same time 
 it renews for us the ages of the young world behind 
 which we must appear ; for the child of the most civilised 
 capital is a born Otaheitan, and the one-year-old Sans- 
 culotte a first Christian, and the last children of the 
 earth came upon the world with the paradise of our first 
 parents. So, according to Bruyn, the children of the 
 Samojeds are beautiful and only the parents ugly. If 
 there were a perfect and all-powerful system of education, 
 and a unity of educators with themselves and with one 
 
 g 2
 
 84 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [FEAG. I. 
 
 another ; then, since each generation of children begins 
 the history of the world anew, the immediate, and through 
 it the distant future, in which we can now gaze and grasp 
 so little, would stand much more fairly in our power. 
 For deeds and books — the means by which we have 
 hitherto been able to work upon the world — always find 
 it already defined and hardened and full of people like 
 ourselves ; only by education can we sow upon a pure, 
 soft soil the seeds of poison or of honey-bearing flowers ; 
 and as the gods to the first men, so do we, physical and 
 spiritual giants to children, descend to these little ones, 
 and form them to be great or small. It is a touching and 
 a mighty thought that now before their educator, the 
 great spirits and teachers of our immediate posterity 
 creep, as the sucklings of his milk-store — that he guides 
 future suns, like little wandering stars, in his leading- 
 strings. And it is all the more important because he can 
 neither know whether he has before him, to unfold to good 
 or evil, a hell-god for humanity, or a protecting and light- 
 giving angel ; nor can foresee at what dangerous moment 
 of futurity the magician, who, transformed into a little 
 child, now plays before him, will rise up a giant. 
 
 § 2. 
 
 Our immediate future demands thought : our earth is 
 filled with gunpowder — like the age of the migration of 
 nations, ours prepares itself for spiritual and political 
 wanderings, and under all state buildings, professorial 
 chairs and temples the earth quakes. Do you know 
 whether the little boy who plucks flowers at your side 
 may not one day, from his island Corsica, descend as a 
 war-god into a stormy universe, to play witl storms and 
 to destroy, or to purify and to sow ? Would it then be 
 indifferent whether, in educating him, you had been his 
 Fenelon, his Cornelia, or his Dubois ? For although you 
 might not be able to break or bend the power of genius — 
 the deeper the sea, the more precipitous the coast ; — yet 
 in the most important initiatory decade of life, in the 
 first, at the opening dawn of all feelings, you might 
 surround and overlay the slumbering lion energies with
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 85 
 
 all the tender habits of a gentle heart and all the hands 
 of love. Whether an angel or a devil educate that great 
 genius is of far more importance than whether a learned 
 doctor or a Charles the Simple teach him. 
 
 Although a system of education must, in the first 
 instance, provide for the beings endowed with genius — 
 since these, though they seldom arise, yet alone rule the 
 world's history, either as leaders of souls, or of bodies, or 
 of both — yet would such a system too much resemble a 
 practical exposition of how to conduct one's self in case of 
 winning the great prize, if it did not observe that the 
 multitude of mediocre talents on which a great one can 
 act are quite as important in the mass as the man of 
 genius is in the individual. And therefore, since, on the 
 one hand, you give to posterity, as alms to a beggar, 
 through children ; and, on the other, must send these last, 
 like unarmed men, into a hidden period whose poisonous 
 gales you know not : so there is nothing more important 
 to posterity than whether you send forth your pupil as 
 the seed-corn of a harvest, or the powder-train of a mine 
 which destroys itself and everything with it : and nothing 
 is more important to the child than whether you have or 
 have not given him a magic jewel which may preserve 
 and conduct him uninjured. 
 
 Let a child be more holy to you than the present which 
 consists of things and matured men. By means of the 
 child — although with difficulty — by means of the short 
 lever arm of humanity, you set in motion the long one, 
 whose mighty arc you can scarcely define in the height 
 and depth of time. But there is something else you 
 certainly know ; namely, that the moral development — 
 which is education, as the intellectual is instruction — 
 knows and fears no time nor futurity. In this you give 
 to the child a heaven with a pole-star, which may ever 
 guide him in whatever new countries he may afterwards 
 reach. 
 
 § 3. 
 
 A perfect child would be a heavenly Aurora of tho 
 soul ; at least its appearance would not be so variously 
 restrained and so difficult as that of a perfect man,
 
 S6 JEA PAUL FKIEDEICH MCHTEE. [FRAG. 1. 
 
 On him everything, from the state down to himself, 
 exercises a forming influence ; but on the fresh child, 
 parents repeat with full power the lawgiving, moulding 
 character of Lycurgus and of Moses; they can sepatate 
 their pupil from others, and form him without interference, 
 better than a Spartan or Jewish state could do. Con- 
 sequently one ought to expect more from the unlimited 
 monarchy of parents. Children living in this kingdom, 
 without Salic law, and in such an overflow of laws and 
 lawgivers that the rulers are often more numerous than 
 the ruled, and the governing house larger than the 
 governed — having everywhere before them cabinet orders, 
 and offended majesties, and most rapid mandata sine clau- 
 sula, and behind the glass the exalted sceptre of the rod 
 — possessing in their sovereign their bread-master, as well 
 as their pain and pleasure master — and protected against 
 him by no foreign power ; for mal-treatment of slaves is 
 punished in many countries, even of cattle in England, 
 but nowhere of children, — children, then, thus absolutely 
 governed without opposition party, or anti-ministerial 
 gazette, and without representatives, should i^sue, one 
 would think, out of this smallest state within the state, 
 far better educated than grown-up persons educated in the 
 greatest of all educational establishments, the state itself. 
 Nevertheless, both educational establishments and states 
 seem to work so uniformly, that it is worth while, next 
 to the necessity of education, to consider, in the two 
 following discourses, its possibility. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 INAUGURAL DISCOURSE AT THE JOHANNEUM-PAULLLNUM ; OR, 
 PROOF THAT EDUCATION EFFECTS LITTLE. 
 
 § 4. 
 
 Most honoured Inspector of schools, Rector, Con- and Sub- 
 rector, master of the third class ! most worthy teacher of 
 the lower classes and fellow-labourers! I hope I shall.
 
 CHAP. II. j LEVANA. 87 
 
 to the best of my abilities, express my pleasure at being 
 inducted as lowest teacher into your educational estab- 
 lishment by entering on my post of honour with the proof 
 that school education, as well as home education, has 
 neither evil consequences nor any other. If I am so 
 fortunate as to lead us all to a quiet conviction of this 
 absence of consequences, I may also possibly obtain that 
 we shall all fill our laborious offices easily and cheerfully, 
 without boasting, and with a certain confidence that 
 needs fear nothing ; every day we shall walk in and out 
 among the pupils, sit on our teaching-chair as on an easy 
 chair, and let every thing take its own course. 
 
 First, I believe, I must set forth who are the educators 
 and complete fashioners of children, — for fashioned, in one 
 way or another, they are ; and in which way rests with 
 and in us ; — and afterwards I will naturally touch upon 
 ourselves, and point out the easy change which may be 
 effected. 
 
 §5. 
 
 Whence comes it that hitherto no age has spoken, coun- 
 selled and done so much about education as our own ; and 
 again, among nations, none so much as Germany, into 
 which Eousseau's winged seeds have been blown out of 
 France and ploughed in? The ancients wrote and did 
 little for it ; their schools were rather for young men than 
 children, and in the philosophical schools of Athens the 
 learner frequently was, or might be, older than the teacher. 
 Sparta was a Stoa, or garrison-school, at once for parents 
 and children. The Romans had Grecian slaves for their 
 schoolmasters, and yet their children became neither 
 Greeks nor slaves. In the ages when the great and 
 glorious deeds of Christendom and knighthood and free- 
 dom rose like stars on the dark horizon of Europe, school 
 buildings lay scattered around as mere dull, little, dark, 
 savage huts, or monks' cells. And what have the political 
 vowels of Europe — the English — whose island is a school 
 of citizens, and whose election every seven years is a 
 wandering seven-day Sunday school ? what have they 
 hitherto better than mere establishments for mal-education? 
 Where do the children more resemble the parents — and to
 
 88 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTEK. [FRAG. I. 
 
 any thing else than a mirror of himself, be it a flat, a 
 concave, or a convex one, the teacher cannot wish to 
 mould and polish - his pupil — than even in those places 
 where the educators are silent, among savages, Green- 
 landers and Quakers ? 
 
 And the further one looks back through past ages to the 
 hoary nations of antiquity, the fewer school books and 
 Cyropedias — in fact, from want of all books — were there : 
 all the more was the man lost in the state ; all the less 
 was the woman, who might have educated, formed for it : 
 nevertheless, every child was the image of its parents, 
 which is more than the best ought to desire, since God can 
 only behold his own image in men as a caricature. And 
 are not our present improved educational institutions a 
 proof that men can raise themselves freely and without 
 aid from bad to better, and, consequently, to all other 
 establishments of a similar kind ? 
 
 §6. 
 
 But who then educates in nations and ages ? — Both ! — 
 The living time, which for twenty or thirty years struggles 
 unceasingly with men through actions and opinions, 
 tossing them to and fro as with a sea of waves, must soon 
 wash away or cover the precipitate of the short school 
 years, in which only one man, and only words taught. 
 The century is the spiritual climate of man, mere education 
 the hothouse and forcing pit, out of which he is taken and 
 planted for ever in the other. By century is here meant 
 the real century, which may as often truly consist of ten 
 years as of ten thousand, and which is dated, like religious 
 eras, only from great men. 
 
 What can insulated words do against living present 
 action ? The present has for new deeds also new words ; 
 the teacher has only dead languages for the, to all appear- 
 ance, dead bodies of his examples. 
 
 The educator has himself been educated and is already 
 possessed, even without his knowledge, by the spirit ot 
 the age, which he asiduously labours to banish out of the 
 youth (as a whole city criticises the spirit of the whole 
 city). Only, alas ! every one believes himself to stand so
 
 CHAP. II.] LEVANA. 89 
 
 precisely and accurately in the zenith of the universe, that, 
 according to his calculation, all suns and nations must 
 culminate over his head ; and he himself, like the countries 
 at the equator, cast no shadow save into himself alone. 
 For were this not so, how could so many — as I also here- 
 after propose to do — speak of the spirit of the age, when 
 every word implies a rescue from, and elevation above it ; 
 just as we cannot perceive the ebb and flow of the tide in 
 the ocean, but only at its boundaries, the coasts. In like 
 manner a savage cannot depict a savage so clearly as a 
 civilized man can do. But in truth, the painters of the 
 spirit of the age have for the most part represented the 
 last one, nothing more. The great man, the poet and 
 thinker, has never been so clearly known to himself that 
 the crystal light-holder and the light have become one ; 
 much less then have other men. However easily 
 blooming every man may open towards the sky, he is yet 
 drawn down by a root into the dark, firm earth. 
 
 §7. 
 
 The spirit of the nation and of the age decides and is at 
 once the schoolmaster and the school ; for it seizes on the 
 pupil to form him with two vigorous hands and powers ; 
 with the living lesson of action, and with its unalterable 
 unity. If — to begin with unity — education must be, like 
 the Testament, a continuous endeavour to withdraw the 
 force of interrupting mixtures, then nothing builds up so 
 strong as the present, which ceases not for a moment and 
 eternally repeats itself; and which, with joy and sorrow, 
 with towns and books, with friends and enemies — in short, 
 with thousand-handed life, presses and seizes on us. No 
 teacher of the people continues so uniformly one with him- 
 self as the teaching people. Minds, molten into masses, 
 lose something of free movement, which bodies, for in- 
 stance that of the world, perhaps that of the universe, 
 seem to gain by their very massiveness, and as heavy 
 colossi move only the more easily along the old, iron- 
 covered track. For however much marriages, old age, 
 deaths and enmities, are in the individual case subject to 
 the law of freedom ; yet lists of births and deaths can
 
 f 
 
 90 JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH RICHTER. [FEAG. I. 
 
 be made for a whole nation, and it may be shown that 
 in the Canton of Berne (according to Mad. de Stael) the 
 number of divorces, as in Italy that of murders, is the 
 same from year to year. Must not, now, the little human 
 being placed on such an eternally and ever similarly acting 
 world be borne as upon a flying earth, where the only 
 directions that a teacher can give avail nothing, because 
 he has first unconsciously received his line of movement 
 upon it ? Thence, in spite of all reformers and informers, 
 nutions, like meadows, reach ever a similar verdure ; 
 thence, even in capital cities, where all schoolbooks and 
 schoolmasters, and even parents of every kind educate, the 
 spirit maintains itself unalterably the same. 
 
 Repetition is the mother not only of study but also of 
 education. Like the fresco painter, the teacher lays colours 
 on the wet plaster which ever fade away, and which he 
 must ever renew until they remain and brightly shine. 
 V\ ho then, at Naples for instance, lays the colours most 
 frequently on the spiritual tablet of one individual, the one 
 tutor, or the multitude of 30,000 advocates, 30,000 lazzaroni, 
 and 30,000 monks ; a threefold company of fates, or nine- 
 fold one of nine murderers, compared with which Vesuvius 
 is a quiet man who suffers himself to be entreated by 
 Saint Januarius * (although not in January) ? 
 
 Certainly one might say that also in families there 
 educates, besides the popular masses, a pedagogic crowd of 
 people ; at least, for instance, aunts, grandfathers, grand- 
 mothers, father, mother, godparents, friends of the family, 
 the yearly domestics, and at the end of all, the instructor 
 beckons with his fore-finger, so that — could this force 
 continue as long as it would gladly be maintained — a 
 child, under these many masters, would resemble, much 
 more than one thinks, an Indian slave who wanders about 
 with the inbnrnt stamps of his various masters. But how 
 does the multitude disappear compared with the highe-i 
 one by which it was coloured ; just as all the burnt marks 
 of the slave yet cannot overcome the hot black colouring 
 of the sun, but receive it as a coat of arms ir a sable 
 field! 
 
 * The protecting ^aint of the NeaDolitans against Ves vius.
 
 CHAP. IT.] LEVANA. 91 
 
 §8. 
 
 The second mighty power by -which the spirit < f the 
 age and people teaches and conquers is the living actior . 
 Not the cry, says a Chinese author, but the rising of 
 a wild duck impels the flock to follow him in upward 
 flight. One war fought against a Xerxes inflames the 
 heart quite differently, more purely and more strongly 
 than the perusal of it three times in Cornelius, Plutarch, 
 and Herodotus : for this last, along with the whole 
 teaching of school phrases, is merely an intellectual imi- 
 tation in cork (a phelloplastic, according to Bottiger's 
 retranslation into the Greek) in order easily to represent 
 ancient temples and magnificent buildings in light cork 
 forms. /Yea, the mere ancestral images of deeds in 
 Plutarch's Westminster Abbey cast the seeds of the divine 
 word more deeply into the heart than one or a few thou- 
 sand volumes of sermons full of true pulpit eloquence^ 
 Heaven ! if words could be compressed to deeds, only a 
 thousand to one, could they yet arouse upon an earth in 
 which pulpits, professois' chairs and libraries of all ages 
 snow down unceasingly their most pure cold exhortations, 
 one single passion to hurl forth volcanic fire? Would not 
 history then be surrounded with mere snow craters and 
 icebergs ? Ah ! most respected teachers, if even we, with 
 our great college libraries that preach to us for tens of 
 years, have never once been brought so far as to become 
 holy men for a month, nay for a week, what dare we 
 expect from the few volumes of words which we let fall in 
 school hours ? Or what more should the parents at home 
 expect ? 
 
 The pedagogic powerlessness of words is unfortunately 
 confessed in a peculiar manner, which is daily renewed in 
 each of us. Namely, every individual being is divided 
 into a teacher and his scholars ; or is split up into the 
 teacher's chair and the scholars' bench. Should you now 
 believe that this perpetual house-tutor in the four chambers 
 of the brain — who daily gives private lessons to the sharer 
 of his apartment, philanthropist and boarder — who is a 
 morning, evening and night preacher — who never ceases
 
 92 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH IIICHTER. [FRAG. I. 
 
 with his eonversatorium and repetitorinm — who accom- 
 panies the pupil, whom he loves as himself and conversely, 
 everywhere with notes of instruction as tutor on hi* 
 travels, in i<lle hours and wine-drinkings, by seats on the 
 throne, by the chair of instruction and elsewhere — who, 
 as the most unlimited head-master to be found under the 
 skull, ever sleeps with his scholar, as a serjeant with a 
 recruit, in the same bed, and from time to time reminds 
 him of much when a man has forgotten himself, — in short, 
 could you believe that this so extremely rare Mentor, who 
 from the pineal gland, as the lodgiDg place of the high 
 light, eternally teaches downward, nevertheless after fifty 
 and more judgments and years, has experienced nothing 
 better in his Telemachus, than what the pure Minerva 
 (the well-known anaanonymous Mentor in the Telemachus) 
 with all her modesty, in the greatest head of the world, in 
 that of Jupiter, also had to experience, namely, that she 
 could not spare her pupil a single one of his animal 
 transformatii >ns ? This, indeed, were scarcely to be 
 believed if we did not daily see the most lamentable 
 instances of it in ourselves. There is, for example, in the 
 history of the learned something very usual and very 
 pitiful : that excellent men have resolved for many years 
 to rise earlier in a morning, without much coming of it — 
 unless they may perhaps break through the habit at the 
 last day. 
 
 § 9. 
 
 ' Permit us to return : and since we have easily asked 
 whether a man may be more effectually moved by a 
 thousand outward foreign words than by a billion of his 
 own inward ones, let us not be very much astonished if 
 the stream of words which is given to the youth, in order 
 that he may thereby guide and bear himself up in the 
 ocean, should be dissipated by the winds and waves on 
 every side. But give us leave to remark that we lay 
 many things to the account of school-rooms, that is, of 
 words, which have in fact had their sole origin on the 
 common teaching-ground of action ; just as, in former 
 times, general pestilences were ascribed to the poisoning 
 of particular wells by the Jews. The schoolhouse of the
 
 CHAP. II.] LEV ANA. 93 
 
 young soul does not merely consist of lecture and lesson 
 rooms, but also of the school ground, the sleeping room, 
 the eating room, the play-ground, the staircase, and of 
 every place. Heaven ! what intermixture of other in- 
 fluences, always either to the advantage or prejudice of 
 education ! The physical growth of the pupil nourishes 
 and draws forth a mental one ! Nevertheless, this is 
 ascribed to the pedagogic tan-bed ; just as if one must 
 not necessarily grow cleverer and taller at the same time ! 
 One might quite as properly attribute the service of the 
 muscles to the leading-strings. Parents very often in their 
 own children regard that as the effect of educational care 
 and attention which in strangers they would merely con- 
 sider the consequence of human growth. There are so 
 many illusions ! If a great man have gone through any 
 one educational establishment, he is ever after explained 
 by that : either he did not resemble it, and then it is held 
 to have been a moulding counter-irritation ; or he did, and 
 then it acted as an incitement to life. /In the same way 
 one might regard the blue library, whose binding taught 
 the librarian Duval his first lessons in arithmetic, as an 
 arithmetical book and school for arithmetic^ If parents, 
 or men in general, in all their education seek nothing else 
 than to make their physical image into their more perfect 
 mental one, and consequently to varnish over this copy 
 with the departed brightness of the original, then must 
 they readily fall into the mistake of esteeming an inborn 
 resemblance an acquired one. and physical fathers spiritual 
 ones, and nature freedom. /, But in this and the former 
 consideration, that holds true of children which does of 
 nations : there were found in the new world ten customs of 
 the old — six Chinese in Peru, four Hottentotish in western 
 America*, — without any other nearer descent to account 
 for these resemblances than the general one from Adam, 
 )r humanity, y^ 
 
 §10. 
 
 ^ We may, excellent fellow-workers, especially flatter 
 ourselves with services to humanity when the position is 
 proved true, that we effect little, or nothing, by education^ y 
 * Ziminermann's History of Man, vol. iii. U^aCpt"^
 
 94 JEAN PAUL FR1EDR1CH RICHTER. [FRAG. I. 
 
 y/ As in the mechanical world every motion, if the opposition 
 of friction were removed, would be unceasingly continued, 
 and every change become eternal ; so, in the spiritual 
 world, if the pupil less bravely opposed and vanquished 
 the teacher, a more beggarly life would be eternally 
 repeated than we can at all picture to ourselves. I mean 
 this : if all the ways and times of this poor earth were to 
 be filled with dull stiff images from pedagogic old prin- 
 cipality-ltw-codes and Swabia-law-codes, that is with 
 counterfeits of school-men, so that consequently every age 
 would be reprinted from the preceding one, manikin for 
 manikin ; * what else is wanted for this tedious misery but 
 that education should succeed beyond our expectations, 
 and a tutor and schoolmaster allow his head, like a crowned 
 one, to pass stamped in all hands and corners ? And a 
 whole bench of knights might become an assembly of 
 candidates fit for the tournament, because they had been 
 previously clean and well copied after the quiet burgher's 
 pattern ? 
 
 "pBut we will venture to hope the opposite ; the school- 
 master and tutor is ever afterwards connected with the 
 nobleman as God with natureS,, concerning which Seneca 
 justly writes — semel jussit, semper paret — i.e., the tutor's 
 study is very soon closed, and the ante-chamber and 
 audience-hall opened. 
 "p In order not to fall into the error of those who introduce 
 the bird Phoenix and the Man in the Moon un wived, I have 
 here in my thoughts girls also, on whom, as on pigeons 
 and canary birds, false colours are painted by governesses, 
 as well as by tutors, which the first rain or moulting 
 removes. But, as has been said, every woman becomes in 
 time something peculiar ; a beautiful Idioticon of her 
 many provinces of language. " — 
 
 §11. 
 
 Through long teaching, to which no advance of the 
 pupil is sufficiently proportioned, schoolmasters of under- 
 standing may arrive at the question : " How will the poor 
 
 • An expression used of a second edition when it is a reprint of the 
 first ; which (as this minor proposition demonstrates) is not the case here.
 
 CHAP. II.] LEVANA. 95 
 
 scholar be able to walk in the right path without our 
 leading-strings, since even with them he runs into error ?" 
 — and also at this wish : " Good heavens ! that we could 
 but wind him up and fix him, exactly like an astronomical v, 
 hundred-yeared chronometer, so that he might show the 
 hours and positions of the planets and every thing quite 
 accurately long after our death ! " — and consequently at 
 this opinion : " That they were in fact the soul of his inner 
 man, and had to raise his every limb, or were at least his 
 supporting mould, in which he ought not merely to carry 
 his broken arm, as in a gentle bandage, but also his 
 leg, his head and his entrails, so as to be completely 
 strengthened." If the tutor accompany his young master 
 to the university, the one goes into much good society 
 without the other : and if they both at last set off on their 
 travels, the young gentleman goes into much of a suspicious 
 nature, and the tutor ends his anxiety ; — which resembles 
 the anxiety of a mother as to how the poor naked fetus 
 can exist when it comes into this cold blowing world and 
 is no longer nourished by hei blood, a 
 "i Truly your singing bird of a pupil will continue to 
 whistle for you through the night ; because, by a night- 
 light, that is by an education out of season, you delude 
 him into the belief of an artificial day-light ; but, when 
 he once flies into the open air, he will then only arrange 
 his notes and sound them at the general break of day. y 
 
 If we place ourselves on another eminence to con- 
 template thence the directions, fears and demands oi 
 teachers, we almost feel tempted to drive them down from ; 
 their lofty position, especially because they, the educators, 
 assume and presume so much ; for they do not take and 
 set before them the great World-plan as their school-plan, ^L 
 nor the All-educator as an example to the poor hedge- 
 schoolmaster man, — but do so anxiously endeavour, with 
 their narrow views, to assist the infinite Pedagogiarch 
 (Prince of teachers) who permits sun to revolve round 
 sun, and child round father, and so the child's and father's 
 father are alike, — as if humanity, neglected for thousands 
 of years, were laid before them, like warm wax, on which 
 they had to impress their own individual induration, to 
 pr )duce future indurations ; so that they might as re-
 
 96 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. I, 
 
 creators agreeably surprise the Creator with a living sea. 
 and plaster cabinet of their coats of arms and heads. 
 A lcng period, and here again a long period ! 
 
 * 
 
 § 12. 
 
 None of all my hearers, of whom I am the nearest, car 
 have forgotten that at the commencement I asked why 
 so much at present in Germany is written about educa- 
 tion and grounded upon it, as I also myself intend to lay 
 some printed ideas on the subject before the public. I 
 answer, for this reason ; because by cultivation all 
 humanity has become a speaking machine, and the flesh a 
 word. (The more education the more notions p) the less 
 action the more speech ; man is becoming a •'man by 
 profession, as there were formerly Christians by profession; 
 and the ear his sensorium commune. The beggar, for 
 instance, passes by the great citizen unnoticed ; the one 
 has fled from the other, not merely in deed, but beyond 
 that, in word : just as battles, pestilences and such like, 
 pass over us only as gentle sounds. Therefore is poetry 
 so beneficial as a counterbalance to civilisation, because it 
 draws an artistic life round the thin shadows, and erects 
 on the battle-field of mere sensuous views its own glorious 
 visions. But as the German spends no time so willingly 
 as a time for consideration — to the most important step he 
 made, namely that into life, he took an eternity of con- 
 sideration — he prefers steady, slow writing, to quick 
 hither and thither roving speech ; unlike the Southerns, he 
 is less a speech-loving than a writing-loving people, as his 
 registries and book-shelves prove. "A word, a man,"*V 
 means now " black on white, a man." Writing and fact, 
 or clothing and body, are now as distinct from one another 
 as shoe and foot, which, as a measure, mean with us the 
 same thing.*! It all depends on one little stroke whether 
 Christ is Goa or not; namely, on the well-known passage, 
 1 Tim. iii. 16, in the Alexandrine codex, where a little 
 stroke with the back of the pen changes OC [i.e. Os] into 
 
 * A common proverbial expression, signifying that no written 
 contract is necessary when a man has given his word. — Tb.
 
 CHAP. II. J LEVANA. 97 
 
 ©C (©eos), and upon an " Or " in the Carolina,* whether a 
 man should be hanged or not. 
 
 ^ But now if the inner being of the cultivated man is 
 merely composed, like some drawings, of letters and words, 
 then enough can never be said of and in education, since 
 the consciousness of having separated the inner life into 
 ideas, consequently into words, secures the certainty of 
 being able again to re-construct it by means of the sepa- 
 rated component parts, that is, by means of words ; in 
 short, to educate through the means of speech, by the pen 
 and the tongue. " Draw," said Donatello to the sculptors, 
 " and you will be able to do the rest." " Speak," say we 
 to teachers, " and you will show how to act."/. 
 
 yAs every kind of existence only propagates itself by 
 itself ; for example, deeds only by deeds, words by words, 
 education by education ; we will, excellent fellow labourers, 
 cheer and strengthen ourselves in the hope that our teach- 
 ing may spiritually reward us by the elevation of our 
 pupils into teachers, who may hereafter speak more ex- 
 tendedly with others ^\and that our Johanneum-Paullinum 
 may serve as an educational institution for many educa- 
 tional institutions, while we send forth from our school- 
 gates matured house-tutors, school -keepers and catechizers, 
 to produce their equals in good school-houses, — not Cyruses, 
 but Cyropedias and Cyropedagogiarchs. 
 
 § 13. 
 
 I now turn to the most worshipful fathers of the city, 
 our supporters and school- archs, not only with thanks, but 
 also with entreaties. There remains, namely, in the most 
 unpractical men and speakers a something harsh and real 
 — it is called, harshly enough, Stomach — which, from 
 selfishness, values in the tongue only its imports, not its 
 exports. Enough ; every one possesses this member ; and 
 it is this especially that makes us wish our school might 
 be raised into a finance or industrial school for all Ihose 
 who receive their incomes from it, so that every one who 
 as scholar subscribes to it may gladly again enter it in 
 
 * Art. 159.
 
 98 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH RICHTER. [FRAG. I. 
 
 order to be paid as teacher. Moreover our school book- 
 shop, less truly school-library, and our school-purse, yea 
 and our school widow's fund, might be well supported; 
 and so of -every thing else, for the only school sickness 
 which teachers have is hunger, an evil for whicb the state 
 should supply domestic means, or so called housekeeper s 
 provision. 
 
 But since all of us, especially as educators of youth, wish 
 to live for something fairer and more enduring than our 
 dinner of black soup, for which we must first all day long 
 distribute whipping-soup, I venture, unabashed, to prefer 
 the proud request : That the desk from which the third 
 master and music teacher, as well as myself, have to pro- 
 pound the needful instruction, may be newly coloured, 
 merely like a book or a Prussian post house, black and 
 white ; and that the Lyceum may receive, if not the name 
 Gymnasium, yet the epithet Royal, and that we may all, 
 as far as possible, be addressed by the title of Professors. 
 Perhaps the school friendship, which has hitherto con- 
 fined itself to the scholars, might then be extended to the 
 teachers. Fiat ! — Dixi ! 
 
 § 14. 
 
 Scarcely had the author composed and delivered this 
 inaugural discourse, than so much of a resignation speech 
 was found in it, that a fair opportunity to deliver this 
 also, and to explain himself more at large, was afforded by 
 his removal which occurred a few days afterwards. There- 
 by he was placed in a position to take leave of his fellow- 
 teachers as publicly as he had received his dismissal, and 
 at the same time to choose as text for his short farewell 
 discourse — The Educational Chair (which he mounted for 
 the second and last time), and to impress upon them its 
 importance.
 
 CHAP. III.l LEVANA. 99 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATION. 
 § 15. 
 
 Most honoured brothers in office! In laying down my 
 short-held office with a certain consoling consciousness 
 that none of those intrusted to my charge will ever stand 
 forth to reproach me with an erroneous plan of teaching, 
 or with hours of instruction gossiped away, I can find no 
 theme for a farewell more connected with the subject than 
 the consideration how deeply a good education penetrates 
 into the heart of the age ; and I choose this the more readily, 
 because it will give me an opportunity to place in a new 
 light much that the day before yesterday was laid down 
 by my predecessor in this desk, the deliverer of the in- 
 augural discourse, — for here I do not venture to speak of 
 myself in any other way since my dismissal. 
 
 It shall only be proved that he advanced mere sophisms, 
 which originally, according to Leibnitz, signified only exer- 
 cises in wisdom. 
 
 " For what other reason," he asks, " do men now write 
 so much about education, than because," he answers, " our 
 whole existence has passed into words, and words so easily, 
 by means of tongues and ears, into the soul." But is this, 
 pray, anything different from what I myself maintain ? 
 We shall see. 
 
 §16. 
 
 No former age or people is to be compared with any 
 since the invention of printing ; for since that time there 
 have been no more isolated states, and consequently no 
 isolated influence of the state on its component parts. 
 Strangers and returned travellers, whom Lycurgus ex- 
 cluded from his republic, like episodes and the intervention 
 of gods from the dramatic unities, now traverse every 
 country in the shape of cheap books and waste paper. No 
 one is any longer alone, not even an island in the most 
 distant sea ; thence comes it that the political balance of 
 
 H 2
 
 100 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [FEAG. I. 
 
 power of many states collected under one arm of the 
 balance is now first mooted. Europe is an interlaced, 
 mis-grown, banyan-forest round which the other qiiarters 
 of the world creep, like parasitic plants, and nourish them- 
 selves on its decayed parts. Books form a universal 
 republic, a union of nations, or a society of Jesus, in a 
 nobler sense, or a Humane society, whereby a second or 
 duplicate Europe arises ; which, like London, lies in 
 several counties and districts. As now, on the one side, 
 the book-pollen flying everywhere brings the disadvantage 
 that no people can any longer produce a bed of flowers 
 true and unspotted with foreign colours : — as now no state 
 can be any longer formed purely, slowly, and by degrees 
 from itself, but, like an Indian idol composed of different 
 animals, must see the various members of the neighbouring 
 states mingled with its growth ; — so, on the other side, 
 through the (Ecurnenic Council of the book-world, the spirit 
 of a provincial assembly can no longer slavishly enchain its 
 people, and an invisible church frees it from the visible 
 one. — And therefore we educate now with some hope for 
 the age because we know that the spoken word of the 
 German teacher is re-echoed by the printed page ; and that 
 the citizen of the world, under the supervision of the 
 universal republic, will not sink into the citizen of an 
 injurious state, all the more because, though books may be 
 dead yet glorified men, their pupils will ever hold them- 
 selves as their living relatives. 
 
 ")C That the age writes so much on education shows at once 
 its absence and the feeling of its importance. Only lost 
 things are cried about the streets. The German state 
 itself no longer educates sufficiently ; consequently the 
 teacher should do it in the nursery, from the pulpit, and 
 from the desk. The forcing-houses in Eome and Sparta are 
 destroyed, — in Sinai and in the Arabian desert some few 
 yet stand. The old circle, that the state should plan 
 and direct the education, and this again act on that, has 
 been very much rectified, or indeed squared, by the art 
 of printing; for now men, elevated above all states, 
 educate states ; dead men, for instance, like Plato ; just as 
 in the deep old morning- world, according to the Saga, 
 .angels with glories wandered about, guided, like children,
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 101 
 
 the new men who had sprang out of the rains, and, having 
 ended their instruction, vanished into heavenX The earth, 
 according to Zach's ingenious idea, has been formed from 
 congregated moons ; one moon, striking on the American 
 side, drove the deluge over the old world ; the sharp- 
 pointed, wildly -up-piled Switzerland is nothing more than 
 a visible moon that once tumbled from its pure ether down 
 to the earth, — and so there is in intellectual Europe, far 
 more than in any age or quarter of the world not addicted 
 to printing, a congregation of soul-worlds, or of woi'ld- 
 souls, sent or fallen from heaven. >(The great man has now 
 a higher throne, and his crown shines over a wider plain ; 
 for he works not only by action, but also by writing, — not 
 only by his word, but also, like thunder, by its echo. So 
 one mind influences its neighbouring minds, and through 
 them the masses. As niany little ships draw a large one £ 
 into harbour, so inferior minds bring the great one to shore 
 that it may be unladen, v 
 
 § 17. 
 
 My predecessor, however, might grant or add much ; 
 namely, that if the great body of authors have gradually 
 assumed the educational position once held by quacks and 
 fortunetellers, the great advancing mass of the people, 
 which so easily overpowers in its vast ocean the early 
 teaching of childhood, has itself changed and increased. 
 " Libraries, and two yearly book-fairs — not including the 
 one of reprints at Frankfort — surpass, I should think, a 
 few schoolbooks and their expounders," the deliverer of the 
 address might, and probably does, say. But a principal 
 point here must not be overlooked. 
 
 It is indubitable that everything impresses man either 
 formingly or improvingly ; so that, I think, not merely 
 an assembly of people and of books, and great electric 
 effusions in his heaven's equator discompose him, but also 
 that damp weather unnerves him, — hence it is certain that 
 no man can take a walk without bringing home an in- 
 fluence on his eternity ; every spur, every star of heaven 
 and of knighthood, every beetle, every trip or touch of the 
 hand as certainly engraves itself upon us, as the gentle 
 dewdrop or the hanging of a mist affects the granite
 
 102 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICH RICHTER. [PRAO. I. 
 
 mountains. But just as certainly, on the other hand, is 
 this assertion necessary : " That the strength of every 
 impression depends on our condition yesterday, to-day, and 
 to-morrow." For the human being assimilates more 
 spiritual food the less he has hitherto received ; as he 
 never grows more rapidly and disproportionately to the 
 given nourishment than as foetus : but, after he has reached 
 the point of satiety, he rejects so much that it is well 
 the brief youth of the individual is compensated by the 
 eternal youth of humanity, whose point of satiety is 
 marked on a scale which takes centuries and nations for the 
 fractions of its lines. 
 
 On this account education is always counselled to do as 
 much as possible during the first year of life ; for it can 
 then effect more with half the power than it can in the 
 eighth -with double, when the sense of freedom is aroused, 
 and all the conditions of being indefinitely multiplied. 
 As farmers believe it most advantageous to sow in mist, 
 so the first seeds of education should fall in the first and 
 thickest mist of life. 
 
 In the first place have regard to morality. The inner 
 man is, like the negro, born white and only coloured black 
 by life. If in mature years great examples of moral worth 
 pass by without influencing our course of life more than a 
 flying comet does that of the earth, yet in the deep heart 
 of childhood the first inner or outer object of love, injustice, 
 &c, throws a shadow or a light immeasurably far along its 
 years ; and as, according to the elder theologians, we only 
 inherited Adam's first sin, not his other sins, since in one 
 fall we copied every fall ; so the first fall and the first 
 flight influence us our whole life long. For in this early 
 moment the Eternal works the second miracle ; the gift of 
 life was the first. It is then that the God-man is con- 
 ceived and born of human nature ; that self-consciousness, 
 whereby a responsible being first appears, may be boldly 
 called a conscience and a God — and unblessed is the hour 
 in which this growing human being finds no immaculate 
 conception, but in the moment of birth the Saviour and 
 his Judas meet. Too little attention has been paid to this 
 one invaluable moment, its environments and its fruits. 
 There are men who can remember far back to this bounding
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 103 
 
 hour of existence, in which their self-consciousness suddenly 
 burst through the clouds like a sun, and wonderfully 
 revealed a beaming universe. Life, especially moral life, 
 has a flight, then a leap, then a step, then a halt ; each 
 year renders a man less easy to convert, and a missionary 
 can effect less on a wicked sexagenarian than an auto-da-fe. 
 
 § 18. 
 
 What is true of the heart of the inner man is true also 
 of his eye. If the former, like an ancient Christian church, 
 must be turned towards the morning of childhood ; the 
 latter, like a Grecian temple, receives its greatest light 
 from the entrance and from above. For, in regard to 
 intellectual education, the child walks hand in hand with 
 a nature which never returns ; this nature is hitherto a 
 wintry desert full of spring buds : wherever a sunbeam 
 strikes it (for all teaching is warming into life rather than 
 sowing) there the green leaves burst forth, and the whole 
 child's life consists of warm creation days. 
 
 Two forces are at work : first, childlike trust, that 
 imbibing power without which there could be no education 
 and no language, but the child would resemble a bird 
 taken too late from the nest, which must starve because it 
 will not open its beak to the hand which brings its food 
 But this trust shows itself only in the minority, and sleeps 
 in the mass of men and years. The second power is 
 excitability. As in the physical, so in the spiritual child, 
 it exists in the highest degree in the physical and spiritual 
 morning of life, and decreases with age, until at last 
 nothing in the empty world excites the worn-out man 
 except the future. Then the whole universe may strive 
 to press its marks upon the man, but on the hardened 
 matter only weak impressions remain. The spirit of his 
 age and nation must work unceasingly on the child : at 
 first his only teachers are the age and nation. Moravians, 
 Quakers, and especially Jews, give a direction to education 
 which predominates over the surrounding dissimilar ages 
 and people : and although even they are influenced by the 
 spirit of the age and of the multitude, yet it impresses them 
 much more slightly than the masses who are differently 
 educated. And however the spirit of the age may move
 
 104 JEAN PAUL FR1EDR1CH EICHTER. [FRAG. I. 
 
 and turn the heart, that little world, yet, like all balls re- 
 volving on themselves, it retains two innate, immoveable 
 poles — the good and the bad. 
 
 § 19. 
 
 Moreover, the whole mass of people does not, as my pre- 
 decessor seems to assert, rush on the individual human 
 being. Only some few in later as in early life affect the 
 formation of our characters ; the multitude passes by like 
 a distant army. One friend, one teacher, one beloved, one 
 club, one dining table, one work table, one house are, in 
 our age, the nation and national spirit influencing the in- 
 dividual, while the rest of the crowd passes him without 
 leaving a trace behind. But when do individuals affect 
 us so powerfully as in childhood ? or when so long — for in 
 education, as in law*, long means ten years — as in the first 
 decade? The waves of the ocean, besides, before reaching 
 the child, break against four walls which encompass the 
 water of his education or crystallisation : father, mother, 
 brothers and sisters, and a few extra people are his forming 
 world ami mould. But, all this deducted, we must re- 
 member in education that its power, like that of the spirit 
 of the age, which must not be measured by individuals, 
 but by the concentrated mass or majority, — must be judged 
 not by the present, but by the future : a nation or century 
 educated by the same method, presses down the balance 
 quite differently from a casual individual. But we, as 
 ever, desire that Fate, or the Time Spirit, should answer 
 our inquiries by return of post. 
 
 § 20. 
 
 I have in this manner, at least I hope so, laid my own 
 opinion, as well as his, before my opponent and predecessor 
 with a respect which is not so common among the learned 
 body as many an opponent of an opponent believes. For 
 the little that he adds about the absorption of the indi- 
 vidual in the mass merits not contradiction but affirmation. 
 The uniformity of the masses permits many irregularities 
 
 * Longnm tempus es 4 chcem annoruui. Homm. prompt.
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 105 
 
 in the individual; and although the tables of mortality 
 are correct, no one hopes and fears only by them. On the 
 globe itself mountains disappear, and from these at a 
 distance, the stony path ; but he who travels it sees it 
 clearly enough And when the dear good man, along with 
 his complaints of the ineffectiveness of good education, 
 gives way to complaints of the influence of bad education, 
 he then clearly proves by a capability to be ill-educated 
 a capability to be well-educated ; and so education is to be 
 reproached with no want but the want of correct tables of 
 the perturbations of a little wandering star caused by the 
 revolutions of other planets ; and will we not readily 
 concede this ? 
 
 And now, worthy Schoolarchy, I should wish to know 
 what further I have to say from this honourable place ?
 
 106 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. II. 
 
 SECOND FRAGMENT. 
 
 Chap. L Spirit and Principle of Education, § 21—24, Chap. IL 
 The Individuality of the Ideal Man, § 25—30. Chap. III. On 
 the Spirit of the Age, § 31—35. Chap. IV. Religious Education, 
 § 36—38. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 SPIRIT AND PRINCIPLE OF EDUCATION. 
 §21. 
 
 The end desired must be known before the way. All 
 means or arts of education will be, in the first instance, 
 determined by the ideal or archetype we entertain of it. 
 But there floats before common parents, instead of one 
 archetype, a whole picture cabinet of ideals, which they 
 impart bit by bit and tattoo into their children. If the secret 
 variances of a large class of ordinary fathers were brought 
 to light, and laid down as a plan of studies, and reading 
 catalogue for a moral education, they would run somewhat 
 after this fashion : In the first hour pure morality must 
 be read to the child, either by myself or the tutor : in the 
 second mixed morality, or that which may be applied to 
 one's own advantage : in the third, " do you not see that 
 your father does so and so ? " in the fourth, " you are little 
 and this is only fit for grown up people " : in the fifth, 
 " the chief matter is that you should succeed in the world 
 and become something in the state " : in the sixth, " not 
 the temporary but the eternal determines the worth of a 
 man ": in the seventh, " therefore rather suffer injustice 
 and be kind " : in the eighth, " but defend yourself bravely 
 if any one attack you ": in the uinth, " do not make such 
 a noise, dear child ": in the tenth, " a boy must not sit so 
 quiet ": in the eleventh, " you must obey your parents
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 107 
 
 better": in the twelfth, "and educate yourself." So by 
 the hourly change of his principles the father conceals 
 their untenableness and one-sidedness. As for his wife, she 
 is neither like him, nor yet like that harlequin who came 
 on to the stage with a bundle of papers under eacn arm, 
 and answered to the inquiry what he had under his right 
 arm, " orders," and to what he had under his left, "counter- 
 orders; " but the mother might be much better compared 
 to a giant Briareus, who had a hundred arms, and a 
 bundle of papers under each. 
 
 This government of the demi-gods, so frequently and so 
 suddenly changed, proves clearly not only the absence, but 
 also the necessity and the right of a superior god : for in 
 the generality of souls the ideal, without which men would 
 sink down into four-footed beasts, reveals itself rather by 
 inner discord than unison, rather by judgments on others 
 than on itself. But with children the result of this may 
 be, and often has been, various and half-coloured pupils, 
 whom (unless some rare peculiarity makes them hard and 
 uciinjurable) the spirit of the age, or the accident of 
 necessity and pleasure, can easily break with its wheel, or 
 even twine round it. The majority of educated men are, 
 therefore, at present Sn illumination which burns off by 
 fits and starts in the rain, shining with interrupted forms 
 and depicting broken characters. 
 
 But the bad and impure spirits of educational systems 
 are yet to be reduced into other divisions. Many parents 
 educate their children only for themselves, — that is, to be 
 pretty blocks, or soul-alarums, which are not set to move 
 or sound when stillness is required. The child has merely 
 to be that on which the teacher can sleep most softly, or 
 drum most loudly ; who having something else to do and 
 to enjoy, wishes to be spared the trouble of education, 
 duly but most unreasonably expecting its fruits. Hence 
 these dull sluggards are so often angry because the child 
 is not at once cleverer, more consistent and gentler than 
 themselves. Even zealous children's friends, like states- 
 men, often resemble inflammable air, which, it is true, 
 gives light itself, but in so doing extinguishes every 
 other : at least a child must often be to them, what a 
 favourite assistant must be to a minister, sometimes only
 
 108 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. I. 
 
 the hand, which copies, sometimes a head which can work 
 by itself. 
 
 Related to those teachers who wish to be machine- 
 makers, are the educators for appearances and political 
 usefulness. Their maxims, thoroughly carried out, would 
 only produce pupils, or rather sucklings, passively obedient, 
 boneless, well-trained, patient of all things — the thick, 
 hard, human kernel would give place to the soft, sweet 
 fruit-pulp — and the child's clod of earth, into which 
 growing life should breathe a divine spirit, would be kept 
 down and manured as though it were but a corn field, — 
 the edifice of the state would be inhabited by lifeless 
 spinning machines, calculating machines, printing and 
 pumping apparatus, oil mills, and models for mills, pumps 
 and spinning machines, &c. Instead of every child, born 
 without past and without future, beginning in the year one, 
 and bringing with him a first new-year, the state, forsooth, 
 must step into and usurp the place of a remote posterity, 
 which alone could make him spiritually, as well as 
 physically, young again, and substitute for him a system 
 of teaching which only stops his wheels and surrounds 
 them like hardened ice. 
 
 Nevertheless the man comes before the citizen, and our 
 future, beyond the world as well as in our own minds, is 
 greater than both : how then have parents, who in the 
 child clothe and bind up the man into a servant, — for 
 instance, into custom-house officers, kitchen-purveyors, 
 jurists, &c. — obtained the right to mxiltiply themselves 
 otherwise than physically, instead of begetting spiritual 
 embryos ? Can care of the body impart a right of spiritual 
 starvation, or of good-living such as the devil would pre- 
 scribe a soul, since no body can outbalance, nay, not even 
 balance, a soul ? The ancient German and Spartan custom 
 of killing weak-bodied children is not much crueller than 
 that of propagating weak-minded ones. 
 
 §22. 
 
 Usefulness to others is only separated from usefulness 
 to one's self as dishonesty is from uncharitableness : both 
 are united in self-love. Hedgerows and Hercules-pillars,
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 109 
 
 however perfect, are blameable as soon as they diminish 
 the free world of a future man. If Mengs, hy slavery of 
 body and soul, made his son, Raphael Mengs, into a 
 painter — according to Winckelmann the Grecian p+ate only 
 reached art through and for freedom — he did but adopt 
 the old Egyptian custom, that the son must follow the 
 trade of his father, only in its higher branches. 
 
 Much of this holds good with regard to domestic orphan- 
 house chaplains, who transform the whole children's train- 
 ing into a church-training and bible-institution, and make 
 free, happy children into bowed-down cloister novices. 
 For the human being is not formed to grow altogether 
 upwards, like plants and deer's horns ; nor yet altogether 
 downwards, like feathers and teeth ; but like muscles, at 
 both ends at once : so that Bacon's double motto for kings, 
 " Remember that thou art a man, remember that thou ait 
 a god, or vice-god," may serve also for children ! 
 
 Education can neither entirely consist of mere unfolding 
 in general, or, as it is now better called, excitement — for 
 every continued existence unfolds, and every bad educa- 
 tion excites, just as oxygen positively irritates — nor in the 
 unfolding of all the powers, because we can never act upon 
 the whole amount of them at once ; as little as in the 
 body susceptibility and spontaneity, or the muscular and 
 nervous system, can be strengthened at the same time. 
 
 A purely negative education, such as that of Rousseau 
 only seems to be, would at once contradict itself and 
 reality as much as an organic living body full of powers 
 of growth without means of excitement : even the few 
 wild children who have been captured received a positive 
 education from the raging and flying animals around them. 
 A child's coffin only can represent a negative hedge-school, 
 prince's school, and school-door. The purely natural man — 
 whom Rousseau sometimes, indeed very often, confounds 
 with the ideal man, because both are equally pure and 
 distinct from the mere worldly man — grows entirely by 
 excitement. Rousseau, in the first place, prefers arousing 
 and influencing the child by things rather than by men, by 
 impressions rather than by discourses ; and, in the second,
 
 110 JEAN PAUL FMEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. II. 
 
 recommends a more healthy and useful series of excitements, 
 whilst his predecessors in teaching had hastened to use 
 upon the susceptible nature of children the most powerful 
 excitements, such as God, Hell, and the Kod ! Only give 
 the souls of children free passage from the limbus * patrum et 
 infantum and Nature, he seems to think, will unfold her- 
 self. This, indeed, she does every where and at all times, 
 but only in ages, countries and souls, which possess a 
 marked individuality. 
 
 § 24. 
 
 Perhaps we may find the centre and focus of these 
 crossing lines and beams from this point of view : If a 
 modern Greek, without any knowledge of the mighty past, 
 were depicting the present condition of his enslaved race, 
 he would find it approaching the highest step of civilisation, 
 morality and other excellences, until a magic stroke 
 revealed to his astonished eye Greece in the Persian war, 
 or Athens in its glory, or fruitful Sparta, like an empire 
 of the dead, like Elysian fields. What a difference in the 
 same nation, vast as that between gods and men ! Never- 
 theless, those gods are not genii, nor in any way exceptions, 
 but a people, consequently the majority and average of 
 talents. When in history we look round on the heights 
 and mountain ranges where glorified nations dwell, and 
 then down into the abysses where others lie enchained, we 
 say to ourselves, — the heights that a multitude has reached 
 thou also canst reach, if thou canst not descend into the 
 depths. The spiritual existence that a nation, a majority 
 of any people, has embodied and showed forth in glory, 
 must dwell and breathe in every individual, else could he 
 not recognise in it a kindred being. 
 
 And so, indeed, it is. Every one of us has within him 
 an ideal man which he strives, from his youth upwards, to 
 cherish or to subdue. This holy Soul-spirit every one 
 beholds most clearly in the blooming time of all his powers 
 — in the season of youth. If only every one were distinctly 
 conscious of what he once wished to become, of how differ- 
 ent ar.d much nobler a path and goal his opening eye, 
 compared with his fading one, beheld ! For if we believe 
 
 * The place whither, according to an old Catholicism, unbaptiaed 
 innocents went after life.
 
 CHAP. II.] LEVANA. Ill 
 
 in any contemporaneous growth of the physical and 
 spiritual man, we must also assume that the blooming 
 season of both occurs simultaneously. Consequently, his 
 own ideal being will appear most clearly to the man 
 (though it be only in vague desires and dreams) in the 
 full bloom of youth. ■ And does not this show itself in the 
 meanest soul which, though fallen during its pilgrimage 
 through sensual and covetous affections, yet once attained 
 a higher hope, and stood within the gates of heaven ? At 
 a later period, in the multitude, the ideal being fades day 
 by day, and the man becomes, sinking and overpowered, 
 the mere j)resent, a creature of necessity and neighbourhood. 
 But the universal complaint, " What might I not have 
 become !" confesses the present existence, or the past 
 existence, of an older Adam in paradise, along with and 
 before the old Adam. 
 
 But the ideal man comes upon the earth as an anthro- 
 polithe (a petrified man) : to break this stony covering 
 away from so many limbs that the rest can liberate them- 
 selves ; this is, or should be, Education. 
 
 The same normal being who, in every noble soul, remains 
 as house tutor and silently teaches, should be outwardly 
 manifested in the child, and make itself independent, free, 
 and strong. But first of all we must discover what it 
 is. The ideal man of Fenelon — so full of love and full 
 of strength — the ideal man of Cato the younger — so full of 
 strength and full of love — could never exchange, or meta- 
 morphose themselves into each other, without spiritual 
 suicide. Consequently, education has in 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 TO DISCOVER AND TO APPRECIATE THE INDIVIDUALITY OF THE 
 IDEAL MAN. 
 
 §25. 
 
 Let a needful breathing space be granted here ! In 
 most languages, like a symbol, the adjective and verb 
 u good " and " be " are irregular. Physical power expresses
 
 112 JEAN PAUL FFIEDRICII RICHTER. [FRAG. II. 
 
 its superfluity in the variety of genera ; hence the tem- 
 perate zone maintains only 130 distinct quadrupeds, hut 
 the torrid 220. The higher kinds of life separate, according 
 to Zimmermann, into more species ; thus, beyond the five 
 hundred species of the mineral kingdom, lies the animal 
 world with seven million. It is so with minds. Instead 
 of the uniformity of savage nations in different ages and 
 countries, for instance, of the American Indians and the 
 ancient Germans, is seen the many-branched, varied forms 
 of civilised people in the same climate and period : just as 
 the art of gardening multiplies sorts of flowers in different 
 colours ; or time separates a long strip of land in the ocean 
 into islands. In so far a meaning may be attached to 
 the saying of the schoolmen, that every angel is its own 
 species. 
 
 §26. 
 
 Every educator, even the dullest, admits this, and 
 imprints on his pupils this reverence for peculiarities, that 
 is, for his own ; at the same time he labours industriously 
 to secure this point — that each be nothing else than his 
 own step-son or bastard self. He allows himself as much 
 individuality as is necessary to eradicate that of others and 
 plant his own in its stead. If, in general, every man is 
 secretly his own copying machine which he applies to 
 others, and if he willingly draws all into ghostly and 
 spiritual relationship with himself as soul's cousins — as, for 
 instance, Homer gladly converted the four quarters of the 
 world into Homerides and Homerists, and Luther into 
 Lutherans — much more will the teacher strive, in the 
 defenceless, unformed souls of children, to impress and 
 reproduce himself ; and the father of the body endeavour 
 to be also the father of the spirit. God grant it may 
 seldom succeed ! And most fortunately it does not pros- 
 per ! It is only mediocrity which supplants that of others 
 by its own; that is, one imperceptible individuality by 
 another equally imperceptible : hence the multitude of 
 imitators. From a wood-cut some thousand impressions 
 may easily be taken ; but from a copperplate only a tithe 
 of that number. 
 
 It were indeed too pitiable for Europe if it were
 
 CHAP. II.] T.EVANA. 113 
 
 altogether sown with Tituses, as every Titus secretly 
 wishes, or with Semproniuses, as the Semproniuses desire ! 
 What a thick, dead sea would be floating along from the 
 usuriously-increasing resemblance of teachers and pupils ! 
 
 § 27. 
 
 As every teacher, even the rigidest, admits that he highly 
 values two strongly marked individualities — namely, that 
 before the deluge which formed his own, and that own 
 itself — and regards them as the two mountain ranges 
 which give birth to the streams below and the vales of 
 Tempe ; and as, moreover, every self-taught man maintains 
 that every thing remarkable in the world has been created 
 by adding and subtracting, but not by transplanting, 
 individualities, some other illusion than that of mere 
 selfishness must be at the foundation of this disregard of 
 the peculiarities of others. 
 
 § 28. 
 
 It is, in truth, the excusable error that confuses the 
 ideal with ideals ; and which, had it lived during the 
 week of creation, would have created all angels, all Eves, 
 or all Adams. But although there is only one Spirit of 
 Poetry, there are many different forms i\± which it can in- 
 corporate itself — comedies, tragedies, odes, and the thin 
 wasp's body of the epigram ; so the same moral genius 
 may become flesh — here as Socrates, there as Luther, here 
 as Phocion, there as John. As no finite can truly reflect 
 the infinite ideal, but only narrowly mirror it back in 
 parts, such parts must necessarily be infinitely various ; 
 neither the dew-drop, nor the mirror, nor the ocean reflect 
 the sun in all its greatness, but they each represent it round 
 and bright. 
 
 § 29. 
 
 I — God excepted, who is at once the great original I and 
 Tlwu — is the noblest as well as the most incomprehensible 
 thing which language expresses, or which we contemplate. 
 It is mere at once, like the whole world of truth and 
 
 i. I
 
 114 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTEE. [FRAG, n 
 
 conscience, which, without I, is nothing. We must ascribe 
 the same thing to God as to unconscious matter when we 
 think of the being of the one, the existence of the other. 
 A second I is, in other respects, even more inconceivable to 
 us than a first. 
 
 Every J is a personal existence, consequently a spiritual 
 individuality- — for a bodily one is so extended that a 
 portion of the sky, earth, city must belong to it as a body ; 
 — this personal existence does not consist in Fichte's theory 
 of rendering the J objectively subjective, that is, in the 
 change of the reflection of what was first mirrored, and 
 which every where returning cuts off all number and 
 time, so that nothing is explained by it, no reflection by its 
 counter-reflection. Further, it does not consist in an acci- 
 dental weighing backwards and forwards of single powers ; 
 for, first, to every embodied army a governing and con- 
 trolling master-spirit is indispensable ; and, secondly, all 
 distinct forces in organic connection rise and fall with 
 the weather-glass, age, &c, alongside the unchanging 
 individuality. 
 
 But it is an inner sense of all senses ; as feeling is the 
 sense common to the four external senses. It is that in 
 others on which our reliance, friendship or enmity rests, 
 and is either an enduring inaptitude, or a capacity for the 
 arts of poetry and thought. As the same incomprehensible 
 organic unity, subjecting to itself disjointed matter, 
 governs and acts differently in plants, in animals, and in 
 their every variety, and multiplies itself in organic per- 
 sonal existence, so also does the higher spiritual unity. 
 The theological question of the schools whether the God- 
 man might not have appeared as a woman, a brute animal, 
 or a gourd, is symbolically affirmed by the infinite variety 
 of individual existences in which the Divine Being 
 manifests himself. It is that which unites all aesthetic, 
 moral and intellectual powers into one soul ; and, like the 
 material of light, itself invisible, gives and determines the 
 many-coloured visible universe, whereby first that philo- 
 sophical pole- word ' practical reason, pure I ' ceases only 
 to stand in the zenith of heaven like a pole-star which 
 marks no north, and consequently no quarter of the world. 
 
 We should know better how to value and protect this
 
 CHAP. II. J LEVANA. 115 
 
 spirit of life, this individuality, if it always stood forth as 
 strongly as in the man of genius. For we all perceive 
 how great a defeat of spirits would arise in a passive war 
 of giants ; if, for instance, Kant, Raffaelle, Mozart, Cato, 
 Frederick the Great, Charles the Twelfth, Aristophanes, 
 Swift, Tasso, and so forth, were all forced into the same 
 press, and formed in the same mould. Even one man of 
 genius, by the exchange and compensation of individual 
 peculiarities, could only become another in a manner 
 resembling the forcible union of two polypi. But if the 
 primary faculty of an ordinary nature be broken, what 
 can result from it but a perpetual confused wandering 
 about itself — a half imitation arising in spite of. not out 
 of, itself — a parasitical worm living on another being, the 
 mimic of every new example, the slave of every master at 
 his elbow ? If a human being be once thrown out of his 
 own individuality into a foreign one, the centre of gravity 
 that held together his whole inner world becomes moveable 
 and wanders from spot to spot, and one oscillation passes 
 into another. In the meantime the teacher has to 
 separate from the individuality which he allows to grow 
 another which he must either bend or guide ; the one is 
 that of the head, the other that of the heart. Every 
 intellectual peculiarity, be it mathematical, artistic, 
 philosophical, is a beating heart, which all teaching and 
 gifts only serve as conducting veins to fill with material 
 for working and motion. At this exact point more weight 
 may be added to the preponderating weight of natural 
 disposition ; and the teacher must not give in the morning 
 of life a sleeping draught — say to peculiar talents for art. 
 The moral nature, however, must be quite differently 
 treated ; if that be melody, this is harmony : you must 
 not enfeeble an Euler by engrafting on him a Petrarch, 
 nor the latter by the former ; for no intellectual power can 
 become too great, and no painter too great a painter. 
 But every moral faculty needs to have its boundaries 
 fixed in order to the cultivation of its balancing powers ; 
 and Frederick the Great may take his flute, and Napoleon 
 his Ossian. Here education may, for instance, deliver 
 sermons on peace to the heroic character, and charge with 
 electric thunder the disposition of a Siegwart. So one 
 
 i 2
 
 116 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICH EICHTER. [FEAG. II. 
 
 might — since, with girls, head and heart are reciprocal — 
 frequently put a cooking spoon into the hand of the boy 
 of genius, and into that of the little cook by birth some 
 romantic feather from a poet's wing. For the rest let it 
 be a law that, as every faculty is holy, none must be 
 weakened in itself, but only have its opposing one aroused ; 
 by which means it is added harmoniously to the whole. 
 
 So, for instance, a weakly affectionate heart must not 
 be hardened, but its sense of honour and purity must be 
 strengthened ; the daring spirit must not be rudely 
 checked and made timid, but only taught to be loving and 
 prudent. 
 
 The conditions may now be required of me under which 
 is to be formed the character of the child, and also that of 
 the prize or ideal man into which he is to be fashioned. 
 But for that purpose one book among the endless multitude 
 of books would not serve ; moreover the books must possess 
 the rare gift of being interpreters of the dreams and 
 symbols of the closely-folded child's character ; which, in 
 a child, who does not display everything matured as a 
 grown-up man, but only budding, would be as difficult to 
 discover as a butterfly in the chrysalis to all who are not 
 Swammerdams. But alas ! three things are very difficult 
 to discover and to impart — to have a character — to draw 
 one — to guess one. To ordinary teachers a naughty trick 
 seems a wicked nature — a pimple or a pock-mark as parts 
 of the countenance. 
 
 If one must translate the prize and ideal man into words, 
 one might perhaps say, that it is the harmonious maximum 
 of all individual qualities taken together, which, without 
 regard to the resemblance of the harmony, is yet connected 
 in all its different parts, as one tone in music is with 
 another. Whosoever now, out of the musical abc d efg, 
 should change, for instance, a piece set in a to b, would 
 injure the piece much, but not so much as a teacher who 
 would convert the ail-variously arranged natures of 
 children into one uniform tone. 
 
 §30. 
 
 To elevate above the spirit of the age must be re- 
 garded as the end of education; and this must stand
 
 CHAP, in.] LEVANA. 117 
 
 clearly developed before us ere we mark out the appointed 
 road. The child is not to be educated for the present — for 
 this is done without our aid unceasingly and powerfully — 
 but for the remote future, and often in opposition to the 
 immediate future. The spirit which is to be shunned 
 must be known. Permit me then a 
 
 THIRD CHAPTER, 
 
 OX THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE. 
 §31. 
 
 You invoke the Spirit of the Age freely and boldly, but 
 let it truly appear before us in your discourse, and do you 
 answer? Since time separates into ages, as the rainbow 
 into falling drops, indicate the greatness of the age of 
 whose indwelling spirit you speak. Has it a century of 
 duration ; and by what chronology is it reckoned — the 
 Jewish, the Christian, the Turkish, or the French ? Does 
 not the expression " spirit of the century " easily escape the 
 lips of a man because he, born in a century and partly 
 measuring one with his life, really means nothing more by 
 " age " than the little day-span which the eternal sun 
 describes from the morning to the evening of his life ? — Or 
 does the age extend from one great event (the Reformation, 
 for instance) to another, so that the spirit of the first 
 vanishes as soon as the second is born? And what re- 
 volution will be considered by you the animating one of 
 the age— a philosophical, a moral, a poetical, or a political 
 
 one 
 
 Further : is not every spirit of the age less changing 
 than flying, — indeed, already flown ; what might be more 
 properly called the spirit of that immediately preceding ? 
 For its traces presuppose that it is already gone, conse- 
 quently gone further. And only from lofty heights can the 
 backward road be surveyed and the future estimated. 
 
 But since the same period unfolds at the present time a 
 totally different spirit in Saturn — in his satellites — ir. his
 
 118 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [FEAG. II. 
 
 rings — upon all the countless worlds of the present ; and 
 again in London, Paris, Warsaw ; and since it follows that 
 the present moment of time must have a million different 
 spirits of the age, — I would ask you where the invoked 
 spirit of the age is clearly manifested — in Germany, 
 France, or where ? As, before, you found it difficult to 
 mark out its limits in time, so will you now to determine 
 them in space. 
 
 I partly spare you the great question which concerns 
 every one, yourself among the number, — how you, how all 
 encircled in the same age, can raise yourselves so far above 
 its waves as to be able to observe its course, not merely to 
 feel its dark irresistible march ? And does not the stream 
 which bears you lead into an ocean whose movements 
 you cannot measure because it has no shore ? 
 
 §32. 
 
 What we call spirit of the age our ancestors called the 
 end of the world, the latest times, signs of the last day, 
 kingdom of the devil and of Antichrist. Mere melancholy 
 names ! No golden or innocent age ever called itself 
 golden, but only expected one ; and an age of lead 
 expected one of arsenic : — only the past glitters, as ships 
 occasionally draw after them a shining train. But the 
 former interpretations of dreams and gazings into the 
 present — would that some one would collect such a dream 
 book of departed great spirits ! — teach us to mistrust those 
 now made. If man, from the observation of the three 
 quarters of the globe, could not prophetically construct the 
 fourth from the combinations of matter, far less can ho 
 divine a future from the more complicated ones of spirit. 
 For man is feeble and poor : his star-reading of the future 
 — a mere strengthening or weakening of the present — sees 
 only a crescent moon in the sky, -which waxes and wanes 
 in unison with himself, but no sun. Every one regards 
 his own life as the new-year's eve of time, and also, like 
 the superstitious, his dreams, woven from memories, as 
 prophecies for the year. Thence there always comes — 
 not the foretold good or evil, nor yet its opposite, but 
 eomething quite different, which receives the prophecies
 
 CHAP. Ill] LEVANA. 119 
 
 and their objects as an ocean does the rivers, and resolves 
 them into the circle of its waves. For, in the moment 
 when yon are prophesying in the desert, the fine seed- 
 pollen of an oak falls upon the earth and, in a century, 
 grows up to be a forest. How, indeed, could man 
 accurately divine any approaching age without at the 
 same time knowing and depicting all after times ? He, 
 for instance, who, from the present course and position of 
 the winds, clouds and planets during one academical half 
 year, could accurately guess the weather of a second, 
 might and must be able, from the data he had foretold, to 
 decipher the third season's weather, and from that every 
 succeeding one — supposing no intervention ; — but there 
 do always intervene comets, earthquakes, the clearing of 
 forests, or the growth of new ones, and all the other 
 power of the Almighty. In the same way, before the eye 
 of the seer, one century after another must be produced in 
 regular order, consequently thousands of years, and finally, 
 the whole time which can dwell upon an earth ; supposing 
 as has been already said, nothing intervenes. But, heavens! 
 What is there does not intervene ! The prophet himself 
 — and the freedom of the spiritual world — and the 
 Almighty, who here withdraws and there sends forth 
 spirits and suns. Thus it is that every one lives so 
 completely in a spiritual twilight (a beautiful word for 
 that dusky time of day) that God himself decides which of 
 the two contending lights shall gain the victory by a new 
 one from the sun or the moon, which men so frequently 
 mistake the one for the other. 
 
 §33. 
 
 How, indeed, were this foregoing two-and-thirtieth 
 paragraph to be written or to be comprehended, if 
 something more were not added about it ; namely, a three- 
 and- thirtieth which follows after it? The older the 
 world grows, the more complacently can it, and will it, 
 adopt the prophesying character of an elder. From the 
 fore-world a spirit speaks an ancient language to us, which 
 we should not understand if it were not born with us. 
 It is the Spirit of Eternity, which judges and overlooks 
 every spirit of time. And what does it say of the present?
 
 120 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG, n. 
 
 Very hard words : — It says that the age can now more 
 easily raise up a great people than a great man ; because 
 the powerful union springing from civilisation joins 
 together the men of one spirit like the vapour-drops of a 
 huge steam engine ; so that even war is now only a war- 
 game between two living creatures. Something, it says, 
 must have decayed in our age, for even the mighty 
 earthquake of the Revolution before which for centuries, 
 as before a physical earthquake, an infinite multitude of 
 worms had crept out of the ground and covered it, has 
 produced and left behind it nothing greater than pretty 
 wings on these said worms. The Spirit of Eternity, which 
 judges the heart and the world, strongly declares what 
 spirit is wanting to the present men inspired by the 
 senses, to these fire-worshippers of the passions, — the Holy 
 one of Him who is above the earth. The ruins of His 
 temple sink lower and lower into the present earth. 
 Prayer is thought to draw along with it the false lights 
 of fanaticism. The apprehension and belief in what 
 is beyond the world, which formerly extended its roots 
 under the foulest ages, bear no fruits in our pure thin 
 air. If, formerly, religion was in war, there is now no 
 longer war in religion — there has grown for us out of 
 the world a mighty edifice, out of ether a cloud, out 
 of God a mere power, out of heaven a coffin ! 
 
 At last the Spirit of Eternity holds up before us our 
 shamelessness, by which we, in our darkness, have per- 
 mitted to play, as a festive illumination, the flames of 
 anger, love and desire, from which all religions, all 
 ancient nations, all great men have held themselves aloof, 
 or regarded with shame : and it says that we, living only 
 in our hate and hunger, like other decaying corpses, 
 only retain our teeth uninjured, the instruments both of 
 revenge and enjoyment. Passion belongs of right to the 
 sickness of the age ; nowhere is found so much impatience, 
 carelessness, indulgence towards self and unrelenting 
 selfishness towards others as on the sick-bed. Now this 
 century lies upon a sick bed. As among the Spartans 
 the men cut away a full prominent breast as something 
 womanish,* so is the same thing done now in spiritual 
 
 * In Russia in former times it was the fashion for men to stuff out 
 their clothiug into large false breasts.
 
 CHAP. III.] LEV ANA. 121 
 
 matters under the same pretext ; and the heart must be as 
 hard as the cavity of the chest above it. Finally, there 
 are some very cultivated men who split themselves in 
 opposite directions towards heaven and hell, as a sala- 
 mander cut in two runs forward with its front, backwards 
 with its hind part. 
 
 § 34. 
 
 So speaks the severe spirit within us, the Eternal one ; 
 but it becomes milder if we hear it to the end. Every 
 heartfelt lamentation and weeping over any age points, 
 like a spring on a mountain, to some higher mountain or 
 peak : only those nations remain sunk in their lethargy 
 who go in the same dull path from age to age, not lament- 
 ing over themselves but over others : and those who suffer 
 from the mental falling-sickness of the French philosophy 
 have, like bodily epileptics, no consciousness of their malady, 
 but only pride in tlieir strength. Sorrow of the spirit (as 
 Night, according to the Greeks) is the mother of gods ; 
 though that of the body is a dark mist bringing poison 
 and death. The bold and soaring thought of the Talinud- 
 ists— that even God prays; like that of the Greeks, that 
 Jupiter was subject to Fate — receives a meaning from the 
 lofty though often conquered longings of the soul, which 
 the Infinite himself has planted within us. 
 
 One religion after another fades away, but the religious 
 sense, which created them all, can never become dead to 
 humanity : consequently, it will only manifest and lead 
 its future life in more purified forms. The saying of 
 Tyrtoous,* that God, in the commencement, appeared to 
 men in their own likeness, then as a voice, and afterwards 
 only in dreams and by inspiration (or spiritual illumina- 
 tion), has a beautiful signification for ours, and all future 
 ages, if by dream we understand poetry, and by illumina- 
 tion, philosophy. So long as the word God endures in a 
 language so long will it direct the eyes of men upwards. 
 It is with the Fternal as with the sun, which, if but its 
 smallest part can shine un-eclipsed, prolongs the day and 
 gives its rounded image in the dark chamber. Even in 
 France, which could for a short time observe a total eclipse 
 * Tyrfceus de Apparitione Dei, c. 17.
 
 122 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICIITER. [FEAG. II. 
 
 of the sun, arose a Chateaubriand, a St. Martin and hia 
 admirers, and other kindred spirits. Our present age is 
 indeed a criticising and a critical one, wavering between 
 the desire and the inability to believe, — a chaos of times 
 struggling against one another : but even a chaotic world 
 must have a centre, revolution round that point, and an 
 atmosphere ; there is no such thing as mere disorder and 
 confusion, but even that presupposes its opposite in order 
 to begin. The present religious wars on paper and in 
 the brain — very different from former ones, which were 
 tempests full of heat, rage, devastation and fertilisation — 
 rather resemble the northern lights (thunder and light- 
 ning of the higher and colder quarters of the sky) full of 
 noisy lights without blows, full of strange shapes and full 
 of frost, without rain and in the night. Does not in fact, 
 the bold self-consciousness — the life of this age — extend 
 still further the original character of man and mind ! 
 And can the character of men, the mental waking, ever 
 be too much awake ? At present it is only not sufficiently 
 so ; for an object is necessary to reflection, as its absence 
 is to thoughtlessne>s ; and the common minds of the age 
 are too impoverished to give a rich field to reflection. But 
 there is one strange, ever-returning spectacle : That every 
 age has regarded the dawning of new light as the fire-de- 
 stroyer of morality ; while that very age itself, with heart 
 uninjured, finds itself raised one degree of light above the 
 preceding ! Is it, perhaps, that as light travels faster than 
 heat, and as it is more easy to work upon the head than 
 on the heart, the burst of light, by its suddenness, always 
 appears inimical to the unprepared heart ? 
 
 To the present age is ascribed productiveness and 
 changeableness of opinions, and at the same time indifference 
 to opinions. But that cannot arise from this : no man in 
 all corrupted Europe can be indifferent to truth as such ; 
 for it, in the last resort, decides upon his life ; but every 
 one is at last become cold and shy towards the erring 
 teachers and preachers of truth. Take the hardest heart 
 and brain which withers away in any capital city, and 
 only give him the certainty that the spirit which ap- 
 proaches brings down from eternity the key which opens 
 and shuts the so weighty gates of his life- prison of death,
 
 CHAP, ni.j LEV ANA. 123 
 
 and of heaven, — and the dried-up worldly man so long as 
 he has a care or a wish, must seek for a truth which can 
 reveal to him that spirit. 
 
 The present march of light indicates anything rather 
 than standing still ; and it is only this which begets and 
 immortalizes poison, as it is on stagnant air that tempests 
 and whirlwinds break. Certainly we are very little able 
 to determine in what manner a brighter age than that we 
 have experienced will be educed from the present troublous 
 fermentation. Every varied age, — and therefore our own, 
 — is only a spiritual climate for an approaching spiritual 
 seed ; but we do not know what foreign seed heaven will 
 cast into it. 
 
 Every sin appears new and near, as in painting black 
 stands out most strongly ; man is readily accustomed to 
 the repetition of love, but not to the repetition of injustice. 
 Thence every one regards his own age as morally worse, 
 and intellectually better than it really is; for in science 
 the new is an advance ; but in morals the new, as a contra- 
 diction to our inner ideals and our historic idols, is ever a 
 retrogression. As the errors of nations in past ages, unlike 
 decorative paintings, seem very distorted and shapeless, 
 because distance hides from us their finer and true com- 
 pleteness ; so, on the other side, the black sin-stains of the 
 past, of the Eoman and Spartan for example, show softened 
 and rounded, and, as on a moon, the high rugged shadow of 
 the past falls round and transparent on the present. For 
 instance, if men estimate the worth of the age after a war. 
 that most ancient barbarism of humanity, and especially 
 after the bad innovations consequent upon it, then the 
 spirit of the age rises before this touch of death in frightful 
 illumination and distortion. But war, as the general storm 
 in the moral world, and the tongue and heart-confusing 
 Babel of the physical world, had in every age repeated 
 injustices which only appeared new because each had heard 
 from the preceding age nothing save the number of the 
 vanquished armies and towns ; but experienced in itself 
 the sufferings. On the contrary, our age has, more than 
 any other, besides a certain humanity of war in respect to 
 life, also a growing insight into its unlawfulness. 
 
 Among nations the head has at all times preceded the
 
 124 JEAN FAUL FKIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. II. 
 
 heart by centuries, as in the slave trade ; yes, by thousands 
 of years, as will perhaps be the case in war. 
 
 § 35. 
 
 Since modes of life beget modes of thought, and opinions 
 actions, and head and heart, spiritually as well as 
 physically, mutually improve or injure each other, so has 
 fate, when both are to be healed at once, only one cure, and 
 that a long one ; the harsh viper-like cure of affliction. If 
 sorrow purify men, why not nations ? Certainly, and it 
 is for this reason that men perceive it less, if wounds and 
 fast-days improve the one, battle-fields and centuries of 
 penance do the other, and generations must sink sadly and 
 sorrowfully to destruction. Not by a splendid martial 
 funeral with firing of cannon, but by a battle of the 
 elements, is the sky made blue and the earth fruitful. At 
 the same time in history, as in the almanac, the thick dull 
 St. Thomas's day is shorter than the bright warm St. 
 John's day, although both conduct into new seasons of the 
 year. 
 
 But until, and in order that our children and children's 
 children may pass through the winter centuries, this it is 
 that nearly affects us and education. We must meet the 
 great entanglement by partial unravellings. The child 
 rnust be armed against the future ; yes, even against the 
 close pressing present, with a counterbalancing weight of 
 three powers against the three weaknesses of the will, of 
 love, and of religion. Our age has only a passionate power 
 of desire, like the brute, the madman, the sick, and each 
 weakest thing ; but not that energy of will which was most 
 nobly displayed in Sparta and Rome — in the Stoa, and 
 in the early Church. And now the arts, as the stato 
 formerly did, must harden the young spirit and subdue 
 the will. The uniform colour of a stoic oneness must 
 extinguish the vulgar praise of the various tiger-spots and 
 serpent brilliancy of passionate agitation ; the girl and the 
 boy must learn that there is something in the ocean higher 
 than its waves ; namely, a Christ who calls upon them. 
 
 When the stoic energy of will is formed, there is then 
 a loving spirit made free. Fear is more egoist' c than
 
 CHAP. IV. J LEVANA. 125 
 
 courage because it is more needy ; the exausting parasitical 
 plants of selfishness only attach themselves to decayed 
 trunks. Put power kills what is feeble, as strong 
 decoction of quassia kills flies. If man, created more for 
 love than for opposition, can only attain a free clear space, 
 he possesses love; and that is love of the strongest kind, 
 which builds on rocks, not on waves. Let the bodily heart 
 be the pattern of the spiritual ; easily injured, sensitive, 
 lively, and warm, but yet a tough free-beating muscle 
 behind the lattice work of bones, and its tender nerves 
 are difficult to find. 
 
 As there is no contest about the nature of power and 
 love, but only about the ways to attain them (these, 
 however, penetrate deep into the matter) ; but as about 
 religion, on the contrary, the doubts of many must first 
 be solved as to whether there be only one, and whether 
 different paths lead to it ; so the third point, according to 
 which the child is to be educated against the age, must aim 
 at placing before the soul first, not the means, but the 
 right to educate religiously. Power and love are two 
 opposing forces of the inner man ; but religion is the 
 equal union of both, the man within the man. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 RELIGIOUS EDUCATION. 
 
 § 36. 
 
 Religion is now no longer a national, but a household 
 goddess. Our little age is a magnifying glass, through 
 which, as is well known, the exalted appears flat and 
 level. Since we now send all our children out into a town- 
 like futurity, in which the broken church bells only dully 
 call the populous market place to the silent church, we 
 must, more anxiously then ever, seek to give them a house 
 of prayer in the heart, ami folded hands, and humility 
 before the invisible world, if we believe in a religion and 
 distinguish it from morality.
 
 126 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. II. 
 
 The history of nations determines that there is this 
 separation. There have been many religions, hut there is 
 only one code of morals ; in those a god has always become 
 a man, and, therefore, been concealed under many folds ; 
 in this a man has become God, and been clearly manifested. 
 The middle ages had, along with moral churchyards full 
 of dead bodies and rank vegetation, full of cruelty and 
 lust, also churches and spires for the religious sentiment. 
 In our times, on the contrary, the sacred groves of religion 
 are cleared and trodden down, and the public roads of 
 morality made straighter and more sure. Ah ! a con- 
 temporaneous decline of religion and morality would be 
 too sad ! The age will conceal the departure of me sense 
 for the heavenly by the greater sharpness and severity 
 of that for the mcral ; and at least by small, delicate, and 
 therefore more numerous sides, acquire a moral breadth. 
 As men in towns, where they cannot build in width build 
 in height, so we, reversing the matter, build in width 
 instead of in height ; more over the earth than into the 
 sky. We may truly say that France, in general, with its 
 chemical, physical, mathematical and warlike noon-day 
 lights, can hardly behold in the starry heaven of religion 
 more than a last shadowy quarter of the moon, resembling 
 rather a cloud than a star ; whilst in England and 
 Germany religion is still at least seen as a distant milky- 
 way, and on paper as a star chart ; but one could not, 
 without injustice, describe the religious difference of these 
 countries as a moral one. Was, therefore, and is Stoicism, 
 this noble son of morality, as love is its daughter, in and 
 by itself religion ? If the difference between religion and 
 morality were not founded on something true, it were in- 
 comprehensible how so many fanatical sects of the early 
 and later centuries — for instance, the Quietists — could have 
 arrived at the illusive belief that in the inmost enthusiastic 
 love of God enduring sinfulness consumes itself, so that 
 none remains as it does in the worldly man. It is true 
 that religiousness, in its highest degree, is identical with 
 morality, and this with + hat ; but that equally pertains 
 to the highest degree of every power; and every sun 
 wanders only through the heavenly ether. All that is 
 divine must as certainly meet and unite with morality, as
 
 QHAP. IV.J LEVANA. 127 
 
 science and art ; so that in every soul rescued from sin 
 there must as certainly he religious Tahors as there are 
 hills in the crater of Etna. 
 
 It must be understood that we do not here speak of that 
 beggar religion which only prays and sings before the 
 gates of heaven until the Peter's pence are bestowed 
 upon it. 
 
 §37. 
 
 What then is Religion ? Prayerfully pronounce the 
 answer. The Belief in God. It is not only a sense for 
 the holy, and a belief in the invisible, but a presentiment 
 of it, without which no kingdom of the incomprehensible 
 were conceivable. Efface God from the heart, and every- 
 thing whieh lies above or below the earth is only a recur- 
 ring enlargement of it ; that which is above the earth 
 would become only a higher grade of mechanism and, 
 consequently, earthly. 
 
 If the question be put, What do you mean by the word 
 God ? I will let an old German, Sebastian Frank,* 
 answer: " God is an unutterable sigh lying in the depths 
 of the soul." A beautiful, profound saying ! Hut as the 
 unutterable dwells in every soul, it must be manifested to 
 every stranger by words. Let me give to the God-fearing 
 Spirit of every age the words of our times, and listen to 
 what it says of religion. 
 
 " Eeligion is, in the beginning, the learning of God ; — 
 hence the great name Divine, one learned about God — 
 truly religion is the blessedness arising from a knowledge 
 of God. Without God we are lonely throughout eternity ; 
 but if we have God we are more warmly, more intimately, 
 more steadfastly united than by friendship and love. I am 
 then no longer alone with my spirit. Its great first Friend, 
 the Everlasting, whom it recognises, the inborn Friend of 
 its innermost soul will abandon it as little as it can do 
 itself, and in the midst of the impure or empty whirl of 
 trifles and of sins, on the market-place and the battle- 
 field, I stand with closed breast in which the Almighty 
 and All-holy speaks to me, and reposes before me like a 
 near sun, behind which the outer world lies in darkness. 
 
 * " Zinkrefs der Teutschen sekarpfsinnige kluge Spriicke," 1639.
 
 128 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [FEAG. IE. 
 
 I have entered into His church, the temple of the universe, 
 and remain therein blessed, devout, pious, even if the 
 temple should become dark, or cold, or undermined by 
 graves. What 1 do, or suffer, is no sacrifice for Him, it 
 counts as little as one made to myself; I love Him whether 
 I suffer or not. The flame from heaven falls on the altar 
 of sacrifice and consumes the beast, but the flame and the 
 priest remain. If my great Friend demand something 
 f com me the heaven and the earth seem glorious to me, and 
 I am happy as He is ; if He deny me anything, it is a 
 storm en the ocean, but it is spanned by rainbows, and I 
 recognise above it the kindly sun which has no tempestuous 
 sides, but only sunshiny ones. A code of morality only 
 rules bad, unloving souls, in order that they may first 
 become better and afterwards good. But the loving con- 
 temnlation of the soul's first Friend, who abundantly 
 animates those laws, banishes not merely the bad thoughts 
 which conquer, but these also which tempt. As the eagle 
 flies high above the highest mountains, so does true love 
 above struggling duty. 
 
 " AVhere religion is, there both men, and beasts, and the 
 whole world are loved. Every being is a moving temple 
 of the Infinite. Everything earthly purifies and suns 
 itself in the thought of Him ; only one earthly thing 
 remains darkly existent, sin, the true annihilation of the 
 soul ; or the unceasing Tantalus, Satan. 
 
 " One may with some right speak to others about that 
 of which one never speaks to oneself : for within me He is 
 so near me that I can with difficulty separate His word 
 and mine ; for from the second self my own is reflected, 
 and I only find Him who illumines myself as well as the 
 dew-drop. 
 
 " But if it be no error to believe all this, how wilt Thou, 
 God ! appear to those who have overcome the agitations 
 of life in the one still hour of death ; then, when world 
 after world, human being after human being, has dis- 
 appeared, and nothing but the Eternal remains with tho 
 mortal-immortal ? He who brings God with him into the 
 last darkest night cannot know what it is to die ; for he 
 beholds the Eternal Star in the boundless distance." 
 
 If you do not believe that religion is the poetry of
 
 CHAP. IV. J LEY AN A. 129 
 
 morality, the lofty, nay, the loftiest, style of life, think 
 less of the mystic enthusiasts, who, as despisers of the 
 doctrine of happiness, were willing to he damned if hut 
 the love of God remained within them, than of Fenelon : 
 could you he purer, more steadfast, richer, more self-sacri- 
 ficing, or more hlessed than he, at once child, woman, man, 
 and angel ? 
 
 §38. 
 
 1 1 ow then is the child to he led into the new world of 
 religion ? Not by arguments. Every step of finite know- 
 ledge can be reached by learning and perseverance ; but 
 the Infinite, which supports the end of those steps, can 
 only be seen at a glance, not reached by counting; we 
 arrive there by wings, not by steps. To prove, as to 
 doubt, the existence of God, is to prove or to doubt the 
 existence of existence. The soul seeks its Original — not 
 merely an original world near the present one — that 
 freedom from which finite existence received its laws : but 
 it could not seek if it did not know and did not possess. 
 The greatness of religion is not confined to one opinion, it 
 extends over the whole man ; as greatness, of whatever 
 kind, resembles the rock -bound mountains, one of which is 
 never found alone in a level plain, but rises up among 
 neighbouring heights and extends into a mountain range. 
 
 As there is no corporeal world without a spiritual soul 
 (or no resurrection-ashes without a phoenix), so there is 
 no soul or spiritual world without God ; just as in the 
 same way there is no fate without a Providence. 
 
 The purest distinction of man from the lower animals 
 is neither reflection nor morality ; for sparks at least of 
 these stars shine in the ranks of the brute creation : but 
 religion, which is neither merely opinion nor disposition, 
 but the heart of the inner man, and therefore the ground- 
 work of the rest. In the middle ages, so dark for other 
 knowledge, religion, like the sky at night, hung nearer to 
 the earth and extended brightly over it ; whereas, to us, God 
 like the sun in the day-time, seems only like the key-stone 
 of the arch of heaven. The old chronicler introduces 
 bloody rain — monsters — fights of birds — children's garner 
 — flights of locusts — yes, even sudden deaths — among the 
 
 1. K
 
 130 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [FRAG. II. 
 
 great events of the world, as important signs, as the smoke 
 clouds of an impending war ; and war, a still more impor- 
 tant sign, had, as a judgment upon sin, its heavenly as 
 well as its earthly origin. At the same time this paral- 
 lelism, or rather predetermined harmony between earth and 
 heaven, was at least more consistent than the new physical 
 influence which allows not the day watch of one man hut 
 the thousand-yeared watch of the history of the world to 
 he fixed hy a God, resembling a theatrical one, only that 
 he is not a mock sun, but a real sun ; as if the difference 
 between the earthly and the heavenly rested only on 
 degrees of greatness ; and as if the admission or exclusion 
 ol the Infinite did not equally apply to the whole of the 
 finite universe and to its smallest part ! 
 
 He who possesses religion finds a Providence not more 
 truly in the history of the world than in his own family 
 history : the rainbow, which hangs a glittering circle in 
 the heights of heaven, is also formed by the same sun in 
 the dew-drop of a lowly flower. The diffident modesty of 
 present individuals who prefer leaving the care of them- 
 selves to blind fate, rather than to watchful Providence, 
 testifies less to unbelief and self-depreciation than to the 
 consciousness of not believing and acting piously. 
 
 Herder proves that all nations have received writing 
 and their earliest forms of civilisation from the teachings 
 of religion ; but does he not thereby prove something- 
 further ? — namely, this : That in nations and consequently 
 in men, the ideal is older than the real ? — that so the child 
 is nearer the highest than the lowest, for that lies in him ; 
 and that we reckon time by the stars and the sun earlier 
 than by the town clock ; and that the Godhead, as once 
 in paradise, so now in the desert, impresses His image on 
 man before he can discolour it, and so afterwards he can 
 never lose or be without it ? Every thing holy is before 
 what is unholy ; guilt presupposes innocence, not the 
 reverse ; angels, but not fallen ones, were created. Hence 
 man does not properly rise to the highest, but first sinks 
 gradually down from it, and then afterwards rises again : 
 a child can never be considered too innocent and good. It 
 is thus that the Infinite Being appears to nations and in- 
 dividuals earlier than the finite, yea than infinite space :
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 1H1 
 
 as the almighty power of 3 T crang nature produced, according 
 to Schelling, the fixed suns earlier than the worlds which 
 roll round them. If a whole system of religious meta- 
 physics did not dreamingly sleep within the child, how 
 could the mental contemplation of infinity, God, eternity, 
 holiness, &c, be imparted to him, since we cannot com- 
 municate it by outward means, and indeed have nothing 
 for that purpose but words, which have not the power of 
 creating, but only of arousing ? The dying and the faint- 
 ing hear inward music which no outward object gives ; 
 and ideas are such inward tones.* In general even the 
 questions, that is the objects of proper metaphysics, are 
 among children, as among the uneducated classes, much 
 more active and common than one supposes, only under 
 different names ; and the four-year old child will ask, what 
 lies behind the curtains of the hidden world, whence is the 
 origin of God? &c. For instance, in children talking 
 together, the author heard his five-year old boy philosophise 
 and say, " God has made every thing, so if one offers Him 
 any thing He has made it ; " whereupon his four-year old 
 sister said, "He makes nothing;" and he answered, "He 
 makes nothing, because He has made it." A gain ; the 
 seven-year old sister maintained, if the soul in the head 
 had another set of arms, legs and a head, another soul 
 must dwell in that, and this again would have a head, and 
 so on for ever.f 
 
 If Kousseau give up God, and consequently religion, as 
 the late inheritance of a matured age, he can, except in 
 the case of great souls, expect no more religious inspiration 
 and love than a Parisian father, who, after the fashion of 
 some nations, never sees his son till he no longer needs a 
 father, can expect filial affection.^ When, indeed, could 
 
 * So the fear of ghosts, this unceasing dread, which without any 
 outward cause — by that only corporeal fear is produced— obtains the 
 mastery, and makes men stiff and cold. 
 
 t While writing this, the above mentioned four, now six-year old 
 3hild said, " Counting has a one and begins, and what begins must also 
 leave off." At last she showed me a stick and asked — " Does it not leave 
 off on all sides?" 
 
 + At least Mercier says that the fashionable Parisians, even tlic- 
 wonien, do not see their children, who are brought up in tl.e country 
 until they are fully grown. 
 
 K 2
 
 132 JEAN PAUL tRIEDRI H RICHl'ER. | FRAG. II. 
 
 the Most Holy take deeper root than in the m Dst holy age 
 of innocence, or that which shall have eternal influence, 
 than in the age which never forgets '*. Not the clouds of 
 the fore or afternoon, but the overcast or blue sky of the 
 morning, decides upon the fairness of the day. 
 
 But as the first rule to be observed by any one who will 
 give something is, that he must himself have it; so it is 
 true, that no one can teach religion who has it not : 
 mature hypocrisy, or lip -religion, can beget nothing but 
 immature ; such a mock-sun can neither warm nor give 
 light, and an acoustic deception returns every optic one. 
 He who has no God in heaven and in his own heart can, 
 without immorality, believe himself bound by no morality 
 ( though perhaps for the sake of utility) to implant in his 
 children a nothing which he has already torn from himself 
 and which he afterwards intends to eradicate from them. 
 But, properly, neither belief in the morality of a religious 
 lie, nor in its political advantages, sows deceit in the 
 trusting open heart of childhood; that is only done by 
 the selfish weakness which willingly makes terms at once 
 with God and the devil ; that argumentum a tuto * (a keeping 
 open of a back-door into heaven, worthy, but for its wound- 
 ing of reason and morality, of a very opposite name) does 
 not rank, thank God ! among the sins of our age. 
 
 The younger a child is the less let him hear the Un- 
 speakable named, who only by a word becomes to him the 
 speakable : but let him behold His symbols. The sublime 
 is the temple step of religion, as the stars are of immeasur- 
 able space. When what is mighty appears in nature — 
 a storm, thunder, the starry firmament, death — then utter 
 the word God before the child. A great misfortune, a 
 great blessing, a great crime, a noble action, are building- 
 sites for a child's church. 
 
 Show every where to the child, as well as on the borders 
 of the holy land of religion, devotional and holy sentiments ; 
 these pass over and at last unveil for him the object; just 
 us if you are alarmed he is so too, without knowing why. 
 Newton, who uncovered his head when the Greatest Name 
 was uttered, would have been, without saying a word, a 
 teacher of religion to children. Not with them, but only 
 * The Safety and Exigency Creed.
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 133 
 
 before them, should you pray your own prayers, that is, 
 think aloud of God ; but their own you should pray with 
 them. A stated exaltation and emotion is a desecrated one. 
 The prayers of children are empty and cold, and are in 
 fact only remains of the Jewish-Christian belief in 
 sacrifices which will reconcile and "win the favour of God 
 by means of innocent beings, not of innocence ; and the 
 child secretly regards the God whom you give him by word 
 of mouth as the Kamtschatkadale and every savage 
 does his. A grace before meat must make every child 
 deceitful. Aa he grows older let a day of prayer, or of 
 any religious observances, become more rare, but on 
 that account more solemn ; what the first affecting Lord's 
 Supper is to the child, that let every hour be in which you 
 consecrate his heart to religion. Let children go to 
 church but rarely, for you might as well take them to hear 
 an oratorio of Klopstock or of Handel, as that of the 
 church ; but when you do take them, impress on them 
 the value of a sympathy with the devotional sentiments of 
 their parents. Indeed, I would rather — since as yet there 
 is no special public worship of God and no special preachers 
 for children — you should lead them on the great days 
 of the seasons, or of human life, merely into the empty 
 temple, and show them the holy place of their elders. If you 
 add to that, twilight, night, the organ, singing, a father's 
 preaching, you will at least leave behind on the young- 
 heart more religious consecration by that one church-going 
 than you could on an old one by a whole year of church- 
 attending. After these considerations it makes one's heart 
 ache to think of that already nearly abandoned custom, 
 which some however kindly wish back,* I mean that of 
 setting the children and young people to take down the 
 sermon, at least an outline of it, in church and afterwards 
 to write it out fully at home or at school. Although this 
 nearly borders on jest, we will ask in earnest, whether this 
 must not convert the religious sincerity of fellow-feeling 
 into a mere anatomy and skeleton, and draw down what 
 is holy and the aspiration of the heart into a means of 
 exercising the understanding, and hold every emotion at a 
 
 * Professor Petri in the new " Bibliothek fur Piidagogik," &i\, 
 July, 1811, who appeals to Reinkard's Youthful example t..ereanent
 
 134 JEAN PAUL FRiEDRICH KICHTEE. [FRAG. II. 
 
 distance because feeling might hinder writing? It were, 
 I erhaps, something about as good if a young woman made 
 a short pragmatic abstract of her lover's declaration of 
 love ; or a soldier, of the fiery speech of his leader before 
 oattle ; or an evangelist, a neat exposition of Christ's 
 sermon on the mount with all its subdivisions. When 
 teachers thus convert all the highest ends into new means 
 and ways, that is to say backways, do they not spiritually 
 use spiritual things, as the modern Eomans really do 
 triumphal arches and temples of Jupiter, which they 
 degrade into wash-houses ? 
 
 For the poor children of the people, whose parents are 
 still pupils of the Sunday, and for whom, as a set-off to the 
 deep desert of the week, a raising hand must not fail to 
 lift them out of their low cloudy heaven, is a public 
 church service more necessary than for the children of the 
 upper classes. The church walls, the pulpit, the organ, 
 are to them the symbols of the Divine ; and as a symbol 
 it is indifferent whether it be the village church or the 
 temple of nature. And do we ourselves know where, or if 
 ever, the Unsearchable can terminate the ascending scale 
 of His symbols '^ Does not the higher spirit require again 
 a higher symbol ? 
 
 Let the eye of the pupil, even where he only sees outer 
 walls and forms, yet every where gaze into the Holy ot 
 Holies of religion, which the church-goer must bring 
 with him into the church as the temple-court of the 
 heart. Let every foreign exercise of religion, and every 
 outward preparation for it. be as holy to him as his own. 
 Let the Protestant child h \ld the Catholic saints' images 
 by the road-side to be as worthy of reverence as the 
 ancient oak-forests of his forefathers ; let him receive 
 different religions as lovingly as different languages, in 
 which but one spirit of humanity is expressed. Every 
 genius is all-powerful in his own language, every heart 
 in its own religion. 
 
 But let not fear create the God of childhood : fear was 
 itself created by a wicked spirit ; shall the devil become 
 the grandfather of God ? 
 
 He who seeks something higher in its own nature, not 
 merely in degree, than what life can give or take away,
 
 CHAP. I V.J LEV ANA. 135 
 
 that, man has religion, though he only believe in infinity, 
 not in the Infinite, only in eternity, without an Eternal ; 
 as if, in opposition to other artists, he did not paint the 
 sun with a human countenance, but rounded off this to 
 resemble the former. For he who regards all life as holy 
 and wonderful, whether it dwell in animals, or, still 
 lower, in plants ; he who, like Spinoza, by means of his 
 noble soul floats and rests less upon steps and heights 
 than upon wings, whence the surrounding universe — the 
 stationary and that moving by law — changes into one 
 immense Light, Life and Being, and surrounds him, so 
 that he feels absorbed in the great light and wishes to be 
 nothing but a ray in the immeasurable splendour ; such a 
 man has, and consequently imparts, religion ; since the 
 highest ever reflects and paints the highest, even though 
 formless, behind the eye. 
 
 True unbelief relates to no individual propositions, or 
 counter-propositions, but to blindness towards the whole. 
 Excite in the child the all-powerful perception of the 
 whole, in opposition to the selfish perception of the parts, 
 and then you raise the man above the world, the eternal 
 above the transitory. Place in the child's hand our 
 religious book ; but do not give the explanation after, 
 but before the reading, so that the strange form may 
 enter the young soul as something entire. Why should 
 misunderstanding be the precursor of understanding ? 
 Without wonder there is no faith ; and the belief in the 
 marvellous is itself an inward faith. You must impart a 
 sun-beam of its origin to every thing great which conies 
 before you, — to genius, to love, to every power; only 
 things weak and curved consist of steps, stairs and 
 torture-ladders ; the true ladder of heaven has no steps. 
 At least two miracles, or revelations, remain for you 
 uncontested in this age which deadens sound with un- 
 reverberating materials; they resemble an Old and a New 
 Testament, and are these — the birth of finite being, and 
 the birth of life within the hard wood of matter. For in 
 one inexplicable thing every other is involved, and one 
 miracle annihilates the whole philosophy. Consequently, 
 you do not act the part of a hypocrite when you permit 
 the child to draw any thing out of the book of religion, oi
 
 136 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICB RICHTEB. [FRAG. II. 
 
 the secret book of nature, which you cannot explain. 
 Living religion grows not by the doctrines, but by the 
 narratives, of the Bible ■ the best Christian religious 
 doctrine is the life of Christ ; and, after that, the suffer- 
 ings and deaths of his followers, even those not related in 
 Holy Writ. 
 
 In the fair spring of the religious admission of the child 
 among his elders, an important one, since then first he 
 comes publicly before the altar and acts with all the rights 
 of an independent being; in this never-recurring time 
 when the dawn of life suddenly breaks into the morning 
 red, and thereby announces the newness of love and of 
 nature ; there is no better priest to lead and accompany 
 the young soul with dancing and great joy to the high 
 altar of religion, than the poet who annihilates a mortal 
 world to build on it an immortal ; so that our life on earth 
 may resemble those polar lands which, so void of animals 
 and flowers, so cold and colourless, yet, after sunless days, 
 display rich nights in which heaven pours down its gifts 
 upon the earth, and where the northern or polar lights fill 
 the whole blue with fire-colours, jewels, thunder, splendid 
 tropical storms, and remind the inhabitants of the cold 
 earth of that which lives above them.
 
 ( 137 ) 
 
 THIRD FRAGMENT. 
 
 Crap. I. Digression upon the beginning of Man and of Education. 
 § 39—42. Chap. II. Joyousness of Children, § 43 — 45. Chap. Ill 
 Their Games, § 46—54. Chap. IV. Their Dances, § 55—57 
 Chap. V. Music, § 58—60. Chap. VI. Commanding, Forbidding, 
 § 61—63. Chap. VII. Punishments, § 64, 65. Cuap. VIII. Pas- 
 sionate Crying of Children, § 66 — 70. Chap. IX. On the Trust- 
 fulness of Children, § 71, 72. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE BEGINNING OF EDUCATION. 
 
 §39. 
 
 When does Education begin its work? With the first 
 breath of the child but no sooner. The Light of the 
 Soul, which we call Life, issuing from I know not what 
 sunny cloud, strikes upon the bodily world and moulds 
 the rough mass into its dwelling place, which glows on 
 until Death, by the nearness of another world, allures it 
 still further on. In this primitive moment — for from it 
 the pulse reckons its first beat, even though time be else- 
 where already — is the invisible beam of individual exist- 
 ence broken into the coloured spectrum of his bodily appear- 
 ance : the dispositions, the sex, yes, even the resemblance 
 to the father's and mother's countenances are distinguished 
 by yet unseen lines. For the unity of the organism, 
 of this state within the world, that is, the embodied 
 system of laws, cannot form itself piece-meal like the in- 
 dividual parts which it governs : for example, the form- 
 ing influence, which moulds the transparent child's face 
 like its father's or its grandfather's, cannot lie in the 
 nine-months' fancies of the mother, but must exist in 
 the child itself.
 
 138 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH RICHTEE. [FRAG. III. 
 
 The two life-chains of the parents are somewhat 
 different ; especially the last link, from which the spark 
 of the new man issued in order to animate the physical 
 clod of earth into an Adam. When one considers how 
 little has yet been done for the races of the coming world 
 (except in the case of horses, sheep and canary birds) not 
 even observations, to say nothing of institutions, merely 
 for a cradle rather than for the child in the cradle ; — how 
 the connexions of the sexes, of years, of months, of hours, 
 are so lawlessly and carelessly forgotten and injured 
 when the foundation stones of centuries are laid ; — how 
 here the giddy, sensual man requires more laws than the 
 unchanging beast which moves straight on in the leading 
 strings of instinct and of health, and when one considers 
 how the divergence — growing by means of culture wider 
 and wider — from savages an 1 aborigines, who still re- 
 tained the advantages of beasts, has doubled lawlessness 
 and ignorance of law — and how the world becomes con- 
 tinually more clamorous in desire, more indifferent to 
 wisdom ; one must, from a carelessness for moral requisi- 
 tions, which contents itself only with the bare fulfilment 
 of the ten commandments for ruffians, finally come to the 
 conclusion, that men seek to settle with morality as with 
 a creditor. It is true that the noble-hearted instructor 
 Schwarz would maintain that the Holy Spirit takes cog- 
 nizance of the future for sin in the highest love ; but he 
 is right only for the highest first love ; and only in the 
 case of want of thought or knowledge. A physician, for 
 example, on the other hand, has not this want of know- 
 ledge. And may not a state, at any rate, like an elder, 
 prescribe for all, with its cold ever-during hand, laws 
 which a loving individual would never have thought 
 of making, and yet is obliged to obey ; just as the law- 
 book, not a pair of lovers, contemplates divorce. 
 
 For the rest we may well venture to complain that 
 Nature, during the "twelve holy nights" in which, as 
 creatress she wanders alone with her youngest creatures, 
 makes it too difficult even for the conscientious not to steal 
 and murder in the dark. At every step down the deep 
 gloomy ladder of futurity up which men and ages ascend, 
 conscience calls " Here is a man, there perhaps a genius,
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 139 
 
 the heaven of his people ;" but we, like night wanderers, 
 must spare the known and injure the unknown. 
 
 Since parents play so prominent a part in the history of 
 the creation of the child's body, one can with difficulty 
 refrain from the question, how much they contribute to 
 the theogony (divine generation) of the child's spirit? If 
 we must think of a dark problem it is also permitted, nay 
 necessary, for us to think of some solution. The mental 
 dissimilarity of dispositions is a mere product of bodily 
 differences, since both mutually presuppose each other. It 
 is, indeed, easier for us to apprehend difference in bodies 
 than in minds ; but properly, there is only an apparent 
 difference of quantity visible in those, and only a real one 
 of quality in these ; so, it is onhy minds which grow or 
 inure themselves to anything. If it will not be admitted 
 that that spark of distinguishing individuality flies down 
 from the stars in clouds during conception, it must then, 
 either, precisely in the moment of inducting its human 
 covering, cast off a previous covering spun from the 
 father's or the mother's life, or it was, like thought and 
 motion, born of soul. Creation of spirits is not more 
 difficult to comprehend than creation of thoughts by 
 spirits, or than any other change. In both cases, 
 especially in the second, not only does the bodily life of 
 the parents cradle the bodies of the future, but also their 
 spiritual life its spirits. But, then, with what trembling 
 should this balance be held ! If thou knewest that every 
 black thought of thine, or every glorious independent one, 
 separated itself from thy soul and took root without thee, 
 and for half a century pushed and bore its poisonous 
 flowers or healing roots, oh ! how piously wouldest thou 
 choose and think ! — And dost thou, then, so certainly 
 know the reverse ? 
 
 §40. 
 
 I come back to my own opinion that spiritual education 
 begins at birth ; for up to that period the mother — as 
 often afterwards in a worse sense — has only a blood 
 relationship, not a nerve relationship, with the child 
 sleeping at the gates of the world. So that all that ih 
 false which has been said about an electric charging chaix
 
 140 JEAN PAUL FKIEDKICH KICHTER. [FEAG. IIT. 
 
 to which the little invisible is attached, and by which be 
 is charged with the streams and sparks of the maternal 
 passions and feelings. Since, according to the best 
 anatomists, the mother does not nourish the child with 
 her blood directly, but through media, the maternal 
 passions which are to affect it through the blood can 
 only work in two ways, either by mechanical change, slow 
 or quick, or by chemical change, oxidised or unoxidised. 
 The embryo soul does not partake of the mechanical 
 change ; because the mother's blood may move as fast in 
 the ball-room of love as in the servant's hall of anger ; or 
 creep as slowly when sitting full of hope before the 
 embroidery frame, as of despair before a bier. The 
 chemical change of the blood by passion, or other external 
 excitement, is itself, in the first instance, a product of the 
 mind and of the nerves which serve it either mediately or 
 immediately. The excitement of the nerves gives the 
 full beat of the pulse, but the converse is not the case ; 
 else the excitement of a race would have as strong an 
 effect as a drink has upon thirst. How the oxidised or 
 unoxidised blood of the mother can more affect the child's 
 mind than her own, must arise from the influence of the 
 blood as nourishment ; and as the blood, before it is 
 capable of affording nourishment must be assimilated by 
 the little foreign body, it can possess no influence dif- 
 ferent from that of every other nourishment : and, in 
 nourishing, as little propagates its differences as does the 
 blood of sheep or of lions. The objections made by nurses 
 go far in justification of this. 
 
 The best proof of this physiological chain of argument 
 is its superfluousness, for experience demonstrates it. 
 For were it true, that the mother had a more spiritual 
 influence on shiftless naked human creatures than that 
 which nourishes them ; what a sorry humanity would be 
 sent out into the world from the nine-months' training 
 institute, where on the mother's side all the spiritual 
 and physical defects of female nature are brought together 
 in the nine months and in the time of travail : while on 
 the side of the children the brain and the susceptibility 
 to impressions are greatest, and thereby every fancy of 
 the mother must develop itself in the magnifying glass
 
 CHAP. I.J LEVANA. 141 
 
 of the victim, as outward form in the child, and every 
 pain as distortion. 
 
 Heaven ! if the loathing at food and people, the un- 
 natural longing, the fear, the weepings and the feebleness 
 communicated themselves thus spiritually; so that the 
 mother's womb were the first " foundling hospital " and 
 "deaf-and-dumb" institute for souls, and effeminacy the 
 constitutional sanatarium for men, what a sickly, timid, 
 feeble after-race of progenerated child-bearers. Not a 
 man would then be left — each one would have lived, 
 tvept, longed and come to nothing. But this is just as 
 it is not : woman gives men, as the .soft cloud gives 
 thunder and hail : the first-born and natural children, by 
 whom the mothers suffer the most, are in fact the 
 strongest : the children of the criminals, the nervous, 
 the consumptive, the mourning widows, or even of the 
 fictitious ones who live for the prospect of divorce, prove 
 themselves just as strong in intellect as the children of 
 other mothers who dance on from joy to joy. If the 
 mother, spiritually copying herself — impressed herself so 
 strongly and spiritually upon the child's soul, 1 do not 
 know whence originates the distinctive character of 
 children of the same mother : each child must be a 
 mental copier in duplicate of his brothers and sisters 
 and the whole nursery a mental casting-foundry for the 
 mother. 
 
 As otherwise concerns the body, that of each child is 
 formed in the very same mother's womb and in an equal 
 period, and with all similarity of condition on the part 
 of the mother — the male twin (to take this case) growing 
 to greater strength and the female to less. He who takes 
 physical abortions for the volcanic outcome of heated 
 fancies on the part of the pregnant mother, forgets that 
 the great Haller denies the whole thing, and adduces the 
 mis-growths of animals and plants in respect to which, to 
 plants especially, heated fancies are little to be regarded : 
 whereunto I add — that amongst 10,000 brooding mothers 
 each one of whom for nine months might have been 
 terrified by an equal number of distorted forms, scarcely 
 one brings into the world anything that is not suited to 
 the world. Tell me not that the beautiful Madonna faces
 
 142 JEAN PAUL FP.1EDEICH PJCHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 seen in Catholic countries are to be regarded as copies of 
 those painted in the churches ; or that the Greeks hung 
 beautiful pictures in the chambers of those blessed, in 
 order to procure living types from them ; for I reply, do 
 not all these circumstances indicate antecedently the 
 productions of beautiful lands and beautiful men ; and 
 further does not the life-long impression of many forms 
 of beauty recoin with more strength than that of nine 
 months the humanity current in the world ? 
 
 At the same time, the disbelief that the nine-months' 
 mother decides on the mental and physical form of her 
 child leaves room for the true belief that her health or 
 sickness is repeated in the little second being : and it is 
 for this very reason that superstitious fancies about 
 marks, mis-births and similar things ought to be so much 
 guarded against ; not because what is dreaded brings its 
 fulfilment, but because it, along with those evils which 
 are produced by alarm before a thing occurs and undue 
 anxiety after it has happened, weakens the body, and 
 brings for the sufferer years of trouble. 
 
 §41. 
 
 At last the child can say to the father — Educate, for I 
 breathe. The first breath, like the last, closes an old with 
 a new world. The new is, in this case, the world of light 
 and colour's the life on earth, like a painter, begins with 
 the eye. The ear, indeed, preceded it — so that it is the 
 first sense of the living as it is the last of the dying — but 
 then it belonged to the realm of feeling ; and it is on this 
 account that birds in the egg, and soft many-punctured 
 silkworms die from a loud report. The first sound, falls 
 with a darker chaos on the closely covered soul than the 
 first beam of light. So the morning of life opens on the 
 freed prisoner with the two senses imparting knowledge 
 of distance, like the morning of the day with light and 
 song, or bustle. At the same time, light continues to be 
 the first enamel of the earth, the first fair word of life. 
 The sound which breaks upon the slumbering ear can be 
 but loud, but none near the labouring mother causes it, 
 but her own travail, and the child ; and so the world of
 
 ( 
 
 CHAP. 1 ] LEVANA. 143 
 
 sound begins with a discord, but the world of sight with 
 beauty and glory. 
 
 Every first thing continues for ever with the child ; the 
 first colour, the first music, the first flower paint the fore- 
 ground of his life ; yet we can prescribe no other law than 
 this, Protect the child from all that is impetuous and 
 violent, and even from sweet impressions. Nature, so soft, 
 defenceless and excitable, may be distorted by one error, 
 and hardened into a growing deformity. For this reason 
 the crying of children, if composed of a union of discord, 
 hastiness, imperiousness and passion, ought to be guarded 
 against by all due means, but not by effeminacy which 
 only increases it. 
 
 §42. 
 
 If in the ocean of a human soul sections may be made, 
 and degrees of longitude and latitude ascribed to it, we 
 must, in the case of a child, make the first section of the 
 first three years, during which, from the want of the 
 power of speech, he still lives in the animal cloister, and 
 only approaches us through the speech-grating of natural 
 signs. In this speechless period, of which we shall now 
 treat, the pupils are quite given up to feminine fluency ; 
 but how women ought now to educate can only be seen 
 later on, when we inquire how they themselves ought to 
 have been educated. In this period of twilight, in thit 
 first moon's quarter, or eighth of life, let the light only 
 grow of itself, do not kindle it. Here the sexes are un- 
 separated, neither divided by the Platonic Aristophanes, 
 nor by the tailor. The whole human being is as yet a closed 
 bud whose blossom is concealed. Like the eggs of birds, 
 whether of song or of prey, and like the new-born young 
 of the dove or of the vulture, all at first require warmth, 
 not nourishment, which might have a very different effect. 
 
 And what, then, is warmth for the human chicken? — 
 Happiness. One has but to give them play room, by taking 
 away what may be painful, and their powers shoot up of 
 themselves. The new world which the suckling brings 
 with him, and the new one which he finds around him, 
 enfold him as learning, or develop themselves as know- 
 ledge; and neither world yet requires the ploughing or
 
 14:4 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. | FRAG. III. 
 
 sowing of stranger hands. Even the artificial gymnastics 
 of the senses, which will teach a year-old child to see and 
 hear and hold, are not much more necessary than the 
 leading strings which show him how to walk ; and can 
 the advantage of teaching some use of the senses, say in 
 three months, which would have come of itself in four, be 
 a recompense for neglecting and wearying oneself in the 
 first year and with the first child, to the injury of after 
 years and the next children, about something which 
 unconstrained life necessitates in savages and country 
 people ? 
 
 The excellent Schwarz, in his Treatise on Education, 
 prompts, by his proposition of an early gymnasium for 
 all the senses, to an appendix to this paragraph. As to 
 the material advantage of these school classes for the five 
 senses, it is certain that rich varied life, by its unceasing 
 influence, educates and practises the senses with a power 
 which does not require the poverty of particular institu- 
 tions for practice, except you wish to convert the whole 
 child into one single sense — into a painter's eye, or a 
 musician's ear. 
 
 ( )n the other hand, these practices have a formal utility 
 in constraining the mind to perceive the finer subdivisions 
 of its sensations, and to measure the world more accurately 
 by lines than by yards. In the mean time, the inner 
 world offers itself to a finer and higher school than the 
 outward. Especially leave out all exercises of the sense 
 of taste, for whose haut gout the kitchen is the best school ; 
 since we do not need by its means to distinguish between 
 nourishment and poison, but rather teach by its exercise 
 at rich tables to confound the two, so that we, unlike the 
 beasts who only when young, from unpractised taste, crop 
 injurious weeds, when old, from refined taste, long for 
 poison-dishes, and poison-goblets. 
 
 Let there be here not so much a degression as a ^re- 
 gression concerning the order of development of the senses. 
 Schwarz, in his Treatise on Education, assigns too late a 
 birth-time, almost beyond the age of childhood, for the 
 senses of taste and smell. He seems, however, to con 
 found the refinement of these senses, which, no doubt, 
 takes place in mature age, with their existence and power,
 
 CHAl'. I. [ LEVANA. 1 15 
 
 which certainly flourish in their greatest strength during 
 childhood. Every one may remember how as a child, like 
 the animals (which remain stationary on this first step) 
 and like savages, he imbibed every thing tasty, fruits, 
 sugar, sweet wine, fat, with a delight and enjoyment 
 which weakened with every year of the subsequent refine- 
 ment of the sense ; hence the so much lamented love of 
 sweatmeats in all children ; hence the experience of so 
 many grown-up people, who have had the favourite dishes 
 of their childhood, cooked for them, that they did not like 
 them. Infants, no doubt, take bitter medicines without 
 resistance ; but this is no reproach to their taste ; we 
 ourselves in later life seek a pure bitter as a higher 
 excitement, in bitter beer, water, and almonds. If a 
 young animal eat poisonous plants which an old one 
 avoids, there is proved by this less want of taste than 
 superabundance of appetite, that is hunger ; which, in it, 
 as easily conquers instinct as, in us, it unfortunately over- 
 comes reason. 
 
 Smell, the dulness of which sense speaks as little in 
 favour of mental delicacy as that of the eye or of the ear 
 does against it,* awakes with consciousness, consequent] y, 
 last in a child. We are less aware of its advent because 
 it subserves few necessities ; and because its continuance, 
 either, for instance, in spice islands, or in Aiigean-stable- 
 like streets, renders the consciousness of it difficult. 
 Children have little scent-glands for the persons nearest 
 them, for instance, for their parents ; and thereby dis- 
 tinguish them from individuals more rarely seen. And 
 it is precisely smell which dies away the first of all the 
 senses ; although it, unlike the other senses, is seldom 
 worn out by too powerful stimulants. And who is there 
 who has not experienced in himself what I have done — 
 that often a nosegay of wild flowers, which was to us, as 
 village children, a grove of pleasure, has, in after years of 
 manhood and in the town, given us by its old perfume an 
 indescribable transport back into god-like childhood; and 
 how, like a flower-goddess, it has raised us into the first 
 embracing Aurora-clouds of our first dim feelings ? But 
 
 * Haller with his weak eves: Pope and Swift with unmusical 
 ears. 
 
 L L
 
 146 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH KICHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 how could such a remembrance so strongly affect us if our 
 childish sensibility to flowers had not been strong and 
 heartfelt ? Ascribe, then, to after life nothing more than 
 the refinement of a deeply implanted feeling. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE J0YOUSNESS OP CHILDREN. 
 
 § 43. 
 
 Should they have any thing else ? I can endure a melan- 
 choly man, but not a melancholy child ; the former, in 
 whatever slough he may sink, can yet raise his eyes either 
 to the kingdom of reason or of hope ; but the little child 
 is entirely absorbed and weighed down by one black poison- 
 drop of the present. Think of a child led to a scaffold ; 
 think of Cupid in a Dutch coffin ; or watch a butterfly, 
 after its four wings have been torn off, creeping like a 
 worm, and you will feel what I mean. 
 
 But wherefore ? The first cause has been already given ; 
 the child, like the beast, only knows purest (though 
 shortest) sorrow ; one which has no past and no future ; one 
 such as the sick man receives from without, the dreamei 
 from himself into his asthenic brain ; finally, one with the 
 consciousness not of guilt but of innocence. Certainly all 
 the sorrows of children are but shortest nights, as their 
 joys are but hottest days ; and, indeed, both so much so 
 that in the later, often clouded and starless, time of life, 
 the matured man only longingly remembers his old child- 
 hood's pleasures, while he seems altogether to have for- 
 gotten his childhood's griefs. This weak remembrance is 
 strangely contrasted with the opposing one in dreams and 
 fevers in this respect, that in the two last it is always the 
 cruel sorrows of childhood which return : the dream, this 
 mock-sun of childhood — and the fever, its distorting glass, 
 — both draw forth from dark corners the fears of defence-
 
 CHAP. II.] LEV ANA. 147 
 
 less childhood, which press and cut with iron fangs into 
 the prostrate soul. The fair scenes of dreams mostly play 
 on an after stage ; whereas the frightful ones choose for 
 theirs the cradle and the nursery. Moreover, in fever the 
 ice hands of the fear of ghosts, the striking ones of teachers 
 and parents, and every claw with which fate has pressed 
 the young heart, stretch themselves out to catch the 
 wandering man. Parents ! consider, then, that every 
 childhood's Rupert,* even though it has lain chained for 
 tens of years, yet breaks loose and gains mastery over the 
 man as soon as it finds him on a sick bed. The first 
 fright is the more dangerous the sooner it happens ; as 
 the man grows older he is less and less easily frightened ; 
 the little cradle or bed canopy of the child is more ea,sily 
 quite darkened than the starry heaven of the man. 
 
 § 44. 
 
 Cheerfulness, or joyousness, is the heaven under which 
 every thing but poison thrives. But let it not be con- 
 founded with enjoyments. Every enjoyment, even the 
 refined one of a work of art, gives man a selfish mien, and 
 withdraws him from sympathy ; heuce it is only a con- 
 dition of necessity, not of virtue. On the contrary, cheer- 
 fulness, the opposite of vexation and sadness, is at once 
 the ground and flower of virtue and its crown. Animals 
 can enjoy, but only men can be cheerful. The holy 
 father is at the same time called the blessed, and God is 
 the all blessed. A morose God is a contradiction, or the 
 devil. The stoic philosopher must unite scorn of enjoy- 
 ment with the preservation of cheerfulness. The Christian 
 heaven promises no pleasures, like the Turkish, but the 
 clear, pure, infinite ether of heavenly joy, which flows 
 from the contemplation of the Eternal. The foretaste 
 of heaven — Paradise, to which the theologians denied 
 pleasures, but not cheerfulness — sheltered innocence. The 
 cheerful man wins our eye and heart, as the morose man 
 drives both away : it is the contrary with pleasures, we 
 turn our back on the luxurious, and open our heart to the 
 
 * The name given in Germany to the fictitious being employed to 
 frighten children into obedience. — Tr. 
 
 L 2
 
 148 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH RICETER. | FRAG. III. 
 
 starving. If pleasure be a self-consuming rocket, cheer- 
 fulness is a returning light star, an object which, unlike 
 pleasure, is not worn away by continuance, but receives 
 from it new birth. 
 
 § 45. 
 
 Now let us return to the dear children. I do indeed 
 think, that they ought to inhabit their Paradise like our 
 first parents, those true first children. But pleasures 
 make no Paradise, they only help to laugh it away. Play, 
 that is activity, not pleasures, will keep children cheerful. 
 By pleasure I understand every first agreeable impression, 
 not only of the taste, but also of the ear and the eye : a 
 plaything gives in the first place pleasure by looking at it, 
 and only afterwards cheerfulness by using it. Pleasure is 
 an irritating burning spot, not an all-embracing warmth, 
 on the excitable skin of the child. Further, if refined, 
 perpetual drunkards and epicures multiply and extend 
 their pleasures by the past and the future ; so children, 
 from want of both, can only have shortest but, conse- 
 quently, deepest pleasures. Their point of sight, like 
 their eye, is less than ours ; the burning-glass of pleasure 
 should not strike them at focal distance, but far off and 
 gently. In other words, divide the great pleasure into 
 little merry-makings, a gingerbread cake into gingerbread 
 nuts, a Christmas eve into a church year. In one month 
 of nine-and-twenty days a child might be mentally 
 destroyed, if one could make out of every day a first 
 Christmas Day. Not even a grown-up head could stand 
 being crowned every day by a new country : the first 
 in Paris, the second in London, the third in Eome, the 
 fourth in Vienna. But little enjoyments work like scent 
 bottles on the young souls, and strengthen them from 
 action to action. 
 
 Nevertheless, this ramification of pleasures only serves 
 for their earliest years : afterwards, in a reversed way, 
 will a Midsummer-feast, a grape- gathering, a Shrove- tide, 
 for which children have long to wait, together with the 
 gleanings of a lively memory, shine all the more brightly 
 in the dull interval. 
 
 A word about children's love Df sweetmeats, against
 
 CHAP. II.] LEVANA. 149 
 
 which Schwarz strives perhaps too eagei ly, may be dropped 
 here. I never yet knew a child to whom sweet savory 
 things and pastry did not seem the most inimitable cakes 
 and altar paintings, and this merely because a child, half 
 animal, half savage, is all taste. Bees have at the same 
 time a honey and a wax stomach ; but among human 
 beings, children have the first, grown people the second. 
 If Schwarz has always found love of eating and want of 
 modesty united, he can only declare this of the age of 
 manhood ; but even then the love of eating was only the 
 consequence and companion of deeper sensual pleasures, 
 not their cause. Certainly, the unbridled sensualist will 
 alter in his meats, and also in his tastes, as the lover of 
 eating does on other grounds ; but, on the other hand, how 
 can the pleasures of taste, which grow weaker as every 
 year is further from childhood, end in still lower sen- 
 sualities, especially since the generality of souls, in regard 
 to love, resemble the Egyptians, among whom the gods 
 reigned earlier tnan mortal men ? The fathers do not hop, 
 but the children do ; then leave them their other Egyptian 
 flesh-pots before their journeying forth into the desert. 
 The author has often made the sugar-island of the tongue, 
 on which of itself no Paphian wood grows, into a kind of 
 palaestra of self-denial ; at the same time he relates the 
 matter with diffidence, only as a question, not an answer. 
 For instance, he gave to the two- and three-year old 
 children candied marchpane (the most wholesome thing) 
 with the command only to suck it at a certain place, and 
 only for so long a time as he permitted. The children 
 learned to value and to keep a promise. He also offered 
 sugar or honey prizes for the endurance of the most strokes 
 on the hand ; but he did it seldom. 
 
 Most royal children can shorten our inquiries by their 
 decision. For, as regards pleasures, they have everything 
 from toys and drinking- and eating-things to carriage 
 seats and bed cushions; but, as far as happiness is 
 concerned, they are tormented from their governors up 
 through every member of their court ; so that the kingly 
 crown is very early underlined with a crown of thorns, or, 
 to speak differently, the black round of sorrow is made 
 broader in proportion to their high rank. For, indeed,
 
 150 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICH1EE. [FEAG. 111. 
 
 when we consider how generally a prince, satiated with 
 eating and drinking, is so educated that he cannot make a 
 step without tutors and lectures, nor a skip without the 
 dancing-master, nor take a breath of fresh air without four 
 horses, we must almost believe that the ancient heretic 
 Basilides is now again right as regards princes, when he 
 declared that the early Christians would often have been 
 martyrs for future sins, if the after-pains were not added 
 to the fore-pains of the future. 
 
 Cheerfulness — this feeling of an entirely free nature and 
 life, this self- enjoyment of the inner world, not of an out- 
 ward minute part of the world — opens the child to the 
 penetrating All; it receives nature, not loveless and de- 
 fenceless, but loving and armed, and lets all the young 
 powers rise like morning beams, and play upon the world 
 and upon itself; and it imparts, asmoroseness takes away, 
 strength. The early blossoms of gladness are not corn- 
 flowers among the seed, but are themselves little young 
 ears of corn. It is a beautiful tradition that the Virgin 
 Mary and the poet Tasso never wept as children.* 
 
 But now the question is of the means and starry 
 influences which preserve this cheerfulness. If it merely 
 resulted from negative and physical conditions, then, at 
 least for the most instructive half year of life, that is the 
 first, all would be obtained by a child who was born in 
 spring. Why do not men begin life, as Oriental nations 
 do the year, with spring ? A child born at this season, 
 might an almanac say without lying, moves slowly on 
 from charm to charm, from leaves to flowers, from the 
 warmth of rooms to that of the sky : the wind is not yet 
 his enemy — instead of storms, melodies breathe in the 
 branches — born to a half year's festival of the earth, he 
 must believe that life remains so — he sees the rich earth 
 only afterwards hidden by its covering — and the enjoy- 
 ment of life which the suckling mother imbibes flows warm 
 through the little heart. 
 
 * Pertschen'a Church History.
 
 CHAP. III. J LEVANA. 151 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 GAMES OF CHILDREN. 
 § 46. 
 
 That which produces and maintains cheerfulness is 
 nothing but activity. The usual games of children, unlike 
 ours, are only the expressions of earnest activity, clothed 
 in lightest wings : children have also a game (it is one to 
 them) I mean that of joking, of unmeaning speech, in 
 order to have something to say to themselves, and so 
 forth. Now if a German were to write a book about the 
 games of children, which would at least be more useful 
 than one about games of cards, he would, it seems to me, 
 distinctly and correctly divide them only into two classes : 
 first, into games or exertions of the receiving, apprehending, 
 learning faculties ; and, secondly, into games of the acting, 
 forming powers. The first class would embrace activity 
 from without working inwardly, like the nerves of sense ; 
 the other activity from within working outwardly, like 
 the nerves of motion. Consequently, if the author went 
 deeply into the first class, which he calls the theoretic, — the 
 second, on the other hand, the practical, — he would adduce 
 games which are properly only a child's experimental 
 physics, optics, mechanics. Children have great pleasure 
 for instance, in turning or raising anything — putting keys 
 into locks and, in general, one thing into another — opening 
 and shutting doors, to which is added, moreover, the 
 dramatic fancy of seeing the room now large now small, 
 and themselves alone one moment, in company the next ; — 
 watching the employment of their parents is to them a 
 game of this kind, as is also listening to conversation. 
 
 In the second or practical division, the author must put 
 all those games in which the child seeks to relieve himself 
 of his mental superabundant activity by dramatic fancies, 
 and of his bodily, by movements. The examples will come 
 in the next paragraph.
 
 152 JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH RICHTER. (~FRAG. in. 
 
 But T think so very scientific a man would form a third 
 class, already hinted at ; namely, that in which the child 
 only plays the game, does not really act and feel it, that is, 
 where he takes and gives a comfortable form and tone ; 
 for instance, looks out of the window, lies upon the grass, 
 listens to the nurse and other children. 
 
 §47. 
 
 Play is, in the first place, the working off at once of the 
 overflow of both mental and physical powers ; afterwards, 
 when the school sceptre has carried off the mental source 
 of all fire, even till rain comes, the limbs only throw off 
 the fulness of life by running, throwing, carrying. Play 
 is the first poetry of the human being. (Eating and 
 drinking are his prose ; and striving to get the needful 
 supplies his first solid bread-study and labour of life.) 
 Consequently play forms all the powers, without imparting 
 an overweening influence to any one.* If a teacher would 
 be cruel enough to form a whole man into one member, for 
 instance, into a magnified ear, he must during the first 
 years so mix the playing cards, by abstracting some, that 
 nothing could ever be obtained but games of sound. If he 
 wished to be anything better in the games than cruel, he 
 would perhaps endeavour to lead his pupil with gentle 
 hand, imitating chance which acts from all sides and 
 develops all. But I dread that grown-up hairy hand 
 and fist which knocks on the tender fructifying dust of 
 childhood's blossoms and shakes a colour off, first here, 
 then there, so that the proper many marked carnation may 
 be formed. We often think to rule the external but 
 broad empire of chance by means which some inner narrow 
 accident has thrown together in ourselves. 
 
 * Many children's games are imitations (but mental, whereas those 
 of monkeys are physical), that is to say, not from any especial interest 
 in the thing, but merely because imitation falls in most readily with 
 the mental impulses of life. Probably the monkey, like Dr. Monro's 
 nervous patient, only imitates strange movements, compulsorily and 
 from weakness.
 
 CHAP, in.] LEVANA. 153 
 
 §48. 
 
 We will, however, step further into the play-place of 
 the little folks, if not to be lawgivers, yet to be markers 
 of their games. During the first months of existence the 
 child knows nothing of creative play or efforts, only of 
 the passive reception of impressions. During that period 
 of the most rapid physical growth and inpouring of the 
 world of sense, the overwhelmed soul does not direct itself 
 towards those active games in which afterwards its super- 
 abundant powers find relief. It can only look, listen, 
 catch, touch : so laden, its little hands and arms quite full, 
 it can do and attempt little with them. 
 
 It is only at a later period, when, by means of the five 
 acts of the five senses, the knowledge of the outer world is 
 attained, and one word after another gradually liberates 
 the mind, that greater freedom produces active play ; and 
 that fancy begins to move, whose unfledged wings lan- 
 guage first plumes. Only by words does the child obtain 
 an inner world opposed to the outer, by which he can set 
 the external universe in motion. He has two kinds of play 
 very different both in direction and time — first, that with 
 playthings ; and second, that with and among playmates. 
 
 §49. 
 
 In the first place the child plays with things, con- 
 sequently with himself. A doll is to him a nation, or a 
 company of players, and he is the theatrical poet and 
 director. Every bit of wood is a gilded flower rod, on which 
 fancy can bud hundred-leaved roses. For not merely to 
 grown-up people, but also to children, the plaything itself 
 becomes indifferent if a happy imagination alone be per- 
 mitted to decide ; whether it be with regard to imperial 
 or laurel crowns, shepherds' crooks, or marshals' staves, 
 the flails of war or of agriculture. In the eyes of wonder- 
 working fancy every Aaron's rod blossoms. As the Elysian 
 fields of the ancients near Naples were grounded (accord- 
 ing to Maccard) on nothing more than a bush in a cave, 
 bo, for children, is every bush a forest ; and they possess
 
 154 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH PJCHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 that heaven which Luther in his table-talk promises the 
 saints, where the bugs are sweet-scented, the serpents 
 playful, the dogs gold-skinned, and Luther a lamb. I 
 mean to say, that in the heaven of childhood the father is 
 God the Father, the mother the Mother of God, the nurse 
 a Titaness, the old servant an Angel of the Communion, 
 the turkey a Cherub of Eden, and Eden itself is restored. 
 Do you not know that there is a time when fancy is more 
 actively creative than even in youth, namely, in child- 
 hood, in which nations create their gods, and only speak 
 in poetry ? 
 
 Never forget that the games of children with inanimate 
 playthings are so important, because for them there are 
 only living things : (a doll is as much a human being to 
 a child as a baby is to a woman ;) and also because to them 
 every word is a reality. In beasts the body alone plays, 
 in children the mind. Life meets them on every side ; 
 they cannot comprehend death, or any thing dead; and 
 therefore the happy beings, animating every thing, sur- 
 round themselves only with life, and hence it is they say, 
 for instance, " The lights have covered themselves up and 
 gone to bed — the spring has dressed itself— the water runs 
 down the glass — his house lives there — the wind dances," * 
 — or of a watch from which the works are removed, " It is 
 not alive." 
 
 But among richer realities fancy fades and grows poor ; 
 in the mean time every plaything and playworld is only 
 a distaff of flax from which the soul spins a many coloured 
 coat. As the rook in chess was among different people, 
 now a camel, now an elephant, a stork, a boat, a castle ; 
 so among children, one plaything often acts many parts, 
 and every time it seems to them, as manna did to the 
 Jews, the very thing they desired. The author remembers 
 a little girl of two years old who, after having long carried 
 about an old doll reduced to the bare wood, had at last 
 placed in her arms a very pretty and skilfully dressed 
 one — a foster-sister of the most beautiful in Bertuch's 
 Journal des Modes, which it resembled as niu -'h in optio 
 beauty as it surpassed it in size. Soon afterwards the 
 * Some girl in terror at the raging of the wind substituted " dance * 
 euphemistically.
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 155 
 
 child not only resumed her former conduct towards the 
 wooden sloven, but went so far as to take into her arms, 
 in the place of child or doll, a shabby boot-jack of her 
 father's, which she nursed and rocked to sleep as lovingly 
 as the above-mentioned original of Bertuch's pictures. So 
 much more readily does fancy invest an invisible Adam's 
 rib with human limbs and fashionable costume than a 
 doll which only diifers in size from a lady, and which, on 
 its side, appears to the imagination at the next tea-party 
 «o perfect that it can be improved in nothing. Just so the 
 same little lassie, sitting beside the author, wrote for a 
 loug time with a pen dipped only in air on an ever-white 
 sheet of paper, until he almost fancied it was a satire on 
 himself. Consequently do not surround your children, 
 like princes' children, with a little world of the turner's : 
 do not give them eggs coloured and painted over with 
 figures, but white ; they will soon from their own minds 
 hatch the coloured feathers. On the contrary, the older a 
 man growt, the more rich a reality should appear : the heath 
 on which the youth gleaned at least the morning-dew of 
 the light of love, grows cold with the dark night-dew to 
 the half-blind old man, and at last man requires a whole 
 world, I mean the next, in order only to live. V 
 
 § 50. 
 
 But by the same fancy which, like the sun, paints the 
 colours on the leaves are they also again removed from 
 them. The same mistress of the robes dresses, and also 
 undresses ; consequently there is for children no ever- 
 enduring play or plaything. Therefore do not let a play- 
 thing which has lost its charm lie long before the eye 
 conscious of the change ; lay it by. After a long time 
 the dismissed favourite will be received with honour. The 
 same is to be said of picture-books ; for a poetic animation 
 is as necessary to the picture-book as to the play drawer. 
 A few words about that. The proper picture-books for 
 ABC children do not consist of a sequence of unknown 
 plants and animals, whose differences only the instructed 
 eye perceives, but of historical pieces which present the 
 actions of animals or men taken from the child's circle.
 
 156 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. [FEAG. III. 
 
 Then this living gallery, in whose universal history the 
 child can more clearly paint the individual being than 
 the reader or author can in the all-embracing generality of 
 poetry, may be exalted into historic groups ; for instance 
 into a Joseph among his brethren, selling or recognising 
 him, — into a Hector's farewell of wife and child, and such 
 like subjects. 
 
 Children — those of one or two years old excepted who 
 still need the spur of colour — only require drawings, not 
 paintings ; colours resemble the above-mentioned luxurious- 
 ness of playthings and, by reality, weaken the creative 
 faculty. Therefore give no plaything whose end is only 
 to be looked at ; but let every one be Buch as to lead to 
 work. For instance, a little complete mine, after being a 
 few hours before the child's eyes, is altogether gone over 
 and each tiny vein of ore exhausted ; but a box of building 
 materials, a collection of detached houses, bridges and 
 trees, by their ever-varying location, will make him as 
 rich and happy as an heir to the throne who makes his 
 mental dispositions known by rebuilding his father's 
 palace in the park. Moreover, small pictures are bettel 
 than large ones. What is to us almost invisible is tc 
 children only little ; they are physically short sighted, 
 consequently suited to what is near; and with their short 
 yard, that is, with their little body, they so easily find 
 giants everywhere, that to these little juveniles we should 
 present the world on a reduced scale. 
 
 §51. 
 
 Before the new philosophers, who in education more 
 readily give everything than something, one grows so 
 very much ashamed of such a paragraph as this that one 
 scarcely knows how to deck and sweeten it. I must, 
 however, say that for children in their early years, I know 
 no cheaper and more lasting plaything, one that is also 
 clean and suited for both sexes, than what everyone has 
 in the pineal-gland, some in the bladder, and birds in the 
 stomach — sand. I have seen children weary of play use 
 it for hours as building material, as hurling machine, as a 
 cascade, water for washing, seed, flour, finger-tickler, as
 
 CHAP. III. J LEVANA. 157 
 
 inlaid work, and raised work, as a ground for writing and 
 painting. It is to boys what water is to girls. Philo- 
 sophers! strew sand less in than before the eyes in the 
 birdcage of your children. Only one thing has to be cared 
 for with regard to it, that they do not eat their plaything. 
 
 §52. 
 
 The second kind of play is the playing of children with 
 children. If men be made for men, so are children for 
 children, only much more beautifully. In their early 
 years children are to one another only the completion of 
 their fancy about one plaything : two fancies, like two 
 flames, play near and in one another, yet un-united. 
 Moreover children alone are sufficiently childlike for 
 children. But in later years the first little bond of 
 society is woven of flower-garlands ; playing children are 
 little European savages in social contract for the per- 
 formance of one drama. On the play-place they first issue 
 from the speaking and audience hall into the true sphere 
 of action, and begin their human praxis. For parents 
 and teachers are ever to them those strange heaven- 
 descended gods, who, according to the belief of many 
 nations, appeared teaching and helping the new men on 
 the new-born earth : at least they are to the child gigan- 
 tic Titans ; — consequently in this theocracy and monarchy 
 free resistance is forbidden and injurious to them, obe- 
 dience and faith serviceable and salutary. Where then 
 can the child show and mature his governing power, his 
 resistance, his forgiveness, his generosity, his gentleness, 
 in short every root and blossom of society, except in 
 freedom among his equals ? Teach children by children ! 
 The entrance into their play-room is for them an entrance 
 into the great world ; and their mental school of industry 
 is in the child's play-room and nursery. It is often of more 
 use to a boy himself to administer the cane than to receive 
 it from his tutor ; and still more to have it inflicted by 
 one of his equals than by one of his superiors. If you 
 wish to form a slave for life, fasten a boy for fifteen years 
 to the legs and arms of his tutor, who is to be at onco 
 theatrical director, and occasional member of the two-
 
 158 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. |~FRAG. III. 
 
 personed company. Like all slaves, the child will 
 probably keep his eye and heart armed against his tyrant's 
 individuality ; but, accustomed to one climate and sailing 
 only with one wind, he will be unable in future to with- 
 stand the all-sidedness of individualities. 
 
 §53. 
 
 The teaching and feeding master of the little one 
 always acts as if the proper life of the child, as a human 
 being, were not actually begun, but waited until he 
 himself had departed in order then to lay the key-stone of 
 the arch. Even the travelling tutor believes that, so 
 long as he walks beside and sows seed in the furrow, the 
 time of leaves and flowers has not arrived. For man, 
 needing an external whole, when once an inner one 
 animates him, fixes that outer one, like the arch of the 
 sky and the approach of heaven to earth, in the 
 distance and on the horizon, although from every hill 
 which he successively mounts that heaven flies away into 
 the more distant blue; and so man arrives at old age, 
 and at last, on the mound of the grave, heaven rests upon 
 earth. The whole of life is, then, nowhere or everywhere. 
 Heavens ! where a man is, there eternity, not time, begins. 
 Consequently the plays and actions of children are as 
 serious and full of meaning in themselves and in reference 
 to their future, as ours are to ours. The early game 
 becomes the earnest of later years ; although children in 
 play often repeat something as the echo of an earlier 
 reality, just as the Neapolitans play cards during theatrical 
 representations. Moser dictated his works while playing 
 ombre : perhaps his have been secretly suggested to many 
 an author by his early childhood's games. As chess is 
 said to serve for instruction in war and government, so 
 the *uture laurels and tree of knowledge grow in the 
 play-ground. The bishop Alexander considered those 
 children on whom Athanasius when a child playfully 
 bestowed baptism, to have been really baptized. If, as 
 Archenholz relates, the boys of Winchester School once 
 rebelled against their masters, garrisoned the principal 
 entrance to the schoolhouse, and provided themselves so.
 
 CHAP. III.J LEVANA. 159 
 
 well with arms and munition that the high sheriff of the 
 county, although he marched against them with 150 
 constables and 80 militia men, was yet obliged to grant 
 an honourable capitulation— I see in this angry play 
 nothing further than the youth of that present (even 
 though it be unjust) manhood, which bars rivers and 
 harbours and their own island, - and on the sea conquers 
 countries : so much does the foam of childish play subside 
 into true wine ; and their fig leaves conceal not nakedness 
 but sweet figs. 
 
 § 54. 
 
 If one were to make propositions, that is wishes, one 
 might express this : That for every child a circle of 
 games and real actions should be provided, composed of as 
 many different individualities, conditions and years as can 
 possibly be found, in order to prepare him, in the orbis 
 pictus of a diminished play -world, for the larger real one. 
 But to give the social account of these three play provinces 
 would require a book within the book. 
 
 Moreover, I would propose pleasure and playmasters, 
 as the precursors and leaders of the schoolmaster — and also 
 play-rooms, empty as those rooms on whose plaster walls 
 Raphael's immortal flowers bloom — and also play gardens. 
 And I am just reading that Grabner, in his travelling 
 description of the Netherlands, gives an account of play- 
 schools, to which the Dutchman sends his children sooner 
 than to the schools of instruction. Certainly if one of the 
 two must fall, it were better the former should continue 
 in existence. 
 
 Yet a few miscellaneous observations. Children love 
 no plays so much as those in which they have something 
 to expect, or to dread : so early does the poet, with his 
 knot making and loosing, play his part in man. From 
 time to time they, like deep, unlucky players, ask for new 
 cards. But this changeableness is not merely that of 
 luxury, but also the consequence of their rapid growth — 
 for the so quickly ripening child seeks new fruits in new 
 countries, as the aged seeks new ones in the old. Perhaps 
 also it is the consequence of that want of a future and a 
 past, whereby a child is so much more strongly affected
 
 160 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IIT. 
 
 and wearied by the present, as though he were seated in 
 a world of sunbeams without morning and evening red- 
 ness : and, lastly, for the child, to whose littleness not 
 only space * but time is magnified, play hours must grow 
 into play years ; and therefore we must indulge him, the 
 short-sighted being, in his desire of change and new games 
 The one-houred constancy of a child equals, nay surpasses, 
 that of one month in his parents. 
 
 The Jews forbad to celebrate two festivals on the same 
 day, a marriage, for instance, on a feast day, or two 
 marriages at the same time. Should not children be 
 refused in a similar manner if, after having taken a walk 
 on a summer evening, they beg leave to play in the garden, 
 and then, thirdly, to bring their playfellows into the 
 parlour for a quarter of an hour before supper? For 
 herein are children antedated growri-up persons ; and, 
 while at work, scarcely long so much for pleasure, as for 
 what comes after pleasure ; from one sugar-island they 
 would at once sail over to another, and heap heaven upon 
 heaven. If this frequentativum of the enjoyment of even 
 innocent pleasures be allowed, the child, dearest mother, 
 becomes only fitted for a court, or royal residence, and 
 lays claim to pleasure as a right — months of thirty-two 
 days, and feast-days of twenty-five hours, each of which 
 measures full sixty-ono minutes. And so the little being 
 is already dipped in the honey of present superabundant 
 pleasure, whereby time clogs the butterfly wings of the 
 Psyche for every flight. The only good (if, indeed, it be 
 any) that can come out of a girl thus educated, is at most 
 a woman who, on the same day, after having received and 
 paid some visits, amuses herself at the theatre, and then 
 afterwards hopes for cards and dancing. 
 
 As nature by cool refreshing night breaks off the 
 culminating pleasures of our constitution, always requiring 
 stronger excitement ; so this healthy night-coolness should 
 be given, in a mental sense, to children, in order not to 
 expose them in the future to the sufferings of the people 
 of the world and of pleasure ; who, like sea-farers in 
 
 * It is a familiar experience that when one lights as a man on 
 objects of childhood all .seem smaller and shorter ; for the measure, not 
 the tilings, has grown longer.
 
 CH.\r. III. J LEV ANA. 161 
 
 northern latitudes, wearied by month-long unceasing day, 
 pray and bless God for a little night and candle-light. 
 
 But let there ever be, if many games, yet few playthings 
 — and not apparent — and every evening put away into one 
 place — and for twins let the same piece be doubled, as for 
 three children trebled, in order to avoid quarrels.* 
 
 The early games should assist the mental development, 
 for the physical advances gigantically without help : later 
 ones should draw the physical up along with the mental, 
 which, by schools and advancing years, takes the pre- 
 cedence. Let the child toy, sing, look, listen ; but let the 
 boy and the girl run, climb, throw, build, bear heat and cold. 
 
 The most delightful and inexhaustible play is speaking ; 
 first of the child with itself, and still more of the parents 
 with it. In play and for pleasure you cannot speak too 
 much with children ; nor in punishing, or teaching them, 
 too little. 
 
 Immediately after waking, the child, owing to his mental 
 and physical excitability, requires almost nothing, still 
 less you ; shortly before going to sleep, as at the burning 
 out of a bonfire, a little weariness is serviceable. For 
 older children, whom labour exercises and controls, its 
 end (freedom) is itself a game ; and then the open air. 
 The open air — an expression which Europe, like death, 
 must soon exchange for the more correct one— the open 
 aether. But let not the teacher after the work also order 
 and regulate the games ! It is decidedly better not to 
 recognise or make any order in games — not even mine 
 — than to keep it up with difficulty and send the zephyrets 
 of pleasure through artistic bellows and air-pumps to the 
 little flowers. Animals and savages never experience 
 tedium, neither would children if we were not so very 
 anxious to keep it away. Let the child experience in play 
 his future life ; and since from that the mountain and 
 storm pressure of tedium cannot be removed, let the child 
 sometimes feel it, in order afterwards not to perish under 
 its weight. 
 
 * Here a sensible friend makes the important objection tbat by this 
 means children are deprived of the pleasure of giving and receiving. 
 He would recommend instead a different toy for each tor the pleasure 
 of exchanging. 
 
 I M
 
 162 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEK. [FRAG. III. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 children's dances. 
 §55. 
 
 I know not whether I should most deprecate children's 
 balls, or most praise children's dances ! The former — 
 before the dancing-master — in the society of lookers-on 
 and fellow dancers — in the hot temperature of the ball- 
 room, and among its hot products — are, in the highest 
 degree, the front ranks and leading steps to the dance of 
 death. On the contrary, children's dances are what I will 
 now commend more at large. 
 
 As the first speech long precedes grammar, so should 
 dancing precede and prepare the way for the art of danc- 
 ing. A father who has an old piano, or fiddle, or flute, or 
 an improvising singing voice, should call his own and 
 neighbour's children together, and let them every day for 
 an hour hop and turn by his orchestra, in pairs, in rows, 
 in circles, very frequently alone, accompanying themselves 
 with singing, as their own grinding organ; and also in 
 any way they like. In the child happiness dances ; in the 
 man, at most, it only smiles or weeps. The mature man 
 can in dancing only express the beauty, of the art, not 
 himself and his emotions : love would thereby comport 
 itself too rudely, joy too loudly and boldly, before the stern 
 Nemesis. In the child, body and soul still live united in 
 their honeymoon, and the active body dances after the 
 happy soul ; until afterwards both separate from bed and 
 board, and at last entirely leave one another. In later 
 times the light zephyr of contentment cannot turn the 
 heavy metal standard to point its course. 
 
 §56. 
 
 Children are like Forrer's watches which wind them- 
 selves up if you walk about with them. As in the old 
 astronomy, eleven of their heavens are moveable, and only 
 cne, that of sleep, stationary. It is only dancing in a 
 circle that is light enough for a child ; only for youth is a
 
 CHAI\ IV.] LEVANA. 163 
 
 Btraight course not too difficult. As to the heavenly bodies, 
 so to children, do the motion and music of the spheres 
 belong ; whereas the older body, like water, takes the 
 Btraight path. To speak more plainly : Women, it is 
 well known, cannot run, but only dance ; and every one 
 would more easily reach by dancing than by walking ;i 
 posthouse, to which, instead of a straight poplar alley, a 
 lordly row of trees planted in the English fashion, con- 
 ducted. Now children are diminutive women — at least 
 boys are, although girls are often only diminutive boys. 
 Dancing is the easiest of all movements, because it needs 
 the least space and is the most varied ; hence joy is not a 
 runner but a dancer : hence the indolent savage dances, 
 and the wearied negro slave rouses himself by dancing to 
 fresh exertion : hence the runner — all other circumstances 
 being the same — has more frequently fallen down dead 
 than the dancer. Hence camels, and armies, and Oriental 
 labourers continue their laborious marches for a longer 
 time and with more ease to the sound of music; not 
 principally because music produces cheerfulness, that 
 might easily be attained by other pleasures, but because 
 music rounds off the straight movement into the circling 
 dance and its still returning rhythm ; for it is only in a 
 circular, not in a straight line, that every thing returns in 
 thirds. As an argumentative or a narrative sequence 
 (science or history) prepares us by every effort of attention 
 for a still stronger, whereas the zigzag of the epigram 
 each moment compels us to a new beginning and fresh 
 exertion ; so physically the same is the case in running 
 and walking, in which, up-hill, or down-hill, no effort is 
 cause of its successor, but the great follows the little. 
 or the strongest the strongest, as the case may be : in 
 dancing, on the contrary, without aim or compulsion, one 
 movement constantly springs out of the other and renders 
 cessation, rather than continuance, difficult. All running, 
 but no dancing, desires an end. What better movement, 
 then, can there be for children than this revolving one ? 
 The gymnastic of running, going on stilts, climbing, &c, 
 steels and hardens individual forces and muscles, whereas 
 dancing, on the contrary, like a physical poet exercises 
 aud equalises all the muscles. 
 
 m 2
 
 164 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 §57. 
 
 Further, the harmony connected with it imparts to the 
 affections and the mind that metrical order which reveals 
 the highest, and regulates the beat of the pulse, the step 
 and even the thoughts. Music is the metre of this poetic 
 movement, and is an invisible dance, as dancing is a silent 
 music. Finally, this also ranks among the advantages of 
 this eye and heel pleasure ; that children with children, 
 by no harder canon than the musical, light as sound, may 
 1 ie joined in a rose-bud feast without thorns or strife. 
 
 In short, dancing cannot come soon enough, "but the 
 dancing-master may more easily come too soon than too 
 late." This last part appears in the first edition. I should, 
 perhaps, more correctly have written singing than dancing- 
 master, because those skilled in the art declare that the 
 early exercise of the voice is injurious to it. The first 
 edition is only right in so far as it may to the utmost 
 remove children, brought up in genteel coquetry, from the 
 influence of the dancing-master, who would reduce all 
 bodily movements to rule and system. On the other side, 
 again, the second edition is right, if it add that better- 
 educated children, who in their eighth and ninth years, 
 instead of vanity, know only the law of the good and the 
 beautiful, may join with less danger to their higher self 
 the trivial regiment and ruling fiddle of the dancing- 
 master in their early years when they can learn to dance, 
 as to walk and to read, without coquetry. Then also the 
 dancing-hour may become an hour of freedom and play to 
 those poor persecuted children who are treated like goats, 
 whose sinews are cut to prevent them from jumping. 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 MUSIC. 
 
 §58. 
 
 Music, the only fine art in which man and all classes 
 of animals — spiders, mice, elephants, fish, amphibious 
 creatures, birds — have a community of goods, niusf
 
 CHAP. V.] LEVANA. 165 
 
 ceaselessly affect the child, who is the spiritual man and the 
 brute beast united. And so one might break the heart of 
 the little new possessor of life with a trumpet, and its eai 
 with shrieks and discord. Therefore, it is probable that 
 the first music, perhaps as an undying echo in the child, 
 forms the secret thorough-bass, the melodious theme in 
 the brain- chambers of a future master of sound, which his 
 after compositions only harmoniously vary. 
 
 Music, rather than poetry, should be called " the happy 
 art." She imparts to children nothing but heaven, for as 
 ye't they have not lost it, and lay no memories as mufflers 
 on the clear sounds. Choose melting melodies, and soft 
 strains ; even with those you only excite the child to frisk 
 and dance about. Savages, powerful and pleasure-loving 
 people, such as Greeks, Bussians and Neapolitans, have 
 their popular songs set entirely in minor keys. For 
 some years the child, like the father, can weep at certain 
 sounds ; but in him it arises from overflowing happiness, 
 for as yet the memory does not place beneath those 
 tuneful hopes the reckoning of its losses. 
 
 §59. 
 
 Yet among all the instruments which sound in Haydn's 
 child's concerts, that best serves the purposes of educa- 
 tional music which is born with the performer — the 
 voice. In the childhood of nations speaking was singing. 
 Let this be repeated in the childhood of the individual 
 In singing, the human being, harmony and heart coalesce 
 at the same time in one breast— whereas instruments seem 
 only to lend him a voice : — with what arms can a parent 
 more closely and more gently draw the little beings 
 towards him than with his spiritual ones, with the tones 
 of his own heart, with the same voice which always speaks 
 to them, but now transfigured into a musical ascension ? 
 
 Thereby they have the advantage and the consciousness 
 that they can imitate it on the spot. Singing takes the 
 place of screaming, which the doctors so much praise 
 as a palaestra for the lungs, and first military exercise of 
 speech. Is there anything more beautiful than a merry 
 singing child ? And how unwearied! v he repeats the
 
 106 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 .same thing, which is so repulsive to the little soul in all 
 other games ! As in maturer age the Alpine shepherd 
 and the chained labourer sing away their vacancy and 
 long hours of compulsory sitting ; so the child sings away 
 childhood, and sings on, hearing only himself. For 
 harmony, like the innate poetry of the feelings, says 
 nothing but the same thing, unsatiated by repetition, 
 unwearied by sound. 
 
 Let the father, like the 1'rieslander, follow the proverb 
 — Frisia non cantat— and never or seldom sing : I would 
 wish him to do it for his children, and the mother for him 
 and them. 
 
 § 60. 
 
 As one drops asleep by inward listening to singing, so 
 one might, at least in a case where immediate waking is 
 necessary (always a most undesirable thing) effect it by 
 music, as Montaigne's father did. A flute-playing clock 
 would be a good awakener. And why should not harmony 
 be employed as a soul-curative means against the maladies 
 of children, against vexation, obstinacy, anger ? 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 COMMANDS, PROHIBITIONS, PUNISHMENTS, AND CRYING. 
 
 §61. 
 
 Rousseau could not write these paragraphs ; for he was of 
 a different opinion. But I agree with Basedow, and do 
 not believe, with the former, that the parental will can 
 and ought to assume the appearance of a mere accident. 
 Rewarding and punishing merely by physical consequences 
 and regulations, and in fact the whole of Rousseau's 
 system of education, would throw away a grown-up man 
 for the sake of a growing one : but life is not given to 
 pass merely from education again to education. Rousseau 
 himself admits that only an approach to his plan is
 
 CHAP. VI.] LEVANA. 1(57 
 
 possible ; but then one is just as far as ever from the goal ; 
 since here it does not depend on the failure of a degree, 
 but of a species. Fortunately this erroneous course is 
 closed against the child's mind. 
 
 V How, then, would the child attain the after-feeling of 
 necessity without the fore-feeling of freedom which he 
 must see as strong in others, or in his equals, as in 
 himself? Much more must the child — proceeding from 
 himself — regard all things, even dead matter, as free, and 
 be exasperated with every opposition, as though it were 
 intentional. The deeper the chain of souls hangs down 
 the broader does the free ocean flow around. The dog bites 
 the stone — the child strikes both — the savage sees in the 
 storm a war kindled and led by spirits. It is only to the 
 clearer eye that that dark iron mass which we call 
 necessity stands in the midst of the universe like a black 
 sun. Even this it is that first draws the free spirit, which 
 begins and ends in freedom, out of understanding into 
 reason, out of the finite into infinitude. The child, then, 
 who makes every thing into an independent being, con- 
 sequently yourself in the first place, finds in every oc- 
 curence a premeditated course of action, and in every 
 hindrance an enemy. Do not we older ones experience 
 during our whole life the iron power of nature, yet 
 without resigning ourselves calmly and uncomplainingly 
 to it, when, for instance, it either closes it irremediably, as 
 in death, or embitters it, as in old age ? And whence do ri. i J. 
 physical consequences obtain their educational reputation 
 except from the unchangeableness of nature ? Now free t*^-/ 
 will may appear to the child just as consequential and 
 immoveable ! Then he beholds a higher than blind ne- ^J 
 cessity. Further, is there any necessity which better 
 teaches endurance than the mental one of a foreign will ? , 
 Finally, how can trust in men — that noble bond of human 
 and higher oneness — come to life in a child without some /•!••-'-'•/ 
 object, without a parent's word on which he may confide ? 
 
 S^ 
 
 § 62 
 
 The modes, then, of commanding and forbidding are all 
 .hat come under consideration. And here we must entreat
 
 168 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FEAG. III. 
 
 pardon for the disorderly ranks of a merely experimental 
 system of education. 
 
 Take no pleasure in ordering t do or not to do, but in 
 the child's free action. In frequent orders the parent's 
 advantage is more considered than the child's. 
 
 Let the child be irresistibly bound by your word, but 
 not you yourself : you need not give any edicta perpetua, 
 but your lawgiving power can each day issue new de- 
 cretals and pastoral letters. 
 
 Forbid seldomer by actions than by words : do not 
 snatch the knife out of the child's hands, but let him lay 
 it down himself at your desire ; in the first case he 
 obeys the pressure of a foreign power, in the second its 
 guidance. 
 
 Let your tables of the law be unbroken, and in raised 
 character. Rather forbid the whole, if it is difficult for 
 you to separate its parts : for instance — touching the 
 table at all, though you may only wish to protect some 
 articles upon it. 
 
 Let the child learn in himself the right he demands 
 from others. Consequently let the respect for property 
 be decidedly and unsparingly exacted from him. What 
 belongs to the child ? Father and mother, nothing more : 
 every thing else belongs to them. But as every man 
 desires a world, yea, a whole universe, for his patrimony, 
 mete out little to the little ones and say — " No more ! " 
 
 The child's ear readily distinguishes a decided from an 
 angry tone of voice : the mother easily falls into the latter 
 when she attempts to imitate the father in the former. 
 His commands are better obeyed than hers for three 
 reasons ; the first, his decided, though far removed from 
 angry, voice, has been already mentioned. The second is, 
 that the man, for the most part, like the warrior, says only 
 one, and consequently the same, imperial No; whereas 
 women can scarcely say to a child, Be quiet ! without 
 colon and semicolon, and most necessary notes of inter- 
 rogation and exclamation. Was there ever in history an 
 instance of a woman training a dog ? Or could a generaless, 
 in commanding her marching army to halt, ever express 
 herself otherwise than thus . " All you people, as soon as I 
 have done speaking, I command you all to stand still in
 
 CHAP. VT.j LEVANA. 169 
 
 your places ; halt, I tell you ! " The third reason is, that 
 the m** 1 ! more rarely withdraws his refusal, /k 
 
 The best rule in politics is said to be " pas trop 
 gouverner : " it is also true in education. But some 
 teachers, in order to be always talking, and rather to 
 resemble ringing silver than dead-sounding gold, preach 
 as often against faults and in favour of virtues which 
 come with years, as against faults and for virtues which 
 increase with age ; why, for instance, is there so much 
 precipitate haste about learning to walk, to knit, to read, 
 as if these arts must not finally come of themselves ? But 
 quite different things are, for example, pure enunciation, 
 correct writing, and holding the pen and person properly 
 while so engaged, a sense of order, and generally those 
 capabilities which only grow with years. Since, un- 
 fortunately, independently of these things, education and 
 instruction require so many words, spare using them 
 against fading faults, and direct them against growing 
 ones. Frugal speech cultivates and strains the powers of 
 the interpreting child, as riddles do. Grown people do 
 the same towards one another : for instance, a great man 
 of my acquaintance says at first, among a circle of 
 strangers, little more than hum, hum, and that very low ; 
 but just as (according to the Indian myth) the silent 
 godhead interrupted his eternity and creation began, only 
 because he in a similar way said, " oum " * so this man, 
 merely by his " hum," gives everyone much to think of. 
 Yes, I know even a greater and more useful one-syllable- 
 ness than even the Chinese : that is no-syllableness, or 
 silence. Young doctors, who do not wish to forget natural 
 philosophy in their usual medical sciences, very often 
 make use of it, in their examinations before the collegium 
 medicum, in reply to very common questions ; as Socrates 
 was silent when angry, so they wish by silence to express 
 their indignation at questions about miserable sciences to 
 which they have always remained strangers. 
 
 But to return from this digression, which can less be 
 
 ranked among the improvements than among the additions 
 
 to the second edition — many of us teachers accompany our 
 
 commands and prohibitions with moral reasons on theiT 
 
 * Gorre's History of Myths.
 
 170 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IvL 
 
 way to the heart, which are mere superficiality, for the 
 child's conscience itself affords their strongest proof: but 
 a sequence of reasons is useful in connection with 
 medicinal, gymnastic, and other commands, which find in 
 the child, instead of an advocate, only curiosity and 
 ignorance. 
 
 Further, we grown-up people all have and admit 
 (though without deriving any peculiar benefit from it) 
 the fault of considering every difference of a child from 
 ourselves as a failing, our scoldings as lessons, childish 
 errors as greater than our own ; and thence it is we so 
 thoughtlessly convert our educational rein and leading- 
 strings into a hanging rope, and would willingly carve 
 the child into a neat cork Swiss model of our Alps (as 
 Pfyffer does the lofty mountains) ; and thence it is also, 
 since the like is not easily accomplished, that we talk on 
 and on, like the shell sea trumpet which ceaselessly sounds, 
 and with our school-chalk draw and lengthen the broad 
 stroke before the beak of the poor hen, so that she may 
 always stare down on the same line without being able to 
 look upwards. 
 
 Even a grown-up man whom some one should follow all 
 day long with moveable pulpit and stool of confession, 
 from which to hurl sermons and anathemas, could never 
 attain any real activity and moral freedom ; how much 
 less then a weak child, who, at every step in life, must be 
 entangled in a " stop — run — be quiet — do that !" It is 
 the same fault as that filling and cramming of the day 
 with mere lessons ; under which rain-spout of instruction 
 princely children especially stand, as if to make up by 
 that flow of teaching for the future ebb of learning. And 
 what else, in fact, is this but unceasingly to sow one field 
 full of seed upon seed ? A dead corn granary may possibly 
 come out of it, but no living harvest field. Or, in another 
 simile, your watch stops while you wind it up, and you 
 everlastingly wind up children and never let them go. 
 Y. The reason why children dread the fire, which always 
 burns, more than the knife, which does not always cut, 
 applies to their different kind of fear of father and of 
 mother : he is the fire, she the knife. The difference does 
 not lie in their severity, for an angry mother is severity
 
 CHAP. VI.] LEVANA. 171 
 
 itself, but in their unchangeableness. The younger the 
 child the more necessary is one-syllahleness ; yes, even 
 that is not necessary ; shake the head and let that be 
 enough. At most say, Pst ! Later on, give the reasons 
 in a gentle voice, merely to render obedience easier by 
 the fair tokens of love. For vehement refusal produces 
 in the child vehement demand. X 
 
 Forbid in a gentle voice, so that a whole gamut of 
 increased force may be open to you, and only once. The 
 last may cost labour. Even in the child that human 
 system of delay rules which for every rapid determination 
 must have time for three words of command and three 
 summonses, together with some hours of grace. Do not, 
 then, be more angry than is fitting, if a child, for instance, 
 closes a forbidden noise with a so finely graduated Allegro 
 ma non troppo and mancando, that you yourself at last 
 cannot accurately distinguish resistance from obedience. 
 Here there remains no choice but either punishment for 
 the most infinitely small disobedience, or, after the first 
 obedience, indifference to the rest : the latter seems to 
 me the best. But there is a more beautiful lingering, the 
 parental. The first and quickest word which a father 
 gives to a begging child, or wife, or servant is, No ; 
 thereupon he endeavours to grant the request, and says 
 Yes at the end instead of at the beginning. The mother 
 does still worse. Can you, then, obtain from yourself no 
 respite, no 'nterval before decision, for the child, or 
 whoever it may be, by merely answering to every request, 
 " Come again," or " After this," or " In three Saxon 
 minutes of rest " ? Women, I would only recommend you 
 this law of delay in order to be less frequently in 
 opposition to others. Another parental delay, that of 
 punishment, is of use for children of the second five years 
 (quinquennium). Parents and teachers would more fre- 
 quently punish according to the line of exact justice if, 
 after every fault in a child, they would only count four- 
 and-twenty, or their buttons, or their fingers. They 
 would thereby let the deceiving present round themselves, 
 as well as round the children, escape ; the cold still empire 
 of clearness would remain behind, and the child, as well as 
 father (supposing, for instance, that anger would else have
 
 172 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. |~FRAG. III. 
 
 been tl e occasion for as well as the medium of the punish- 
 ment, or the correction also the repetition of the fault), 
 would learn in the reflected mutual pain to regard that of 
 the other. Beccaria rightly attaches the punishment, or 
 hangman, close to the heels of the criminal, because 
 compassion and oblivion would else only act against, not 
 in favour of the executioner ; but the presupposed, wide- 
 extended despotism of the parental law admits of the 
 softening interval of time before the spectators, as well as 
 before the child, and in the rulers themselves. Only with 
 regard to your youngest children attach the punishment 
 to the very fault, like a physical effect to its cause. 
 
 §63. 
 
 After unchangeable biddings and forbiddings, one might 
 also recommend to the parents some wishes, whose fulfil- 
 ment would depend solely on the love and free choice of 
 the children, in order to exercise them in freedom and love 
 and merit. I will do so. 
 
 The obedience of children, in itself alone without 
 consideration of its motive, can have no other value than 
 that thereby much is made easier to the parents. Oi 
 would it be good for a soul's growth, suppose your child 
 always submitted, bent and broke his will to that of others 
 as to yours ? What a pliable, dislocated human member, 
 bound on the wheel of fortune, would the child then be ! 
 N^But what you desire is, not his obedience, but his inclina- 
 ' tion to it, love, trust, self-denial, the grateful reverence 
 for the best (namely his parents) ! And in so far you are 
 right. But therefore take care to command nothing to 
 which the higher motive does not itself call and incline 
 you. To forbid will less irritate and less cause to err a 
 child who regards everything as the independent property 
 of his parents, than to command ; since the young spirit 
 already knows that he has at least one property, himself 
 and justice. Mothers willingly call to the help of their 
 biddings and forbiddings the dissipating method, which 
 by pleasurable by-ways conceals from the child the goal 
 of authoritative command. But by this flattering mum- 
 mery tl\a child learns no rule and no discipline, but before
 
 CHAP. VII.] LEVANA. 173 
 
 his short-sighted eye all right and steadiness is con- 
 verted into a merry game of chance, which hardens and 
 accustoms him to nothing. 
 
 X.Further, the children, always only the receivers of 
 their parents' gifts, are themselves sometimes gladly the 
 hosts of their hosts, and do the work of love more 
 cheerfully than that of necessity ; just as their parents 
 more willingly give than pay. Let, then, the request be 
 proffered in the gentlest tone of voice (but without giving 
 any reasons) and recompensed by gladness at its fulfil- 
 ment ; yet let not its refusal be punished. Only the slave 
 is 1 lashed to over-service ; even the camel moves no swifter 
 before the whip, only behind the flute. Children it has 
 been remarked, have a particular affection for the station 
 of their grand-parents ; and how comes this but because 
 they require and order little, and consequently their 
 grand-children receive it the more willingly from them ? 
 Finally, can you more beautifully and soothingly ex- 
 tinguish the memory of a punishment than, when it is 
 over, making the child happy by expressing a wish for a 
 little act of courtesy to some one? More of this in the 
 chapter on the education of the affections. X, 
 
 CHAPTEK VII. 
 
 PUNISHMENTS. 
 
 §64. 
 
 This unchildlike tvord will scarcely issue from my pen : I 
 would rather write pain or after-smart. Punishment 
 should only apply to guilty conscience, and in the begin 
 ning children, like animals, have only an innocent one. 
 They, as the fixed stars viewed from the mountains, 
 should never tremble ; and the earth should seem to them, 
 as it would do from a star, glorious shining, not earthy 
 black. Or, if you necessitate them to sacrifice and pawn 
 their irrecoverable May-time, in order that they may
 
 174 JEAN PAUL FRIEDPJCH EICHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 thoroughly enjoy its inmost kernel in some subsequent 
 tempestuous period of life, do you advise them any 
 thing different from what the Indian does, who buries his 
 gold in order to enjoy it in the next world after he him- 
 self is buried ? 
 
 Great rewards, says Montesquieu, betoken a falling 
 state ; the same is true of great punishments in the 
 schoolhouse; yea, and in the state also. Not great but 
 unavoidable punishments are mighty, truly almighty. 
 Hence most police punishments are usury — punishing 
 with pounds where pence would suffice — so also are 
 torturing cruelties, because no one dreads the wheel who 
 scorns the gallows. There exists in men a fearful cruelty; 
 as compassion can grow into positive pain, so the infliction 
 of pain for punishment can grow into pleasure. It is 
 strange, but to be proved by schoolmasters, soldiers, 
 rustics, hunters, overseers of slaves and murderers, and by 
 the French revolution, that wrathful cruelty is easily 
 fanned into a pleasurable sensation, to which screams, 
 tears, and flowing wounds actually become a refreshing 
 spring to the thirst for blood. Among the people the 
 blows of fate on the parents usually beget, as in a 
 stormy sky, retaliating blows on the children. Common 
 mothers strike their own children the harder because they 
 see strangers do it— or because they cry too much — or 
 because they are too silent. Is it more our subjection 
 to jurist Home — which considered children, as well as 
 women, slaves and those who were not Romans as things, 
 not men — or more our reverence for the domestic sanctu- 
 ary which explains the indifference with which the state 
 beholds the painful judgments of parents and teachers, 
 the tortures of defenceless innocence ? 
 
 §65. 
 
 If the ancient Goths, Greenlanders, Quakers, and even 
 savages, form tranquil and brave children-souls without 
 the cane, round which ours must twine like tame snakes, 
 we may perceive how ill we use the twig which must 
 afterwards be thickened to a stick, The one ought to 
 have rendered the other unnecessary Even the smallest
 
 CHAP. VII.J LEVANA. 175 
 
 rod should only be used occasionally as paradigma and 
 theme of the future ; afterwards the mere threatening 
 preaches and restrains. At the same time the reproach of 
 Goths and savages, that blows destroy the courage of a 
 boy, proves rather too much, because it would equally 
 serve against every useful preventive which teaches by 
 pain, for instance, burning the finger ; and, moreover, 
 may be disproved, partly by the example of the common 
 German soldier, who probably gives as many blows in war 
 as he received in time of peace, and also, partly, by that 
 of the officers, with whom sometimes the opposite is the 
 case. 
 
 A child who strikes should be struck, and best by the 
 object itself, if he be old enough ; by the servants, for 
 instance. If a child be struck, say a girl, the father may 
 be her curator sexus (guardian of the sex) ; on the contrary, 
 if it be a boy who struck a boy, he would not deserve the 
 future man's hat if he rather raised his voice than his hand, 
 
 d took refuge in his father's revenging stick. 
 
 Never let the contest of parental and childish obstinacy 
 
 ike place ; the one in punishing persistency to obtain its 
 object, the other in enduring refractoriness. After a 
 certain amount of exerted authority, leave to the grieved 
 child the victory of No ; you may be certain he will the 
 next time avoid so painful a one. \ 
 
 Tremblingly I venture to propose suggestive questions, 
 presupposive of the matter — such, it is well known, are 
 forbidden to judges, because they would thereby attach to 
 the prisoner's answer what they had first derived from it ; 
 and because, by this blackening of forbidden wares, they 
 would soon arrive at the blackening of the accused thus 
 urged to stumble. At the same time I would permit the 
 educator occasionally to make use of such questions. If 
 he know with every likelihood of truth that the child, for 
 instance, has been on the ice, contrary to his order, he 
 may, by the first question, which only concerns indifferent 
 by-circumstances, as How long he has been on the pond 
 and who was sliding with him, take away from him at 
 once the wish and the attempt to pay the inquirer with 
 the false silver of a lie ; a wish and an attempt to which 
 the simple question, Whether he had remained in the house
 
 176 JEAN PAUL FR1EDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. Ill 
 
 .would have afforded room and temptation. It is impos- 
 sible that wickedness and presence of mind can be so great 
 in a child, that in this confusing assault he will declare 
 the seeming omniscience of the parental inquiry to be a 
 lie, by himself giving a bold lying denial of the fact. 
 Children, like savages, have a propensity to lie, which has 
 chiefly reference to the past, and behind which, as Rous- 
 seau's lie about the ribbon proves, the truthfulness of riper 
 years is developed. Baser and more dangerous than lies 
 about what is past are prospective lies, or those about the 
 future, by which the child, else the echo of the present, anni 
 hilating himself, declares, with the consciousness of doing 
 so, the design of a long contrary course of bad action : the 
 lie of the past steals good money, the lie of the future 
 coins false. The carefully moral use of a similar leading 
 question at least renders difficult the so dangerous success 
 of the titular truth of a lie ; for one successful lie is the 
 mother of lies ; and out of every wind-egg the devil 
 hatches his basilisks. 
 
 One word about after-anger ! A serious punishment of 
 a child is scarcely so important as the quarter of an hour 
 immediately succeeding, and the transition to forgiveness. 
 After the hour of storm every seed-word finds a softened 
 warm ground ; fear and hatred of the punishment, which 
 at first hardened and struggled against what was said, are 
 now past, and gentle instruction falls in and heals, as hoaey 
 relieves a sting and oil cures wounds. During this hour 
 one may speak much, if the gentlest possible tone of voice 
 be used, aud soften the grief of others by showing our own. 
 But every long winter of after- wrath is poisonous ; at 
 most an after-grief, not an after-punishment, is allowable. 
 Mothers, viewing every thing on the foundation of love, 
 and so treating their children like their husbands, fall easily 
 into this after-punishment, chiefly because it better agrees 
 with their activity, gladly dividing itself into little parts, 
 and because they, unlike the man, who sets the stem round 
 Avith thorns, willingly cover the leaves with prickles. I 
 have dearest lady-readers, met the gentlest, mildest, 
 " Blondinas " in public places, who, neverthelesss, in the 
 nursery (and in the servants' hall too) resembled beautiful 
 white roses, which prick as sharply as the fullest and
 
 £HAP. VII. J LEVANA. 177 
 
 reddest. Unfortunately it is often the case that women, 
 like so many authors (myself, for example) do not know 
 when to stop and say, Halt ! A word which I have hither- 
 to vainly sought in every female dictionary, and in every 
 female street-quarrel. Now this after-anger, this should- 
 be-punishing appearance of loving less, either passes over 
 the child, living only in the present and resembling a beast 
 which immediately after the greatest pain and madness 
 eats on peaceably, without being understood and without 
 having any effect ; or, from the same sense of the present, 
 the child reconciles himself to the want of marks of affec- 
 tion, and learns to do without love : or his little heart is 
 embittered by the continued punishment of a buried fault ; 
 and so by this after-rancour the beautiful affecting pas- 
 sage to forgiveness is lost, which by long gradations is 
 weakened. But afterwards this after-tax of punishment, 
 so dear to women, may do good service when the girl is 
 about thirteen years old, and the boy fourteen : this later, 
 riper age counts so much past in its present that the long 
 regretful seriousness of a father or a mother must move 
 and influence a youth or a maiden at the time when their 
 hearts thirst for love ; in this case coldness ripens and 
 sweetens the fruit, whereas earlier it only kills the 
 blossom. Is there any thing more beautiful than a mother 
 who, after a punishment, speaks to her child with gentle 
 earnestness and serious love ? And yet there is something 
 even more beautiful — a father who does the same. 
 
 What is to be followed as a rule of prudence, yea of 
 justice, towards grown-up people, should be much more 
 observed towards children ; namely, that one should never 
 judgingly declare, for instance, " You are a liar," or even, 
 " You are a bad boy," instead of saying, " You have told 
 an untruth," or " You have done wrong." For, since the 
 power to command yourself implies at the same time the 
 power of obeying, man feels, a minute after his fault, as 
 free as Socrates : and the branding mark of his nature, not 
 of the deed, must seem to him a blameworthy punishment. 
 To this must be added that every individual's wrong 
 actions, owing to his inalienable sense of a moral aim and 
 hope, seem to him only short, usurped interregnums of the 
 d e vil, or comets in the uniform solar system. The child,
 
 178 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH PJCHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 consequently, under such a moral annihilation, feels the 
 wrong-doing of others more than his own ; and this all 
 the more because in him want of reflection, and the 
 general warmth of his feelings, represent the injustice of 
 others in a more ugly light than his own. 
 
 If it be permitted to the state only to declare actions, 
 not men, dishonourable — except in cases where it adjudges 
 the loss of life with that of honour, because loss of honour 
 is the extinction of humanity ; and every heart, however 
 degraded, still preserves indestructible the life-germ that 
 may grow up into the restoration of the man : — then is it 
 still more sinful, by the cruel frost of ignominious punish- 
 ment, to injure this life-seed in the child, which as yet 
 only bears unripe and growing members. You may give 
 him as rewards, coats of arms, chains and stars of orders, 
 and doctors' hats — or, as punishments, take all these 
 away ; but do not let the punishments of honour be 
 greater ; that is to say, do not let them be positive, as the 
 dunces' caps and wooden horses of many schools are. 
 Shame is the cold Orcus of the inner man ; a spiritual 
 hell, without redemption, wherein the damned can become 
 nothing else but at most one devil more. Therefore, even 
 Gedicken's advice, to oblige a child deserving punishment 
 to write a theme about his fault, is to be rejected (except 
 dt a somewhat later period) ; for what else can this raking 
 up of the inner slough produce but either foul, complete 
 sinking and incrustation of the fallen child, or poisonous 
 stunning of the better by marsh exhalations? And does 
 not the tender being thus harden and accustom himself to 
 a contradiction between words and feelings ? Somewhat 
 similar is the punishment of kissing the hand which has 
 inflicted chastisement. The state and education do so 
 mutually work after and imitate one another! I only 
 cite as an example the disgraceful retractation of an 
 injury. For, as no civic power can remove the opinion of 
 the injurer, the command to revoke his words is only the 
 command for a lie, and every other punishment would be 
 juster and more acceptable, than this dictated self-pro- 
 fanation, whereby the man — against other rules of justice 
 — must show himself up as the house-witness of his own 
 shame. Only the judge, not one of the parties, can justlj
 
 CHAP. VIII.] LEVANA. 179 
 
 (not morally) restore honour to the other ; for else he 
 could also take away what he gave back.* Still stranger 
 is it that in the more refined degrees of recantation 
 the defendant loses in his own honour what of another's 
 he restores to the plaintiff — like a master of the mint who 
 becomes bankrupt. But back to our ill-treated child ! 
 Are not the wounds which an honoured warrior scarcely 
 feels made deep and burning by dishonour ? so the dis- 
 honoured and helpless being struck by two blows hangs 
 between heaven and earth, scourged both in body and 
 soul, and languishingly desolate. But, ye parents and 
 teachers, in a less degree, but in the same way, do you 
 inflict inward and outward torments on the weak hearts 
 when — as is so often — you surround with thorns the 
 corporeal, or other punishments, by derision of their 
 appearance, or by ludicrous names. Never let the least 
 pain be inflicted scoffingly, but seriously, oftener sadly. 
 The sorrow of the parents purifies that of the child. For 
 example, if the royal pupil of Fenelon gave way to ebulli- 
 tions of passion, this bishop of Cambray — more properly of 
 Patmos, for he might have been the second disciple whom 
 Jesus loved — commanded all the servants to wait on the 
 king's son seriously and silently, and so let stillness 
 preach. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 SCREAMING AND CRYING OF CHILDREN. 
 § 66. 
 
 The best about this is already written, and the gleanings, 
 too, along with it. All that need be done more is-^to do 
 what is written ; and this I expect from the women for 
 the first time if they have children in the second world, or 
 
 * But here nothing is said or is above intended against (rather for) 
 the old German fashion which, without judicial intervention, left 
 simply to the two parties (for an honour-stealer was forthwith a judge 
 of honour before the end of the matter) the determination of their 
 honours bv a trial of strength. 
 
 H 2
 
 180 JEAN PAUL FRIED-RICH EICHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 at all events in the third. But now their weak, five-sensed 
 heart is driven to and fro hy the crying and screaming of 
 children, as by winds and waves ; and, since they them- 
 selves often perform miracles with the liquidising blood of 
 St. Januarius, that is, with tears, it is nattiral that they 
 shxmld melt at the flowing tears of others. Only to the 
 man, for whom eye-water frequently becomes a petrifying 
 water, shall a few mollifying considerations be here pre- 
 sented ; so that every screaming of a child shall not make 
 him a savage, a beast, and worse than a beast. 
 
 As Kubens by one stroke converted a laughing into a 
 crying child, so nature frequently makes this stroke in 
 the original : a child's eye, like the sun, never draws 
 water so readily as in the hot temperature of pleasure ; 
 for instance, after the return from a playing party of 
 children. Their mirth very easily passes beyond the first 
 extreme verge, which, by exhaustion, leads to the second. 
 Moreover, consider that children have their hypochondriacal 
 sufferings — days and hours of rain, just as much as their 
 parents ; that the four great seasonal wheels on quarter 
 days also affect young nerves, and that the child's quick- 
 silver easily falls and rises with that in the glass, before 
 storms and cold weather.* 
 
 You should not, however, consider it in order to give 
 more way to it, or more to ward it off, but just to make 
 nothing out of it, neither anxiety nor sermons. 
 
 Since women so willingly translate their sensations 
 into words, and by their talkativeness distinguish them- 
 selves, more than we do ourselves, from parrots, among 
 which class of birds the females talk little — hence only 
 the males are brought to Europe — so we must consider 
 the prologue to speech in little girls, that is, some crying 
 and screaming, as the overflow of the future stream. A 
 
 * The parallel line, or rather parallel zigzag, between our corporeal 
 world and the outer universe would have been correctly laid down long 
 ago if the great changes produced by the weather in our bodies had 
 rot appeared in the weaker part before their occurrence, in some along 
 with it, and in stronger natures afterwards, so that the same weather 
 makes one person ill which seems to restore another, on whom, in fact, 
 the future is exerting its influence. From a similar reason the mother 
 of the ebb and flow of the tide, the moon, was so long unknown because 
 they followed her after an interval of hours or even dayo.
 
 CHAP. VIII.] LEVANA. 181 
 
 boy must digest bis pain without water, a girl may have 
 a few drops after it. 
 
 Children have, in common with weak men, an incapa- 
 bility of instantaneous cessation from what they are doing. 
 Often no threatening can stop their laughter : remember 
 the converse in their crying, in order to treat their weak- 
 ness as a physician rather than as a judge. 
 
 §67. 
 
 We may divide children's hurts, or crying at hurts, 
 into four, like the four feelers of a snail, with which they 
 touch the ground. First, screaming about some outward 
 hurt, a fall for instance. Here nothing is more injurious 
 than — what is so desirable in all requisitions to the child 
 — the soft, compassionate mother's voice : the compassion 
 of another joins in with what he feels for himself, and he 
 cries on for pleasure. Either say dryly, " Courage," " Be 
 quiet," " It doesn't signify ;" or, still better, repeat some 
 merry old Da-capo word, " Hoppa " for instance. The 
 strength or weakness of the child must decide whether 
 you should in the first case choke the pain by an absolute 
 forbiddal of its outbreak — since victory over the sign by 
 distraction and division becomes a victory over the thing 
 — or, in the second, let nature heal itself by those inner- 
 home methods, which in grown-up people are exclamations 
 and curses, and tears and noise. You need not answer 
 mo, " Very common advice," for I reply, " But of very 
 rare accomplishment." The unaltered course of old coun- 
 sellors ought to produce an improved one in the hearers. 
 
 §68. 
 
 In the second kind of crying, on the contrary, that 
 caused by illness, the gentle, soothing mother's voice is in 
 its right place — namely, by the sick bed. And for what 
 other reason than this, because the little spiritual I oi- 
 l-let, whose place it is to govern and direct the physical, 
 is itself attacked and plundered, and the mind, lying in 
 iron chains, knows not how to bear " the order of the irou 
 crown " ? Here you must indulge complainings, yet witii
 
 182 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [FEAG. III. 
 
 out paying more attention to them than at other times. 
 Maintain the spiritual regimen, oven if you must change 
 the physical. Children in sickness are morally distorted ; 
 the sick-bed improves — the sick-cradle injures. No sick 
 child ever yet died of good education. But why are we 
 so serious on this point but because too frequently, in 
 private, the whole education of childish humanity is only 
 made into the nurse of physical progress ; as (if the expres- 
 sion may be allowed) men use the holy breath of life to turn 
 the sails of windmills, and the next world as a swimming 
 oladder on our earth ? Bad enough ! Every unholy 
 thing sets before itself (and others) a period from which 
 it will first begin to contemplate the eternity of the Holy ; 
 as if humanity were attached to some future year, the 
 twentieth, thirtieth, sixtieth, instead of to every present 
 moment. Where, and in what age and place, will the 
 fear of hurting life by the strict consistency of education 
 be overcome ? Think always only of the best ; the good 
 vill soon appear. 
 
 §69. 
 
 The third kind of crying is that used to get something. 
 Here hold fast Bousseau's advice, Never let the child 
 obtain an inch of ground by this war-cry ; only the mis- 
 fortune is, women are never to be moved to this patient 
 indifference towards screaming. But they say to him, 
 " No, you shall have nothing while you are so naughty ; 
 but, when you have done crying, you shall see what I 
 will give you." And does the little despot want any- 
 thing more ? The greatest thing it might be permitted a 
 mother to do in her distress would be, if her little tributary 
 king were young enough, to bring down and offer him the 
 usual tribute and exchequer bills, instead of this extraor- 
 dinary war-tax ; i.e., to grant him a different, instead of 
 the required, gift. But, heavens ! has one then never seen 
 how happy a child is who knows no orders, and consequently 
 no foreign stubbornness — who skips away as laughingly 
 after a no, as after a yes — who by no changing arbitrariness 
 between permission and restraint, between yes and no, to 
 which a victorious screaming fit always leads in the end, 
 has not yet made the first bitter experience of injustice ;
 
 CHAP. IX.] LEVANA 183 
 
 and who, consequently, receives no other nor deeper 
 wounds than those which can strike the body ? Mothers, 
 have you never yet seen this happy child ? Try it, for an 
 experiment, in one point ; for instance, strictly forbid your 
 child of about two years and three-quarters old ever to 
 touch your watch, even if the watch lie openly every day 
 on your work-table, and only act thus three days together 
 so as never to contradict yourself — you will curse your 
 former " forfeit moneys." 
 
 § 70. 
 
 Against the fourth kind of crying — about loss, from 
 fear, from vexation — the imposition of some occupation is 
 useful. Or thus : you earnestly demand the child's at- 
 tention, and begin a long speech ; it is quite indifferent 
 where it at last ends ; it is sufficient that the child 
 has exerted himself and forgotten his misfortune. The 
 thunder-spark, of a harsh word is very good — " Quiet ! " 
 for instance. Never let the mind's green and yellow 
 sickness — ill-temper — spread over the whole being. Hence 
 it is very important, especially with little children, never 
 to wait for the full outbreak of ill-humour, but at once to 
 mark and repress its first smallest indication. For the 
 rest, never put to flight naughtinesses which die away with 
 years by those which grow with years : the tears of child- 
 hood dry up before the sighs of manhood commence. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 OX THE TRUSTFULNESS OF CHILDREN. 
 
 §71. 
 
 Long before the child can speak he understands the speech 
 of others, and that without gestures or cadence in the 
 voice ; jiist as we understand a foreign language without 
 being able to speak it. It is for this reason that this 
 chapter is placed here.
 
 184 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 One need but lend nearer objects to the child-faith (fides 
 implicita) of the elder theologians,* and their expression 
 becomes important and true. If the child have in his 
 own father a holy father, with all the advantages of 
 infallibility, and with the additional protection of a holy 
 mother — if, retaining the discourse of a stranger at once 
 with belief and unbelief, he bring it to his parents and ask, 
 Is it true? — if to him, according to the primary propositions 
 of the Wolfian philosophy, the father be the proposition of 
 the sure foundation, the mother the proposition of doubt 
 and the teacher the proposition of the undistinguishable ; — 
 if he, believing without proof, set a pair of human beings 
 against the whole outer world and equal to his own inner 
 world ; if, when threatened, he rely with no more con- 
 fidence on the bodily strength of the parental arms than 
 on their spiritual power ; if all this be so, it reveals a 
 treasure of humanity which, to value according to its 
 worth, we need but to find and behold in older hearts. 
 What then rests on this yet unmeasured faith in men? 
 In the intellectual world nearly every thing ; and in the 
 moral world at least as much. 
 
 The intellectual world, it is true, will be least ready to 
 grant this of itself. But what do we know of any island 
 whatever which a voyager discovers more than our faith 
 in him gives? Or what of whole continents? A rough 
 seafarer by his testimony governs a geographic continent 
 in the learned world. If you oppose to me the multitude 
 of witnesses — although few distant countries have as many 
 witnesses as a testamentary document — I answer, Even 
 out of the multitude of witnesses no weight of probability 
 would ensue if the great faith in one individual were not 
 strengthened by the multiplication of individuals. Man 
 believes man more readily about the distant and the vast 
 — about former centuries and quarters of the globe, than 
 about what is near and small ; and he does not permit in a 
 stranger the probability of a lie to increase with the facility 
 and impunity of uttering it, but with the very reverse. 
 
 Thus we glean our Eoman and Grecian history chieiy 
 
 * Who understood thereby the faith imparted to children and 
 heathens in the hour of death.
 
 CHAP. IX.] LEV ANA. 185 
 
 from their own testimony — for we ourselves contradict the 
 Persians who contradict Herodotus— and we do not make 
 half the difficulty about the collateral testimony of a 
 thousand other witnesses (for no historian ever experienced 
 all that he calls to life and describes) concerning a succes- 
 sion of a million actions, which lawyers do about one single 
 matter of fact for which they require two witnesses. 
 What gives us this certainty ? Faith in humanity, and 
 so in men, and consequently in one individual. 
 
 So, further, the sciences of medicine, of astronomy, 
 natural history, chemistry, are built up sooner and more 
 extensively on others' experience than on our own : conse- 
 quently on faith. Even our convictions from philosophical 
 calculations call in trust in others to aid the probability 
 that we have not miscalculated. And wherefore does an 
 irresistible longing impel us so strongly 10 the. opinions of 
 great men about the foundations of our being, about God 
 and our own souls, but because we believe their assurances 
 more than the proofs of others and of ourselves ? And how 
 does not intoxicated youth hang — like bees on flowering 
 lime-trees — drinking in the spirit of a celebrated teacher ? 
 
 But this faith reveals most richly its glorious form 
 when its object is moral. Here the heart is refreshed by 
 true bliss-imparting faith. In the intellectual world ono 
 trusts to what you say — in the moral, to what you are. 
 As lovers trust each other, as the friend trusts the friend, 
 and the noble heart trusts humanity, and the faithful 
 trust God — this is the Peter's rock, the fast foundation of 
 human worth. Alexander, who drank the suspicious 
 medicine, was greater than the physician who made it 
 healing instead of poisonous ; it is nobler to exercise a 
 dangerous confidence than to deserve it : but wherein 
 consists the divinity of this trustfulness ? Not by any 
 means merely in this — that you cannot presuppose any 
 power of vital danger in another without knowing and 
 possessing it actively in yourself — -for you may both know 
 and possess it, and yet not presuppose it ; and then in 
 dangers, as in the case of Alexander, the trustful only is 
 endangered — not the trusted. But herein consists the 
 triumphal banner of faith in humanity, and the civio 
 crown of heaven ; that the trusting must forbear and remain
 
 186 JEAN PAUL FPJEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 quiet — which, as in war, so in everything else, is more 
 difficult than to do and struggle — and that faith, although 
 the matter in hand be but a single case, yet beholds and 
 embraces all cases, a whole life. He who rightly trusts 
 shows that he has seen the moral deity face to face ; and 
 there is, perhaps, no higher moral gratification on earth 
 than this — if sense and testimony attack the friend in 
 your heart to hurl him thence, even then to stand by him 
 with the God in you, to preserve and to love him, not as 
 formerly, but more deeply. 
 
 Therefore, if this trustfulness be the holy spirit in man, 
 a lie is the sin against that spirit ; since we place another's 
 word so high — even above our own — that according to 
 Pascal, a man to whom any sin was ascribed would at 
 last believe and realise it. Platner maintains that the 
 weaker the brain the more readily it believes, as is seen 
 in drunken persons, sickly women, and children : but the 
 question here becomes whether this (merely physical) 
 weakness which affords room for so many tender develop- 
 ments of the heart — for love, inspiration, religion, poetry 
 — does not prepare, though at the cost of the other powers, 
 the true, pure loneliness of absolute dominion to the 
 holiest of the perceptions, the perception of the holiness 
 of others ? The English are more easy of belief than any 
 other nation, but neither weaker nor weak : they hate a 
 lie too much ever to presuppose it. 
 
 I return to the trustfulness of children. Nature has, 
 as if figuratively, richly prepared them for reception : the 
 bones of the ear are, according to Haller, the only ones 
 which are as large in the child as in the grown-up man ; 
 or, to use another simile, the veins of imbibition are, accord- 
 ing to Darwin, the fuller the younger they are. Holily 
 preserve childlike trust, without which there can be no 
 education. Never forget that the •little dark child looks 
 up to you as to a lofty genius, an apostle full of revelations, 
 whom he trusts altogether more absolutely than his 
 equals, and that the lie of an apostle destroys a whole 
 moral world. Wherefore never bury your infallibility by
 
 CHAP. IX. j LEVANA. 187 
 
 useless proofs, nor by confessions cf error : the admission 
 of your ignorance comports better with you. Power and 
 scepticism the child can sufficiently early, and not at 
 your charges, polemically and protestantly exercise and 
 strengthen on the declared opinions of strangers. 
 
 Do not in the least degree support religion and morality 
 by reasons : even the multitude of pillars darken and 
 contract churches. Let the Holy in yourself be directed 
 (without lock and turnkey) to the Holy in the child. 
 Faith — like the innate morality, the patent of the nobility 
 of humanity brought with it from heaven — opens the 
 little heart to the great old heart. To injure this faith is 
 to resemble Calvin who banished music out of the churches : 
 for faith is the echo of the heavenly music of the spheres. 
 
 When in your last hour — think well of it — all in the 
 broken spirit fades and dies, poems, thoughts, strivings, 
 rejoicings : even then the night-flower of faith still blooms 
 on and refreshes with its perfume in the last darkness.
 
 188 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [ FRAG. III. 
 
 APPENDIX TO THE THIRD FRAGMENT. 
 
 ON PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 
 
 The expression is, properly, false ; for as the science of 
 care of the body it would equally apply to beasts, strong 
 men, and the aged ; the cook would be a Labonne, and 
 the kitchen a magazine of school-books. Permit me here 
 to insert some observations on attention to the bodies 
 of children which I addressed to a newly-married man 
 shortly before his wife's confinement. (Some readers will 
 not agree so theoretically with this letter as my three 
 children, who, during the printing and distribution of the 
 first edition, were educated in accordance with it, practically 
 did, by their flourishing condition.) 
 
 You may freely inform your dear wife why I write 
 now on this point instead of half a year later ; namely, 
 because she is now still trustful, but will, in time to come, 
 be as disobedient as possible. I have known the most in- 
 telligent women who have really assisted and followed up 
 the wishes of their most intelligent husbands in regard to 
 the physical care of their child until the second had not yet 
 arrived ; but then, or at most when the fourth came, the 
 dietetic kitchen-Latin and medicinal patois of the women 
 assumed the government, and nothing more could be 
 effected than one or two propositions without results. 
 
 A woman during her first pregnancy might easily 
 commit to memory Hufeland's " Good Advice to Mothers," 
 since in the new edition there would be but three and a 
 half pages to be learned monthly. 
 
 But Heaven preserve every one from that timid over- 
 carefulness with mistrusts nature, and has every child's 
 tooth extracted by the physician or apothecary ! If one 
 venture nothing upon children, yet one ventures them- 
 selves : their bodies probably, their minds certainly. 
 Only let a person observe the rosy children in lonely
 
 APPENDIX.] LEPANA. 189 
 
 villages, where the whole Brownian apothecary's shop has 
 nothing in its phials save brandy ; or the descendants of 
 savages compared with the fading Flora of noble houses, 
 for which every-day draughts of every possible kind are 
 compounded. 
 
 However, nowhere is Hufeland's " Good Advice to 
 Mothers " less attended to than in the huts of peasants 
 and beggars. There one sees many little pale creatures 
 looking out of the narrow windows when one goes out on 
 sledging expeditions. But they bloom again with the 
 earth ; the open air makes them rosy sooner than the sun 
 does the apple. 
 
 Hunters, savages, mountaineers, soldiers — all contend 
 with all their powers for the advantages of fresh air ; all 
 those who have lived to be a century and a half old were 
 beggars ; and in fact if a man wish to become nothing 
 but old, and to continue nothing but healthy, there is no 
 more wholesome, fresh-air-imbibing exercise than begging ; 
 nevertheless mothers believe that a child, placed for half 
 an hoiir at an open window, inhales out of a town, which 
 itself is but a larger room and merely contains street air 
 instead of house air, as much ethereal breath as is necessary 
 to purify and cleanse twenty-three hours and a half of 
 cavern air. Does no one remember, or no one remind her 
 with all her dread of air, that during the miserable 
 autumn weather she travelled, on account of the war, 
 three days long, with her infant baby in an open vehicle 
 through the pure fresh air, without any other particular in- 
 jury than that of being brought hither ? Could no chemist, 
 by visible representations of the different kinds of poisonous 
 air, impart to the mothers in towns a sense of the value 
 of heaven's free air, in order to break them of their care- 
 lessness about the only invisible and ever active element ? 
 
 Why do you write, — " I fear nothing so much as the 
 procuring of a wet-nurse " ? — Two of my children, precisely 
 the strongest, were brought up without the breast. But 
 if a nurse be commonly healthy, and have not much less 
 given her to do, nor much more to eat than during her 
 necessitous solitude, she may any day enter your service. 
 Certainly I do not offer myself as security against any 
 mental poisoning by her morals and care, any more than
 
 190 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. Ill, 
 
 I do for all women servants from the midwife downwards ; 
 an honest, old, but good-tempered man-servant, your 
 John, for instance, would be much better for a child's 
 heart than any nurse and child's maid ; just as at a later 
 period, for the same reason, children are more spoiled 
 and enervated in the friendly, praising, indulgent society 
 of women than in the cold, dry company of men. As 
 regards the physical empoisonment of the milk by mental 
 excitement, I should prefer the nurse to the lady. One 
 often sees a common mother, as a bombarding ship or 
 bomb-shell, foster that kind of conversation with another 
 woman which is the only one in this world that has 
 never grown wearisome and which men call wrangling 
 and abusing ; but the suckling has observed or cried little 
 about it. On the contrary, a lady, whom a false stitch of 
 her maid, like the sting of a tarantula, sets into an armed 
 dance, may poison it three or four times a day. What 
 concerns another mental poison-draught for the child I 
 utterly deny. If, as I believe I am able to prove, no 
 partial transmigration of soul from the mother into the 
 new-born child be possible, how much less can mind in- 
 fluence mind by means of a nourishment which first affects 
 the stomach ! One might just as well believe, with the 
 Caribbees, that pork produces small eyes ; or, with the 
 Brazilians, that the flesh of ducks imparts the lazy awk- 
 ward pace of a duck.* On this principle, goat's milk, and 
 perhaps most nurses' milk, would have the same effect as 
 that of Jupiter's nurse, which so completely transformed 
 the god that he may be employed as anything rather than 
 an example of many of the ten commandments. Bechstein, 
 it is true, remarks that otters may be tamed by human 
 milk ; but one may find a much nearer and truer cause in 
 the circumstances which such a milk-diet presupposes. 
 
 Much contention may take place about the relation of 
 the mother's milk to the child's body. If a healthy 
 stomach, like death, make all alike, potatoes, bread, 
 venison steaks, ship biscuits, ale, insects (crabs), worms 
 (snails), and, finally, human flesh, into the same chyle, 
 will not the stomach of a child be able to reduce its 
 nurse's milk to the same substance? And does not Hi, 
 
 * Home's ' History of Mankind,' ?cl. ii.
 
 APFENDIX.] LEVANA. 191 
 
 child's body, in all its organic peculiarities, as frequently 
 resemble its father as its mother? Why, if the milk 
 (instead of organisation) effect so much, are not most of 
 the nobility giants, since peasants' milk is often added to 
 aristocratic blood as wine to water ? Indeed, on the 
 ground of the influence of maternal relationship, there 
 would be more to determine for, than against, a nurse. 
 The body ceaselessly polarises itself; consequently the 
 nitrogen, for instance, of the nurse would counterbalance 
 the oxygen of the lady ; and, on the other side, a town 
 lady would be the best official nurse of a peasant boy. A 
 cosmopolite tutor and diet master might go still farther, 
 and, in order all-sidedly to exercise and train a swaddled 
 child — mummies are swaddled corpses and helmsmen 
 swaddled men — insist on its having one day, ass's milk 
 (the positive pole, thesis), the next, dog's milk (the nega- 
 tive pole, antithesis), the day after, human milk (indiffer- 
 ence, synthesis). 
 
 As early as possible determine the hours of eating, and 
 consequently the times for sleep ; only observing that in 
 the first years the intervals must be more frequent and 
 shorter than afterwards. 
 
 The stomach is such a creature of habit, such a time- 
 keeper, that if, when hungry, we delay its usual period of 
 gratification for a few hours, it does nothing but reject 
 food. But if its hours of compulsory service be appointed 
 it works beyond its powers. It is only in later years 
 when the sketch and colours of the little man are more 
 strongly marked that middle tints and half shadows may 
 be ventured on ; a child, like a savage, is often freed, often 
 made a slav , by sleep and eating ; the physical nature 
 is then either exercised or vanquished, and the spiritual is 
 crowned in both cases. 
 
 Do not keep the tumult of daily life far distant from 
 the little infant, as though it were an aristocratic patient. 
 If you do not actually permit the fire bell or the discharge 
 of artillery to be heard by its cradle, its long deep slumber 
 in the world will so harden it against every noise, that 
 afterwards, when its ears are quicker, it will yet be able 
 to sleep in the midst of noise; and what is still better, 
 and prevents injurious night feeding, it will only sleep* all
 
 192 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH RICHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 the sounder in the contrasting stillness of night. I 
 earnestly contend against suckling in the night ; for your 
 wife ought to sleep ; and it is quite sufficient if she sucklo 
 her little darling shortly before going to sleep, and then 
 again immediately after wakening. It is a trifle, hut so is 
 a line ; why may I not give one to the other ? I mean, 
 why do you lay the head of a new-born child higher than 
 its body ? In the months preceding birth the body actually 
 stood on the head ; I should think that a horizontal 
 direction after a perpendicular was quite sufficient ; where- 
 fore, then, create a new want, or prevent the subsequent 
 use of a remedy, which the higher placing of the head is 
 to children in case of colds, by employing it before it is 
 needed ? 
 
 With regard to animal food, most people say — Wait till 
 there are teeth to bite it. Why ? toothless children take, 
 with advantageous effects, broths, and the strongest honey- 
 thick extract of meat that I know, the yolk of eggs. Even 
 flesh-meat is less to be objected to on account of its size, 
 since it may be cut quite as small as it can be chewed, 
 than on account of its being swallowed without chewing, 
 that is, without saliva. But children enjoy and digest 
 milk and broth almost entirely without previous gastric 
 juice, the saliva, as birds of prey do pieces of flesh. Pro- 
 bably large pieces are chiefly injurious because we take 
 more of them and quicker than little ones in the same 
 time ; for the stomach reckons satiety — in hunger as in 
 thirst — not according to quantity (for a pint of water will 
 frequently not quench the thirst as well as a slice of 
 lemon) but according to organic assimilation : hence of no 
 kind of food does one more easily eat so much too much as 
 of what is indigestible ; because the difficult and more 
 lardy assimilation delays and conceals the feeling of 
 satiety. What digestion is, no physiologist has hitherto 
 been able to explain. The gastric juice which is said to 
 excite or produce hunger (is there any thirst juice for 
 thirst ?) with its few spoonfuls is not sufficient — when 
 diluted and surrounded by a bottle of wine and a plate of 
 soup, as a grain of arsenic by oil — to dissolve a Styrian 
 cock's comb, not to mention an early meal, or even a late 
 one. The gentle animal warmth which, as August is the
 
 APPENDIX.] LEVANA. 193 
 
 wine-cook, ought to be the cooking-wine of food, is cooled 
 and deluged by cold liquids with less of disadvantage than 
 advantage to the digestion. If the stomach of men, as 
 their nature in general, work as an ellipse, with two foci, 
 and so not merely as a membranaceous vulture stomach, 
 but also as a fleshy poultry stomach, and along with 
 chemical possess also mechanical force, I do not understand 
 how a pressure — that, for instance, of meat -broth or of 
 gruel — assists it in digestion. 
 
 But we are concerned with the thing itself, not with its 
 explanation. Flesh-meat seems especially useful to coun- 
 teract the weakness of childhood and the superabundance 
 of sour food ; since even the young of granivorous birds 
 are fed advantageously with eggs, ■worms and insects. A 
 slight and rare surfeit will exercise and strengthen the 
 stomach's power of endurance : only do not let the beast 
 of burden be overloaded with easily injurious substances, 
 such as eggs or meat, but with things of moderately long 
 duration, such as pulse or potatoes. 
 
 Why do not people give children, at times when they 
 will not take their food, sugar (as distinct from con- 
 fections as food from poison) on whose nourishing sub- 
 stance the negro feeds himself and his horse during 
 journeys of days together ? 
 
 During the earliest years — I was about to commence so 
 again, but without any reason, — for the strict ordering of 
 life only comprehends a period sufficiently long to raise and 
 fasten the scaffolding of life. But as the danger of death 
 diminishes every day — it is well known to be greatest at 
 first — growing freedom and powerful many-sidedness must 
 arm the child against all the two-and- thirty winds and 
 storms of life. 
 
 Tea and coffee, as well as cakes and fruit, are generally 
 given much more willingly and abundantly to children 
 than wholesome wine as a tonic, and wholesome hopped 
 beer as a drink ; whereas it were much better not to 
 give the two liquids at all, cakes very seldom, and fruit 
 abundantly only in the early glowing years. As to the 
 emperor Joseph II., who by an ordinance of 1785 forbade 
 that wine should be given to children * (somewhat as 
 
 * No imperial law would be less likely than this to be observed in 
 I.
 
 194 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. IH. 
 
 +obacco, hops, and Peruvian bark were at an earlier date 
 prohibited j — I put him to flight by the children of the 
 many wine-countries, who have not yet perished thereby; 
 else would there meanwhile be no longer a right bank t<s 
 the Ehine — to leave the left out of the question. By 
 all means give them wine, (but not any old, Spanish or 
 Hungarian,) not out of a punch-ladle, but out of a tea- 
 spoon, and more frequently than abundantly, and every 
 year less, and in the season of manly strength and vigour 
 none at all. Bitter beer, at a proper distance from two 
 meals, is at once excitement and nourishment. After- 
 wards, in the eighth and tenth years, water must be the 
 drink and beer the tonic. I would not merely allow 
 girls to drink beer longer than boys, but always ; unless 
 the mothers, like true Lycurguses, forbid growing fat. 
 Thank God, my friend, in the name of your posterity, 
 that you, like myself, do not live in Saxony, or in the 
 Saxon Voigtland, but in Baireuth, near the best beer — 
 the champagne beer. 
 
 White beer without hops is a slimy poison for children ; 
 and unhopped brown beer not much better. Those who 
 are too fat should only take it in water, as the Greeks did 
 wine. In the early ages of Germany, before tea, coffee, 
 and foreign wine ruled and weakened, fourfold stronger 
 beer was brewed ; then people did not dig the bones of 
 giants out of the earth, but frequently consigned them to 
 it ; whereas for us, under the government of concentrated 
 tea and coffee poison, the only antidote, beer\ is weakened. 
 
 About one point, my friend (forgive my following no 
 other order than that of yourself and your wishes) you 
 will in future often grow hot or cold towards your gentle 
 wife, at least I expect so — and that is, actually about heat 
 and cold. It is a well-known fact that more than one 
 excellent author has much prolonged the continuance of 
 the honey-moon, holding it to resemble the year- weeks of 
 Daniel, and has only fixed its certain end after the birth 
 of the first child ; concerning this, however, there has 
 
 Scotland, where the smallest children before they .grow up into the 
 strongest Scots, have brandy given to them. — Humphry; Clinher't 
 Travels, vol. iii. p. 19.
 
 APPENDIX.] LEVANA. 195 
 
 been much quarrelling : partly on the man's side with 
 medical reasons, and partly on the woman's with her 
 own ; I mean this in case the child be healthy ; if it be 
 sickly perfect rage ensues. I once wrote a paragraph 
 on this subject in case I should ever experience the 
 happiness of forming myself on my own principles of 
 education. 
 
 Since women, like a born parlour-race, or household 
 divinity — we are merely sea, land, and air gods ; or, com- 
 pared to those domesticated doves, kindly-meaning but 
 untamed wild pigeons — love warmth as they do coffee, and 
 so, besides covering, seek all manner of warm wraps, only 
 far too many for one body ; and would rather have nine 
 accumulated veils and shawls than one, though of the 
 largest, and for that reason lay aside furs, however warm 
 and costly they be ; therefore it is that these mentally 
 tropical beings willingly press their preferences and 
 necessities on the beings they love best — their children. 
 But does not nature herself at birth make the most marked 
 change when she casts it out of an organic bed, which she 
 herself warmed, through the air, into a lifeless one for 
 which the child must be the bed-warmer ? To which is to 
 be added the partial and, moreover, injurious uncovering, 
 that of the face and head, after the previous uniform 
 warmth of the whole body. Hence the question might be 
 mooted, whether the head of the new-born infant — so hair- 
 less, so thin-skulled and unclosed — does not need to be 
 protected by warm coverings more, or at least as much as 
 the other members, if many men, among whom we, the 
 whole congregated posterity of our ancestors, are to be 
 reckoned, had not hitherto withstood it and are still alive : 
 so richly does Nature gush forth in new springs whether 
 you close against her one or one hundred. In the mean- 
 time she receives the child after this transit from the hot 
 zone of the earth into the cold one, with two invigorating 
 provocatives ; with nourishment for the lungs and nourish- 
 ment for the stomach — two hitherto unemployed members. 
 Well, then, let the mother imitate therein the universal 
 mother, and not let the child fly from external cold, but 
 conquer it by excitements to inward warmth. The best 
 fur-coat for children grows on wine mountains. Joy is 
 
 o 2
 
 196 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. | FRAG. III. 
 
 the warm sunny side of the mind and of the "body. Exer- 
 cise is the third non-conductor of frost. The new eulogists 
 of warmth are only in the right when they are interrupted. 
 In the cold air of a room a child would shrivel up like a 
 plant on the top of a mountain ; but it would do the same 
 in everlasting heat : the strongest men are not produced 
 either in the immediate neighbourhood of the equator, or. 
 of the poles, hut in the temperate zones, which alternate 
 between frost and warmth, but with a preponderance of 
 the latter. Do not let any apartments for children be cold, 
 with the exception of the sleeping-room ; for bed is of 
 itself an external fur covering, and sleep an internal one ; 
 and what additional warmth is possible, in case of illness, 
 if you have already more than reached the degree per- 
 mitted ? If you allow your future Paul (if I may venture 
 to choose his godfather before you) to go without shoes 
 (which would be to you hut a saving of leather, but to him 
 of a whole funeral train of evils) ; or if you order your 
 future Paulina (to whom he will, probably, with gentle- 
 manly politeness permit the first entrance into life, for 
 most first children are females,) to go without stockings, 
 though soled or shoed, then, in every illness where a warm 
 foot-bath is advisable, you can give one of the longest 
 duration simply by a pair of shoes and stockings. I had 
 my reasons, friend, for recommending shoes, as though 
 they were bridal shoes, to your Paulina, although, alas ! 
 along with them all the corns, cold feet, thin tender soles 
 and heels, which a shoe includes. For I know from afar 
 off the despair, the womanly dread, lest feet without shoes 
 should really grow as largaas nature intended, and so quite 
 beyond the conventional size of a foot. Our Chinese 
 Podolatry (foot- worship) more readily suffers the nakedness 
 of the higher parts, for instance, of the bosom or of the 
 back, than for a girl to go barefoot. Luckily — in this 
 case — a boy is not a girl. So let him dance barefoot 
 through his young world, like the ancient heroes, who are 
 always represented with bare feet. If his foot grow into 
 a pedestal, what signifies it to us two men, since we and 
 even rational women, care so little about it ? 
 
 Why do mothers talk a hundred times about taking 
 cold, and scarcely once about becoming over-heated, which,
 
 APPENDIX.] LEVANA. 197 
 
 ospecially in winter, so readily passes into fatal cold ? 1 
 snail answer this in a very unexpected way, when I say, 
 It is because winter lies nearest to their heart, and con- 
 sequently most in their eyes. Winter is, in fact, the 
 bleacher and fair colourer of their faces, and they approach 
 the snow as a new whitening material ; hence summer is 
 much too warm for them to uncover their necks and 
 shoulders as they do in winter which does not discolour 
 them. Hence those tender chamber-covered nurslings, 
 lily-white and lily-fragile, come from the north, and re- 
 semble those white blades of grass which may be found 
 under stones in the midst of green spring. Certainly this 
 dazzling winter-snow does not bear the fruits of the true 
 blossom-snow, for which, nevertheless, we often mistake it, 
 as we do beauty for strength. 
 
 A fortunate accident for daughters is the Grecian 
 garment-fashion of the present Gymnosophists, (naked 
 female runners,) which, it is true, injures the mothers, but 
 hardens the daughters ; for as age and custom should avoid 
 every fresh cold, so youth exercises itself on it, as on every 
 hardship, until it can bear still greater. 
 
 The Unalasks (hear it, ye enemies of every hardening 
 process !) dip a crying child into the sea until it is quiet ; 
 it necessarily afterwards grows the stronger for it.* So, 
 simile-wise, the present naked manner of dressing is a cold 
 bath into which the daughters are dipped, who usually 
 grow cheerful in it. A physician should always invent 
 the fashions ; since he cannot remove a new one except by 
 something still newer. 
 
 A system of physical hardening is, indeed, mentally 
 necessary, because the body is the anchor-ground of courage. 
 Its aim and consequence is not so much health and pro- 
 longation of life — for weakly and sensual persons often 
 grow old, and nuns and court ladies still oftener — as a 
 fortification against weakness of character, and for cheer- 
 fulness and activity. As it is not a woman's but only a 
 man's mind which becomes more womanish by effeminacy, 
 it may easily happen in the higher ranks, in which the 
 men are, comparatively, more effeminate than the women, 
 that the weak will surpass the weakened sex ; and men 
 * See Kant's Phys. Geog. von Vollmeer, vol. hi. 1st div.
 
 198 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG, m. 
 
 and women have the delightful prospect of resembling 
 date-trees, of which the female only produces fruit, the 
 male nothing but flowers. 
 
 The present fashion in dress, regarded as an air hath 
 establishment, might have its ?nd more perfectly obtained 
 among children, if the garments were occasionally entirely 
 laid aside. I mean, why do not we give ourselves, but still 
 more our children, the pleasure of playing naked half a 
 day in the warm air and sunshine, like Adam in his 
 paradise of innocence ? 
 
 In ancient Germany, where our ancestors tasted the 
 forbidden fruit later, and consequently hung the fig-leaves 
 later round them, the children were permitted, as in Egypt, 
 to remain ten years longer in nakedness : what spirits of 
 physical power must not have stepped from their cold 
 forests, when eighteen hundred years of warmth and 
 luxury have not sufficed to make their descendants weaker 
 than either of us two ! So the wood of stripped trees can 
 bear a greater weight than that of those which retain 
 their bark. 
 
 One need but see how light, active, and refreshed an 
 unclothed child feels, drinking and swimming through the 
 air, moving its muscles and limbs freely, and ripening 
 in the sun like a fruit from which the leaves have been 
 removed. So many children's games are Olympic and 
 gymnastic, let the children, then, at least be Greeks, that 
 is to say, unclothed. 
 
 The cold water bath may be best used immediately after 
 the air bath ; if, in other respects, it may be uncondition- 
 ally recommended to children under four years old. There 
 is, however, one substitute for the bath ; that of a baptism 
 in daily colder water of the whole body, though each limb 
 be only wet in turns and quickly rubbed dry. I permitted 
 this Anabaptist (re-immersing) sin against Brown and his 
 followers to be perpetrated every day upon my own chil- 
 dren : the consequences were, not chilliness, colds and 
 weakness, but the very reverse.* Schwarz, in his treatise 
 on education, regards the dislike of a child to this treatment 
 
 * With regard to the advantages of coldness without retardation, 83 
 to how such sun-obscurations exist, see Vorschule der Aeethetik y iii. 
 p. 578.
 
 APPENDIX.] LEV ANA. 199 
 
 as a hint from nature ; but then the same reascn would 
 apply to many medicines, and also to the warm bath, which 
 children struggle against in the first instance, because 
 they feel all at once so many unaccustomed delights. 
 
 If cold water have medicinal powers for the stomach 
 which evaporate when warmed, so has it also for the 
 imbibing skin. After air, cold and warm baths, sleep is 
 beneficial. 
 
 There is still one kind of bath, hitherto unused, which 
 would be very advantageous both to parents and children, 
 I mean a thunder-storm bath. Physicians employ in their 
 experiments on nervous invalids, electric air, electric 
 plates, electric baths ; but thunder, or rather thunder 
 water, they have not as yet prescribed. Have they never 
 experienced that a person never feels so fresh, cheerful and 
 elastic as after a warm or tepid rain has penetrated to the 
 skin ? Since human beings, when dry again after a storm, 
 feel so much invigorated, and the world of flowers still more 
 so, why will they not receive this united fire and water 
 baptism from above, and sutler themselves to be raised and 
 healed by the wonder-working arm in the thunder cloud ? 
 
 One ought to have an especial rain or bathing suit of 
 clothes, as a frequenter of the spring cloud-baths ; and 
 then, when there is promise of wet weather, make a rain 
 party, and return home dripping. 
 
 The bath company must, alas ! change their clothes — 
 the only thing about it which does not please me. The 
 shepherd boy, even in the cold rainy days of November, 
 takes no chest of clothes with him to the field ; neither 
 does any French soldier who has marched himself warm 
 all day in the rain, and lies down at night on the cold 
 ground ; the fisher stands with his feet in the water and 
 his head in the sun, precisely breaking and reversing the 
 physician's rule ; — yet the only hundred-and-seventy year 
 old man in England was a fisher, and had previously been 
 a soldier and a beggar ! Heavens ! with what a fair play- 
 ground and free city of the body is our mind originally 
 surrounded ! and how long must it have been the slave of 
 sin and of opinion ere it was condemned to be the chained 
 helmsman or ship-mover of the body ! 
 
 Mental all-sidedness, which means all-powerfulness, is 
 not granted us, but physical is ; now let childhood at least
 
 200 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH PJCHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 be formed for this, and the body, which can inhabit all 
 countries, be exercised in accommodating itself to all ; as 
 the Russian does who imitates his own empire, a miniature 
 Europe in climate, and endures a vapour-and-ice-bath, 
 and the extremes of hunger and of repletion. Is it not 
 enough to be so pampered as to make a pillow of a snow- 
 ball ? — and now do we actually use a cloak bag, or even a 
 feather bed ? * 
 
 I add to the above remarks, that parents in physical 
 matters — alas ! that it should happen in morals — ought to 
 require more from their children than from themselves : 
 in accordance with this, let the rain-wet clothes at ap- 
 pointed times dry on the children. 
 
 Would that every mother would consider that, as she 
 opposes inoculation to natural small-pox, so, on the same 
 grounds, she should oppose the blow of accidental, un- 
 expected, and therefore unprepared-for danger, by the 
 favourable hardening of versatile childhood when the 
 choice of the battle-field is so easy ! 
 
 Our modern women might more readily imitate the 
 ancient Germans in every point than in this ; of becoming 
 ministers of the art of healing, and so the midwives of the 
 future world. If I were a physician, or an important 
 teacher in a girls' school, I should consider it my most 
 useful work to prepare a medical ' Theory of Doubts ' for 
 women ; I would therein merely ask questions, give a 
 hundred answers to each, and then ask them to choose. I 
 would, for instance, lay quite undecided before them the 
 theory of fever in all its infinite variety, yes, and even 
 the thousand causes of headache, the intermixture of 
 which so much increases it. Whosoever, even in the 
 cradle, gave attention to the science of medicine — a science 
 in which, more than in any other, genius and learning 
 should form one indivisible compound being — would be 
 
 * In Home's ' History of Mankind,' p. 384, is the following : A party 
 of Highlanders were overtaken by night, and encamped upon the 
 smooth snow. A somewhat pampered youth, of good birth, wished to 
 make himself more comfortable, and rolled himself a small pillow out 
 of the snow. " What," said his father (Sir Evan Cameron), " will you be 
 so womanish?" and kicked with his foot the snow pillow awn y from 
 under his head. — Ah ! our ideal would be to rival only the son of Sil 
 Evan Cameron.
 
 APPENDIX.] LEVANA. 201 
 
 astonished at the boldness with which any no-doctor, and 
 his wife into the bargain, pronounces on the parentage, 
 name and progeny of every illness. Good heavens ! my 
 friend, women think they understand something, we will 
 say the very smallest part, of the most difficult of all 
 applied sciences, that which is applied to the various 
 mental and physical nature united undistinguishably in 
 one organisation ; whereas whole cities would thank God 
 if there were to be had in each of them but one graduated 
 man, universal doctor, medical counsellor, and first 
 physician, who would assist you less to heaven than to 
 your legs again ; and would not, as if he were a pope, 
 regard every pilgrim on this earth as a pilgrim of the 
 cross, whom he had to send forth to win a consecrated 
 grave (if he deserved one). The best physician is a prize 
 in the lottery ; the best medicine from him is a prize in 
 the lottery. And yet every woman considers herself to be 
 both lotto and lottery ; at once both the great prize, and 
 that fifth in order ! 
 
 Whence comes this absurd pretension to the art of 
 healing among women and — let us include ourselves — ■ 
 among other human beings, myself for instance (whose 
 whole letter proves it) and among men of former ages, as 
 the old Latin proverb testifies*, and Eulenspiegel also, 
 to whom every passer-by prescribed a cure for his tooth- 
 ache ? This folly proceeds from a hundred causes ; for 
 instance, from the confusion of the science of medicine 
 and the art of surgery; from the differences among 
 physicians ; from anxiety and affection, &c. &c. — but, I 
 believe, chiefly from trust in the proposition of a sufficient 
 reason. Man, a cause-seeking animal as well as one of 
 mere habit, — however modestly he may listen to all 
 scientific things which end in history or mere information, 
 to all histories of the world or of nature, to information 
 about measurement, coining, language, arms, antiquity, 
 history, — this man cannot restrain his power and insight 
 when any scientific theory is presented to him, whether 
 it be of the subject in hand, of nature, of morals, of taste, 
 
 * Fingunt se medicos quivis idiota, sacerdos, Judreus, monachus, 
 bistrio, rasor, anus — i.e. Every layman fancies himself a physician—* 
 priest, jew, monk, jack-pudding, barber, and dame.
 
 202 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH PJCHTEE. [ FEAG - m « 
 
 of sickness. The peasant gives his opinion about the 
 causes of the world, of a thunder storm, of sin, of a per- 
 formance on the organ, of bodily pain ; for in all these 
 cases he draws his theory entirely out of himself. 
 
 If women particularly desire to cure something, I 
 would propose to them besides souls, — for which they 
 would be better soul-curesses than the soul-curei s are — 
 wounds ; as in some Spanish provinces women remove the 
 beard, so should they also legs and arms ; their hands, 
 so gentle, tender and apt, their keener survey of what 
 is actually before them, and their compassionate hearts 
 would certainly as sweetly heal common wounds as they 
 make those of the heart. Many a soldier, if the female 
 surgeon of his regiment were pretty, would boldly expose 
 himself to wounds were it only to have them bound by 
 her, or suffer his arm to be amputated by her in order to 
 give her his hand. The blood-fearing eye of women would 
 become sufficiently hardened, though not so flinty, as that 
 of men ; as the Parisian fish-women prove by wounds and 
 blows. Moreover, at this present time the whole world is 
 forming hardening-schools for the feelings, — I mean wars. 
 I will only add a page or two to my over-lengthy epistle 
 and then break off. Although every mother plays the 
 doctor, she yet constantly requires one for the child. Then 
 she wants very many remedies, in order to try each only 
 once, and so, in consequence, not at the wrong time. Then 
 she requires many doctors, in order to hear and to say much. 
 And many even think to instigate the doctor to a more 
 active campaign against the malady by representing it as 
 worse than it is, and concealing the favourable symptoms : 
 as if a person should try to rescue himself from the danger 
 of drowning by screaming fire, or from fire by the distress 
 signals in use at sea. 
 
 Meanwhile, as no woman's mind will suffer itself to be 
 deprived of a physicking finger along with the doctor's 
 ring, nor of its brains as well as the doctor's hat, a man 
 might, myself for instance, remove the chief danger of 
 a domestic practice of medicine for the family circle by a 
 lew general rules, such, perhaps, as the following : — Grant 
 in general, for instance, that most illnesses are asthenia 
 or weakening — according to Brown above eight-ninths, 
 to Schmidt the full nine-ninths; now, the younger tha
 
 APPENDIX.] LEVANA. 203 
 
 children are the more asthenic are tney, and so more likely 
 to die from sudden loss of strength than from sudden over- 
 stimulants ; wherefore, in every case you may prescribe 
 strengthening domestic remedies, that is to say nourish- 
 ment, a tonic of the least injurious kind. 
 
 The heat of fever can only be allayed by what the child 
 himself fancies ; and still less must it be strengthened by 
 medicines instead of nourishment ; and least of all by food 
 instead of drink. A few words on this point may be allowed 
 even to the laity ; the superior excellence of a glass of 
 wine to all glasses of medicine in cases of weakness is seen 
 in grown-up people, in whom, after all apothecary's 
 essences, the electric spark of life has frequently been re- 
 kindled by one strengthening bottle of wine, — of this I 
 have experienced strangely decisive instances. And many 
 things might easily be added to this; wine has the advan- 
 tage of a monger, slower, and more constant influence ; 
 whereas the tonics of the apothecary assume the name of 
 aquavitae and act like earthquakes, that is to say, by small 
 doses and long intervals. 
 
 I will give yet one other piece of good advice, the very 
 best, to women; that is, when a child is really ill to do 
 nothing whatever — especially nothing new — not to change 
 a moderate temperature — to give him what he wishes to 
 eat or drink — to say nothing if he fast for a few days — and 
 to avoid all domestic recipes. A mistake in a domestic 
 remedy, giving wine, for instance, instead of vinegar ; or, 
 in an opposite case, fruit instead of eggs, may just as easily 
 be the cause of death as a mistake in a prescription. The 
 only thing I would further recommend to the mother is 
 Dr. Kilian's excellent ' Home and Travelling Physician,' — 
 and that, not that she may attempt to cure by it, but 
 that, after a physician has named the complaint, she may 
 use a treatment in accordance with it. For the husband I 
 should recommend Kilian's ' Clinical Handbook,' a new 
 edition of the former work, enlarged and enriched with 
 receipts. Both books will be sent for your perusal by the 
 next carrier. 
 
 The gymnastic instruction of your Paul shall be discussed 
 another time, in some six or seven years, when he shall be 
 born and have attained that age. In any case I would, at 
 least, let my own children, for weeks together, climb, leap,
 
 204 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. III. 
 
 swim, run races, play at ball and nine pins; but I would 
 also just as soon, for weeks together, let them dig like a 
 burrowing mole, or be kept quiet like a person recovering 
 from scarlet fever j and this not that they become well, 
 but may continue well, and in a century given more to 
 sitting than to speaking, may bring with them so much 
 sitting faculty that they may not suffer penance on their 
 bench every session. At least, I would exercise the strong 
 in sitting as much as the weak in exercise. I would also 
 rather ^et them to hard bodily labour in the evening than 
 in the morning, and so cause physical exertion to follow, 
 not precede, mental. Sitting and thinking after violent 
 exercise is not nearly so healthy or agreeable as the 
 reverse. Active exercise in the morning, as an excite- 
 ment to the sluggish early pulse, along with the greater 
 excitability experienced at that time, will frequently 
 exhaust for the whole day. The leaps which boys practise 
 on their way from school show the bent of nature. In 
 spite of all these reasons I would yet do the opposite — not 
 always, but yet occasionally, in order to inure the body to it. 
 I will now close my letter, which consists almost en- 
 tirely of postscripts because I constantly intended to 
 conclude and always went on. Fare you well, and your 
 wife still better. J. P. F. K. 
 
 P.S. If you should have purchased Dr. Marshall's 
 * Instructions for the care of Mothers, Children, &c. &c, in 
 their peculiar illnesses,' third edition, two parts — be 
 somewhat mistrustful and disobedient with regard to his 
 instructions ; or at least, let them be first filtered and 
 refined by some Brownian physician. When, for instance, 
 he orders a lying-in woman to have nothing during the 
 first nine days but sour fruit, saltpetre and other weaken- 
 ing diets, he does just the same as if one were to lay 
 a person apparently frozen to death, who can only be 
 recovered by very gradual application of warmth begin- 
 ning at the lowest possible degree, in an ice-house for a 
 few days in order that he might recover gradually from 
 the cold. Certainly he would do so slowly enough as he 
 would scarcely become warm before the resurrection.
 
 ( 205 ) 
 
 COMIC APPENDIX AND EPILOGUE TO THE 
 FIRST VOLUME. 
 
 A DREAMED LETTER TO THE LATE PROFESSOR GELLERT, JN 
 WHICH THE AUTHOR BEGS FOR A TUTOR. 
 
 Suffer a dreamed letter to find its place here, for the 
 recreation both of reader and writer. Few men have 
 experienced so rational a kind of dreaming as I have 
 done ; — whereof more shall be said at some future time in 
 a revision of my treatises : others must treasure up their 
 rational waking thoughts. I was obliged, when awake, 
 to help out this dream, even with some changes in its 
 order, so that it might — by the system of opposite ends 
 and aims, as well as of memory and oblivion — really 
 appear what it is. For the rest, I hope I paid it sufficient 
 heed ; for, as soon as it was over, I employed the well- 
 known art of recalling dreams by shutting the eyes and 
 keeping every limb motionless. Unfortunately all the 
 fancies or foundlings of a dream — the enfans perdus of the 
 imagination, all the more truly because they usually carry 
 us back to the days of our childhood, and so form a limbus 
 infantum — have this great fault, that they shine brilliantly 
 until we awake, but then little or nothing of them is to 
 be found. At least, such is my case ; and I hope the 
 reader consents. 
 
 " Excellent departed Gellert ! I want a tutor for my son 
 Max : for I am at present engaged in writing on educa- 
 tion, and consequently have not a spare minute to devote 
 to the practice of it ; just as Montesquieu found himself 
 obliged to resign the office of president to devote himself 
 to the ' Spirit of Laws.' Since at every university there are 
 pedagogic engrossers and purveyors, and fewer subjects 
 of instruction than accomplished instructors ; and since, 
 moreover, you, before your decease, exercised the patron's 
 right of appointing tutors, I did not know why you
 
 206 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTEE. [APPEND. TO 
 
 should not proceed in it still better now, not merely 
 because you have marched forward with time, but also 
 with eternity. In the extended acquaintance your im- 
 mortal part must have formed on many planets — for as 
 virtue in futurity is the reward of virtue, so also heavenly 
 authorship will be the reward of earthly — you cannot 
 fail to have ample choice of people and candidates in out 
 system. Only you must not propose to me any tricked 
 out, spurred dweller in Leipsig, of your time, clothed 
 throughout in beautifying cement ; no, not even the late. 
 Gellert himself (except as far as regards his loving 
 gentleness and naive cheerfulness) : I want a very hard 
 material — mind. There are, unavoidably, so many born 
 harlequins, shall we also make educated ones, or both 
 together; stamped pinchbeck pieces, crawling, cringing, 
 worms ? 
 
 " Heavens ! how is it that I always find something good 
 in books on education, and so seldom anything of it in 
 teachers ? What have I not seen of these last, Gellert, 
 and yet may see in any town I please ? I do not (because 
 I will not)«think of those peevish creatures full of child- 
 hate, those living aversions to little ones — for manly 
 justice makes even a false system of education good ; and, 
 to give an instance, nothing is so dangerous in icebergs as 
 the clefts or chasms— but of those sickly-sweet, honey- 
 dewed, sugar-of-lead perpetual teachers, who would con- 
 secrate every thing for the young, even the swaddling 
 clothes, as a pope does those actually used. Oh ! I perfectly 
 understand that tutor : after every step and every leap of 
 the young creature he will sow something ; and, moreover 
 be most anxious to know whether the mental cherry-stones, 
 which he has brought him enveloped in their sweet 
 covering, will grow and take root in his stomach as he 
 hopes ; or, to use another different living metaphor, 
 whether the frog's eggs he has given him in a draught 
 of pond water are developing themselves. In physical 
 matters, says he, the same thing is commoner but in- 
 iurious, and then he shortly alludes to the lessons in which 
 he also teaches it. 
 
 " The tutor stands up for the U without which the 
 child's Q cannot be pronounced. ' Let my sermon precede
 
 FIRST VOL. J LEVANA. 207 
 
 every action,' says he, ' the man, forsooth, must strengthen 
 with many reasons every childish action of the child, and 
 shave it with a scythe.' 
 
 " He who has seen such a man frequently, though not 
 everywhere, has learned much. In China there is a law- 
 book, and interpreters of it too, to teach the best method 
 of drinking tea genteelly. But the above-mentioned man 
 would wish the thing to be done improperly and properly 
 also ; because, indeed, he finds a very great want of direc-. 
 tions for children how to take coffee, tea, tobacco, stones — for 
 throwing; hands — for kissing; and cakes — for stealing.' 
 It is the same man who chalks up the Ten Commandments 
 on the study door, as on a pillar of remembrance, so that 
 the young may always have them before their eyes — which 
 is precisely the best means of never seeing them. Most 
 parental and tutoral commands resemble the inscription 
 one sees on some doors — of ' shut the door ' which cannot 
 be read if he have left the door open. 
 
 *' Observe from above a tutor who chains himself to his 
 prisoners ; who permits himself to be adopted as spiritual 
 father — which the real father ought to be, since we can 
 indeed give instruction to a stranger's child but education 
 only to our own, because the one may know cessation, the 
 other must proceed without interruption — observe him and 
 he must appear to you (even without the bird's eye per- 
 spective of another world) less in that serious light which 
 is usual above than in a very different one ; when, for 
 instance, you see him take a walk with his auditory of 
 slaves, endeavouring to turn every hill, and stream, and 
 knot of people (in themselves nothing) into a medium of 
 imparting instruction to his slaves. For as long as the 
 child is awake he ceases not to develop him ; although, 
 perhaps, his dreams develop him much better. If every 
 eastern pearl costs the life of a slave, every western pupil 
 costs a teacher, and something more. The teacher, who 
 cannot live to himself, suffers his pupil as little life to 
 himself; and so they mutually impart to each other sins 
 of weakness ; somewhat as the new and the old world 
 imparted to each other a new di-ease, that of the double 
 small-pox. 
 
 " To speak in figures, departed friend, tutors and
 
 208 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEE. [APPEND. TO 
 
 beggars mutilate children in order to feed themselves, 
 only the former expose the distortions as curved lines of 
 beauty, the latter as holes and chinks in their living alms' 
 boxes. 
 
 " Or by their long polishing of the child they rub off its 
 pure form ; like those glass dishes in which curious 
 specimens of glass are so laboriously piled that at last 
 their original depth is positively diminished. 
 
 " But should this be, excellent immortal ? Must my good 
 Max, whose eye and hand aim at power, fall down so 
 weakened and weary? Must, in short, a boy of the 
 nineteenth century be blown out by his tutor so thin, and 
 tender, and brittle, that he — like the man recorded by 
 Lusitanus, who thought his seat was made of glass and 
 therefore always remained on his legs — must regard 
 everything about him as moral, aesthetic, intellectual glass, 
 and so not venture to sit, to stand, or to lie — nay, not 
 even to be ? As was said above, dear friend, I chose to say 
 this in a somewhat figurative style, because I wished to 
 tread in your footsteps. But, like all imitators (I know 
 that too well) I must retire with a longer nose and not 
 much shorter ears ; for your present figurative style 
 (since in heaven or Uranus you are near the greatest 
 objects and worlds — Jupiter and Hell— and have them to 
 inspire you) must be totally different from any other, even 
 you own mortal style, from which doubtless it is dis- 
 tinguished by bold oriental imagery ; and you will say, 
 even Gellert, naturalised in heaven, writes in some degree 
 more wittily and instructively, and no one there speaks 
 dully. — For the rest I know perfectly well, even to your 
 very phrases, the objections you will make to me against 
 the influence of tutoral glazing. For you will find an 
 anecdote which you have read in Marville* applicable to 
 the point. As an instance how accurately I can guess, I 
 will myself relate it to you. ' A young gentleman, a 
 preacher, with fine action, voice and so forth, mounted the 
 pulpit and began his sermon ; but lo ! he had forgotten it, 
 and knew, even less than before, what he had to say. 
 However, he composed himself, raised his voice (and 
 himself too, as he hoped by the action) and proclaimed to 
 
 * Melange d'histoire de Vijfneuel-Marville.
 
 FIRST VOL.] LEVANA. 200 
 
 his audience, with rare energy, one conjunction after 
 another — enfin, car, done, si, or — and muttered with falling 
 voice all kind of inaudible matter between the particles. 
 The poorer parishioners were excited and in the highest 
 degree attentive, yet without being able to understand 
 much ; and so they, naturally and reasonably, attributed 
 their not hearing to the distance of their sittings from the 
 jralpit, which one part of the congregation supposed too 
 far off, and the other too near. And so this soul-curer, 
 with his connecting, passionate and apostrophising words, 
 preached about three-quarters of an hour, throwing himself 
 and the pew occupiers into a fever and perspiration ; then 
 pronounced the Amen, and descended from the pulpit 
 with the reputation of a true pulpit orator. The whole 
 body of hearers resolved next time to choose their seats 
 better ; some to sit nearer, some farther off, so as not to 
 lose a syllable.' 
 
 " Now what else do most teachers preach to children, 
 and philosophers to the sons of muses and their readers, 
 than a few thousand sis, doncs, cars, without any rational 
 word attached? 
 
 " What else are most lessons to children — as most men's 
 conversations to women — than customary marks to pay no 
 attention ? 
 
 " You now know what kind of a spiritual father I, the 
 physical father, wish to adopt for my child. Naturally I 
 only speak of the tutor's soul. His body may just as well 
 be kneaded out of the earth of Uranus, Saturn, the moon 
 or. the sun, as out of the earth of this world. As to the 
 soul, I wish that you would select such from among the 
 candidates out of the present ten planets as you did 
 formerly from those out of the ten German circles — which 
 circles, dear Gellert, since your removal, have almost 
 undergone ten persecutions of the Christians and meta- 
 morphoses of Vishnu— and then, out of this selection from 
 the planets, choose one for me. You will spare me a 
 subject out of the leaden, dull and heavy, selfish Saturn ; 
 who, with all his breadth of rings and abundance of moons, 
 has wearisomely long years and gives a bad light ; as well 
 as a spring beetle out of that merry lancer roimd the sun, 
 Mercury, the domestic Frenchman. o{ the solar system,. 
 
 I. p
 
 210 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [APPEND. TO 
 
 who always intoxicates himself in the sunshine and yet, 
 when he really comes before the sun, only looks like a 
 black spot. Excellent professor, you now know every- 
 thing, and many things much earlier than we do ; of 
 which I only name to jou Pallas, Ceres, Juno, and 
 the planets discoverable in future. I will have no in- 
 structor out of Pallas — a morsel broken from the earth, 
 and, moreover, at such a distance, for light and heat 
 Trom the sun Apollo ; I purposely mention this dwarf 
 planet because your preference for Athens, whose pro- 
 tecting deity Pallas was, might perhaps influence you. 
 You must be partial to nothing but the next world, and 
 my first child. 
 
 " In one word, I do not know any distinguished star from 
 which I would select my tutor but the morning and 
 evening star ; and so let it be, Gellert ! Much might be 
 said about that star — its double name, indeed, says two 
 things — moreover it is named after the goddess of beauty ; 
 also after a certain light-bearer (Lucifer) not light-destroyer 
 ■ — especially the star possesses this excellent quality (and 
 many others) that it occupies a very perfect position in the 
 heaven, neither too far from the sun, nor too near the 
 earth ; and that (for children) it does not so strikingly wax 
 and wane as the nearer moon. In short I consider Venus 
 to be the best nurse. And so, I beg my tutor may come 
 from Hesperus. 
 
 " For your son of .Hesperus will certainly, I imagine, 
 deal excellently with my child. He will — since liberality 
 is in every case inestimable, and why not then in education 
 in the first place— treat him with practical freedom and 
 power, and not deprive him of his own. He will find little 
 fault with what is childish. Quickly and perfectly appre- 
 hending what is outward, what inward, he will in no case 
 make many words and vast preparations ; will draw him 
 on to what is great and universal, not to what is insigni- 
 ficant ; will rather be the physician to his weakness, than 
 the extinguisher of his strength. He will above all lend 
 his ai I to the child of earth ; and shine befoi-e and be- 
 hind \ im as his starry dwelling, Hesperus, does for the 
 earth, and that only when the sun has not yet risen, or 
 is already set ; it is certain that so wise a Hesperid will
 
 FIRST VOL. J LEVANA. 211 
 
 not attempt to help the sun in the day time ; I know him 
 too well to suppose it possible. 
 
 " Even in physical matters he will not, with womanish 
 anxiety, be perpetually fearful lest the child should break 
 his leg against every twig — though, indeed, the breaking 
 of a leg is better than the dread of it ; and, on the other 
 hand, children are themselves careful, owing to the novelty 
 of all their experiments and the natural magnifying of a 
 place where they may fall, caused by the shortness of their 
 own bodies — or lest he should be poisoned by tin soldiers 
 and children's trumpets ; or hurt by a rocking-horse ; 
 or spoiled by wearing trowsers. He who is so fearful for 
 others may himself be suspected of fear ; and a coward 
 makes a coward, as a hermit does a hermit. Our ancestors, 
 old Gellert, grew up sufficiently strong and modest with 
 all their trowsers, feather beds, saddles and spices. 
 
 " It would on another account be particularly agreeable 
 to me that you choose my tutor out of Venus ; because 
 there, according to the best telescopes and astronomers, 
 may be found the loftiest mountains, compared with which 
 our Chimborazzo were but a mole-hill — and so the purest 
 mountain air is near the hottest sultriness of the valley ; 
 (I can readily picture to myself the heat of Lucifer or 
 Venus). What a powerful, manly Alpine breast, joined to 
 an Italy in the heart, must the inhabitant of Phosphorus 
 bring to me at Baireuth, in the capacity of a right carefully 
 selected tutor ; who must resemble a general full of con- 
 trasting powers, of irrevocable strictness and order, sincere 
 friendshij), good fellowship, and persuasiveness. 
 
 " I am convinced my tutor will understand me when I 
 say, that as the man can do without the scholar, but not 
 the scho'ar without the man, I pray you above all things 
 to ingraft the scholar upon the man, but not the reverse. 
 Our nineteenth century, (I might thus speak to him more 
 distinctly in the evening under the warm rain of punch.) 
 whatever century you may reckon on your little planet, 
 will not be the best, at least not the strongest, although it 
 may, like yours, deserve the names of Phosphorus and 
 Lucifer. What we magnify ourselves about is the French 
 Revolution ; or the changes of something little. The 
 stones which the giants formerly hurled became islands ; 
 
 p 2
 
 212 JEAN PAUL FPJEDPJCH RICHTER. [APPEND. TO 
 
 now, when islands are hurled, there come but stones, tomb- 
 stones and grindstones. The Revolution, like an earth- 
 quake, put some motion into the skeletons of a charnel 
 house. Tutors, like the anatomist Waltherin Berlin, seek 
 their glory in preparing skeletons by removing the flesh, 
 and then bleaching them. Brother-dwellers on Venus, or 
 rather on this earth, could you think so ? Then should I 
 repent writing to Gellert ! To impart strength, and to 
 leave strength will, I hope, be your first and last words in 
 education. What is educated for the age will be worse 
 than the age. The Hesperid answers me : ' In the 
 springtime of child hood, fathers often look forward as far 
 as the distant snow-white mountain peaks, and point out 
 the winter to the spring. Far better the wind-fall of a 
 spring storm, than the snow-fall of age.' As true as 
 beautiful, candidate ! I reply. Lavoisier made an instru- 
 ment of ice into a calorimetre, or measurer of heat ; thus 
 fire is often measured by ice ; the boy by the grey-headed 
 man. 
 
 " The candidate will animadvert on much in the con- 
 versational style of his paymaster ; but I go on little 
 affected by his remarks ; ' Howsoever I may express 
 myself, it is certain that the artistic, compound-fractured 
 style, into which writing masters and tutors would break 
 the sotiIs of their pupils, like letters, is in nothing dif- 
 ferent from the compound fractures of surgeons, except in 
 the case of wit, which truly requires variety in order to 
 find without restraint distant resemblances.' The candi- 
 date replies : ' If only to the innate energy of a child the 
 sap of life and room for its development be afforded, there 
 will be no need to graft on every branch, to cut the 
 leaves, or paint the flowers ; one must, like a king, 
 direct the whole, but not interfere with the individual 
 parts.' 
 
 " I exclaim, ' You are the man for me, (if not, indeed, 
 more than a man !) If the tutor's situations which I 
 once filled were yet vacant you should be my vicar in 
 them— but you shall be so in the last, in the one I 
 overlook and present to as father and patron. The easy 
 conditions need scarcely be mentioned. You are not to 
 torment the child with a thousand languages — for merely to
 
 FIRST VOL.] LEV AX A. 218 
 
 learn languages is to throw away one's money in buying 
 beautiful purses, or to learn the Lord's Prayer in all lan- 
 guages without ever praying it.' 
 
 " ' 1 agree, with all my heart ! ' said he boldly. ' So 
 you will only teach him French, English, Spanish, Italian ; 
 — Greek, Latin, and German, of course — but the last most 
 thoroughly. As regards the sciences, the child will bo 
 fed by you, as its young are by the house swallow, only 
 on the wing — not attached to any long appointment of the 
 hours of study.' 
 
 " ' You know the human heart, and show a most beauti- 
 ful one,' interrupted he, and drank. ' But when your usual 
 eight hours of study are over, and the child or you testify 
 any further desire of study, you may, without hesitation, 
 take as much from the second or from the last third of 
 the day as you choose, and teach during the whole of it. 
 Now in what appertains to science itself (for the art of 
 dancing, fencing, swimming, riding, leaping, singing, 
 playing on the violin, the horn, and the piano, will be 
 recreations for both of you), it will satisfy me if the poor 
 child only learn history — namely, as much of the past as 
 is already gone ; and also I would wish that, along with 
 the most recent, a little of the piquante future should be 
 insinuated, together with other not less necessary histories : 
 those of nature, of books, of heretics, of gods, of church 
 history, &c. — in the same way a few of the most necessary 
 branches of knowledge — knowledge of the stars, of coins, 
 of antiquity, of heraldry, &c. ; and the doctrines of natural 
 science, of jurisprudence, of medicine, of nobility, of 
 morality, &c. ; and the descriptions — as descriptions of 
 the earth, &c, a few ics, as aesthetics, dietetics, phello- 
 plasties, &c. ; for, say I perpetually, why the devil should 
 a poor, unbearded, thin-skulled child be immeasurably 
 laden with learned fat and refuse ? Why should his life 
 be interwoven, not with fair white leaves, but with whole 
 full books ? And he himself become a pack and baggage- 
 bearing Pegasus ? Wherefore this, say I ? ' 
 
 " You have to do, and can do, nruch ; for you are a few 
 thousand tutors in one. Frequently I cannot at all 
 understand why a whole regiment of tutors and gover 
 nesses is not engaged at once ; especially when I consider
 
 214 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICH KICHTER. [APPEND. TO 
 
 how many demigods and goddesses the Eomans ascribed 
 to children and worshipped; for instance, Nascio, or Natio, 
 presiding over the birth — Eumina over suckling — Edusa 
 over eating — Potina over drinking — Levana, moreover — 
 Statilinus and Statana over the standing of both sexes — 
 Fabulinus over speaking — I purposely omit, from detesta- 
 tion of prolixity in others, many half divinities, such as 
 Yagitans, Ossitago, Nundina, Paventia, Carnea.* Could 
 one so arrange it, and pay, one should appoint a distinct 
 teacher for almost every faculty, who should direct that 
 only ; yea, and even teachers for the various subdivisions 
 of the same faculty were at least pious wishes. I could 
 like (but nothing will come of it) if I possessed that army 
 of various teachers, to have a son exercised, say in aesthetics, 
 according to the different divisions of Krug ; one teacher 
 instructing him in that author's Hypseology, another in 
 his Kalleology, a third in his Krimatology; and so the 
 child might at one time have his sublime tutor, at another 
 his feeble, at another his naive. I would also wish, dear 
 friend, that, in the virtues, you should prescribe special 
 private exercises and instructions in each virtue, so that 
 they might not all run into one another and the poor 
 child stand there like a stupid angel, who knows neither 
 right nor left, but only what is right. If Franklin 
 schooled and exercised himself each week in a different 
 virtue, might not the various Sundays and festivals, which 
 as holydays can be used for little real instruction, be applied 
 to the inculcation of many virtues ? On every festival 
 might he taken a new one : on three holydays the three 
 parts of repentance ; and on every Apostle's day some 
 fault might be eradicated. I can, indeed, picture to 
 myself a long feast of the Trinity, in which one might, 
 hour by hour, allow the child to go through all the virtues, 
 so that at the prayer-bell he might be presented as a saint 
 of a month, or holy image. 
 
 " Moreover, so excellent a tutor for my child might rest 
 assured that, were the good Gellert still living, 1 would 
 with pleasure, at the end of his engagement (when Max 
 would no longer require him) and with all the influence 
 which I, as an author, might possess with Gellert, give 
 • Augustine, de Civit. Dei, i. 4 & 9.
 
 FIRST VOL. J LEV/YA.. 215 
 
 hiin recommendations to him, in order that he might 
 further recommend the young man ; and so provide for 
 him according to his merits." 
 
 At this point I awoke ; wanted to know what I had 
 dreamed ; and tried to recall it. But I soon found that, 
 out of my dreamed letter to Gellert — quite in accordance 
 with the mad order of a dream — I had fallen into a new 
 conversation with a teacher who was there sitting before 
 me. Meanwhile such a conclusion may be in so far good, 
 as, should I print it, it will serve to prove that I have 
 not, as is, alas ! very usual, dreamed in sport, and for the 
 sake of publishing, but in very deed and truth.
 
 216 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV, 
 
 FOURTH FRAGMENT. 
 
 ON FEMALE EDUCATION. 
 
 Chap. I. Jacquelina's Confession of her Education, § 73 — 75. Chap 
 II. Destination of Women less for their Husbands than for their 
 Children, § 76—78. Chap. III. Nature of Women, Proof of their 
 predominating Purity of Heart, § 79 — 86. Chap. IV. Education of 
 Girls in regard to Reasonableness, § 87, 88; to Purity of Heart and 
 Love of their own Sex, § 89 ; to Gentleness, and the Tendency to 
 Female Passionateness, §90; to Economy of Living, and Domestic 
 Affairs. § 91—93; to Knowledge and Skill, § 94, 95; to Dress, 
 Ornament, &c, § 96 ; to Cheerfulness, § 97 ; Education of GirlB 
 endowed with Genius, § 98. Chap. V. Private Instructions of a 
 Prince to the head Governess of his Daughter, § 9 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 § 73. 
 
 Under female education I understand three things at 
 once, which are in themselves contradictory ; first, the 
 education which women generally give ; second, their 
 peculiar call to a right education as compared with men ; 
 third, the education of girls. 
 
 The first and second would have required an earlier 
 consideration if the characteristics of the female sex, 
 according to which its education should he regulated, 
 were not united in them hoth ; and, especially, if in this 
 little experimental work it were necessary to arrange the 
 position of its matter in very strict order. A reader, to 
 whom so many systems are presented must hold his way 
 armed with a predetermined one, unless each is to occupy 
 his mind in turn.
 
 CHAP. I.J LEVANA. 217 
 
 § 74. 
 
 Ill-educated and ill-educating states, as well as fathers 
 immersed in business, can only trust the welfare of educa- 
 tion to mothers, as the second chapter shall show ; hut 
 the evil that mothers might obviate can be easily stated 
 in this paragraph. Were it in other respects accordant 
 with the tone of this work, I willingly confess that I 
 would offer to the world in a merrier manner this little 
 register of sins, or list of losses in gaming, and debts 
 of honour ; and the more so because, in this very case, 
 a certain, otherwise excellent, mother of five children, 
 Madame Jacquelina, luckily turning over the pages of my 
 Levana, offered to give me an airy embodiment of it. 
 Jjadies love to dress, undress, and redress. For as I had 
 known my excellent friend a long time, much was pre- 
 pared and made easy ; and I could well imagine that the 
 fair Jacquelina, as sister- orator for her whole sex- — though 
 without any other commission to show than her beauty — 
 would stand before my writing desk, as though it were a 
 confessional, and declare she heartily desired to be absolved 
 by me ; only, for very shame's sake, it was impossible for 
 her to make an auricular confession, but she would take it 
 very kindly if I would regard her as a deaf person — after 
 the fashion of former confessors who pronounced the 
 confession of their fair deaf and dumb penitents over them 
 — and so, as her representative and spiritual father, make 
 the following confession for her : — 
 
 § 75. 
 
 " Honourable and dear sir ! " (I was thus to put the 
 address to me into her own mouth lest the joke should be 
 continued) " I confess before God and yourself that I am 
 a poor pedagogic sinner, and have broken many commands 
 of Eousseau and of Canvpe. I confess that I never truly 
 carried out any one principle for a month, but only for an 
 hour or two ; that 1 have often, half with thought, and 
 so half without thought, forbidden my children to do 
 something, without afterwards observing whether they
 
 218 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRTCH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 did it or not ; that I never could deny them anything, 
 when both they and I were floating in the midst of a sea 
 of happiness, which else from calm reason I should have at 
 once refused ; and that precisely at two seasons, the most 
 sunshiny and the most cloudy, whether of myself or of 
 the children, did I spoil them most. Have I not even 
 done still worse? Have I not, when strangers were 
 present, said to my Bella, as well as to my pet (I mean 
 by that only my poodle) Faites la belle 1 
 
 " Have I not, at each of our great fairs, given holy days 
 on account of strangers' visits, especially those of eminent 
 frequenters of the fair to my husband, and thus valued a 
 visitor more highly than five children ; so that I very 
 little resembled that German woman, of whom my husband 
 read in the twelfth volume of the mental Fama, who had 
 the courage to decline dancing with two kings on the 
 same evening because she considered it to be unchristian ? 
 And during all last year did I not see my two youngest 
 children, Josephine and Peter, only once a day, at break- 
 fast, and that merely because I wanted to finish a novel 
 and a piece of worsted- work ; and, also, because my noble 
 friend, the princess, for whom I was working it, had 
 taken up her residence here ? Only this consideration 
 can tranquillise my conscience, that I took the greatest 
 trouble to procure a trustworthy nurse for my little 
 ones, who promised me to treat them as a real mother ; 
 and may Heaven punish her if she was ever inatten- 
 tive to so dear a trust, or ever let my precious lambs 
 go out of her sight for a moment, or ever left them 
 in the hands of strangers ! Ah, God ! when I think of 
 the possibility of such a thing ! But, alas ! what do such 
 creatures know of the anxieties of a tender mother's 
 heart ? 
 
 " At other times, I have indeed (and that consoles me) 
 always allowed all my children to come to me twice a day, 
 after breakfast and after dinner, and have then often 
 for hours fondled and taught them. But I confess that 
 my impetuosity would never let me be satisfied to kiss 
 them in moderation ; and so I drew on me my husband's 
 blame, who dislikes that exceedingly and says, ' Children 
 (even if not my own) may, with the Princess of Conde,
 
 CHAP. 1. 1 LEVANA. 219 
 
 lament that their misfortune is to be loved by old people 
 — the holy seal of the heart, a kiss, is to children an 
 empty, meaningless thing ; ? very energetic one may even 
 be painful, and perhaps injurious, to the fifth pair of 
 nerves in the lips — a gentle stroking .of the head is 
 better, and a gentle loving word, a kiss "which they give, 
 and a softer one which they receive.' 
 
 " I confess that, as in the game of forfeits, when I 
 asked myself, What shall this forfeit (that of love) 
 which 1 hold in my hand do ? I always answered, Love 
 me immeasurably. Whereby, because I required so many 
 marks of love, I have made Josephine too sensitive, Sophia 
 hypocritical, and Peter ill-tempered. After any severe 
 punishment I inflicted instead of allowing the whole 
 of my former love to glow warmly on them, (a striking 
 change, which my husband says is the only means of 
 correcting and reconciling a child, during at least the 
 first eight or ten years,) I suffered the long cloud of after- 
 wrath to hang over them ; as if their young hearts could 
 trace hidden love, or suffer for it long, or, in the best case, 
 not learn to imitate that sulkiness. 
 
 " I confess that, though not in the least nervous at 
 whatever may happen out of the house, I yet never could 
 be tranquil with my dear children, although I knew that 
 the least impetuosity, were it even of a hasty running 
 to their assistance, is injurious, and has a tendency to 
 produce a similar disposition in them. And I confess that 
 I show anger too soon, even towards my maid-servants, 
 in spite of my knowing perfectly what my husband so 
 beautifully says that to give way to an angry expression 
 of countenance, or of voice, before even the youngest 
 children, is in fact to teach them anger. For, as the 
 whole soul is imprisoned and moulded into the whole 
 body, it follows that every mental is connected with some 
 physical part, and thus these mutually excite each other 
 — the outward expression of passion produces the mental 
 emotion, and so of the reverse. 
 
 " My husband asserted and, moreover, carried out the 
 principle, that a husband can never so well establish a 
 normal school for female teachers (like a good wife, I use 
 his very expressions) as during the first year after mar-
 
 220 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH ETCHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 riage ; in this time, he thought, a wife might be mentally 
 enriched with every kind of manly instruction, which, 
 should she afterwards neglect, she would yet seek and 
 cherish for the love of her first child, and of him who is 
 even before the first, her husband ; for at an after period, 
 continued he, somewhat of that glowing love-service 
 towards the husband, and somewhat, also, of that anxious 
 solicitude about the children, vanishes ; and so, still 
 continued he, the education of many children does not 
 proceed better, at least, not more carefully. But I rejoice 
 that I have confuted him in this, as in many other things, 
 and that I brought up my third child, even while expect- 
 ing the fourth, for several months precisely as my wedded 
 lord and school-master directed during the school-weeks 
 of the honeymoon. 
 
 " But, venerable father, you certainly do not know by 
 experience what whims husbands take some nine or ten 
 months after marriage ! Did not mine positively, seriously 
 desire, that when I occasionally washed the little thing, 
 I would not rub its face and wipe it quickly up and 
 down ; because, said he, this kind of violence is disagree* 
 able to them and excites their passion ; but that I would 
 softly glide from above downwards, and then gently 
 round ? What ridiculous pedantry ! Surely a woman 
 must know how to wash ! So 1 go on just as usual, 
 and care not how loudly both little and big cry out 
 against it. 
 
 " For the rest I confess, and would willingly do 
 penance for it, that I am never so soon angry as when 
 dressing, or engaged in any other important business ; 
 the beautiful, perfect repose of my education then 
 vanishes. My husband wants to place, for penance 
 and the removal of my angry wrinkles, a magnifying 
 glass beside my toilet glass ; but, thank God ! 1 do not 
 yet need such a glass of detraction ; and, besides, my 
 features are less changed than my colour. Perhaps I am 
 excusable for admitting my three eldest girls (and Lucy, 
 too, often) to my toilet, because in the first place, they 
 watch me so gladly, and are so quiet (especially when I 
 tell them that they may perhaj)s go with me), and because, 
 secondly, a young girl's eye is best exercised in taste -with
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 221 
 
 regard to matters of dress on the costume of a grown-up 
 person. 
 
 " It consoles me, however, to reflect that 1 never 
 purchased a handsome new article of dress, either for 
 myself or my daughters, without labouring to repress the 
 love of finery, by telling them how little a woman's worth 
 depends on dress, and that a rich habit is only chosen 
 because thereby alone can rank be shown. At the same 
 time I must confess that all my daughters are vain : 
 however many sermons I make to them during my toilet, 
 I am not listened to but only looked at. How often do I 
 turn round with reproaches when my really beautiful 
 Maximiliana stands behind me peeping into the glass 
 and say, ' There, again, a pretty, rosy, blue- eyed mask is 
 looking at herself, and can never be tired of peeping and 
 staring ! ' 
 
 " I farther confess, worthy sir, that I wias certainly in- 
 finitely more displeased with Peter when he lately threw 
 Veritas (really a most exquisite ideal figure from Bertuch's 
 repository of arts) out of the window, than if he had told 
 ten lies ; on the other hand, I hope I remain perfectly 
 tranquil when my husband sometimes makes such an 
 uproar about some little fibs or other the children may 
 have been telling ; or about their frequently quite 
 justifiable scoldings of the servants : then, says he, 
 reflecting on my anger, ' The Eoinans did wisely when 
 they wrote the initial letter of the word signifying man 
 inverted to indicate woman.' 
 
 " If God will only forgive me the sins wherein I meant 
 well, I shall be satisfied to be punished for the rest. 1 
 certainly have sinned much, and deserved temporal 
 punishments and bad children. I will, however, from 
 this time forth amend my educational life and become 
 better and better ; and I entreat you, reverend, dear sir, 
 to forgive me my sins in God's stead." In which case I 
 should certainly lay my hand on Jacquelina's round white 
 shoulder, and readily absolve her past, though truly not 
 her future, sins,
 
 222 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 §76, 
 But the seriousness of the subject demands that a 
 
 SECOND CHAPTEE, 
 
 ON THE DESTINATION OF THE FEMALE SEX, 
 
 Should restore to it its due honour. A father, who only 
 sees and educates his children for an hour or two, must be 
 careful not to require his own hour's strict attention and 
 persistency from the mother who wearies herself with them 
 all day long. This longer companionship excuses much 
 maternal overflowing, both of love and anger. In the 
 same way, a stranger always considers parental displeasure 
 too severe, because he sees the fault for the first time and 
 isolated, which the parents behold for the thousandth time, 
 and in an ever-strengthening chain of habit. Mothers 
 readily acquire an over-estimation of their children 
 because, placed sufficiently near the development of their 
 minds to count every new leaf, they regard each universal 
 human growth as a particular individual one, and thence 
 infer some few miracles. And then how much must the 
 physical care of the children, which in the middle classes 
 entirely devolves on the mother, weary and deaden her — 
 as compared with the independent father — for their 
 mental culture. 
 
 § 77 
 
 The education of the first half of the first decade of life 
 is already placed in the hands of the mother, owing to the 
 necessities of the body. His avocations in the state, in his 
 profession, or business, only grant the father intervals, and 
 those rather for instruction than education — two happy 
 classes of fathers alone excepted. The first is a country 
 gentleman, who reposes in such a golden mean of all 
 circumstances that he converts his mansion into a bene- 
 volent institution for his children, if he love his successors 
 better than cards, and hares, and rents. The second is the
 
 CHAP. II.] LEVANA. 223 
 
 man whom he app>ints— a country clergyman. The six 
 days' leisure, the country's separation from the turmoil of 
 towns, the open air, the office, which is itself a higher 
 educational institution, and, finally, the seventh day, which 
 presents their physical father to his children on a glorifying 
 elevation as a holy and spiritual lather, and impresses an 
 official seal on the lessons of the week — all these things 
 open to the minister a sphere of education into which he 
 may attract other children ; since he niay always better 
 convert his parsonage into a school-house than a tutor's 
 study into a parish. I would rather trust my son to a 
 clergyman than to a tutor ; because he is freer, and stands 
 on his legs, not upon crutches. 
 
 In the middle ranks the men educate best, because the 
 women are little cultivated : in the higher classes, generally, 
 the women, because there they are more carefully brought 
 up than the men. What, now, can the man do ? a philo- 
 sopher, we will suppose, or a minister of public affairs, a 
 soldier, a president, poet, or artist ? 
 
 In the very first instance he must love and recompense 
 his wife better, in order that she, by double support, the 
 love of her children and the love of her husband, may more 
 easily carry out the most difficult part of education— the 
 first. In this way the husband may bestow care and 
 attention on the first and most important education, that 
 given by the mother, which no after tutors, schools, or 
 paternal praise and blame, can ever replace; that is to 
 say, he will exercise the law-giving power of education, 
 the mother the administrative. Let the husband only 
 continue to be the lover of his wife and she will listen to 
 what he says about education, at least of the mind. How 
 readily will a noble-minded marriageable girl, or a bride, 
 surveying from afar her future work, listen to the educa- 
 tional rules which even a youth gives ! And, when married, 
 a woman willingly adopts many a good suggestion about 
 the education of her children which a stranger offers. 
 Only by the union of manly energy and decision with 
 womanly gentleness does the child rest and sail as at the 
 conflux of two streams ; or, in another figure, the sun 
 raises the tide and so does the moon, but he raises it only 
 one foot, she three, and both united four. The husband
 
 224 JEAN PAUL FPJEDIUOH EICHTEK. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 only marks full stops in the child's life, the wife commas 
 and semicolons, and both more frequently. One might 
 exclaim, " Mothers, be fathers !" and " Fathers, be 
 mothers !" for the two sexes perfect the human race, as 
 Mars and Venus gave birth to Harmony. The man 
 works by exciting powers ; the woman by maintaining 
 order and harmony among them. The man, in whom the 
 state, or his own genius, destroys the balance of powers for 
 the advantage of one, will always bring this overlaying 
 influence to education : the soldier will educate warlikely ; 
 the poet poetically ; the divine piously ; the mother only 
 will educate humanly. For only the woman needs to 
 develop nothing in herself but the pure human being ; as 
 in an iEolian harp no string predominates over the rest, 
 but the melody of its tones proceeds from unison and 
 returns to it. 
 
 §78. 
 
 But you mothers, and especially you in the higher and 
 less busy classes, whose fortune spares you the heavy 
 burden of careful housekeeping, and surrounds you with a 
 cheerful green garden for the education of your children, 
 how is it that yon can prefer the tedium of solitude and of 
 society to the enduring charms of your children's love — to 
 the drama of their fair development — to the sports of the 
 best beloved beings — to the reward of the most delightful 
 and lasting influence ? That woman is despicable who, 
 having children, ever feels ennui. Well formed nations 
 have been, according to Herder, the educators of the human 
 race; s-o let your beauty be, not merely the external 
 garment, but the very instrument of instruction and 
 education. Towns and countries have female names, and 
 are represented as females ; and, in truth, the mothers who 
 educate for the future the first five years of their children's 
 lives do found cities and countries. Who can leplace a. 
 mother? Not even a father. For she, attached to the 
 child by the daily and nightly bonds of care for its physical 
 wants, can and must weave and embroider mental instruc- 
 tion in glittering characters on those tender ties. Will 
 you, then, neglect the fairest time for working purely and 
 deeply on posterity, since the stronger sex and the state
 
 CHAP. II.] LEVANA. 225 
 
 will soon step in, and bring pulleys and grappling irons 
 instead of your leading strings and gently raising levers, 
 and therewith move them harshly and roughly ? Dost 
 thou, royal mother, consider it nobler to guide the intrigues 
 of a cabinet than the little future heir-apparent ? Thou 
 hast borne him within thee, when a heavier burden, and 
 hast suffered acutest pain when he was taken from thee, 
 and this only for his physical life ; and wilt thou shun to 
 undertake something less than both these, whereby thou 
 mayest draw a holy spiritual ^lory around thy victory ? 
 How often are your night watches recompensed by a 
 child's coffin ; but your day watches over his mind ever by 
 rich daily rewards ! If you once believe that everything 
 depends on education, what name do you deserve when, 
 precisely as your position is high, you intrust the education 
 of your children to persons of lower rank ; and while the 
 children of the middle classes have their parents, those of 
 the higher classes have only nurses and maids, as the 
 directors of their path in life ? 
 
 The whole ancient world elevates maternal above 
 paternal love ; and the mother's must be great indeed, for 
 a loving father cannot even picture to himself any love 
 greater than his own ; why, then, are you, compared 
 with the fathers, who are so anxious about education 
 and who even write great books upon the subject, so 
 indifferent about its application ? For your lover you can 
 freely give wealth and health ; why not then spare a few 
 hours for the little helpless creature you love ? For the 
 one you overcome opinions and inclinations ; why should 
 you do less for the other ? You, on whose physically and 
 spiritually nourishing bosom Nature has cast the orphans 
 of the earth, will you let them fade and die on a cold hired 
 breast ? You, who are provided by nature with patience, 
 grace, gentleness, eloquence and love for the beings who 
 fly to you even from their father, can you not watch over 
 them ? I do not mean during the night, but only during 
 the day. See ! they who once rested beneath your heart, 
 and have now no longer a place in it, stretch their little 
 arms towards her who is most related to them, and beg 
 again for nourishment. As in many ancient nations no 
 request was denied to a woman holding a child in her 
 
 Q
 
 226 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTER. [FEAG. IV. 
 
 arms, so now do children, lying in your arms, or in their 
 nurse's, offer up petitions for themselves. 
 
 It is true that the sacrifices you make for the world will 
 he little known hy it — men govern and earn the glory ; and 
 the thousand watchful nights and sacrifices by which a 
 mother purchases a hero, or a poet, for the state are for- 
 gotten, not once counted ; for the mothers themselves do 
 not count them ; and so, one century after another, do 
 mothers, unnamed and unthanked, send forth the arrows, 
 the suns, the storm-birds, and the nightingales of time ! 
 But seldom does a Cornelia find a Plutarch who connects 
 her name with the Gracchi. But as those two sons who 
 bore their mother to the temple of Delphi were rewarded 
 by death, so your guidance of your children will only 
 find its perfect recompense at the termination of life. 
 
 Twice, however, you will not be forgotten. If you 
 believe in an invisible world in which the glad tears of a 
 thankful heart are more valued and shine more brightly 
 than worldly crowns set round with the petrified tears of 
 sorrow ; if you believe this, you know your future ! And, 
 if you have educated rightly, your child knows you. 
 Never, never has one forgotten his pure, right-educating 
 mother. On tbe blue mountains of our dim childhood, 
 towards which we ever turn and look, stand the mothers 
 who marked out to us from thence our life ; the most 
 blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget the 
 warmest heart. You wish, women ! to be ardently 
 loved, and for ever, even till death. Be, then, the mothers 
 of your children. But you mothers who do not educate 
 your children, how should your thanklessness for an 
 unmerited blessing cause you to hang down your head in 
 shame before every childless mother, every childless wife, 
 and blush because one worthy woman sighs after that 
 heaven which you have abandoned like a fallen angel. 
 Oh ! why does fate, which often for some century's blood- 
 hound gives a million souls to the rack, deny to the most 
 lovely gentle being the bliss of one child's heart ? Why 
 must Love long for an object, and Hate, not? Ah! 
 Emestina,* how wouldst thou have loved and made 
 
 * The excellent lady to whom the poet here pens so fine a memorial 
 was his wife's younger sister, Emestina Augusta Philippina Mahl-
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 227 
 
 happy ! But thou wast not permitted : the death-cloiul 
 parried thee away with all the roses of thy youth, and 
 thy warm mother's heart was called, childless, into the 
 unknown world of spirits. Oh ! how wouldst thou have 
 loved and educated with thy clearness of perception, thy 
 strength of character, thy ever-flowing spring of love, 
 thy self-sacrificing soul — thou, who wert adorned with all 
 the virtues of an ancient German woman ! 
 
 CHAPTEE III. 
 
 NATURE OF GIRLS. 
 §79. 
 
 The education of daughters is the first and most im- 
 portant business of mothers ; because it may be uninter- 
 rupted, and continue till the daughter's hand glides 
 straight from the mother's into that which holds the 
 wedding ring. The boy is educated by a many-toned 
 world, school-classes, universities, travels, business, and 
 libraries ; the mother's mind educates the daughter. For 
 that reason he is more independent of the shocks of 
 foreign influence than his sister ; for outward contradic- 
 tion compels him to an inner balancing unity, whereas 
 one little corner of the world easily appears a whole 
 quarter, nay, a whole world, to the maiden. 
 
 Before we speak of the education of the sex, we must 
 first determine its character. According to well-known 
 principles the nature of men is more epic, and formed for 
 reflection ; that of women more lyrical, and endowed with 
 feeling. Campe truly remarks that the French have all 
 the failings and perfections of children — hence, I believe, 
 they gladly call themselves Athenians, whom the old 
 
 maim, of Leipsig. She died, Feb. 18, 1805, in the twenty-sixth year 
 of her age. The desire to press a child to her heart occupied the last 
 moments before her death. She was one of the noblest beings that 
 ever lived. — Trans. 
 
 Q 2
 
 228 JEAN PAUL FRIEDE1CH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 Egyptian priest found at once very childlike and very 
 childish. I have discussed more at large in other places 
 the great resemblance between the character of tho 
 French nation and that of women. From these two 
 assertions, at least from the more nattering, a third would 
 follow, the resemblance between women and children. 
 The same unbroken unity of nature — the same clear 
 perception and understanding of tho present — the same 
 sharpness of wit — the keen spirit of observation — ardour 
 and quietness — excitability and easily raised emotions — 
 the ready, quick passage from the inward to the outward, 
 and, conversely, from gods to ribbons, from motes in the 
 sunbeam to solar systems — the admiration of forms and 
 colours, and excitability carry out, by a mental alliance, 
 the physical alliance of the two beings. Hence, to use 
 an appropriate simile, children are in the first instance 
 dressed in women's habits. 
 
 He who loves antitheses of the newest fashion might 
 call women antique, Grecian, or even Oriental beings ; 
 men, on the contrary, modern, northern, European ; those 
 poetical, these philosophical. A man possesses, as it were, 
 two selfs ; a woman but one, and needs another to see her 
 own. From this female incapacity for holding dialogues 
 with self may be explained most of the advantages and 
 disadvantages of woman's nature. And so, because their 
 near echo readily becomes a resonance and confused with 
 the original sound, they can neither poetically nor philo- 
 sophically separate and re-unite their component parts, 
 and are more truly poetry and philosophy than poets and 
 philosophers. Women show more taste in dressing others 
 than themselves ; and, precisely because it is the same 
 with, their bodies as with their hearts, they can read in 
 those of others better than in their own. 
 
 §80. 
 
 Let us illustrate in various ways the unity and sincerity 
 of woman's nature. Because in her no power predominates 
 and all her powers are rather receptive than formative ; 
 bt cause she, true mirror of the versatile present, accom- 
 panies every external by an internal change ; even because
 
 CHAP. III.J LEV ANA. 229 
 
 of these tilings does she seem to us so enigmatic. To 
 guess what her soul is, means to guess her physical and 
 other external relations ; hence, the man of the world 
 loves her as well and names her after those long, thin 
 wine-glasses, called impossibles, because they cannot be 
 emptied how high soever you raise them. 
 
 Like the piano-forte, we might call her pianissimo- 
 fortissimo, so accurately and strongly does she reflect the 
 extremes of accident ; at the same time, and for this very 
 reason, her natural position must be one of repose and 
 equal balance, like Yesta, whose holy fire none but women 
 tended, and which everywhere, in town, temple, or jorivate 
 room, took, by law, the middle place. 
 
 Passion drives the man, passions the woman ; him a 
 stream, her the winds : he declares some one power to be 
 monarchic, and suffers himself to be ruled by it ; she, more 
 democratic, lets the passing moment rule. The man is 
 more frequently serious ; the woman, for the most part, 
 either blessed or cursed, joyful or sorrowful ; which does 
 not contradict our former praise of her measured tranquil 
 constitution ; for cheerfulness dwells all day with one 
 woman, sadness with another ; it is only passion that hurls 
 both headlong. 
 
 §81. 
 
 Love is the life-spirit of her spirit ; her spirit the law, 
 the motive-spring of her nerves. How deeply she can love 
 without cause and without return, even if not perceived in 
 her love of children, may be remarked in her dislikes, which 
 prey on her as strongly and unreasonably as her love 
 animates. Like the Otaheitans, who are so gentle and 
 childlike and yet eat their enemies alive, these delicate 
 creatures have a similar appetite, at least for their female 
 foes. They often yoke doves to a thunder car. The 
 somewhat shrewish Juno demanded, and obtained, from 
 antiquity gentle lambs as her favourite sacrifice. Women 
 love, and that infinitely and truly ; the most enthusiastic 
 mystics were women ; it was no man but a nun who died 
 of longing love to Jesus. But it was only a man, and no 
 woman, who could demand from the Stoic sage indifference 
 to friendship. Nature sent women into the world with
 
 230 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. [FEAG. IV. 
 
 this bridal dower of love, not, as men often think, that they 
 may altogether and entirely love them from the crown of 
 their head to the sole of their feet, but for this reason — 
 that they might be, what their vocation is,* mothers, and 
 love children, to whom sacrifices must ever be offered and 
 from whom none are to be obtained. 
 
 Woman, in accordance with her unbroken clear-seeing 
 nature, loses herself and what she has of heart and 
 happiness in the object she loves. The present only exists 
 to her ; and this present, again, is a determinate one, it is 
 one, and only one, human being. As Swift loved not the 
 hunian race, but only individuals belonging to it, so 
 women, though they have the warmest hearts, are no 
 citizens of the world, scarcely citizens of a town or a 
 village, but only of their home ; no woman can at the same 
 time love the four quarters of the world and her own child, 
 but a man can. He loves the idea ; she the manifestation, 
 that which alone is ; as God — if this bold figure be not too 
 bold — has only one loved object — His Universe. This pe- 
 culiarity is seen in many other ways. Men love things best ; 
 for instance, truths, possessions, countries : women love 
 persons best : the former, it is true, readily personify what 
 they love. Just as what is the goddess of wisdom to a 
 man, to a woman easily becomes a man who has wisdom. 
 Even when a child, a woman loves a mock-human being — 
 a doll, and works for it ; the boy gets hold of a wooden 
 horse and a troop of tin soldiers, and works with them. It 
 probably arises from this very fact, that among boys and 
 girls, sent at the same age to school, though the latter 
 mature sooner they yet retain their play-persons longer 
 than boys do their play-things. When, however, grown- 
 up women of the lower classes look intensely after a 
 beautiful doll, carried by a child in the higher ranks of 
 life, it seems their love of dress may exceed their love of 
 children. Further, girls kiss one another more frequently 
 than boys ; those look at the rider, these at the horse ; 
 those inquire about appearances, these about their causes ; 
 those about children, these about animals. 
 
 * See § 83.
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 231 
 
 § 82. 
 
 The more corrupt a century, the more contempt is there 
 in it for women. The more slavery in the form, or form- 
 lessness, of government, the more do they become the 
 handmaidens of servants. In old free Germany women 
 were considered sacred, and, like their images, the doves of 
 Jupiter at Dodona, pronounced oracles ; in Sparta and 
 England, and in the fair age of chivalry, women bore tho 
 order-jewels of man's reverence. Now, since women rise 
 and fall, become noble or base, according to the form of 
 government — and this is constantly created and maintained 
 by men — it is clear that women, after the character of 
 men is formed, imitate that model : that there must first be 
 seducing men before seduced women ; that every deteri- 
 oration of the female character is but the after- winter of a 
 similar one in men. Place moral heroes in the field, and 
 heroines follow them as brides ; but the opposite does not 
 hold true ; no heroine can create a hero through love of 
 her, but she may give birth to one. Therefore, all the more 
 contemptible is the narrow-minded, squeamish Parisian 
 man who makes tirades against the Parisian women, and, 
 consequently, against all women, while he only ingrafts 
 on them his own old sins, and poisons their womanhood by 
 his own womanishness. How would such a plaster-cast 
 creature of the age stand and tremble and wither away 
 before a Spartan or an ancient German woman ! 
 
 Consequently the present age, in complaining of female 
 sensuality, admits the previous existence of the sin in 
 men. Meanwhile let the devil's advocates stand forth 
 against women, and those of holiness for them, and to the 
 advantage of women. There are many satirical crea- 
 tures who get something printed, and are viewed with 
 wonder, and written up by German critics as men deeply 
 read in human nature for no other reason than this, be- 
 cause, without any further pretension to knowledge of the 
 world, insight, heart, or mind, they have converted every 
 woman into nothing more than a fifth or sixth sense, and 
 all their own desires into one overlaying one : and then 
 especially the critic (he's a school-teacher !) thanks God
 
 232 JEAN PAUL FBIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 and the author that now, for a few pence, which he does 
 not pay but receive as a reward for his favour, he at last 
 holds in his hand the key of the French and allied female 
 castle. 
 
 These denouncers of women are, at all events, only half 
 right, and certainly half wrong ; the former when they 
 speak of physiological, the latter when of moral, sensuality. 
 Of the former — when without the concurrence of a perfectly 
 innocent heart — no one is guilty but God the Father ; and 
 just as well might the greater beauty of a woman's bosom 
 be attributed to her as a sin and excess. But, if Heaven 
 created her especially for children, it is manifest that this 
 physiological sensuality was ordained by the great Father 
 of all children for the advantage of the growing after- 
 world. The first dwelling which man inhabits is an 
 organised one ; and can this be too rich, too strong for 
 his first original formation ? Can want of power and 
 life ever form an organic creature full of power and life. 
 And which moment is the most important in the whole 
 life ? Certainly not the last, as theologians have often 
 stated ; but probably the first, as physicians show. 
 
 On the other hand, there is allotted, as a counterpoise 
 to the senses of woman a purer heart than that of man, 
 which makes common cause with them ; and thus the 
 accusation of her physical conformation closes with an 
 eulogy on her spiritual nature. But these good beings 
 do not defend themselves save by proxy ; and it is 
 probable that, with their facility of belief, mistrustful 
 words may at last turn their watchfulness away from 
 their inward heart ; just as many lose their religion, or 
 their religious sentiments, without knowing how, merely 
 because they hear discussions, and nothing else, about it. 
 
 §83. 
 
 Nature has directly formed woman to be a mother, only 
 indirectly to be a wife ; man, on the contrary, is rather 
 made to be a husband than a father. It were, indeed, 
 somewhat strange if the stronger sex must lean on the 
 weaker, the flower support its stem, the ivy the tree ; 
 nevertheless he, just because he is the stronger, does
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 233 
 
 enforce something of that kind, makes his wife into the 
 bearer of his arms and burdens, his marketer and provision 
 cooker ; and the husband regards the wife as the barn and 
 outer shed of his household goods. He is far more created 
 for her than she for him : she is for physical what he is 
 for mental posterity. Fleets and armies prove the dis- 
 pensableness of women ; on the contrary, societies for 
 women, convents for instance, do not arise without some 
 male directing lever as primum mobile. Nature, which 
 moves on kindly, yet cruelly, towards her vast ends in 
 the world, has, for this purpose, armed women — the 
 colleges and training houses of posterity — mentally and 
 physically with power of giving and power of denying : 
 both their physical and mental charms and weaknesses 
 afford them protection. Hence arise regard and attention 
 to their persons, with which their souls are more in- 
 timately united into one existence than ours; hence their 
 dread of wounds, because these affect a double life, and 
 their indifference to sickness ; whereas men fear wounds 
 less than illnesses, because those affect the body most, these 
 the mind. Connected with these are her temperance, her 
 love of cleanliness, and also her modesty and her inclina- 
 tion to housewifery and quietness. The moral and ap- 
 prehensive nature of girls is more rapidly developed than 
 the mind of boys (as, according to Zach, satellites move 
 quicker than planets ; or, as flowers in valleys bloom 
 sooner than on mountains ;) because to the physical, and, 
 consequently, maternal, maturity of fifteen, nature has 
 also added that of the mind. So soon as the luxuriant 
 flower has, with its pollen, provided for another spring, 
 Nature harshly destroys its attractive colours, and leaves 
 it to its mental treasures and harvest. On the con- 
 trary, she nreserves man's body, which has to serve 
 on a longer journey of action and thought, active into 
 the vale of years, and far beyond the season of woman's 
 bloom. 
 
 We may here subjoin this remark, drawn from the 
 animal kingdom, that the male shows his greatest courage 
 and power in the love-season, but the female after having 
 given birth to her offspring. 
 
 It is easy to draw out these assertions into the lesser
 
 234 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH EICHTEK. [FRAG. iV. 
 
 matters of detail ; for instance, female avarice, which 
 saves not for self but for her children ; love of trifles ; 
 love of talking ; the gentle voice, and many things which 
 we blame. 
 
 § 84. 
 
 We return to the former complaints about women. But 
 why do men use this word so often about those beings to 
 whom they owe the first thanks for existence, and who 
 are sacrificed by Nature herself that life may follow life ? 
 Why are the treasure-houses of humanity, its creators 
 under God, not esteemed more highly ; and why do they 
 only receive the wreath of corn ears to carry because it is 
 prickly ? Were there only one father on the earth we 
 should worship him ; but were there only one mother 
 we should reverence and love her as well as worship. 
 
 The noblest and fairest quality with which nature 
 could and must furnish women for the benefit of pos- 
 terity was love, the most ardent, yet without return, and 
 for an object unlike itself. The child receives love, and 
 kisses, and night-watchings, but at first it only answers 
 with rebuffs ; and the weak creature which requires most 
 pays least. But the mother gives unceasingly ; yea, her 
 love only becomes greater with the necessity and thank- 
 lessness of the recipient, and she feels the greatest for 
 the most feeble, as the father for the strongest child. 
 
 " But," it may be objected to this view of woman's 
 destination, "women particularly seek after and honour 
 all mental or physical power ; they love their own sex 
 little, and judge its weaknesses more harshly than the 
 roughness of men. However angry a master may be with 
 his servant, a mistress is far more so with her slave, 
 whether in the colonies or in Germany ; and the Roman 
 ladies chose to have their toilets performed by maidens 
 with bared bosoms, so that they might, at the least mis- 
 take in dressing, stick pins into them for punishment. 
 Mothers, as well as courts, celebrate the birth of a princess 
 with fewer cannon shots than that of a prince. If a 
 woman, in any trick of cards, is asked to fix on some one 
 card, she always chooses the king or knave, at all events,
 
 CHAP. HI.] LEVANA. 235 
 
 nevei a queen ; and actresses like to perform no parts better 
 than those of disguised young men. But one does not 
 need to be very long in Paris, or in the world, aye, or 
 upon the world, to guess what they want by it." 
 
 Nothing bad ; but a protector for their children. As 
 Herder has beautifully remarked, nature has implanted 
 reverence for men in women's heart ; from this reverence 
 springs, in the first instance, love for men, but afterwards 
 it passes into love for children. If even men, loving with 
 the fancy and after preconceived notions far more than 
 with the heart, follow actresses because they have seen 
 them play fine romantic characters, — queens, goddesses, 
 heroines, yes, heroines of virtue ; why should not women 
 fall in love from reverence when they see us play the 
 greatest parts, not as an actress does Lucretia, Desdemona, 
 or Iphigenia, for a short evening's amusement, but for 
 years of sober seriousness on the theatre of the world or 
 of the state : one man is a hero, another a president, a 
 third a king, a fourth a world-teacher, I mean an author ! 
 Children demand this love of the mother for their father 
 as their inheritance, or pledged property, and she can only 
 keep some interest ; until, in old age, when the children 
 themselves are parents, she, a grey-headed woman, as 
 silver-bride*, again experiences a kind of love for her 
 silver-bridegroom. In a childless marriage the wife 
 regards the husband as her first and only son, possessed 
 of qualities which constitute her true honour and support 
 her during her whole life ; and she loves the young man 
 unutterably. 
 
 §85. 
 
 If a young woman cherish a love compressed into the 
 bud of esteem, she will do little less than all for her lover ; 
 or what a mother does for her child. She forgets herself 
 in him, because only through him does she remember 
 herself; and her paradise is only valued as a condition 
 and fore-court of heaven to him : and she would receive a 
 hell at the same price. Her heart is the citadel, every 
 
 * In Germany, as sometimes in England, the twenty-fifth anniversary 
 of a married couple's wedding-day is called their silver wedding-day : 
 the fiftieth, their golden wedding-day — Trans.
 
 236 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 thing else is but the suburbs and country round about it ; 
 and only with the former is the latter vanquished. 
 
 If it be true that the lost, in their haunts of misery, 
 would gladly exchange the poisonous lures by which they 
 must maintain and deceive themselves for the sweet 
 intoxication of sincere heart-felt love, will not the fresh 
 virgin heart resign all for the sunrise of life, for the first 
 unbounded love, which is ardent in accordance with its 
 purity and its previous non-existence, to the god-man ; 
 who, for a being hitherto bound to a little corner of the 
 world, suddenly reveals a whole new world which is, for 
 the maiden, this world joined with the next. Who, then, 
 shall restrain the gratitude of love towards him who has 
 opened happiness and freedom to a mind chained to the 
 narrow present, who has embodied all those dreams which 
 formerly the unoccupied soul personified in the stars, in 
 spring-time, in friends, and child-like duties? I know 
 him well who shall place that restraint ; it is even he who 
 requires the opposite,— the lover. Certainly a wisely and 
 purely educated maiden is so poetic a flower of this dull 
 world, that the sight of this glorious blossom hanging 
 some years after the honey-moon with yellow faded 
 leaves in un watered beds, must grieve any man who 
 beholds it with a poet's eye ; and who must, consequently, 
 in sorrow over the common usefulness a»d servitude of 
 the merely human life, over the difference between the 
 virgin and the matron, utter the deadliest wishes : yes, I 
 say, he would rather send the virgin with her wreath of 
 rose buds, her tenderness, her ignorance of the sufferings 
 of life, her dream-pictures of a holy Eden, into the grave- 
 yard of earth, which is God's field, than into the waste 
 places of life. Yet, do it not, poet : the virgin becomes 
 a mother, and again gives birth to the youth and the Eden 
 which have fled from her ; and to the mother herself they 
 return, and fairer than before : and so let it be as it is ! 
 
 §86. 
 
 How is it that in morally, as well as architecturally,* 
 undermined Paris the women read the characters of 
 * It is well known that Paris is built from the quarries beneath it.
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 237 
 
 Heloise, Attila, Valeria, in which only the love of the 
 heart plays and burns with as great eagerness as love 
 letters ? Women, even old women, and young men devour 
 such works ; whereas older men prefer behi£ devoured by 
 works of a very different kind. As in a well played game 
 of chess, or in war, he wins who makes the first move, so 
 must women, as the assaulted party, succumb. But who 
 attacks us, save ourselves ? And which is more guilty, 
 the serpent on the tree, or Eve under the tree ? And how 
 small and transitory is often the price for which we bar- 
 gain away the whole happiness of a woman's life ! It is 
 like Xerxes who carried a war into Greece because he 
 liked eating Attic figs. 
 
 Farther : a woman's imagination, not worn out like a 
 man's by wine and excitement, must all the more easily 
 burst, on our account, into those flames which consume 
 happiness. 
 
 Hippel remarks, and with justice, that a man overtaken 
 in wrong-doing is ashamed and speechless, but that a 
 woman becomes bold and passionately indignant. And 
 this is the cause of it : the man clearly beholds himself, 
 not so the woman ; therefore, she the more readily makes 
 her innocence appear both to others and herself. In short, 
 our sins are more generally intentional ; hers thoughtless, 
 and therefore the more excusable. 
 
 And finally : there are everywhere more chaste damsels 
 than young men, more chaste women than men, more old 
 maids than old bachelors. Man, however, may glorify 
 himself on two accounts. First : his relations to life and 
 the world, and his courage lead him more frequently into 
 temptations ; — and second : the man who preserves his 
 chastity on principle possesses therein a praetorian cohort ; 
 but the woman who protects hers with her heart and from 
 regard to social morality has a guardian angel and guard 
 of honour. The cohort, however, is stronger than the 
 angel and the guard.
 
 238 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEE. JFEAG. IV. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 EDUCATION OF GIRL3. 
 
 § 87. 
 
 After the last chapter this might be a short one, because, 
 according to it, girls are to be educated as mothers, that 
 is, as teachers. Our only duty would consist in giving 
 them printed and verbal lessons in instruction :* and for 
 this purpose no more susceptible period is offered to the 
 parents than the time of hope and the six months of their 
 daughter's engagement; nor to the husband, than the 
 first year of wedded life : and then, again, that the elder 
 daughters should be permitted to educate the younger. 
 The last is probably the most spiritual school for obtaining 
 clearness of ideas, patience and circumspection to which 
 parents can send their daughters : unfortunately it is 
 closed against the youngest child. 
 
 But before and after being a mother, a girl is a human 
 being ; and neither motherly nor wifely destination can 
 overbalance or substitute the human, but must become its 
 means, not end. As above the poet, the painter, or the 
 hero, so above the mother, does the human being rise pre- 
 eminent : and as the artist, while forming his work, does, 
 at the same time, form something higher — himself, the 
 creator of that work ; so the mother forms, along with the 
 child, her own more holy self. Every divinely human 
 thing has attached to it by nature the condition of locality ; 
 the ideal dwells within the bodily manifestation, the flower 
 pollen within its cup : the costliest pearls, so easily lost, 
 are strung on common bands and threads, and pierced in 
 order to be preserved. 
 
 Since nature has ordained woman for maternity, it has 
 also ordered her development ; and we need but not to 
 
 * Why do they not have published for them gleanings, especially 
 for the female sex, from Hermes' many novels, rather than from other 
 writers; since they comprise so many fine, deep, severe and weighty 
 views and hints.
 
 CHAP. IV.] 1.EVA.NA. 239 
 
 oppose nor anticipate its determinations. But as it always 
 labours blindly and fixedly on, only for its own one-sided 
 aims, its end or ends, so education must not attempt to 
 vanquish it, — for every natural energy is holy, — but to 
 make the whole nature complete by softening, purifying 
 and harmonizing the preponderating power by means of 
 the other balancing powers. 
 
 A woman feels, but does not see, herself; she is all 
 heart ; her very ears are ears of the heart. To observe 
 herself and what appertains thereunto, viz. reasons, is too 
 disagreeable for her. Perhaps it was on this account that 
 our ancient jurisprudence sooner relieved a man than a 
 woman from an oath, but applied the torture sooner to him 
 than to her. Eeasons ehange and affect the firm man 
 more easily than the weak versatile woman : as lightning 
 passes better through solid bodies than through the thin 
 air. 
 
 "What then will happen ? Feelings come and go, like 
 light troops following the victory of the present : but 
 principles, like troops of the line, are undisturbed and 
 stand fast. Shall we now by anatomising it rob the heart 
 of its fair fulness of inner life. It were sad if one could 
 do it ; but Sommering, after the thousand ears he has 
 dissected, still experiences the charms of harmony ; and 
 the philosopher, even after publishing his theory of morals 
 and of taste, still feels the power of conscience and of 
 beauty. 
 
 Let a girl learn to prove, analyse and explain, not her 
 feeling, but the object of that feeling ; and then, having 
 experienced the wrongness of the object, she will be com- 
 pelled during the whole continuance of the sensation to 
 follow only the insight she has gained. Do not oppose 
 the feelings, but the imagination. 
 
 This, in a picture of war, for instance, compresses the 
 miseries of a nation into one heart ; those of a day or of 
 a year into one moment ; the various possibilities into 
 one certainty : now, if by means of the severing concave 
 mirror of reason, we separate this fancied focus into its
 
 240 JEAN PAUL FPJEDEICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 various individual rays, the feeling is not destroyed, but 
 only deferred. But, dear mother, cherish and protect every 
 warm and tender feeling which years themselves bring 
 and form, and do not revel in the sensibility of your 
 youngest daughter, and lose yourself in tears of love while 
 relating some lamentable story, or imparting such feelings 
 in all their nakedness. For in future years either these 
 beings will succumb to their feelings, or their feelings 
 to them. Feelings, flowers, and butterflies, live all the 
 longer the later they are developed. Any thing, whether 
 mental or physical, which will certainly at some time come 
 into real existence, may without injury arrive somewhat 
 late, but not too soon ; and the Germans of Tacitus pre- 
 served without disadvantage that heart full of energy 
 which they gave for ever to one, even though it might 
 not be a young virginal one, which had beaten for them 
 in many battles. 
 
 Sin not against your daughters, nor blasphemously 
 offend the spirit of God, by showing and recommending, 
 even indirectly, any excellence they may possess, be it art, 
 science, or the sanctuary of the heart, as a lure to men, or 
 bait for catching a husband : to do so is truly to shoot 
 wild fowl with diamonds, or to knock down fruit with a 
 sceptre. Instead of making heaven a means and handle 
 for this earth, we should, in the highest possible degree, 
 elevate this as a means of attaining that. Only an under- 
 standing of the general regulation of a house, — order, 
 knowledge of house-keeping, and similar matters, should 
 be spoken of as valuable for the future groundwork of the 
 marriage tie. The so called lady-like accomplishments 
 are, at most, but garlands of flowers by which Cupid may 
 be bound ; but Hymen, who breaks through these, and 
 garlands of fruit too, is best guided and held by the golden 
 official chain of domestic capability. 
 
 By persuasive speech impart clearness to principles, and, 
 by dint of repetition, give them the force of intuitions. 
 Especially, permit as little as possible the enjoyment of 
 self-commiseration, which, merely for the pleasure of 
 hugging pain, flies from every cheerful light. The hatred 
 and correction of every humour, and war against every 
 objectless frame of mind, are exercises- Even in the
 
 CHAP. IV.J LEV ANA. 241 
 
 smallest matters, let nothing wilful pass unpunished in 
 your daughters. 
 
 To effect all this, some man is needed round whose firm 
 stem this weak wavering flower-stalk may be trained. 
 A lover before marriage generally prefers looking at the 
 rainbow of tearful sensibilities, of fickle whims, and helpless 
 weaknesses ; but after marriage, when the rainbow turns 
 into wet weather, he requires reasonableness and thorough- 
 ness, because he suffers more from whims which are 
 perpetually recurring than from graver faults ; and, if he 
 does not find these qualities, he awakes from his private 
 dreams without finding them realised. His dreams are 
 these : he had, forsooth, when a lover, in various pastoral 
 Arcadian hours of the heart, led his love to different 
 resolutions, — for which he had given his own good reasons, 
 — hence he was led to expect a marriage full of governing 
 reasons ; " For," said he, " if now, in the warmth of youth, 
 she already follow reasons, what will she do when cooler 
 and older ? " Merely the very opposite. For she had only 
 paid attention to his wishes, not to his chain of reasoning, 
 and done every thing solely from love. Wherefore, ye 
 husbands, retain the love of your wives and you are raised 
 above the necessity of sermons on reason. Should it be 
 more difficult or more unprofitable, to live and act in 
 company with your own wife and household queen, than 
 to enter into partnership with the Virgin Mary, the queen 
 of heaven, as a merchant in Messina did, and honourably 
 handed over to her a share of his profits ? * 
 
 Preserve girls from fear and affectation, which, for the 
 most part, find place where reason is excluded. Even at a 
 very early age you may cover with a coloured veil many 
 imaginary fears : for instance, you may tell a child that 
 the first clap of thunder she hears is the rolling of the 
 chariot on which the so long expected spring arrives ; or 
 you may yourself unconcernedly regard animals which 
 alarm by the rapidity of their movements, as mice ; or by 
 their size, as borses ; or by their unpleasing forms, as 
 spiders and toads. Then direct the child's eye from the 
 whole to the individual beautiful limbs, and gradually, 
 without compulsion, draw child and beast together : for 
 
 * Neue Sammlung der Reisebeschreibungen, B. 7. 
 
 &
 
 242 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 children, unlike animals governed by instinct, have 
 scarcely any other fear than that produced by strangeness. 
 One scream of fear from a mother may resound through 
 the whole life of her daughter ; for no rational discourse 
 can extinguish the mother's scream. Yon may make any 
 full stop, colon, semicolon, or comma of life before your 
 children, but not a note of exclamation ! 
 
 §89. 
 
 The morality of girls is custom, not principle. Boys 
 might be improved by the bad example of drunken Helots ; 
 girls only by a good one. Even boys return from the 
 Augean stable of the world with some of its smell adhering 
 to them ; but girls are frail, white Parisian apple-blossoms, 
 parlour-flowers, from which decay must be averted, not 
 with the hand but with fine camel-hair brushes. They, 
 like the priestesses of antiquity, should be educated only 
 in holy places, and never hear, much less see, what is rude, 
 immoral, or violent. Magdalena Pazzi said, on her death- 
 bed, that she did not know what a sin against modesty 
 was : let education at least try to imitate this example. 
 Girls, like pearls and peacocks, are valued for no other 
 colour than the most perfect whiteness. A corrupt youth 
 may lay down a noble book, walk up and down the room 
 in passionate tears and exclaim, " I will amend ;" and keep 
 his word. At the end of forty years Eousseau accomplished 
 his first transformation from the caterpillar state, and con- 
 tinued in it until death removed him by a second change. 
 I have hitherto read of few women who have reformed 
 themselves by other means, even in the most favourable 
 cases, than that of a husband ; and, what concerns some 
 Magdalen asylums in great Magdalen cities, no man 
 desirous of marrying would accept from them, as from a 
 matrimonial-office, his wedded half, properly but a kind of 
 broken fragment. Perhaps this consideration excuses the 
 conduct of the world which regards the errors of men but 
 as the chicken-pox, which leaves few or no marks behind ; 
 but those of women as the small-pox, which imprints its 
 traces on the recovered patient, and lives on in the general 
 remembrance. 
 
 The purer the golden vessel the more readily is it bent ;
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 243 
 
 the higher worth of women is sooner lost than that ot 
 men. According to the old German rural custom, the sons 
 walked to church behind the father, but the daughters 
 before che mother, apparently because the latter should 
 not be much left out of sight. 
 
 Nature herself has surrounded these delicate souls with 
 an ever-present in-born guard, with modesty, both in 
 speaking and hearing. A woman uses no figure of eloquence 
 — her own, at most, excepted — so often as that of accismus* 
 Keep watch over this guard, and pursue, by this 
 indication of nature, the way to education. On this 
 account mothers, fathers, men, and even youths, are their 
 best companions ; and, on the contrary, girls connected 
 with other girls of a similar age, as in schools, provoke oae 
 another to an exchange of foibles rather than of excellences, 
 to love of dress, admiration and gossip, even to the for- 
 getting of accismus. Even sisters of unequal age injure 
 one another, how much more, then, similar-aged play- 
 fellows. To know this one needs only to listen to the 
 mutual teazing among the members of a girl's school when 
 perchance a young man has entered, or even approached 
 the door. In the paternal dwelling little would be made 
 of such a circumstance, because it would happen more 
 frequently, with perfect seriousness, and among fewer 
 rivals. And what more is there to say about these despotic 
 interim-convents ? Men are made for society, but women 
 for maternal solitude. A boy's school is right, but not a 
 girl's ; just as a ship of war filled with women would be 
 merely a castle in the air, — from its requiring so much 
 unity, quickness, punctuality and obedience. Girls depend 
 upon one heart, boys on many heads. The most that a 
 girl could find in a school would be a second mother ; but 
 the father would be wanting. 
 
 Another thing which a mother should carefully guard 
 against can scarcely be avoided in a girls' school. It is, 
 that as a mistress rules and speaks, (for a master would 
 speak quite differently) and as rude, violent, dull-minded 
 girls must be mingled with gentle, delicate and susceptible 
 ones, the bad must be cured by means of many punish- 
 
 * So rhetoricians term the figure by which one speaks, without all 
 longing, of the very objects for svhich the strongest desire is felt. 
 
 R 2
 
 244 JEAN PAUL FR1EDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 ments which are poison to the best. I mean this ; nothing 
 so roughly brushes the tender auricula-dust, or flower- 
 pollen, off the minds of girls as that old-maidish cry of 
 alarm at our sex : that prudish abuse of a sex from which 
 every one must make an exception in favour of her father 
 and her husband. There is a kind of bad, unspiritual 
 modesty that resembles the stone veil in a statue of modesty 
 by A. Corradini, which, according to Yolkman, hangs down 
 from it clearly and separately as another body. There are 
 certain precipices along which women, like mules in 
 Switzerland, must not be led if they are not to fall. 
 Definite warnings against them serve as attractions and 
 lures. Let the parents shine before them as pure 
 examples, and they will not need to strengthen modesty, 
 the wing-covers of Psyche's wings, with extra coverings. 
 By instruction a child is robbed, in the first instance, of her 
 innocent want of shame, afterwards of its silent presence. 
 
 What follows is true, though in a less degree, of other 
 schools besides those for girls. In the parental dwelling 
 educational precept is lost in practice, and the child, to the 
 unspeakable advantage of his feeling of freedom and his 
 quicker susceptibility, receives all moral instruction only 
 as the natural unobtrusive accompaniment of his thread of 
 life ; in a school, on the contrary, the child feels as if life 
 only served for instruction, as if he himself lay like a block 
 of marble, chisels and hammers passing over him in every 
 direction, from which so much was to be hewn away that 
 a grown-up man should, at last, rise from the block. The 
 secret parental formation, under which the child believed 
 himself to be growing of his own accord, stands here 
 revealed in its naked aim ; he feels his carnation buds 
 opened with a penknife, not gently disclosing themselves, 
 after warm rain, by their own native force. For this very 
 reason a young creature would scarcely wish to remain 
 longer than the appointed time in the school-house, but 
 would gladly live for ever in its parent's home. 
 
 Somewhat better than girls' boarding-schools are day- 
 schools, places where they merely receive instruction. It 
 were to be wished that in both of these, as well as in the 
 girls' room at home, there could be more womanly class- 
 spirit inspired, more love and reverence for their own sex,
 
 CHAP. IV.J LEV ANA. 245 
 
 and woman's excellence shown as well as the more brilliant 
 advantages of men. This leads me to a disinclination not 
 sufficiently struggled against in girls' schools, I mean that 
 of women towards women. 
 
 When Eichardson had put every means of torture, or 
 passion, which such a preying shark hides under his skull 
 to use against women sufferers, into the head of that devil 
 towards women, Lovelace, against the angel Clarissa ; and 
 when he really permitted this holy virgin to be crucified 
 by him, he could naturally only expect that women would 
 take the part of the sufferer, not of the beast of prey ; but, 
 to his utter astonishment, every day's post brought him 
 letters from women entreating the final happiness of the 
 good Lovelace, just as Klopstock received similar ones for 
 the reformation of his Abadonna. Much the same befel a 
 converter of the heathen in Greenland ; who, after having 
 employed, as he hoped, every admitted power of eloquence 
 to depict the burning heat of hell, saw, to his astonish- 
 ment, an ever-increasing cheerfulness in the faces of the 
 Greenlanders ; until at last, on descending from the pul- 
 pit, he learned that, by his warm description of bell, he 
 had excited a special longing in the whole congregation 
 to go thither as to a milder climate. Such a charming 
 hell was Lovelace to women, although a purgatory to 
 Clarissa. 
 
 It almost sounds like satire to say that women are not 
 particularly fond of each other, and that, with all their 
 friendly words to one another, they rather imitate the 
 nightingale, which, in Bechstcin's opinion,* aims by its 
 luring tones to scare other nightingales ; and so the 
 assertion of the schoolman, that they would rise up as 
 men at the last day, may be in some measure confirmed 
 by the nature of heaven, in which, as the abode of eternal 
 love, women changed into men would naturally and more 
 readily feel a universal love by the entire absence of their 
 own sex. Moreover, we possess the facts that the ancient 
 Roman women (according to Bottiger's Sabina) manifested 
 a degree of cruelty towards their female slaves, and 
 European women in the Indies also towards theirs ; and 
 the most ancient governing sister on the island of Lesbos 
 * Fee his Instructions tor catching Birds, 1790.
 
 246 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEE. [FEAG. IV. 
 
 towards her other sisters, and even towards their mothers ; 
 and, finally, modern mistresses towards their maid ser- 
 vants ; to w r hich our conduct towards our male domes- 
 tics forms a noble contrast, so that we bear away, to our 
 astonishment (for we often flog servants), the honourable 
 name of the gentler sex. I only passingly mention 
 calumniation, or the " doing to death by evil tongues," 
 whereby a parlour is converted into a canvassing society 
 of the heads and hearts of such foredoomed women as are 
 not there drinking tea. 
 
 Should we not then, seriously, exclaim, " Oh ! mother, 
 above all other things implant and cherish in your 
 daughter a love and reverence for her own sex. Is it 
 possible that you cannot succeed in so doing if you show 
 her the crown of noble women shining gloriously amid 
 the darkness of past ages ; the elevating examples of 
 united female friends; and the relationship of all their 
 sex's sisters with them in worth and in danger ; and the 
 thought that in her sex each honours or despises the sex 
 of her mother; and the certainty that as hatred of humanity 
 is punished in misanthropes, so the half of that sin, 
 towards half the human race, will be punished in the 
 haters of women ? " Even the father may contribute his 
 share, and indeed the largest, towards this end, by not 
 merely preaching to his daughter but showing her more 
 regard towards her sisters, as the mother also may show 
 more love. And, since no precept insures the practice of 
 any virtue, it were well if the daughter were accus- 
 tomed to regard in maid-servants not merely their common 
 humanity, but their fellowship with her in sex. 
 
 §90. 
 
 Some of the modern aesthetic lithologists would gladly 
 see female flowering plants converted into petrifactions : 
 they ought, say they, to repose more fully on the rights 
 of the stronger. First, however, it were to be wished 
 that more wood and kernel were imparted to the present 
 soft spongy character of men : when that is effected the 
 woman will enclasp it like an ivy plant and form its 
 second crown. How strong in will women are, is a
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 247 
 
 question to be asked not of lovers, but of such husbands 
 as, on their wedded penitential stools, are summoned to 
 Socratic discourses with a female S aerates, or to such as 
 Job's wife held. In the love before marriage the girl 
 appears too weakly characterless and submissive ; but 
 marriage, in accordance with her destination for children 
 suddenly opens, like a northern sun, all her blossoms, be 
 they those of an aloe, or of a thistle. Is it on this account 
 that most Slavonians * call their beloved, as the Poles, 
 indeed, do all women, The Uncertain ? In short, the girl 
 matures into the mother; and the man, who wishes to 
 possess in his wife at once a slave and a goddess, stands 
 half discomfited by the change ; the little that he can say 
 on the matter consists in such ideas as these rather than 
 any thing else : " He had, trusting in his own steadfast- 
 ness, lovingly proposed to himself to have been a prop to 
 her ; but she had brought with her and packed up for use 
 so much of her own that subsequently, between man and 
 wife, the sex was as difficult to distinguish as in young 
 birds ; which was God, which Goddess, was, in his own case, 
 as hard to guess as in the early Grecian statues of deities ; 
 indeed, it were to be wished that the similarity were less 
 absolute." 
 
 Consequently the will of girls is less to be strengthened 
 than bent and polished. Like plastic divinities, women 
 should only gently and mildly express their feelings. 
 Every outward and inward excess is a blemish in their 
 charms, a poison to their children. Even a man chooses 
 gentleness as the first, though perhaps not the second, 
 mode of expressing his will and determination. No mere 
 strength goes to war against feminine gentleness ; so the 
 tranquil moonshine is rarely broken by a storm, though 
 the glowing sunshine may be. From the moment in 
 which the bravest man shall speak in the gentlest manner 
 will sweetness and compliance arise more and more in 
 the strongest woman : she may continue to be a pyramid, 
 but in the pyramids is found a soft echo. 
 
 Since the present warlike age and present style of 
 German poetry send women less to the flute-school of 
 gentleness than to the fighting-school of war, a few 
 * See Antuii'd Essay on the aucient Slavonians, vol. i.
 
 248 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 sentences added to this ninetieth section which, though 
 not bringing cure, may yet possibly avert the evil, will 
 not be useless, at least to those daughters who add their 
 own character as a female water pipe to our present 
 tempestuous season. 
 
 Passionateness in a woman's soul is often found united 
 with all the overflowing fulness of a deep noble heart, yes 
 even with predominant gentleness and affection ; — and yet 
 such a hard adjunct of nature may draw the being herself, 
 and all who love or are loved by her, into the most irre- 
 mediable misfortunes. 
 
 The usually tranquil female character is naturally so 
 much inclined to whirlwinds of passion that even the 
 laws (those of Prussia for instance), dreading the angels 
 of destruction in these otherwise mild angels, forbid an 
 apothecary to sell poison to any woman, whereas they 
 permit violent men to procure it. The laws seem usually 
 to consider them as snow-white, snow-dazzling, and snow- 
 cold Heclas full of fire. If, now, this naturally over- 
 powerful disposition of the sex be increased by that of the 
 individual, we behold a thunder-goddess, who beats down 
 with waterspouts her little flower- children, not to mention 
 her drenched husband, flooded house, and drowned love. 
 A storming mother is a contradiction in education, and 
 resembles those tropical storms which injuriously increase 
 the temperature of the atmosphere ; whereas a storming 
 father coolingly purifies the air. To the child, yet standing 
 on his pure, clear heights, passion perhaps sounds as weak 
 as does a crash to one ascending lofty mountains ; but in 
 the valleys of future life it becomes a thunder clap, and 
 every fit of maternal passion returns as a sevenfold echo 
 in the married life of her daughter. As I have above said, 
 I do not refer to conjugal love, in which, during these 
 female hurricanes, the thin axle of Aphrodite's fair car 
 breaks, or her yoked doves tear themselves loose and fly 
 away, because the readers do not here require the poison 
 to be shown them, but its antidote. 
 
 This, however, is not so close at hand, as Our discourse 
 is only of girls six or seven years old. But to oppose 
 violence to violence, to attack passion by passion, is to try 
 to put out fire with boiling oil : punishments, especially
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 249 
 
 in early youth, do more injury than the stifling of the 
 flames warrants ; to which must be added that punishment, 
 as is natural, only affects the passion when it has provided 
 the match for a still greater future one. Every repetition 
 of the fault becomes, in this case, a doubling of it, to which 
 even the furrows of pain act as inflammatory incitements. 
 As a physical remedy one might advise more vegetable 
 than animal diet, and that of a cooling nature, were it not 
 that advancing years with their fiery blood would again 
 produce heat. But the best means to use against it in 
 early life are the prevention of all, even the smallest, 
 occasions for it, or sparks for the match : and, on the other 
 hand, let every power of love, of patience, of peacefulness 
 be cherished and manifested and employed against that 
 consuming fire. Commands effect nothing ; but examples 
 of gentleness, whether given or related in tone and action, 
 do all. The children of Quakers are gentle without 
 punishment ; they see their parents ever shining as tranquil 
 white stars through the stormy clouds of foreign environ- 
 ment. 
 
 On the contrary, in the later years of reflection and the 
 blush of shame, this punishment may be permitted, indeed 
 ordained ; that such a female Boreas of fifteen years old 
 may, in the midst of her roaring storm, openly and harshly 
 receive the metaphorical blow in the face on her burning 
 swollen cheeks, which, given previously, without its 
 figurative meaning, would only, as I have already said, 
 have increased the whole swelling evil. 
 
 § 91. 
 
 The wife of a nobleman was formerly called house-wife 
 The ancient Britons were often led to battle by brave 
 women. Many Scandinavian women, according to Home, 
 were pirates. A North American on the land, and a 
 Parisian woman in the shop, do every thing that with us 
 devolves on the man. Ought it, indeed, to be sufficient if 
 a girl can ^ew, and knit, and net? When Sweden, under 
 Charles the Twelfth, had sent forth all her men at the call 
 cf glory, the women became postmasters, cultivators of tho
 
 250 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [~FRAG. IV. 
 
 land and overseers of the public offices.* And since it may 
 possibly happen in time that all the men may be engaged 
 in a war and peace establishment, it seems to me we should 
 think more of educating girls to be the conductors of our 
 business, and the managers of our estates ; for, subsequently, 
 if the men were killed, there might be another conscription 
 and enlisting demanded from the women than that under 
 husbands. 
 
 The gymnastics of life and labour are, if the two former 
 sections be correct, the third commandment in female 
 education. But these do not consist of so-called ladylike 
 occupations. Sewing, knitting, or spinning with a Parisian 
 pocket spinning wheel, are recreation and repose from 
 labour, not labour and exercise ; for that spinning while 
 walking, as the Moldavians do f, at least must be ordered. 
 Worsted work, this female mosaic work, not unsuitable 
 for the higher classes who must refresh themselves from 
 doing nothing by doing little, easily converts the pattern 
 into a covering for indisposition or ill humour. Xenophon 
 tells us that Lycurgus sent the Spartan women to the public 
 places of exercise, and only the slaves to the embroidery 
 frame and the spinning wheel. I do not reckon as greatest 
 those physical disadvantages, the slavish carriage of the 
 person, for instance, which need a dancing-school to correct 
 what the sewing-school has done, for a watchful mother 
 might as easily enforce correct sitting during the sewing 
 lesson as a writing master can do during the writing 
 lesson ; neither do I reckon the nerve-enfeebling, finger- 
 pricking irritation of knitting ; and the physical evils of 
 a sedentary life shall be treated of hereafter. But most 
 employments of the fingers by which you attempt to fix 
 the female quicksilver have this injurious effect, that the 
 mind left to idleness rusts away, or is entirely given up to 
 the waves of circle after circle spreading fancy. Sewing 
 and knitting needles, for instance, keep open the wounds 
 of an unhappy attachment far more than do all romances 
 they are thorns which themselves pierce the falling rose. 
 If the young woman have, as the young man generally 
 has, some occupation which every moment demands now 
 
 * Memoires aecrets sur les replies de Louis XIV. par Duclos. 
 t SumaraKotFd Tour in the Crimea
 
 CHAP. IV.J LEVANA. 251 
 
 thought, the old one cannot perpetually stand out in the 
 most prominent light. A change of occupation is es- 
 pecially adapted to the female character, as the steady 
 pursuit of one is to that of the man. 
 
 Distraction, forgetfulness, want of consideration and of 
 presence of mind, are the first and worst consequences of 
 this sweet internal and external far niente ; and a woman 
 needs nothing more to poison the holy trinity of wedlock, 
 child, husband, and self. Heavens ! how a young man 
 must every day draw his thread of life from a new fleece, 
 or conduct his plans on their long journey nearer to the 
 goal, while a young woman repeats yesterday in to-day as 
 the image of to-morrow ; he indeed walks, and she sits ; 
 the one is permitted to stand, the other only to sit. 
 
 The female sex has such a preference for every anchoring 
 manner of life, that it would gladly, as Gerning says the 
 Greek women actually did, carry a camp stool with it, so 
 as after every step to have a seat ready at hand. Yet I 
 should think women might be satisfied to resemble the sun 
 in its shining and warming powers, and not also in its 
 immoveableness. They, in common with the sitting pro- 
 fessions, tailoring and shoe-making, are the victims of 
 spleen and fanaticism. This sedentary life, full of noon- 
 tide rests, morning and afternoon rests, and vesper rests, 
 in which great ladies with full tables and stomachs in- 
 dulge, gives so much trouble to the doctors, running 
 hither and thither, that finally a knowledge of medicine 
 will be as necessary as a knowledge of French to every 
 chevalier d'honneur and chamberlain. In such a circle 
 one certainly need seek few Swiss heroines, not to mention 
 that Czekleress from the district of Gyergyoer, who, in a 
 battle with the Moldavians, killed seven of them at one 
 stroke, and in the evening returned and was brought to 
 bed of a son.* This circumstance happened on the seventh 
 of September, 1685. 
 
 A certain Quoddeusvult, in the (yet imprinted) twenty- 
 third volume of the Flegeljahre, thinks to find some 
 excuse, when, after having spoken of the female love of 
 sitting and dancing until he hit upon a simile drawn from 
 those hovering flies which hover unwaveringly and shoot 
 * Supplements of the A. L. Zeitung, No. 19.
 
 252 JEAN PAUL FRIEDPJCH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 down swift as arrows, he thus expresses himself concerning 
 it : " The reason why the female nature loves rest better 
 than man's is less obvious even in crabs — of which the 
 female has much the fewer legs under its tail — than in the 
 human foetus itself, for the boy begins to move in the 
 third, the girl in the fourth month. Also in the Culs de 
 Paris is the sitting mode of life sufficiently exemplified. 
 But Nature softens this as she does other things ; she 
 gives a desire for sour kraut and herrings as a curative 
 diet to fever patients, and has implanted in the bed and 
 sofa-lying woman, as well as in the lazy savage, the 
 love of dancing. As in a concert, so in her, prestissimo 
 follows adagio. I know not what is more necessary to 
 the present largo di molto sitting than the hop furioso. 
 A ball is a strengthening snail and oyster cure for 
 crawling snails and sitting oysters ; a the dansant is the 
 best cure for a tea drinking. The two medical fingers 
 tread on the foot as ten medical toes ; and at a masked 
 ball the uncovered lady has her pestilence preserver in her 
 hand, as the plague doctors formerly went about in wax 
 masks. If you want ladies to go faster than posts and 
 couriers, arrange an English country dance between 
 Leipsig and Dessau, and let the girls ' chassez,' then see 
 who arrives first, the post or the dancers," — and so on. 
 For however true some of it may be, it is yet better placed 
 where it is, in the twenty -third volume. 
 
 This love of sitting also affects the minor branches of 
 family and household affairs, in which women often permit 
 and neglect matters merely not to have to rise from their 
 seats : they unwillingly purchase the exercise of their 
 children with their own, or willingly delay physical, and 
 force mental, growth. In London ringing twice summons 
 the footman, thrice the chambermaid, apparently to give 
 time to the sex. 
 
 § 92. 
 
 Now how can this be obviated ? Just as it is obviated 
 among the lower classes. Let a girl, instead of her dreamy 
 monotonous finger- work, manage the business of the house- 
 hold, which every moment restrains dreaminess and 
 absence of mind by new duties and calls on the attention ;
 
 CHAP. IV.J LEVANA. 253 
 
 in early years let her be employed in every thing from 
 cooking to gardening ; when older, from the management 
 of the servants to keeping the accounts. What a minister is 
 in a small state that a woman is in her lesser state; namely, 
 the minister of all departments at once, the husband 
 managing the foreign affairs ; more especially is she the 
 minister of finance, who, in the state, in the last resort, 
 according to Goethe, regulates peace, as well as, according 
 to Archenholz, the magazines of war. Even noble ladies 
 would be healthier and happier if they fulfilled the duties 
 of maitre d 'hotel and femme de charge, I mean for the 
 house : I know they frequently act in both capacities for 
 their husbands. Certainly, as a whole, the females of the 
 higher classes are rendered more delicately beautiful by 
 this absolute idleness ; but such a Venus resembles that of 
 Rome, who was also the goddess of corpses ; among these 
 may be reckoned her children, her husband, or herself. I 
 do not speak about the art of cookery, in order not to be 
 laughed at, as Kant was who wished that here (as in 
 Scotland) regular lessons should be given in it as well 
 as in dancing. Rather will Seneca's beautiful words 
 addressed to sacrificers — " Puras Deus, non plenas adspicit 
 manus " (God regards pare not full hands) — acquire a new 
 meaning with noble ladies ; and they will suppose their 
 husbands value pure white hands more than those which 
 present them some good dish they have cooked. 
 
 But how is it that in the order of female rank her real 
 title, housewife, is not esteemed higher ? Is it not in that 
 capacity that as once physically, so now financially, she 
 prepares a freer future for her children ? And can a woman 
 find that in detail beneath her regard, in which, as a whole, 
 the greatest of men, a Cato of Utica, a Sully, and others, 
 sought their glory ? Once for all, the household must be 
 managed in some way ; and is it better that the husband 
 should add this extra weight to his out-of-door duties? If 
 so, I should merely be lost in astonishment that the 
 women — for the thing is practicable, as Humholdt and 
 others have seen examples of it among the men in South 
 America — do not commit to our charge the reasonable 
 and easy duty of suckling the children. After a little 
 creative practice there might be male instead of female,
 
 254 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER, [FRAG. IV. 
 
 wet-nurses ; the ministers, presidents, and other principals 
 (the children carried after them into court) would stand 
 it better than the women, &c. &c. 
 
 For the rest, let no more flighty than intellectual 
 woman declare that housekeeping, as a mechanical affair, is 
 beneath the dignity of her mind, and she would rather be 
 as mentally happy as a man. Is there, then, any mental 
 work without hand work ? Do accountants' offices, 
 secretaries' rooms, the military parade, places of govern- 
 ment set the hands less in motion than the kitchen and 
 household affairs, or is it merely that they do so in a 
 different way ? Can the mind show itself earlier, or 
 otherwise, than behind the mask of the laborious body ? 
 for instance, the ideal of the sculptor otherwise than after 
 millions of blows and chisel-strokes on the marble ? Or 
 can this present Levana appear in the world and in print 
 unless I make pens, dip them in the ink and draw them 
 up and down ? 
 
 Ye holy women of German antiquity ! ye knew as little 
 of an ideal heart as of the circulation of the pure blood 
 which flushed and warmed you when you said, " I do it for 
 my husband, for my children ;'' you, with your anxieties 
 and cares, seeming only subordinate and prosaic ! But the 
 holy ideal descended through you, as heaven's fire through 
 clouds, upon the earth. The mystic Guyon, who in a 
 hospital took on himself and fulfilled the duties of a 
 loathing maid servant, has a higher throne among glorified 
 souls than the general who, with the arms of others, yea, 
 and with his own, makes wounds which he does not heal. 
 All strength lies within, not without ; and whether a poet 
 on his printed sheet, or a conqueror on his missives and 
 treaty-papers divide and unite countries, the difference is 
 only externally so great as that between all and nothing : 
 I mean to the vulgar. 
 
 §93. 
 
 Women are by nature intended for people of business : 
 they are called to it by the equal balance of their powers 
 and their keen sense of observation. Children require an 
 ever-open eye, but not an ever-open mouth : claude os, apen 
 oculo8. But what circle of talking, which always incloses
 
 CHAF. IV.J LEVANA. 255 
 
 only small and trifling relations, could so well exercise 
 that ever-present glance as the circle of domestic affairs? 
 Boys destined for certain occupations, to be artists, 
 professors, or mathematicians, may dispense with a 
 capacity for business, but never a girl who will marry, — 
 especially one of the above-mentioned boys. Above all 
 things must that wandering or absence of mind be strictly 
 combated which is no fault of nature, but solely of the 
 individual, and is never the determining condition of any 
 superior power. Every dissipation of mind is partial 
 weakness. For instance, were the poet or philosopher 
 who wanders about so absently in the outer world, which 
 is foreign to his sphere of action, to work with equal want 
 of reflection in his inner world, which alone he has to 
 observe and govern, he would certainly be either mad or 
 useless. The same thing is true in the opposite case ; if a 
 woman, indifferent to the outer practical world in which 
 her business lies, neglects it for the sake of the inner. If, 
 now, a girl is intended to grow up with a clear eye for 
 every thing round her, — if she is not to waste her many 
 eyes in company, as Argus did his, by misplacing them as 
 painted eyes in a peacock's tail ; or if she is not, like 
 that sea fish, the turbot, to have two eyes on the right side, 
 but, in compensation, to be blind on the left, — let her 
 be many-sidedly exercised in household affairs ; and the 
 parents must not be disturbed if some admirer of an ethereal 
 bride should find fault with her, as Plato did with Eudoxus, 
 for having profaned pure mathematics by applying them 
 to mechanics ; for to-day or to-morrow the wedding comes, 
 and the husband, the honey-moon being past, kisses the 
 mother's hand for all that the daughter does beyond his 
 expectations. 
 
 §94. 
 
 Let every thing be taught a girl which forms and 
 exercises the habit of attention, and the power of judging 
 things by the eye. Consequently botany, — this inexhaust- 
 ible, tranquil, ever-interesting science attaching the mind 
 to nature with bonds of flowers. Then astronomy, not 
 the properly mathematical, but tin Lichtenbergian and
 
 256 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICH EICHTEK. JFKAG. IV 
 
 religious, which, with the expansion of the universe 
 expands the mind ; along with which it does no harm if a 
 girl experiences why a longest night is advantageous to 
 sleep, a full moon to love. I should also even recommend 
 mathematics ; but here, unfortunately, women who have a 
 Fontenelle for astronomy have not one for mathematics ; 
 for, with regard to girls, I only mean those simplest 
 principles of pure and mixed mathematics which boys can 
 understand. And geometry itself, as a second eye, or 
 dioptric line, which brings as distinct separations into the 
 world of matter as Kant has done by his categories into 
 the world of mind, may also be commenced early ; for 
 geometrical observations, unlike philosophical, strain the 
 mind to the injury of the body as little as the external 
 sense of sight. Sculptors and painters study mathematics 
 as the skeleton of visible beauty without injury to their 
 sense of beauty : I know a little girl of two years and a 
 half old who recognised, in the full foliage of nature, the 
 dry paper skeleton of the mathematical figures which she 
 had learned to draw in play. In the same way these little 
 beings have early developed powers of calculation, 
 especially for the important part of mental arithmetic. 
 "Why are they not also taught a multiplication table for 
 the reduction of the various kinds of money and yard 
 measurements ? 
 
 Philosophy is something quite different, indeed dia- 
 metrically opposite. Why should these lovers of wisdom 
 and of wise men learn it ? A lottery ticket with a great 
 premium has been occasionally drawn from among this sex 
 — a true born poetess ; but a philosopheress would have 
 broken up the lottery. A woman of genius — Madame 
 Chatelet — may understand Newton in English, and render 
 him into French ; but none could do that in German 
 for Kant or Schelling. The most spiritual-minded and 
 intellectual women have a way of their own, a certainty 
 of understanding the most profound philosophers, which 
 even their very scholars despairingly aim at — namely, they 
 find every thing easy, especially their own thoughts, that 
 is feelings. In the ever-changing atmosphere of their 
 fancy they meet with every most finely-drawn skeleton of 
 the philosophers ; just like many poetical followers of the
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 257 
 
 new schools of philosophy who, instead of a clearly defined 
 circle, give us a fantastic wreath of vapour. 
 
 Geography, as a mere registry of places, is utterly 
 worthless for mental development, and of little use to 
 women in their vocations ; on the contrary, that is indis- 
 pensable which, teaching the enduring living history of 
 the earth — in opposition to that which is transitory and 
 dead — is at once the history of humanity, which divides 
 itself into nations as well as into contemporaneous historic 
 periods, and also that of the globe itself, which converts 
 the twelve months into twelve contemporaneous spaces. 
 The mind of a girl attached to her chair and her birth- 
 place, like an enchanted princess in a castle, must be 
 delivered and led forth to clearer prospects by the de- 
 scriptions of travellers. 1 wish some one would give us 
 a comprehensive selection of the best travels and voyages 
 round the world, shortened and adapted for the use of 
 girls ; if the editor were well furnished with Herder's 
 patience and insight into the most dissimilar nations, I 
 know of no more valuable present to the sex. With regard 
 to descriptions of places, every station requires a different 
 one, a merchant's daughter one very unlike that provided 
 for a princess. 
 
 Almost all this equally applies to petrified history, 
 which only conducts from one past age into another. For 
 a girl it can scarcely be too barren in dates and names. 
 How many emperors in the whole history of German 
 emperors are for a girl ? On the other hand, it cannot be 
 sufficiently rich -in great men and great events, which 
 elevate the soul above the petty histories of towns and 
 suburbs. 
 
 Music, vocal and instrumental, is natural to the female 
 mind and is the Orphean lute which leads her uninjured 
 past many siren sounds, and accompanies her with its 
 echo of youth far into the autumn of wedded life. Drawing, 
 on the contrary, if carried beyond the first principles, 
 which educate the eye and taste in dress more perfectly, 
 steals too much time from the husband and children ; 
 therefore it is usually a lost art. 
 
 One foreign language is necessary, and at the same 
 time quite enough, for the scientific explanation of ber 
 
 i. s
 
 258 JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH EICETBR. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 own. Unfortunately French pushes itself most promi- 
 nently forward, because a woman really must learn it to 
 comply with the necessities consequent on the billeting 
 of French soldiers. I would wish — why should one not 
 wish, that is, do every day of the year what one does on 
 the first ? — that a selection of English, Italian, Latin 
 words were placed before every girl as an exercise in 
 reading, so that she might understand when she heard 
 them. 
 
 The talking and writing world has sent into circulation 
 so large a foreign treasury of scientific words that girls, 
 who do not, like boys, learn the words along with the 
 sciences, should have weekly lessons in them out of a 
 scientific dictionary, or translate into comprehensible 
 phrases tales in which such anti-Campean words are pur- 
 posely employed. I wish that for this end an octavo 
 volume full of foreign words, with an explanatory ency- 
 clopaedia to them, were published. The best women read 
 dreaming (the rest truly sleeping) ; they pass gliding as 
 easily over the mountains of a metaphysical book as 
 sailors do over the mountainous waves of the ocean. 
 None of them ever thinks of asking the dictionary, 
 nay, not even her husband, what any word means ; but 
 this vow of silence which regards asking questions as a 
 forbidden game, this contentment with dark thoughts, 
 which possibly learns in the twentieth book the meaning 
 of a scientific term used in the second, ought to be pre- 
 vented. Else they will read books as they listen to men. 
 
 There is one charm which all girls might possess, and 
 which frequently not one in a provincial town does 
 possess ; which equally enchants him who has, and him 
 who has it not ; which adorns the features and every 
 word, and which remains imperishable (nothing can exist 
 longer) while a woman speaks ; — I mean the pronunciation 
 itself, the pure German indicating no birthplace. I 
 entreat you, mothers, to take lessons in pure German 
 enunciation and to rehearse them constantly with your 
 daughters. I assure you — to place the matter on a firmer 
 foundation — that a vulgar pronunciation always rather 
 reminds one of a vulgar condition, because, in general, the 
 higher the rank the better is the pronunciation, though
 
 CHAP. IV. J LEVANA. 259 
 
 not always the language. The higher ranks, contrary to 
 Adelung's change of words, are not the best musical 
 artists of language (composers), but they are the best 
 deliverers of it (virtuosi). 
 
 Girls, unlike authoresses, cannot write too much. It is 
 as though on paper, this final metamorphosis of their dear 
 flax, they themselves experienced one, and, in the back- 
 ward viewing of the rough and smooth external world, 
 won space and rest for their own inner world ; so often in 
 letters and diaries do we find women, the most ordinary 
 in conversation, reveal an unexpected spiritual heaven. 
 But the theme on which and for which they write must 
 not be one drawn from a learned caprice, but from the 
 observation of life — for their sensations and thoughts 
 depend upon climate far more than those of boys ; of 
 course I speak of real letters and their own diaries, not 
 mere exercises. From this cause — that an appointed goal 
 marked and restrained their course — the author has re- 
 ceived so many eloquent, profound and brilliant letters 
 from feminine, nay, masculine, minds, that he has often 
 exclaimed in vexation, " If only five authoresses wrote as 
 well as twenty lady-letter-writers, or twenty authors as 
 well as forty correspondents, literature would be of some 
 value!" 
 
 § 95. 
 
 . The greatest part of the above will help to form female 
 power in connection with female mind, activity along 
 with gentleness : not only in marriage, but in the woman 
 herself, ought there to be a reflection of that heavenly 
 zodiac in which the Lion shines beside the Virgin. 
 Intellect acts democratically on the mind ; feeling, mon- 
 archically. Any circumstance, even dressing for a ball, 
 seizes on a woman, like the Eomans on the Sabines, and 
 tears her from her inner world. One who before the 
 toilet for the ball can think of any thing better loses many 
 more inches of mental elevation. The present governs 
 none more powerfully with one single idea than minds 
 which step dazzled out of their little dream-cell into the 
 dear daylight. 
 
 8 2
 
 260 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 On this is grounded the well known experience that 
 they are never ready till it is too late, and have always 
 forgotten something. But how easy were it to send a 
 daughter every week into the struggling school of im- 
 provement ! Let the father say, " Dear Nanny, Fanny, or 
 Annie, if you are ready dressed in one hour you shall 
 dance to-day." In a similar way he might cure them of 
 forgetfulness and want of punctuality by pleasure parties, 
 as stipulated rewards for immediate cessation from their 
 occupations and quick packing up of all necessaries. 
 
 § 96. 
 
 There is just as much to be said against the vanity of 
 women as against the pride of men ; that is. just as little. 
 Charms, which like flowers lie on the surface and always 
 glitter, easily produce vanity ; hence women, wits, players, 
 soldiers are vain, jwing to their presence, figure and diess. 
 On the contrary , other excellences, which lie deep down 
 like gold and are only discovered with difficulty, strength, 
 profoundness of intellect, morality, leave their possessors 
 modest and proud. Nelson could become just as vain by 
 decorations and the loss of his eye and arm, as proud by 
 his cool bravery. No man can with sufficient liveliness 
 place himself in the position of a beautiful woman who 
 carrying her nose, her eyes, her figure, her complexion, as 
 sparkling jewels through the streets, blinds one eye after 
 another with her dazzling brilliance, and risks no capital 
 in exchange for her profits. Contrariwise the very clever 
 and learned rector creeps behind her, like a man chained 
 and imprisoned, covering his inner pearls with two thick 
 shells : and no one knows what he knows, but the man 
 himself must admire and dazzle himself only. 
 
 The desire to please with some good quality which rules 
 only in the visible or external kingdom is so innocent and 
 right that the opposite, to be indifferent, or disagreeable, to 
 the eye or ear, would even be wrong. Why should a 
 painter dress to please the eye, and not his wife ? — I grant 
 you there is a poisonous vanity and love of approbation ; 
 that, namely, which lowers the inner kingdom to an 
 outer one, spreads out sentiments as snaring nets for the
 
 CHAP. IV.J LEVANA. 261 
 
 eye and ear, and degradingly buys and sells itself with 
 that which has real inherent value. Let a girl try to please 
 with her appearance and her dress, but never with holy 
 sentiments ; a so-called fair devotee, who knew that she 
 was so and therefore knelt, would worship nothing save 
 herself, the devil and her admirer. Every mother, and 
 every friend of the family, should keep a careful watch 
 over tneir own wish to praise — often as dangerous as that 
 to blame — which so easily names and praises an unconscious 
 grace in the expressions of the heart, in the mien, or in the 
 sentiments, and thereby converts it for ever into a con- 
 scious one ; that is to say, kills it. The counting of his 
 subjects lost them to David. The gold presented by demon 
 hands vanishes when spoken of. While man finds a 
 cothurnus on which to raise and show himself to the world 
 in the judge's seat, literary rank, the professor's chair or 
 the car of victory, woman has nothing save her outward 
 appearance whereon to raise and display her inner nature ; 
 why pull from under her this lowly foot-stool of Venus ? 
 And as man stands in some college or corporate body, as 
 in an assurance office for the maintenance of his honour, 
 but woman only asserts the lonely worth of her own 
 individuality, she must attach herself to it all the more 
 strongly. Perhaps this is a second reason why women 
 cannot endure modified praise ; for the first is surely this, 
 that from want of self-division, and owing to their constant 
 subjection to the present, which always presents the bitter 
 more powerfully than the sweet, they are more sensitive 
 to the limits set to the praise than to the praise itself. 
 
 We will now pass to the clothes-devil, as the old theo- 
 logians formerly called the toilet. 
 
 What else does a woman's dressing-room signify than 
 the attiring- room of a theatre ? And why, then, are 
 there so many sermons against it ? 
 
 The preachers do not sufficiently bear in mind the fol- 
 lowing considerations : to a woman her dress is the third 
 organ of the soul (the body is the second, and the brain 
 the first), and every upper garment is one organ more. 
 Why? Because the body, her true wedding-gift, is more 
 completely one with her destination than ours is with 
 ours : while ours is rather a pilgrim's or miner's dress
 
 262 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 with its protecting apron, hers is a coronation rohe, a 
 court suit. It is the holy relic of an invisible saint which 
 cannot be sufficiently worshipped and adorned; and the 
 touch of this holy body works all kinds of miracles. To 
 cut off a man's hand was in early ages scarcely less 
 dangerous than to touch a woman's, on which pressure the 
 Salic law lays a fine of fifteen gold pieces ; a violent kiss 
 formed the ground for a criminal indictment; and in 
 Hamburg there is still a fine of twopence on every kiss 
 imprinted in a work-shop. Hence dress and ornament 
 must be as important to women as varnish to paintings ; 
 they must regard them as a multiplication of their surfaces 
 or facets. Hence for the most part women visit a lying- 
 in-state to see how people look under the ground among 
 the dead. Perhaps the love of dress may be among the 
 causes of our having had great female painters, but no 
 great female musicians ; for a great space in women's pio- 
 tures is filled with dress, but in music they think they 
 cannot be sufficiently seen unless they sing. Hence, also, 
 light falls on the female art of putting on a shawl of a 
 Hamilton. Even in old age and on the sick bed, of both 
 which a man takes advantage to make himself comfortable 
 in night-cap and dressing-gown, they still put on an orna- 
 mental costume, not to please men but to please themselves : 
 in the most secret coffin of the most lonely Carthusian 
 convent of La Trappe they will not be behind the exhumed 
 corpses of Pompeii, which advantageously display them- 
 selves to posterity in ornaments and ear-rings. If there 
 were a Miss Eobinson Crusoe on a desolate island, with no 
 one to please but her own reflection in the water, she 
 would yet every day make and wear the newest fashions. 
 How little they make themselves into artificial work and 
 three-cased watches for the sake of men may be seen in 
 the fact that they never dress more carefully than for 
 ladies' parties, where every one studies and vexes the 
 rest. 
 
 Unembarrassed by witnesses, each one places herself 
 before her ideal world — the mirror — and dresses the bridal 
 pair. Formerly, in France, every woman carried a glass 
 on her person, apparently to be more agreeable tc her 
 friends, and to indemnify them by their own pictures for
 
 CHAP. I V.J LEVANA. 2G3 
 
 the bearer of them. In Germany, in olden time, a mirror 
 was hound up with the hymn-books — why is it not so now ? 
 Pity that such loss of the divine image should be caused 
 by the want of a looking-glass ! 
 
 On this same ground of natural destination not even the 
 cleverest can pardon the censure of her personal appear- 
 ance ; she even values its praise more highly than that of 
 her mind. From the time of Louis the Fourteenth the 
 French kings have sworn never to forgive two things, 
 both perpetrable only between man and man, the duel and 
 something worse. Women will willingly forgive all save 
 one thing ; not, indeed, the denying of their charms, but 
 the loud proclamation of some deformity or want of personal 
 attraction. And every man's tongue which could declare 
 such a thing i.s immorally cruel. Woman, more subject 
 to the sensuous present, to appearance and opinion than 
 we are, must painfully feel her affirmed unsightliness to 
 have, as her beauty has, a wide extending influence. I 
 should even consider this very speaking of it cruel did I not 
 know from my own experience, as well as from that of 
 others, that a woman's lovely heart as completely effaces 
 all external blots as an unlovely one does all personal 
 charms ; and that a fair soul has at most only the first 
 moment, but a foul one the whole future, to dread. 
 Woman's body is the pearl oyster ; whether this be 
 brilliant and many-coloured, or rough and dark from the 
 place of its birth, yet the pure white pearl within alone 
 gives it value. I mean by this thy heart, thou good 
 maiden, thou who expectest not to be appreciated, but 
 only to be misunderstood ! 
 
 From the destination of women may possibly be derived 
 the greater coldness and severity with which women of 
 rank treat their female domestics ; they cannot conceal 
 from themselves many resemblances and. many possi- 
 bilities of exchanged circumstances ; in which husbands, 
 to whom more is attributed in the proposition of in- 
 difference than in that of contradiction, readily confirm 
 them. Women, especially beauties, regard very little the 
 difference of mental cultivation ; men that only in regard 
 to their servants ; and Fompey, assured of his victory, did 
 not inquire whether his cook looked as ; e did.
 
 '-04 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTER. [FRAG. IV 
 
 Woman's love of dress has, along with cleanliness which 
 dwells on the very borders between physical nature and 
 morality, a next-door neighbour in purity of heart. Why 
 are all girls who go out to meet princes with addresses 
 and flowers dressed in white ? The chief colour of the 
 mentally and physically pure English women is white.' 
 Hess found white linen most used in free countries ; and I 
 find states all the more modest the freer they are. I will 
 become no surety for the inner purity of a woman who, as 
 a counterpart to the Dominicans who wear white in the 
 cloister but black when abroad, only puts on the colour of 
 purity when walking in the streets. 
 
 I might speak of the wardrobe — the female library ; for 
 our white cloth consists of black on white. I might also 
 ask whether girls do not love clothes more on this account ; 
 because they make many of them, and consequently enjoy 
 all the more heartily a garment they have made in their 
 own little summer-house. But the more immediate 
 question is, how the water-shoots of a flowering branch 
 engrafted by nature are to be repressed or cut off'.'' 
 
 Animate the heart, and it no longer thirsts for common 
 air, but for ether. No one is less vain than a bride. 
 Mark out for your daughter any long course to some 
 important business and she will look the seldomer about 
 her. A true work takes possession of the author as 
 well as afterwards of the reader — neither thinks any more 
 about himself. In a sea-fight no Nelson is vain ; in a 
 land-fight, no Alcibiades ; in a council of state, no Kaunitz. 
 
 Let a daughter learn and exemplify the artistic charm 
 of dress on other persons. 
 
 Treat her as an artistic mannikin and lay the value on 
 the product itself; she may then regard herself as an 
 actress who does not become a queen by means of her 
 dress. Costly clothes make much vainer than pretty 
 ones. 
 
 Do not permit nurses, ladies' maids and such-like locusts, 
 to praise and deify the dressed-up girl : yes, even keep a 
 sharp eye on her play-fellows, especially those of lower 
 rank ; because they readily lose their astonishment at the 
 fine dress in admiration of the wearer. 
 
 Ascribe to cleanliness, symmetry, propriety of dress, and
 
 CHAP. IV.J LEVANA. 2G5 
 
 all the aesthetic requisites of beauty, their brilliant and 
 true worth ; so a daughter, like a poet, forgets herself in 
 her art and in her ideal, and her own beauty in what is 
 beautiful. She will be a painter who paints herself — ■ 
 whom not the original, but the copy, charms. Finally, 
 if the mothers are not their own incessant purveyors of 
 fashionable dress, nor a fruitless tulip-bed of modish 
 colours, much, if not all, is done for the daughters. 
 
 §97. 
 
 1 could write a whole paragraph merely in favour of 
 cheerfulness and merriment in girls, and dedicate it to 
 mothers who so frequently forbid them. But seriously to 
 assure girls they may laugh on suitable occasions would 
 look very much like presenting them an opportunity of 
 doing so. Mothers have much a habit of grumbling, even > 
 though they may smile inwardly ; the daughters, on the 
 contrary, generally only laugh visibly. The former have 
 passed out of the triumphant church of virgins into the 
 church militant of matrons ; their growing duties have 
 increased their seriousness ; the bridegroom is changed 
 from a honey -bird, who invited them to the sweets of the- 
 honey-moon, into a resolute honey -hunting bear, who will 
 himself have the honey. 
 
 Then all the more, mothers ! grant these dear light- 
 hearted beings their sports around the flowers ; their 
 minute's play before long years of serious duties. Why 
 may not comedy precede tragedy, with them, as with the 
 Romans ? If the boy may be a zephyr, why may not the 
 girl be a zephyrette ? Is there in the whole range of life 
 any thing so beautiful, so poetical, as the laughing and 
 joking of a maiden who, still in the full harmony of ail 
 her powers, plays with every thing in luxurious freedom, 
 and neither mocks nor hates when she jests ? For girls, 
 the antipodes of fish, which, as is well known, are not 
 only deaf but also possess no diaphragm, have and impart 
 the true sportiveness of poetry, so difficult for authors to 
 imitate, so unlike satire and the humour of men. Their 
 seriousness is rarely so innocent as their fun; and still
 
 266 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 less innocent is that supercilious discontent which con- 
 verts the virginal Psyche into a heavy, stupid, humming, 
 wing-drooping moth ; a death's head, for instance. The 
 melancholy night-flyer may possibly please the lover ; but 
 the husband requires his day Psyche, for marriage demands 
 cheerfulness. In a certain Libyan people* the young man 
 married that girl among his guests who laughed at his 
 jokes ; perhaps my meaning is contained in that custom. 
 
 Laughing cheerfulness throws sunlight on all the paths 
 of life. Peevishness covers with its dark fog even the 
 most distant horizon. Sorrow causes more absence of 
 mind and confusion than so-called levity. If a woman 
 can perform this comedy impromptu in married life, and 
 occasionally enliven the serious epic of the husband, or 
 hero, by her amusing heroic ballads, or get up, as the 
 Eomans did, a merry farce against misfortunes, she will 
 have bribed and won joy, and her husband, and her 
 children. 
 
 Never fear that feminine merriment precludes depth of 
 soul and feeling. Does it do so in men V And did not the 
 lawgiver Lycurgus, and his Spartans everywhere, build 
 an altar in his house to Laughter ? It is precisely under 
 external cheerfulness that the quiet powers of the heart 
 increase and grow to their full stature. How heavenly 
 must it be, then, when, for the first time, the smiling face 
 weeps for love, and the irrepressible tears mirror the whole 
 gentle heart ! 
 
 Wherefore, ye mothers, do not merely suffer but assist 
 your daughters to become externally French girls, in- 
 ternally German, and to convert life into a comic poem 
 which surrounds its deep meaning with merry forms. I 
 know few books to recommend for this purpose — we men 
 always think of these first when advice is to be given — 
 besides the letters of the incomparable Sevigne. But wit, 
 mere wit, is — in opposition to aesthetics — the comedy and 
 humour of women ; an epigram is to them a humorous 
 chapter, a Haug or a Martial, a Sterne or an Aristophanes. 
 They will laugh themselves ill, or rather well, about the 
 curious marriage of the great and little ; which only seems 
 no mis-alliance to man surveying the long connected chain 
 * Alex, ab Alex lib. I. c. 24.
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 267 
 
 1 
 
 of being. But laugh away ! and may your mothers read 
 you many epigrams ! I wish much there were a suitable 
 selection of these for girls, and a few comic works written 
 expressly for them, which would certainly sound very 
 French ! Then let the dear merry children laugh to their 
 hearts' content among one another, and especially at any 
 grave pompous man who comes among them, even were he 
 the author of this ninety-seventh paragraph. 
 
 §98. 
 
 Inquiries might still be made concerning the education 
 of women of genius, and one of a peculiar nature required 
 for them. But I will only insist the more strongly on the 
 necessity of an ordinary one for them, which may act as 
 the balance and counterpoise of their fancy. Genius — 
 which with wonderful works as with holy festivals breaks 
 into the common course of the week — cannot be learned, 
 can be very little taught, and not at all overcome ; and 
 will boldly raise its brow above time and sex and every 
 difficulty. Talent, not genius, can be repressed, that is, 
 annihilated ; just as a compound can be destroyed, that is 
 decomposed, but not a simple power. And truly, were the 
 repression of genius by circumstances possible, we should 
 never once have experienced its existence. For then 
 genius, always appearing only as the one intercalary day 
 of many years, as one single day contradicting and voting 
 against a majority of 1460 days, must have fallen a prey 
 to the opposing tendencies of its age — that is to tendencies 
 which, enslaving men from the earliest times, would bind 
 them down to the latest — as a horse to the multitudinous 
 stings of bees. Nevertheless, genius has existed, for we 
 have the word. They whom it inspired made, like other 
 generals and monarchs of this world, separate treaties of 
 peace with their neighbours, and only after death a general 
 one with the whole world. 
 
 But if a man of genius must also be a man and a citizen, 
 and, if possible, a father too, a woman must not suppose 
 herself elevated by her genius above her appointed day- 
 labour in life. If a Jean Jacques write upon education, an
 
 268 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 intelligent Johanna Jacquelina need not be ashamed of the 
 occupation of intelligent men ; on the contrary, the rare 
 excess of female talent should rather be an additional call 
 to education than a passport for neglecting it. 
 
 But, if women are ever ashamed of acting up to the ideas 
 on which they pride themselves, their destiny avenges 
 itself upon them justly and severely. 
 
 First, justly. For woman is appointed to be the Vesta, or 
 Vestal priestess, of home — not the sea nymph of the ocean. 
 The fuller she is of an ideal perfection the more must she 
 endeavour to express it in reality ; as the ideal of all ideals 
 — God — has manifested Himself in the world ; she should 
 educate a daughter as He educates the whole human race. 
 If a poet can express his ideal as well in the narrow 
 limits of the Dutch school as in the far horizon of the 
 Italian, wherefore should she not be able to express hers 
 in the kitchen, store-room and nursery? 
 
 And, secondly, the punishment of the neglected re- 
 lations of life is severe. A woman can never forget to 
 love, though she be a poet or a ruler. Then, instead of 
 children, women of genius seek the society of men. By 
 these they expect to be loved as women, though they 
 themselves only love as men. So they, like flying-fish 
 between the two elements, hover between manhood and 
 womanhood, injured by both, and persecuted in both 
 kingdoms. They then become the more unhappy the 
 wider their intellectual circle extends ; a poetess, for 
 instance, becomes more so than a painter. 
 
 But, if they unite their woman's destiny with genius, a 
 mighty and rare blessedness fills their hearts ; the clouds 
 which pour their floods in the valleys, gently dissolve on 
 their heights as on mountain tops. 
 
 What is most to be desired for such heads is a crown, a 
 prince's or a ducal coronet ; and this brings us to the next 
 chapter.
 
 CHAP. V.] LEVANA. 269 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 PRIVATE INSTRUCTION'S OF A PRINCE TO THE GOVERNESS OF HIS 
 DAUGHTER. 
 
 § 99. 
 
 Permit me to embody in a dream the few thoughts 1 
 have to offer on the education of princesses. The dream 
 of which I speak elevated me at once above all middle 
 grades into the rank of princes ; an elevation yon will 
 please to ascribe less to secret veneration than to excessive 
 newspaper reading. It seemed to me, then, that I was 
 called Prince Justinian, and my consort Theodosia, the 
 mother of the Princess Theoda, and our governess 
 Pomponne, apparently some French surname. The private 
 instructions which I imparted, my princely hat upon my 
 head, to Madame de Pomponne, may sound sufficiently 
 dreamy in somewhat of the following form : — 
 
 My dear Pomponne, I like going at once openly to 
 work. What my consort arranged with you yesterday 
 about Theoda's education I ratify with pleasure, because 
 she wishes it : but as soon as you have read my wishes 
 on this subject I confidently expect some private altera- 
 tions in the list of rules which has been laid before 
 you. For truly I give out my laws as readily as another, 
 though I also intentionally receive some ; one cannot 
 always have the crown close at hand in one's pocket, as 
 the German emperors formerly carried their imperial in- 
 signia along with them in every journey : but let people 
 beware of resembling my royal cousins, who — albeit the an- 
 cient Persian kings dared refuse nothing to their queens on 
 their birthday — scarcely ever close their birthday-festivals. 
 
 I confess that shortly after my nuptials I hoped my 
 wife, like those in humbler stations, might possibly take 
 upon herself the education of a future princess, and that 
 you would merely have borne the title of governess. In 
 fact when I, who best know what a longest day and a 
 longest night combined in one four-and-twenty hours 
 tdgnify, take into consideration the tedium of a court, I
 
 270 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 should think that a princess, who must feel it even more 
 severely than a prince, would for that very reason gladly 
 expend her time and her whims on the education of a 
 daughter. Since one becomes so weary of courtiers, who, 
 like people in boots and stirrups, always think they stand on 
 the palace floor most securely with bended knees, that ono 
 actually longs for dogs and parrots and monkeys ; because 
 they, indifferent to rank, are always free, new and inter- 
 esting ; surely my child, who in a court belongs to the 
 small number of my equals, and therefore ventures freely 
 to say what she thinks, must be even more interesting 
 And should not an excellent royal mother, who can devote 
 whole years to a painting or a piece of embroidery, more 
 gladly sit to herself and paint herself in the living copy 
 of her daughter ? And why do the simple priests at the 
 altar only pray that princesses may become happy mothers, 
 and not that they should continue such by educating their 
 children ? 
 
 But these are only questions. There are many difficulties 
 which my beloved Theodosia could not so easily overcome 
 as my paternal imagination fancied. For the rest she is 
 so loving and tender a mother, as you will yourseli 
 experience, that she seldom or never permits a week to 
 pass without once sending to call Theoda. 
 
 Nevertheless, dear Pomponne, much, indeed most, 
 depends upon your love and attention to the child. 1 
 yesterday heard and subscribed the long chapter on 
 external propriety, royal female dignity and reserve ; so 
 let that be ; and I will myself, at the right time, procure 
 the princess a daneing-master from Paris who shall 
 instruct her in the art of raising or letting fall her train. 
 But, my good lady, I hope you will not carry too far that 
 self-confining fence round every step, that consideration of 
 every verbal expression, that squeezing mould, and that 
 crooked or straight bending of the body. Oh ! my good 
 Theoda ! must it be so ? Court is indeed a pays coutumier^ 
 and only the country a pays du droit civil, which the regal 
 palace least of all is. Many attitudes and impetuosities 
 which, in my officers, I should regard as improprieties and. 
 offences against my majesty, are in me, the master, treated 
 (perhaps from flattery) as original traits, as piquant and
 
 CHAP. V.J LEVANA. 271 
 
 amiable peculiarities ; and the earnest wish is expressed that 
 they may be frequently repeated. Acting on this method 
 of interpretation, I pray you to permit the princess always 
 to run a little. After my marriage I became acquainted 
 with one of the fairest and most amiable princesses — 
 excepting, of course, your mistress — who had the charming 
 ill-manners — any thing else in her were not to be supposed 
 — of never moving in a concert-room, or other assembly, 
 save at a running pace with full sails. And what said 
 the court, and foreign princes, myself among the rest, to 
 this ? We all praised her animation ! Now, had she been 
 twelve years old, and her governess present, that celestial 
 animation might have excited a fire of a very different 
 description. 
 
 Must, then, poor unhappy princesses be deprived of all 
 soul, and converted into mere machines of propriety, and 
 be placed in the court as in an ice-oven through which the 
 little naphtha-flame cannot pass ? Must a princess be indeed 
 so closely imprisoned that she may never venture to cross 
 a bridge on foot, except the fane} 1- park-bridge ? Are 
 tears the best princess's ivasliiny water? It is at least 
 fortunate that we princes have given our name to some- 
 thing harder — prince's metal. Must not the poor children, 
 in later years, be bound down in formality with golden 
 chains, pompously introduced into life's desert where 
 love is not, and banished under the polar sky of the throne, 
 which sends forth as much fog and frost as does the actual 
 pole? Even a ruling master lies oppressed under it, who 
 could be very different and thunder. By all means let 
 every thing during public exhibitions and festivals be 
 measured and cold ; but not so when she is alone with 
 you. White gravel may lie glittering and smooth on the 
 garden walks, but no one uses it in flower-beds. The Duke 
 of Lauzun said, To make princesses love you treat them 
 harshly and scold them unceasingly. You will certainly 
 not confound this ducal method of securing love with that 
 to be adopted by a teacher. You admire, as- 1 heard you 
 say on Sunday, the Scandinavian my thoh >gy . tell me, 
 now, would you wish only to be Nos^a * to my daughter 
 and not also Gefione ? Health is the true Gefione ; and 
 * The goddess Nossa gave maidens beauty : Gefione, protection.
 
 272 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH PJCHTEE. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 may this goddess lead Theoda by the left hand, as well as 
 Nossa by the right ! 
 
 Certainly a beautiful princess has more subjects than 
 her prince, and certainly nowhere does female beauty 
 display its bloom so perfectly as on the Alps of the throne ; 
 but my offspring will not give to posterity a perfectly 
 bloomed flower. The prince's hall in which, as in a 
 fortress, the German future lays down its safety and its 
 freedom must indeed be built by fair and tender, but also 
 by strong hands. If every mother is a being of importance 
 I should think a royal mother is one of the greatest im- 
 portance. If I can only arrange it so Theoda shall ac- 
 company me next July, and I shall have the pleasure of 
 accompanying you. I will then effect much. It is stated 
 in the Indian travels of the old Mandelsloh that only the 
 kings among birds of paradise have feet ; apparently we 
 princes are only birds of paradise, and every common 
 person is our king. But at that time my Queen Theoda 
 shall go on foot; and, what is more, she shall ride on 
 horseback, which no Roman Dictator ventured to do. I 
 really do not like to think how the health of royal persons 
 must be undermined by things which they probably drink 
 every day ; had I an hereditary prince royal I should 
 almost lose my senses with anxiety ! 
 
 I should wish you to allow my Theoda to read more 
 English than French books, and more German than both. 
 I know not what witty author* has shown the similarity 
 of the courtly and worldly tone of mind to that of the 
 French literature ; at the same time, the thought is 
 striking. In a French book we always live in the fashion- 
 able world and at court ; in a German book occasionally 
 in villages and in the market-place. I must also have the 
 princess lose some of that awful ignorance about the people 
 which makes her imagine them only a multitudinous re- 
 petition of the fat servants who stand behind her chair to 
 remove her plate and clear the table. She must not fancy 
 that a beggar cannot be relieved with silver coin, because 
 for convenience she only carries with her gold. This, 
 however, is but a very small matter. In German books as 
 
 * This was I myself in the third volume of the ^Esthetics ; but in 
 dreams the bust known things are forgotten.
 
 CHAP. V.] LEVANA. 273 
 
 a whole there predominates a healthy force of affec- 
 tions, boldness of language, lovo of morality and religion, 
 carefully balanced understanding, sound-common sense, 
 unbiassed all-sidedness of view, hearty love of human 
 happiness, and a pair of eyes which look towards heaven. 
 Now, if tills German strength and purity be ingrafted on 
 a mind tenderly formed by sex and rank, it must necessarily 
 bear the loveliest flowers and fruits. 
 
 A French library, on the contrary — if I do not judge 
 unjustly, embittered by Gallic newspaper writers and by 
 my old loyal tutors — is nothing better than a kind of 
 anteroom or exchange. Theoda would only read in it 
 what she every day hears ; — the same softness of speech 
 with hardness of thought (just as mineralogists append to 
 their newly discovered stones the soft Greek termination 
 ite, as Hyalite or Cyanite) ; — the same flattery of diame- 
 trically opposed occurrences, because the man of the world 
 resembles the Epicurean who denied that a proposition 
 was either true or false; the same resemblance in other 
 matters of the worldly man and the Frenchman to the 
 Epicurean school which, unlike every school of philosophy, 
 had no sects because the whole school agreed about wine 
 and meats, women and God — . 
 
 No, no, let my Theoda read her Herder (she will 
 hear Voltaire in plenty amongst her chamberlains) and 
 Klopstock and Goethe and Schiller. You, dear friend, 
 of children and of French people, are a quite sufficient 
 French library. Formerly in German courts— not merely 
 in mine — your countrymen and their works were equally 
 welcome and effective ; as if what the Romans found in real 
 life, that Gallic slaves made the best shepherds,* were also 
 true figuratively, and that your nation could furnish the 
 best shepherds of the shepherds of the people — that is to 
 eay, tutors of princes — and also the best shepherds of the 
 people — that is to say, princes. 
 
 Only do not forget fiousseau and Fenelon, nor Madame 
 de Necker and her Memoires. A book more delicate, re- 
 fined, elegant, religious and, moreover, interesting is 
 scarcely to be found for well educated women than this 
 
 * Meiner's History of the Decline of Morals in the Romans, from 
 Varro. 
 
 I. T
 
 274 JEAN PAUL FREEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 by Madame de Neeker, whose jewels possess as much 
 medicinal virtue as colour and brilliancy. But her 
 daughter, Madame de Stael, may postpone leaving her 
 cards for my daughter until the girl is old enough to 
 receive so intellectual a visit. 
 
 Germau princesses now fill and unite almost all Euro- 
 pean thrones; as — if I dare speak so pedantically — 
 Aurora's rosebuds do the mountain tops. Formerly, as 
 Thomas remarks, heathen princes were converted to a 
 hotter religion by their marriages with Christian princesses. 
 This achievement cannot now be expected from any 
 princess ; but it is well for her if she have been brought 
 up in a pure religion. He who has no higher and firmer 
 heaven above his head than the canopy of the throne, 
 composed of wood and velvet, is very circumscribed, and 
 has but a narrow prospect. And he who, on the blooming 
 heights of humanity, attains no happiness is, if he possess 
 not God in his heart, more helpless than the most lowly 
 who, in lamenting over his own humble condition, seeks 
 the hope of improvement. Eeligion only can reward and 
 arm with energy, tranquillity, life and peace princesses 
 who, like Narcissus, are too frequently sacrificed to an 
 infernal deity. By what othe raid could women in former 
 ages, when there was less refinement, endure and even 
 forget to grieve at the rudeness and cruelty of men, than 
 by that of religion, which transfigured many an hour of 
 tears into one of prayer ? A woman, to whom so much 
 perishes ere she herself dies, needs, more than a man does, 
 something which may accompany her as a glorious star 
 from youth to age. And what is the name of this star? 
 In the morning of life it is the star of love ; later, it is 
 only called the evening star. 
 
 Henry the Eighth of England forbad women to read 
 the New Testament ; the age, alas ! does so now. Happily 
 for my wishes I know you and your sex. An unbelieving 
 princess is almost as rare as a believing prince, and you 
 perhaps grant both. In earlier ages, it is true, we find 
 Gustavus, Bernard, Ernest, and some others, anchored to 
 religion as to a firm mountain.* My position may possibly 
 
 * E. g. to the mountain of Tachwa in Novgorod. Hubo's Physic, 
 vol. i.
 
 CH/VP. V.] LEVANA. 275 
 
 lead me astray, but I confess that to every ideal I form of 
 female beauty a throne is the footstool. My travels may 
 form an excuse for this — but so it has always been with 
 my ideals of woman's mental beaut}% and I have ever seen 
 it crowned. " With thorns ?" you ask. " Probably," I 
 answer, " but also with gold." 
 
 In short, I believe that a certain ideal delicacy and 
 purity of the female soul can be developed nowhere so 
 beautifully as in the highest position — on the throne— as 
 the loveliest flowers bloom on mountains, and the sweetest 
 honey comes from hilly countries ; two resemblances 
 which hold forth a promise jf the third. As female 
 nature for her fairest flowers requires forms and customs, 
 which may be compared to fine soil and elegant vases, 
 whereas man's roots can press through and burst open 
 the hardest earth and rocks ; so she finds what alone she 
 needs at court, which is, confessed^, all form and custom, 
 and that of the narrowest and most absolute description 
 — I do not say this, self-laudatorily, of my own — for the 
 mere fact of an education among the highest ranks, as well 
 as the contemplation of the most refined politeness, — these 
 forms and reflections of morality, — will be there not only 
 as the reversed and dim counterpart, but as the original 
 bright-coloured rainbow. I might also adduce decency, 
 honour, propriety (of the men as well as of the women), 
 delicacy, f irbearance, which are all required by courts; 
 and not merely, as is falsely supposed, in the public, but 
 also in the private personal demeanour ; I mean in every 
 word by which the courtier expresses, not himself, but 
 something better — a moral seeming. 
 
 Woman's virtue is the music of string instruments, 
 which sounds best in a room ; but man's that of wind 
 instruments, which sounds best in the open air. As men 
 always act most honourably in public — the act of 
 cowardice which might be committed in a closet or in 
 a wood becomes impossible at the head of an army or a 
 nation, and as we royal martyrs in our apartments too much 
 resemble the Greek tragic actors whom the chorus never 
 left for a moment alone on the stage, and, finally, as women, 
 avoiding the observation of many eyes yet pay regard 
 to them by the fairest actions, my proposition is natural. 
 
 T 2
 
 276 TEAN PAUL FMEDFJCH EICHTER. [FRAG. IV, 
 
 I can still add something. The princess, free from 
 distracting labour in the rough service of life ; placed in 
 the mild climate of physical repose, advantageous to the 
 heart as well as to the beauty ; brought up rather to 
 observation than to action, at least unless she absolutely 
 will, without compulsion, enter that black pit of statecraft 
 at whose mouth prince and minister throw off the mantle 
 of love, as they would give their servants a woollen cloak 
 to hold ; — I really do not remember how or why I began, 
 but I do know this; that the nobler class of women, even 
 after a long black funereal train of misanthropical expe- 
 riences, still keep alive their loving heart and genuine 
 feeling ; whereas men in such cases, yes, even sometimes 
 after one single grievous misfortune, bury their desolate 
 lost heart in the perpetual hatred of their species. A 
 woman could more easily close for ever her mouth than 
 her heart. 
 
 Why waste many words ? I have seen excellent 
 princesses. Without the advantages of the throne they 
 would have lost much, and without its disadvantages, the 
 rest. In fact, patience, a little suffering, and that of 
 the mind — as when, for instance, years convert the 
 wedding-ring into a chain — and other things of a similar- 
 nature form within the flower the fruit, and within that 
 the seed of a heavenly life. 
 
 To this head belongs the patience necessitated by the 
 courtly tedium of our rank. The Sabbath was especially 
 ordained by Moses as a rest day for slaves ; but it is pre- 
 cisely this day of rest which at court is converted into 
 a day of unrest. As often as my people envies me during 
 these tumultuous festivals, I seem to myself to resemble 
 the Spartan helots who were flogged to death to the sweet 
 sound of flutes. 
 
 My clear Theodosia would gladly have her daughter as 
 highly gifted as herself, and therefore strongly impressed 
 upon you the desirability of cultivating her imagination. 
 It is, perhaps, because I myself am of a dryer and harder 
 nature, and prefer keeping myself warm with my wings 
 to flying far up into the cold ether, that I lay so very 
 much stress on my daughter's possessing sound common- 
 sense. Indeed, if I could, I should like to undermine this
 
 CHAP. V.] LETANA. 277 
 
 powerfulness of imagination. Fancy in a princess pro- 
 duces a great many fancies in a prince ; hence arise storms 
 in the royal atmosphere and all kinds of volcanic products, 
 burning of the treasure closets, maledictions on the crown 
 jewels, and much else that I could name. If a fanciful 
 woman could carry the whole verdure of the country, in its 
 meadows and its woods, compressed and poetically sub- 
 limed into one ring, on her finger, in the shape of the 
 largest emerald — by Heavens ! Pomponne, she would do 
 it ! Therefore, I would most gladly exchange it for a 
 sound understanding, if I had it not. I grant one can 
 make but very little show with it, but then one can judge 
 all the more correctly. And this I certainly know, that 
 many a princess, who, during her husband's reign, 
 modestly snowed herself as nothing more than a sensible 
 affectionate mother and wife, could, after his death, (I 
 pray you call to mind the widow of my dear old friend in 
 M — g — n,) replace the father by the mother of her country, 
 and with her clear eye, and ear open to instruction, 
 rightly guide the vessel of the state. Fancy and fancies 
 on the throne, round which, as round other heights, more 
 winds blow than behind the low hull of the ship, are only 
 full spread sails in a storm, which the captain, or the 
 understanding, ought to take in. 
 
 I would wish Theoda to have as much cheerfulness as 
 possible, but wit only in moderation. The latter, when 
 united with good sense and a constant kindly heart, may 
 perhaps guide, or, at all events, drive the prince consort, 
 as the weak sorceress formerly ruled the devil ; but wit 
 alone without heart, salt without meat, transforms a 
 woman, like Lot's wife who became a pillar of salt from 
 whom the old Lot parted and went on his way. 
 
 But to return to the imagination. I should be glad, 
 Madam, if you coirid discover, or excite in my daughter a 
 talent for either music or drawing. Music, if only listened 
 to and not scientifically cultivated, gives too much play to 
 the feelings and fancy ; the difficulties of the art draw forth 
 the whole energies of the soul. Hence a certain minister, 
 Hermes, in Berlin, * recommended girls to be taught 
 
 * Now consistorial-councillor in Breslau. Princely and dream- 
 like transmutation withal.
 
 278 JEAN PAUL FE1EDKICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IV. 
 
 thorough bass. Drawing also is good, a lthough it has the 
 xlisadvantage of giving too much pr eponderance to a 
 woman's naturally keen eye for forms. One thing or the 
 other ; a painting, for instance, at which a princess has 
 laboured for about half a year, if it have not been produced 
 with the help of the court artist, as private instructor and 
 father of the piece, would to her, — a bee imprisoned in the 
 variegated tulip-bed of the court, — smell sweetly as the 
 flowers ; for thus she possesses something which she sees 
 daily grow under her hands, in which consists the happi- 
 ness of life. The old Saxon princess who, as I have read, 
 embroidered the banks of the Rhine on a robe, was 
 certainly as happy, yes, happier, while embroidering it, 
 than in the robe itself. At the present day half her 
 heaven would have been stolen from her, since, as I hear 
 we no longer possess the left bank.* 
 
 AVith regard to female vanity you need do — that is, say 
 — nothing ; for every word in your apartment is useless if, 
 in the evening at tea or in the concert room, Theoda heal 
 the very opposite from grave men and women, who think 
 to do honour at the same time to both rank and sex, and 
 by this very confounding of both constantly intrude the 
 latter on the poor child. As she grows older a very 
 marked admiration becomes the duty of every courtier, 
 since, unfortunately, the stupid printed genealogical tables 
 every year declare the age of a princess ; in London they 
 act in a still more foolish fashion and actually shoot the 
 number of years into people's ears by the discharge of 
 cannon ; therefore, she need not — like the modern Roman 
 women, whose dislike of perfumes keeps them at a distance 
 from the altar with its incense — retreat from the admiration 
 naturally attendant on her rank and sex, but simply 
 remain standing. 
 
 And now I come to the most important point; namely, 
 — all of religion and human happiness which I have 
 hitherto desired at your hand for Theoda must assist and 
 be subservient to her princely destiny, and not by any 
 means work against it. Consolation and fortitude I would 
 wish her to draw thence, but no arms against her parents' 
 will. This, between ourselves, is what I mean. Since 
 * Written in 1805.
 
 CHAP. V.] LEVANA. 279 
 
 my last travels I do not feel by any means certain that, in 
 eight or ten years, my Theoda, regarded as a cement of 
 severed lands, or rivet of different crowns, may not he 
 united to a prince whom, which Heaven forbid ! she may 
 from her heart detest. To this fear royal parents must 
 submit : in fact, I must regard the glory of my house ; and 
 I have always considered children as royal pledges, whom 
 I have only to place as far from me as possible in order to 
 win an extension of territory. Wherefore, Madam, on this 
 point my daughter must learn to give no other answer thau 
 yes. Would that bridegrooms were as easily selected by 
 diplomacy as brides ! Still some good may be made out of 
 the worst case ; and on the rocks of the throne, against 
 which others make shipwreck, we can only bleed. A 
 woman, previously so undetermined and obedient to the 
 whole compass of male zephyrs, becomes, under the 
 influence of .a fixed husband who determines her fate, a 
 steady trade-wind. The most ugly often becomes, at the 
 altar, or shortly afterwards, the most beautiful ; and a 
 similar change often accompanies precisely opposite condi- 
 tions. The priest's words, like lightning on the magnet, 
 easily reverse the position of the positive and negative 
 poles. 
 
 But too much of this. I consider my little future son-in- 
 law to be honourable, and no one yet knows what kind of a 
 man may grow out of the merry boy. But even supposing 
 that the priestly blessing were to the princess a priestly 
 anathema, and that her honeymoon were passed in courtly 
 mourning, yet I cannot help her, at all events before she 
 gives her hand. 
 
 It is true that in Loango a princess, and only a princess, 
 can choose what husband she will ; and in Homer, Penelope 
 had a hundred-and-eight wooers, without reckoning the 
 absent husband; but that is of no avail to our princesses, 
 especially before marriage, for those are neither our times 
 nor countries. Diplomatic marriages must be like English 
 soldier marriages, provided not merely hands and hearts 
 but whole countries are to be united. Should it really 
 happen that a throne became a Gold Coast where a 
 daughter was sold into a slave ship, then you can give her 
 no fairer princess's dowry and mxrriage gift than a mother's
 
 280 JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. IV 
 
 heart ; this will compensate her for all her sacrifices : a 
 child's love is more certain than a husband's. 
 
 After such confidence 1 require from you no other ans\?er 
 than the future, which the governess of a princess holds 
 more surely in her hand than does the tutor of a prince ; 
 for the latter is relieved and removed, and his successors 
 less resemble the popes, each of whom continued the 
 building of St. Peter's, than princes who, for the most part, 
 leave the buildings of their predecessors unfinished. You, 
 on the contrary, may long lead Theoda by the hand ; 
 perhaps even till you resign it into that of her husband. 
 May you succeed well ! 
 
 Justinian. 
 
 My dream came to an end along with my letter and I 
 arose. But as I laid aside the crown along with my night- 
 cap and became as usual a private person, a critic who 
 should blame any thing in my instructions would prove 
 nothing more than that he was ignorant of, or indifferent 
 to, Kant's axiom, that a deposed sovereign can never be 
 punished for faults committed by him on tlie throne. It is 
 something quite different when I am awake, and then fall 
 into errors.
 
 ( 281 ) 
 
 FIFTH FRAGMENT. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ON THE EDUCATION OF A PRINCE. 
 §100. 
 
 M < ny readers, especially critical ones, will probably, 
 without my aid, make the remark and the reproach, that 
 in the former Chapters I have treated of the particular 
 before the general — of the education of women before that 
 of men, which extends into a wider sphere of moral, 
 intellectual and aesthetical development ; and that, again, 
 in this Chapter the particular education of kings is placed 
 before the general one of men. And, truly, in the 
 fragment about girls, readers will miss any systematic 
 order, and only find a systematic want of order for women. 
 Now, should any one forget to make these remarks and 
 reproaches, they are here set down ready for him. 
 
 Moreover, in treating of the education of a prince, the 
 author must again avail himself of the kind reader's 
 former permisson, to turn letter writer ; but in this instance 
 lie did not dream a letter in bed, but really sent the 
 subjoined one by post. 
 
 LETTEK 
 
 ON THE EDUCATION OF PRINCES, ADDRESSED TO MR. ADELHARD, 
 PRINCE'S TUTOR AND PRIVY COUNCILLOR. 
 
 Baireuth, Oct. 1, 1805. 
 
 Your invitation, my dear friend, to visit you and the 
 prince at his country residence could not have come more 
 opportunely than just now when I am In the very act of
 
 282 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH EICHTEK. [FRAG. V. 
 
 packing up and taking flight because the lava stream of 
 war seems to take its course towards our country. And, 
 what is still better, I am at present engaged on a Doctrine 
 of Education in fragments, one of which, at least, must 
 contain a few words about the education of royal children ; 
 and I am very much mistaken if I shall not find with you 
 that Magna Charta and electoral franchise which is the 
 most important for a prince ; namely, that which the tutor 
 lays down and prescribes for the little prince. In fact, I 
 expect from you two patterns ; one of a teacher, and one 
 of a pupil. 
 
 If you will not regard it as a jest, dear Adelhard, I will 
 now write a long letter, divining and predicting what you 
 have begun and accomplished with your pupil, merely 
 that I may place the letter among my fragments as a 
 pocket mirror for princes' tutors. It seems to me that 
 when I prophesy my predictions at once become rules. 
 
 For I have a kind of dislike absolutely to lay down 
 rules. If one must place oneself in the soul of the pupil, 
 in order thence to educate him, the task becomes in the 
 highest degree difficult for any fellow-creature, especially 
 for the tutor of a prince ; because the external conditions 
 of royalty differ from ours not in degree but in kind. 
 Kingly government is totally different from any other; 
 we only experience power over parts, not over the whole ; 
 we see approaches to ourselves both from above and from 
 below : the prince sees one ; but the highest and the 
 lowest servants of the state are to him equally distant from 
 the throne, equally incapable of holding the sceptre. 
 While common plants are contented with the common 
 earth and air, the prince, like a plant of foreign growth, 
 requires a peculiar soil, a southern aspect, and a hothouse. 
 
 Therefore the choice of the royal gardener is all the 
 more important. Fortunately the kingdom of education, 
 at least, is an elective monarchy. Even the court — which 
 formerly employed learned men as the fair Spaniards use 
 glow-worms at night, only as glittering gems, but not as 
 the Indians do fire-flies, as lights — regards the choice of a 
 prince's tutor as a matter of sufficent importance to break 
 it up into sects. Do you not remember the Schismatics 
 and Separatists in the court of Flachsenfingen about thq
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 283 
 
 choiceof the prince's tutor? Ionce related them to you on the 
 very best authority, in the presence of the principal gover- 
 ness of the royal children. You, dear Adelhard, were only 
 selected by the father and mother for their child, so that 
 no one should be able to say which of the four human 
 beings was the most fortunate. But in Flachsenfingen 
 the queen-mother and her party declared in favour of the 
 flat, dull-gold, court preacher ; — the king and his adherents 
 concurred in desiring to secure my services: — the third 
 party, that of the lord high chamberlain and his worn out 
 favourite, the chief governess, all my declared enemies, 
 unanimously voted for that genteel, nice, young man whom 
 we all pretty well know, that wretched powder without 
 report which every one previously avoided. So very 
 wisely does a court know how to unite the happiness of 
 the country with the good fortune of its own relatives, by 
 seeking the former through the latter ! This is the reason 
 why courtiers do not appear by any means so unselfish and 
 honourable as they are. Just as the banker at a great 
 gaming-table fastens to his hat the card (let us suppose 
 it the ace of hearts) upon or against which he will not bet ; 
 so the marshal by a golden star, and the governess by a 
 golden heart, as symbols of light and love, showed which 
 were the two cards on which they would never lose nor win 
 anything. This is what many people call intriguing for 
 the choice of the prince's tutor. 
 
 Charles the Great, owing to his physical strength, was 
 called an army : every prince, owing to his political power, 
 may be regarded as a moral army ; and this army at first 
 has no other generalissimo than the tutor. He alone may 
 freely instruct and touch the mind, which, in after years, 
 will neither experience nor suffer contradiction. This 
 task is more easy and varied than that of any future 
 favourite ; for he has only wax, not marble, to shape. He 
 may be bold enough to oppose and punish the passions 
 of the little prince, which his subsequent attendants will 
 only use and misdirect. Yes, he may carry his influence 
 so far — which never minister or favourite yet did — as to 
 gain such a victory as Fenelon, who transformed an ill- 
 disposed duke of Burgundy into a pure noble-minded man, 
 whose premature death probably opened the entrance into
 
 284 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. V. 
 
 the great catacomb of the last century. The knowledge, the 
 habits, the principles, the tastes, which he may give or leave 
 to his pupil, work either for or against all future influences. 
 He may, in a spiritual light, imitate the men who carried 
 torches before the Eoman emperors even in the day time. 
 In short, he may — if he possess the power within himself 
 — combine in one office both the characters of that 
 Dionysius who was a king in Sicily, a schoolmaster in 
 Corinth. Let him at least strive to do so ! For to the 
 perfect formation of a political prince a man of moral 
 power is necessary ; he may be called tutor to the prince, 
 but he, in fact, as a spiritual father, first gives permission 
 to wear the crown ; — as the pope, in his chaiacter of holy 
 father, gave a similar permission 10 the Jesuit, John the 
 Third, to assume that of Portugal. 
 
 Is there, then, my friend, for the whole human race, not 
 merely for the royal parents, a higher moral and intel- 
 lectual sphere of action than that of tutor to a prince ; 
 who, perhaps, in the royal child holds in his power the 
 future of half a century — a something which may either 
 be the fructifying germ of an oak forest, or the powder 
 train of a mine for his country ? If it be granted that the 
 first circumstances of a man's education, as the deepest and 
 richest, bear all the rest which time heaps on him, I cannot 
 consider the wish too bold, but only natural, that, as there 
 are normal schools for teachers, so there should be at least 
 one of that kind for the tutors of princes. 
 
 But I will now — so as to have something to put in my 
 book — cast the nativity of the past and present, and predic '. 
 what you have done and are now doing. 
 
 I suppose, from your residence in the country, that you 
 will as frequently as possible forbid the court to your 
 Friedanot (a fine-sounding and significant name!), and 
 persuade his parents to see him, for the most part, without 
 lookers on. If the cloud of flattery may be, to a prince, a 
 falling mist, it is to a royal child a rising mist, which is 
 followed by dark, bad weather. How else than by distance 
 can you protect your Friedanot from the ladies of the court, 
 who must press around him, allured by his three graces, of 
 being a prince, a child, and a boy. Than this union there 
 can be nothing greater in a woman's eyes. As the emperor
 
 CHAF. I.J LEV ANA. 285 
 
 of Morocco, so Agrell tells us, is drawn by a team of twelve 
 state-horses when he takes a drive ; so our little heir to 
 the crown can command, when he will, twelve children's; 
 carriages, each with a dozen lady-drawers. And when at 
 last n becomes twelve years old he will be absolutely 
 worshipped beforehand, so as to secure his adoration 
 afterwards. Character and childhood are both at once 
 destroyed by early gallantries which incite to gallantries. 
 
 The men of the world reserve their influence for this 
 age. If any thing, like poison on the nerves, destructively 
 opposes the earnestness of a royal tutor's labours — or, 
 indeed, of any teacher — it is the worldly views of worldly 
 people, even when honourable and impartial. Like the 
 founder of their order, Helvetius, these modern Helvetians, 
 in whom no Caesar finds an enemy, can be good natured, 
 lovers of the arts, farmer-generals and every thing good, 
 but not martyrs to their faith, nor keepers of their word. 
 In other respects these Helvetians are good enough ; like 
 their geographical namesakes they are lovers of cold, — 
 herdsmen on the heights for which their home-sick hearts 
 long ; "no gold, no Swiss " — united by confederacy — 
 upright in deeds, if not in words — without much money ; 
 mere door-keepers of palaces, — in short, men who willingly 
 stand and suffer themselves to be ordered about as guards 
 and hirelings in the court of a Louis the Fourteenth. But 
 such, Adelhard, are not fit companions for an heir-apparent. 
 If you have to conduct your pupil through two totally 
 different worlds, out of the one into the other — out of that 
 really great world in which only nobility of soul, character, 
 great principles and comprehensive views are valued — 
 where only the despisers of pleasure and the passing hour, 
 the men of eternity stand — where an Epaminondas, a 
 Socrates, a Cato, still .speak from their tombs and deliver 
 oracles as from an everlasting Delphic cavern — where 
 earnestness of purpose and man and God bring all things 
 into life ; out of this into that world of sham-greatness, in 
 which all that is great and departed is little esteemed, and 
 what is trifling and present is alone held important — where 
 every thing is custom, and nothing duty, not to mention 
 kingly duty — where the whole country is looked upon as 
 an estate, all offices as appendages of the crown ; where
 
 286 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. V. 
 
 inspiration seems a passing love affair, or a mere artistic 
 talent — if you have to do this, must not all these glittering 
 influences destroy that of the tutor? Must not the child 
 become a kind of double creature, a double stone, half 
 diamond and half common court crystal, which needs but 
 the application of heat to sever the scholastic addition 
 from the courtly mass, — just as other double stones are 
 tried and burst asunder by heat. 
 
 You are, then, right in regarding the easy attainment 
 of a glitteringly-cut outside as a small recompense for 
 the damage done by people of the world. Must he not, 
 without your help, pass his whole life among decorators 
 and manufacturers of cosmetics, as under curling machines 
 for royal heads? And will easiness of demeanour ever 
 become difficult to him who, from the freedom of an 
 upright posture, has but to return bows ? Nevertheless it 
 will do so ; every thing, crime excepted, becomes princes ; 
 they, like great artists, are permitted many external pecu- 
 liarities ; nay, are imitated in them : and what in lower 
 stations is considered want of good manners, in the highest 
 is held to denote their superabundance, or at all events, 
 to be a veil of Moses drawn over the splendour of the 
 crown. Stiff citizen-manners occupy only the middle 
 place, the extremities approach one another so closely 
 that in the highest ranks the freedom of the savage is 
 renewed. 
 
 But you will reply to me in your next letter and com- 
 plainingly say, I can take my Friedanot nowhere but a 
 court will follow him : where a prince stamps his foot 
 a courtly circle rises — as an army did at the approach of 
 Pompey, — and the altars of incense smoke around him ; 
 for truly the middle and lower ranks flatter their prince 
 more injuriously, that is more grossly and slavishly, than 
 the nobility. It is probably on this account that many 
 novel writers think they present us with the most beauti- 
 fully sculptured heads of princes on their coin by merely 
 permitting the little dauphin, prince of Calabria, prince 
 of Brazil, protector of England, to be educated and kept 
 in perfect ignorance of his future rank. In this case the 
 dauphin apparently imitates the Mamelukes,* by the lawa 
 
 * Bolingbroke's Political Letters concerning Europe.
 
 CHAP. I.] LEV ANA. 287 
 
 of whose empire only he may ascend the throne who was 
 not born upon it. The opponents of these few novel 
 writers are merely the whole class of historians. For 
 although Macchiavelli remarks that the best among the 
 Roman emperors were those who had been adopted, yet — 
 besides the exception of Augustus, who adopted himself to 
 the government, and also besides that of many emperors 
 chosen by the senate and the praetorian band— other his- 
 tories are opposed to that of Rome ; take, for instance, 
 that of the East which never depicts viziers, beys, and 
 sultans, brought up in slave ships and promoted to the 
 ranks of pilot and captain, as better princes than others. 
 Further ; have the popes made better rulers because they 
 were not born to be popes ? And when (as on the extremity 
 of the opponent's chess-board a pawn may become a queen) 
 a peasant, Massaniello, for instance, becomes a king — is 
 his government, therefore, so very markedly different from 
 that of those who had expected it for twenty years? And, 
 moreover, in the olden time was not every usurper and 
 destroyer of freedom a man who, in his childhood, had 
 possessed no prince's tutor, no court, no royal father ? 
 
 On the contrary, a prince can never contemplate soon 
 enough the Tabor of the throne, so that in after years he 
 may be gloriously transfigured on it, and not hang as a 
 cloud on the mountain. It is the Sinai on which he, 
 praying, shall receive the laws which, in their reflected 
 brightness, he is to carry down to the desert. I could 
 recommend no other refuge from anticipated courts for an 
 heir-apparent than a foreign country, where the native 
 prince would draw away all flatterers from the stranger. 
 But the evils consequent on the necessary contemplation 
 of his future high rank may be guarded against in many 
 ways. A child's views of life must necessarily be confused 
 if his master is at the same time his servant ; or, like a 
 bad royal tutor, a compound of tyrant and slave. There 
 may be inequality, but let it be upwards. With us lower 
 people every father is at times the fellow-labourer and 
 fellow-teacher of the schoolmaster ; should not the father 
 of his country also occasionally be the father of his son 
 and successor ? Antiquity holds out the example of princes 
 who were the play-fellows of their children ; how much
 
 2hS JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. V. 
 
 more praise would they merit as their teachers! I can 
 imagine no more honourable group than a royal father 
 among is sons, earnestly instilling into them the high 
 laws of the kingly office which he himself religiously 
 observes. 
 
 But if the affairs of government occupy too much of the 
 father's time, or if this recreation would abstract him too 
 much from business, the queenly mother is still there 
 with the powerful influence of her heart and of her 
 leisure. Baron, the actor, said that a tragedian should 
 be nursed in the lap of queens. It seems to me that the 
 dauphin, whom he represents and imitates, claims the 
 first place there ; and such a mother will be more usefully 
 employed teaching her son than her husband how to 
 gevern. " Crowned mother, do for your son what the 
 uncrowned mother of the Gracchi did for hers, so that he 
 may be as noble as either of them, and more fortunate 
 than both." So, my dear Adelhard, would I speak almost 
 in public, in the hope of perhaps cheering some princess 
 who has thus acted. 
 
 It were also desirable if kings' children could associate 
 with their equals in the school-room ; — I mean if there 
 were a school for princes, in a higher sense than that near 
 Naumburg. We, linked together in a community of 
 children, were all educated under the mutual influence of 
 equals ; the heir to the throne sits in the room alone with 
 his tutor. Princes only learn the art of war with an 
 army of fellow-students ; perhaps that is an additional 
 reason why they understand and like it best. 
 
 I am not without the expectation that you attempt to 
 preserve Friedanot, although he is now more than eleven 
 years old, from poison to a childlike mind by obliging 
 him to pay deference to age and merit. As yet he is 
 merely a subject, like his tutor and even his mother. 
 This is a matter of great importance ; for the child who 
 does not respect grown-up people as such, readily enters 
 the path of contempt for his fellow-men, — a vice very pre- 
 valent on the throne. If rank, especially a prospective 
 one, outweigh the man to whom properly he ought to 
 bow, in after years the masses of citizens will, in his 
 princely eye, resemble those stags' heads in Fontainebleau
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 289 
 
 under which was inscribed — " Such or such a Louis did 
 me the honour of shooting me;" and the smaller select 
 number will be like certain royal stag-hounds in the same 
 country, which a courtier addressed as " Vous, Monsieur 
 Chien," though in former times the term " monsieur " was 
 only applied to the saints, and afterwards was refused 
 even to the five directors of Paris. Since in the eye of 
 princes, as in that of the law, or still better in the union 
 of both, individual peculiarities are lost in one living 
 mass of souls, it is an easy change for a crowned despiser 
 of humanity to regard those souls as the mere mechanism 
 of peace and war, till one man only seems to exist — 
 himself. 
 
 Therefore, let a prince, as long as he is a child, always 
 measure merit by inches ; for inches are to him yet as 
 though they were long years, and years as munificent 
 gifts. It is certainly a trifle that you, as I venture tc 
 guess, contrary to custom, do not permit the servants to 
 help the prince first when old^r guests are at table ; but 
 the opposite method would not be a trifle. A Louis the 
 Fifteenth (how great a love of children that monarch had 
 in the days of his innocence !) may always give his play- 
 fellows an order of blue and white ribbon,* and a medal 
 with the picture of the pavilion in which they played ; 
 but the child should not receive the ribbon of an order 
 appropriate to mature years as a leading-string ; still less 
 should he, as the monarch I have just named and his 
 predecessor, Louis the Fourteenth, hold a lit de justice 
 almost in his cradle, or, like other royal children, grasp 
 the staff of a commander in the hands which yet feel the- 
 rod. Why might not as well little ministers and presi- 
 dents surround the throne of the royal child, and little 
 ambassadors of the highest rank accompany him in his 
 carriage? This degradation of the state and of human 
 nature, works like a destructive poison on the excitable 
 mind of the child. To this cause may be traced that 
 premature, worn-out, shallow-cunning, cool expression on 
 the faces of so many royal children, — an expression com- 
 pounded of the presumption of rank and youth, and the 
 weakness of age. 
 
 * Fragmens de Lettres orig. de Mad. Elizabeth de Baviere, etc. i. 253 
 i. U
 
 290 JEAN PADL FEIEDEICH RICHTER. [FRAG. V. 
 
 Strange that, while writing this, your last letter but 
 one, to which you referred in your last epistle, has just 
 come to hand. I now understand much. Your recent 
 Friedanot's festival might really be celebrated as the 
 alliance between my prophecies and your rules; or as 
 the passage from what has preceded to what is about to 
 follow, from negative to positive education. 
 
 To proceed, then : only princes and women can be 
 educated for a determinate future ; but all other men for 
 one which is uncertain, for the empire of chance in their 
 aims and ranks. Now this is the living spirit of your 
 life, and of that entrusted to you. The education of a 
 prince, like his position in the state, is the only one of the 
 kind. As your pupil can never think too modestly of 
 himself, so can he never think too proudly of his dignity ; 
 the reverse of this produces misery everywhere. His 
 office, a high office at the altar of the state, demands from 
 a fallible human form the powerful agency of a god. He 
 is not merely the first servant of the state, but its very 
 heart, which alternately receives and sends out its life 
 blood ; he is its centre of gravity which gives form to its 
 varied powers. Then let German philosophy show him 
 in his high station something different from what the 
 persiflage of French philosophy and that of worldliness 
 exhibits ; which endeavours to represent the throne as the 
 highest heritable place at court, or as a regency with a 
 handsome income, and the country as a vast regiment at 
 once ridiculous and useful. Ah ! verily the ancient error 
 of regarding princes as the sent and anointed of God 
 (which in fact every man is, only in different degrees — 
 the man of genius, for instance, or every rational creature 
 as compared with the beasts) is much nobler, and more 
 efficacious for good, than the modern error of declaring 
 them only to be the ambassadors of selfish extortions, that 
 is, of the devil. But let German earnestness of heart 
 show the young eagle-prince his wings, his mountains, 
 and his sun. "When some warm, benevolent, but too rash, 
 genius of the earth saw the erring efforts of humanity to 
 shape its course, and how, broken up among individuals, 
 it, like the sea, only raised waves, but gave them no 
 direction, he longed to give the ocean a boundary and a
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 291 
 
 rapid current ; then he called up the first great king to 
 collect the scattered forces and guide them to one end. 
 Moreover, this genius would have experienced the bliss of 
 seeing nations linked together round our globe like the 
 glittering girdle of Venus, had he not forgotten something 
 which another and better genius, who always permits 
 more men of genius than spiritual monarchs to appear at 
 the same time, remembered. I mean, if he had taken care 
 that a continued succession of good kings had drawn a 
 holy family circle round the globe, and described a ruling 
 line of beauty, happiness and honour through all time. 
 Oh ! what might not poor humanity have become if, like 
 the thirty popes who, one after another, continued building 
 the great cathedral at Eome, a contemporaneous and suc- 
 cessive band of princes had, joining temple to temple, so 
 urged on the great temple-building of humanity! Can 
 humanity blame fate for opening to it, through one indi- 
 vidual, the way to the highest elevation or the lowest 
 degradation, when one reckons the number of princes 
 with free power to be the leaders of their age and country, 
 and, like many flat glasses placed at once before the sun, 
 fancies them united into one celestial luminary ? It is not 
 Heaven's fault, but man's, if they have more readily con- 
 verted themselves into the war-gods and scourges of states, 
 than into their protecting deities. 
 
 I would, therefore, imitate you and teach the prince 
 his dignity ; because only he adorns the station who 
 believes himself to be adorned by it. Princes are apt to 
 think meanly of princes, as mountains look little when 
 viewed from mountains. 
 
 I would indeed, as your fellow-labourer, prepare yearly, 
 — say, on his birth-day, — a feast of dedication for the 
 young heir-apparent, a rehearsal of his coronation, in 
 which the holiness of his future, the inviolableness of his 
 soul, should be gloriously and intimately presented to the 
 young eye longing after virtue, under the triumphal arch 
 of great and free nations, in sight of the arms and banners 
 of his ancestors and of all past ages. On such a day he 
 might also look down into the abyss of fallen nations. 
 Let him learn by heart Plutarch's histories of the great, 
 more useful to him than the more recent ; and let him 
 
 u 2
 
 292 JEAN PAUL FEIEDKICH RICHTER. [FRAG. V. 
 
 every day pray out of the meditations ot Antoninus. 
 Let that noble order, — the name, Father of his country, 
 which the great Camillus first bore, -as founder of the 
 order, and subsequently Cicero, the enemy of Catiline, as 
 a member, until it lost its glory and sank down upon a 
 Csesar, an Augustus, and such-like men, — burn before 
 him like an illumination on the seven hills of freedom. 
 He must not consider himself as a commander-in-chief of 
 all the forces, nor as a minister of foreign affairs, nor as 
 president of the council, nor as chief justice, nor as a 
 rector magnificus of all the sciences, but as the protector 
 of his country, in the highest sense of that word ; as one 
 who has his eye on every department in the state, like 
 the true judge of works of art who can appreciate every 
 form of beauty. He should be a Jupiter who bears his 
 satellites and his courtly ring at once round himself and 
 round their common sun. 
 
 " According to the usual requirements of learned men," 
 you write, " a prince who would govern well ought to 
 unite in his own person the knowledge of all his ministers, 
 bo as to be able to judge of all their affairs. But the 
 knowledge of things, which cannot all be embraced by 
 one individual, is less necessary and less possible than the 
 knowledge of men by whom they must be proposed and 
 executed. Consequently, if the prince have only character, 
 and if that have matured steadily and purely under the 
 eye of his teacher, he will be able both to penetrate into 
 matters and to use vigorous measures." You might have 
 copied this out of my own soul ! If men have been easily 
 able to blind us, yet, in a hundred cases, some weakness 
 in our heart, rather than any weakness in our eyes, has 
 been first to blame. Among princes a pure and firm 
 character is especially needed for seeing and acting ; for 
 on the throne the nerve of sight is easily transformed 
 into the motive-nerve of the muscles. Mere goodness 
 without character will, or may, be governed and used 
 by all the enemies of a people ; whereas character without 
 goodness can only be acted on by one enemy of the 
 people — itself. 
 
 The whole present time is a regicide of character, espe- 
 cially of all healthiness of character ; for over it poisonous
 
 CHAP. I.J LEVANA. 293 
 
 victims are passed to bodies and souls, and for the sacrifice 
 of a god a man is offered up. Hence so many marrowless 
 but sceptre-griping arms ; hence the life of so many 
 princes is but a passive " council of five hundred ;" and 
 even good may only be done and published by permission 
 of the subjects. 
 
 So much the better, dear Adelhard, that you endeavour 
 to give your pupil a strong body ; only watch over him 
 till he has passed through the usual powder mines of royal 
 youth, — the capitals, for instance, of the grand tour, a 
 few middle-aged women, and his majority. 
 
 From your letter I can perceive the truth of the sup- 
 position I cherish, that you do not recommend or cultivate 
 in Friedanot any active love of the arts of painting, music 
 or architecture, lest, as you say, " he should convert govern- 
 ment into a subservient art." Nero, truly, had a genius 
 for art, — as Frederick the Great had a genius for govern- 
 ment, — his whole life, from the time of his subjection to 
 the laws of art,* even in the midst of his cruelties and 
 down to his last sigh, testifies as much feeling for art as 
 absence of feeling for humanity. If, for instance, a prince 
 devote himself — not to adduce more ancient, still less 
 modern, examjiles — like the Macedonian king Europus, 
 to making candles (in a metaphorical sense that would be 
 good) ; or, like the Parthian kings, to sharpening swords 
 (that were good in a different way) ; or, like Attalus 
 Philomatur, to the cultivation of poisonous plants f (this 
 only admits of no good metaphorical sense) the whole 
 court, suppose that of Attalus, would be converted into a 
 garden, and every one would seize the royal gardener bv 
 his weak side, — his botanical mania. All courtiers wish 
 their king to love something besides government and his 
 country. Every great lord, according to the law, must 
 practise some handicraft ; but only in the same way that 
 every Mussulman, and every Eabbi among the Jews, must 
 understand some art, and not, as Montesquieu and some 
 others suppose, in order that he may refrain from strang- 
 ling people for pastime : for, as an inspired person, h is 
 
 * He obeyed the orchestra-regulation, never to sit down, to have no 
 occasion tor poc];ct-liaudkerchief or spittoon, &c. Tac. Ann. xiv. 15. 
 t Alex, ab Alex. iii. 21.
 
 294 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH BICHTEE. [FEAG. V„ 
 
 allowed free by his religion, fourteen of such, for slaughter 
 every day.* I should suppose that he could not claim, by 
 club-law of his handicraft, any more for his sword. 
 
 Am I not, then, agreed in opinion with you when I say 
 that princes need no subordinate pursuit any more than 
 ancient statues needed the adornment of colours,? How 
 much useless knowledge about history, languages and art, 
 might and ought to be spared them ! 
 
 A general love of science, like an alternation between 
 two heights, enriches and refreshes royalty, as was exem- 
 plified in Frederick the Great. There is a wider prospect 
 from Parnassus than from the throne. I wish that even 
 there, as in the high schools, reading and learning were 
 called government. And what greater ground for alarm 
 would there be, if the king were president of the great 
 academy of all the sciences, than that favourites and 
 courtiers would become members of it, and understand a 
 great deal ? And is it not very much better that he, like 
 Louis XIV., should expend sixty-six thousand three hun- 
 dred livres in pensions to learned men, than that, like the 
 same king, he should waste thirty-three millions of livres 
 in the mere lead of the palace at Versailles and its water- 
 works ? f Openly tell your Friedanot that in every 
 country, where the press is free as well as where it is 
 submitted to censorship, there is no one to whom so many 
 books are forbidden as to the king himself; the censors 
 will scarcely allow him a newspaper. Although the king 
 need not know so much of law as his lord chancellor, nor 
 so much political economy as his prime minister, he yet 
 must know as much or more of the art of war than his 
 first general. This union of sceptre and sword is unmis- 
 takeable. The royal infant even is consecrated to no other 
 inaugural post of honour than that of war. A helmeted 
 preface (prcefatio galeata) precedes his life ; he passes his 
 mornings in the arsenal. No prince scruples to serve in 
 war among the soldiers of a greater foreign prince than 
 himself, and to fight and bleed for him as unconditionally 
 as his meanest subject ; but he would consider it beneath 
 
 * The Prince Kantemir's History of the Ottoman Empire, in 
 Btruve's Hebenstunden, v. 
 t Pieces inte'ressantes et peu connues, par. M. D. L. P., I. 1805.
 
 CHAP. I.J LEVANA. 295 
 
 his dignity to be the same monarch's prime minister, 
 president of his council, or even general-in-chief of his 
 forces. 
 
 Whence arises, and why is there, this equality of royal 
 and warlike honour in this and other points, as if the 
 prince were only the first servant of the state by being 
 its foremost fighter ? 
 
 Voltaire's saying, " The first king was a successful 
 soldier," and the corollary to be drawn thence that "A 
 successful king is the first soldier," does not sufficiently 
 explain his position in a state by his position before thee 
 was a state. Moreover, war is now only the exception, 
 and peace the rule ; and however much the country be 
 turned into an arsenal, and the throne into a fortress, yet 
 preparations for peace must be carried on as long and as 
 industriously as preparations for war. But the prepon- 
 derance of the arts of war over those of peace, in all per- 
 sons destined for the throne, may be explained and justified 
 by two totally different reasons and sentiments. In the 
 first instance, the mutual defence of individuals formed 
 the state ; and afterwards, as each nation experienced the 
 necessity of defending itself against the aggressions of 
 other nations, the king seemed to perform his duty to the 
 state best by watching over its frontiers, not by becoming 
 chief architect, food-provider, farmer, coiner, and regulator 
 of its domestic affairs; he had rather to act externally by 
 the law of the stronger, than internally by the power of 
 the affections. 
 
 One evil was a necessary consequence of this state of 
 things, that nations, — which, in the last resort, only con- 
 sist of individuals — owing to this love of war in their 
 governors, fell into that very condition out of which the 
 individuals had endeavoured to extricate themselves by 
 combining to form a state. So little yet does man regard 
 the interests of man ! Confined to his clod of earth, like 
 the insect to its leaf, he does not perceive that every war 
 on the face of the globe is, in fact, a civil war ; and a dark 
 6ea, in a spiritual sense as truly as in physical fact, gives, 
 by its concealing cloak, the appearance of separate en- 
 chanting islands to the girdle of mountains which sur- 
 rounds the world.
 
 296 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [FEAG. V. 
 
 But the monarch has a yet weightier ground for his 
 love of war ; the sentiment that all dignity arises from 
 moral worth, and that the chief basis of manly dignity 
 consists in courage or honour. The brave prince covers 
 his head and his inner man with a crown different from 
 that which rests on his outward form. Courage or honour 
 is expected in every man, but not talent. The prince, 
 like the first nobleman in the highest rank of nobility, 
 must oppose his enemy with the courageoiis point of 
 honour, as though it were a bright focus of burning rays. 
 Courage is a virtue of no doubtful seeming ; there can be 
 no contradiction, no diversity of opinion, about it. A 
 prince who exposes his body, carefully protected and con- 
 secrated by the state, as though it were a common one, to 
 the rank-scorning bullet, against which, in a foreign land, 
 his crown is no helmet, but only a mark, gathers laurels 
 with his own hand in the eyes of thousands. But the 
 honour of peaceful talents is not so uncontestedly ascribed 
 to him, because many a prince has been a sun which 
 the minister must surround with his clouds ere it emitted 
 beams.* 
 
 I grant that war is accompanied with certain by- 
 charms. It is well minutely to dissect them before 4rim 
 to whom you would fain render them hateful. A king 
 likes to govern, especially when he can do so easily and 
 absolutely ; on the drum he finds a moveable throne ; and 
 the art of war is surrounded with a poetical halo ; it 
 is more definite and more obvious than the art of govern- 
 ment, and the movements of the general's baton are more 
 clearly marked by the eyes of men than are those of the 
 sceptre. 
 
 The powder-mill of war moves on the wheels of fortune. 
 As the southern promontory of Africa, so here the head- 
 land of storms is called the Cape of Good Hope. And to 
 what lottery could a ruler more cheerfully subscribe than 
 to that of war — especially because he only ventures foreign 
 possessions, and wins no part of his home inheritance, 
 because he wins the whole ? Further, nothing irritates a 
 youth so much as to be obliged to mount the throne when 
 
 * According to Herschel, only the cloud-covering of tbe sun givefl 
 light, and the body of suu only spots.
 
 CHAP. I.J LEVANA. 297 
 
 of mature age, and then find his whole life, even down to 
 the horizon, marked out and enclosed. The royal youth 
 longs, in the first place, to do something in life ; and, in 
 the second, to render himself immortal by it. Now, for 
 the accomplishment of the first wish, what means lie so 
 near him, or seem so glorious to his fancy, as war, which 
 opens to him a career in foreign countries ? or what can 
 gratify the second desire more easily than the field of 
 battle, which matures in one day the precious flower of 
 immortality, which would require a whole life to blossom 
 on the throne? The noble Henry IV. of France said, 
 " I would rather gird on my armour than make laws." 
 It is on the same principle that novices in poetry, and 
 novices on the dramatic stage, make their first essays in 
 the horrible, the glory arising from which is easily and 
 quickly gained. 
 
 I think you say in one of your letters that the satiety 
 princes experience of the praise and emulation of inferiors 
 is apt to engender a warlike longing for a contest with 
 kings and enemies before the eyes of all Europe. Very 
 true ! The poisonous air of courts readily communicates 
 that yawning fever of which so many died in Italy 
 during the seventh century. Men seek to clear the air 
 with gunpowder. 
 
 But how can a young prince ever behold the dark side 
 of the glittering form of war, that hellish stream which 
 surrounds the living earth and is peopled with the dead ? 
 For it is in truth necessary that he should do so, especially 
 for Germany, which is becoming more and more the Hyde 
 Park and Bois de Boulogne to which Europe resorts when 
 it resolves to fight. Will you let him hear the chorus of 
 all wise men and poets cursing war, the last ghost and 
 savage ariny of barbarism ? Will you, before war, preach 
 such a sermon as this on peace to the king who is about 
 to hurl his torch-like missive to kindle the fire of war ? 
 " Consider well : one step beyond your frontiers changes 
 the whole face of two empires ; thine own is consumed 
 behind thee, thine enemy's before thee. That moment an 
 earthquake takes possession of both, and labours to the 
 destruction of «both ; all ancient law courts, all judgment- 
 seats, are overturned ; heights and depths are confounded
 
 298 JEAN PAUL miEDEICH PJCHTER. [FRAG. V. 
 
 together. It is a last day, full of rising sinners and 
 falling stars ; it is the tribunal at which the devil judges 
 the world, where bodies condemn spirits, physical force 
 the power of love. Consider it, prince ! Every soldier 
 in this empire of lawlessness becomes thy crowned brother 
 in a foreign land, bearing the sword of justice without her 
 balance, and governing more despotically than thyself. 
 Every meanest drudge in the enemy's ranks is thy king 
 and judge, carrying in his hand an axe and a halter for 
 thee. The arbitrary powers of force and chance only sit 
 upon the double throne of conscience and of knowledge. 
 Two nations are converted, half into slave dealers, half 
 into slaves, mingled without order among one another. 
 In the eyes of higher beings, the human race has become 
 an assemblage of lawless, conscienceless, stone-blind beasts 
 and machines, which robs, devours, strikes, bleeds, and 
 dies. Even granting that justice be on thy side, yet by 
 the first line of a manifesto, as by an earthquake, thou 
 lettest loose the chained devils of injustice out of their 
 prison-house ! The dread despotism thus enthroned is so 
 great that little misdeeds never reach thy ears, and great 
 crimes only by their frequent repetition. For the per- 
 mission to slay and take possession includes in itself all 
 lesser crimes. Even the unarmed citizen's voice is heard 
 amidst the screams and discord, exchanging all his plans 
 of life for a few moments' indulgence and lawless freedom, 
 treated by the allied soldiers as partly, and by their oppo- 
 nents as altogether an enemy. Think of all this, prince, 
 ere thou hide thy light amid the locust-clouds of war, 
 and ere thou make the warriors of a stranger the judges 
 and executioners in thy hitherto justly governed land, or 
 ere thou give thine own soldiers such power in the con- 
 quered country ! " 
 
 At all events, much might be done. We should endea- 
 vour to verify the expressions of a history or a newspaper, 
 so short and so lightly passed over, " Battlefield, distress 
 of the besieged, a hundred waggons of wounded ;" which 
 by their perpetual repetition have passed from living 
 figures to paintings, and lastly, to mere sounds ; we should 
 picture them in all their terrible details, in the suffering 
 which one waggon bears and fearfully increases, in the one
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 299 
 
 agonizing day of a single fainting and dying soldier. Not 
 only history, in which all ages and nations bleed, but our 
 common newspapers and way of speaking, and the scien- 
 tific appearance of warlike preparations for surgical assist- 
 ance, change wounds into words, and the monstrous amount 
 of suffering into letters. Hence, the same minister who 
 tranquilly observes the hygrometer of war's bloody rain, 
 and cheerfully orders a bath of blood for two nations, is 
 overcome by the wounds and tears of a stage play, merely 
 because the poet's art transforms the words back to their 
 living meaning. A prince whose tendencies you feared 
 might be conducted over a bloody battle-field with the 
 same warning advantage as accrues to children of a dif- 
 ferent class who are led through a hospital. But God 
 grant that humanity may ever fail to offer such schools 
 and such remedies ! 
 
 Properly — and this might be instructively said to a 
 prince — the people only should decide upon war with 
 another nation, that is, upon a return to the first state of 
 nature ; especially as they only gather its bitter, not its 
 sweet, fruits; and should determine whether they are 
 willing to give themselves up a» a sacrifice to the storms 
 and tempests of war. It is a crying sin against Heaven 
 that one king, for an offensive expression from another 
 king, should involve two nations in mortal strife. In 
 reading modern history one shudders to see how the 
 merest trifles have kindled the fires of war; how a 
 woman's pin, or an ambassador's finger, has been the 
 conductor of a thunder-storm ravaging whole countries. 
 The wars of modern times ought certainly to strike sol- 
 diers only, not the ranks of unarmed citizens. When the 
 more active part of the latter disturb the operations of 
 the former, as in shooting from houses, they at once 
 appeal to the right of distinction, and proceed to attack 
 and punish them ; but why should the unarmed classes, 
 without the advantages, yet participate in all the suffer- 
 ings, plunder, imprisonment, &c, of those who are armed ? 
 One or all of these three remedies must be applied to this 
 terrible coil, in order that the future may atone for the 
 past : either that naval conflicts may be carried on without 
 letters of marque, and that in land fights the soldiers may
 
 300 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. V. 
 
 be placed in some desert, as the scene of their many- voiced 
 and many-handed duel; or that, as in republics which 
 have fallen to destruction or risen to an unearthly life, 
 eveiy citizen should be a soldier, and consequently every 
 soldier a citizen ; or, finally, that the eternal banner of 
 peace should hang down from heaven, and flutter in the 
 pure ether above the earth. 
 
 I have an idea that either you, or one of your friends, 
 once declared that history — the long war report and 
 bulletin of humanity — imparted the infection of war to 
 young princes. But I would almost trust to it as the 
 remedy for the love of war. Charles XII. of Sweden 
 could scarcely have imbibed his passion for glory and 
 conquest from the mere perusal of Curtius's Life of 
 Alexander, since Alexander had the same passion without 
 having read his biography; and Cassar, also, without 
 knowing more of Curtius than his hero. In history may 
 be found the test of the anchors and swords of sea and 
 land fights. It alone shows to the monarch, thirsting 
 for glory, how little mere bravery appertains to glory ; 
 for a cowardly nation is more rare upon the earth than 
 a brave man. What nation, in ancient or modern times, 
 is not brave ? At present, for instance, all Europe is so ; 
 Bussians, Danes, Swedes, Austrians, English, Hessians, 
 French, Bavarians, and Prussians, all are brave. The 
 lower Bome's free spirit sank, the more wildly and 
 vehemently rose the merely brave spirit ; Catiline, Caesar, 
 Augustus, had conquerors for their servants. The fre- 
 quent arming of the ancient slaves, as of the modern 
 beggars, testifies against the value of the common bravery 
 of fists and wounds. Iphicrates, the Athenian, said that 
 the best soldiers were those who loved plunder and 
 violence ; and General Fischer has added to these, vaga- 
 bonds. Cannot a monarch wish to shine upon posterity 
 with something else than the showy tiger-spots of a 
 conqueror, in which the Timurs, Attilas, Dessalines, and 
 other scourges of God, or knouts of the devil, outdo him ? 
 How coldly does one walk in history over the countless 
 battle-fields which fill the earth with beds of death! 
 And with what curses does one hasten past the crown 
 which, like the ajutage, or leaden head of a pip© raised
 
 CHAP. I.] LEYANA. 301 
 
 by the upward gushing of a fountain, is only kept up by 
 starting streams of blood ! But where an eternal glory 
 hovers round some heroes, as those of Marathon's plain 
 and Thermopylae's pass, there other spirits fought and 
 fell, — heavenly visions of the courage of freedom. And 
 whatever individual stands greatly forth in. history and 
 fills its spaces, does it not from any pyramid of skulls 
 erected on battle-fields ; but a great soul hovers there, 
 like the form of an unearthly world glorified in the night, 
 and touches the stars and the earth. 
 
 For there is a nobler courage, which once, though not 
 long, Sparta, Athens and Rome possessed ; the courage of 
 peace and of freedom, the bravery which showed itself at 
 home. Many a nation, a cowardly slave in its own 
 country but a bold hero out of it, resembles the falcon 
 (though become tame, unlike it, rather by sleeping thaa 
 by sleeplessness) which is carried hooded on the wrist of 
 the falconer, until left to its ancient freedom, a momen- 
 tary wooer of the air, it boldly and bravely vanquishes 
 some new bird and then returns with it to the slavish 
 earth. But the truly, because freely, brave people carries 
 on its war of freedom at home, against every hand which 
 would stay its flight or blind its eye ; this, indeed, is the 
 longest and bravest war, and the only one which admits 
 no truce. Just so brave, and in a higher sense, may a 
 monarch be. Let the great ideal of art, to unite dignity 
 with repose, be the ideal of the throne. To extinguish 
 the flames of war is more worthy of a king, as it is more 
 difficult, than to kindle them. If this bravery of peace 
 be already secured, whereby alone a monarch can dis- 
 tinguish himself in history — then that of war, if neces- 
 sary, becomes easy, and every wound glorious. Hence, 
 the great men of antiquity are rather distinguished by 
 their character than by their deeds, rather by the trophies 
 of peace than those of war : the plough-heroes of battle- 
 fields by an intensity of love, which, as in Phocion, 
 sowed the steep cliffs which bound the mighty ocean 
 with balmy spice plants ; which in Cato the younger 
 loved and bewailed his brother with all a woman's tender- 
 ness, and caused Epaminondas to remember the duties of 
 a host even on the scaffold ; which made Brutua a tender
 
 302 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. V. 
 
 husband, Alexander a trustful friend, and Gustavus a 
 Christian. 
 
 It seems to me that a young prince should view the 
 future, which he helps to form, from this side and through 
 this opening in history ; in this manner he must learn 
 to subject the inferior to the nobler kind of courage. 
 Certainly a king who avoided war from cowardice would 
 be more dangerous — especially in the present position of 
 Germany — than one who sought it from fool-hardiness; 
 and, moreover, he would be less easily cured. The sceptre 
 resembles Saturn's scythe, which is at once the emblem of 
 harvest time and of death. 
 
 The thing that grieves me when I consider the excel- 
 lence of the education you, dear Adelhard, impart, is that it 
 will be of little or no use, unless you are ennobled, or unless 
 the prince might remain at home. I mean this ; I cannot 
 but lament that he must grasp the pilgrim's staff before 
 the sceptre, and must pass through the three kingdoms ot 
 nature, or three courts of the grand tour, Italy, England 
 and France, in order to return different from what he 
 started ! Enough cannot be said in favour of travel, but 
 not of early travel. Let the man, not the boy, travel ; 
 let his travelling-cap be the crown. If he go uncrowned, 
 sent as a travelling fortune to the fair of Paris, we know 
 — by the example of his noble companions — what, not to 
 speak of ruined health, he will bring back ; namely, a 
 mind full of contempt for his little inland patrimony, full 
 of plans for miniature imitations, and of acquired notions 
 whose importation the Prussian Lycurgus and the Spartan 
 Frederick the Second prevented, the one into the nobility, 
 the other into the people, by forbidding travelling. If 
 we wish, by imitation, to give the dominion over our 
 domestic affairs to foreign countries, which by treaties of 
 peace — those of Westphalia and Luneville, for instance — 
 have already quite sufficiently ruled and changed the 
 constitution of the Germanic empire, I really think we 
 burden ourselves with too great a weight of gratitude, 
 especially when we consider the rareness of the oppor- 
 tunities for requital. If foreign travel is indispensable 
 to mental growth why do we see so few Dauphins, so 
 few Princes of Wales, of Asturia, or of Brazil, in ouj
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 303 
 
 hotels ? If the coat of worldly varnish given hy strangers 
 cannot he done without, fortunately his court will he so 
 frequently visited by so many who will gladly linger 
 there a long time that he may easily remain at home. 
 For the same reason, among the artisans of Berlin, 
 Konigsberg and other large towns, the sons of master 
 workmen are not required to travel like other journeymen. 
 
 But there is one country which an heir-apparent may 
 minutely survey in his travels — it is his own ; and the 
 deeper he penetrates into the lower classes the more 
 productive of benefit will his journey be. Like an iEneas, 
 or a Dante, he will return a wiser man out of this lower 
 world into the upper regions of the throne. A prince 
 cannot picture to himself hunger as any thing other than 
 a rare gift of God and of the stomach ; or labour, than as 
 a hawking-match to procure it ; or the people, which 
 experiences enough of both, as any thing different from 
 the pampered crowd of his court servants. If in Corea 
 the people must shut their doors and windows when the 
 king is passing by, we may be sure that he will also close 
 his from the eyes of his people : and so one invisibility 
 produces the other. 
 
 If he be crowned and married, and about as old or even 
 older than Joseph II., or Peter the Great, or Popes on 
 their travels, or the ancient Romans, whose proconsulships 
 were also journeys, he will receive greater advantage 
 from his travels than he would even as his own am- 
 bassador ; for he will see every thing more accurately, 
 more quickly, and be less taxed for doing so. Boling- 
 broke tells us that if at forty we read again some of our 
 childhood's books we shall find every thing new : even 
 so, if at the same age we revisit the land of our youth, we 
 shall find a new world previously overlooked. A young 
 prince, perhaps, brings home with him out of some foreign 
 country a faded garland, as a memento of rare flowers of 
 happiness ; a prince of mature age brings also the seeds 
 of those flowers. When the warm-hearted, manly, true 
 German duke of Meiningen travelled, the year before his 
 death, to one of the southern cities of Germany, he did 
 not visit courts, balls, princes and women ; but machines, 
 manufactories, soup-kitchens, mines, artists and thei/
 
 304: JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEE. [FRAG. V. 
 
 works, financiers and their tables — ah ! why was he 
 doomed so shortly afterwards to make the longest journey 
 to the most distant country ? A noble prince who loves 
 his people can never tread that path too late. But, if 
 your Friedanot must go on his travels before he ascends 
 the throne, I would wish you to be ennobled and to 
 accompany him. Every royal tutor should receive nobility 
 from his connection with a prince, just as iron becomes 
 magnetic by contact with a magnet, in order that he may 
 afterwards be employed at the dinner or card-table, when, 
 otherwise, his place must be occupied by some one whose 
 rank admits him to the royal table. How happy is a 
 princess whose Orbilia and La plus Bonne is, from the 
 commencement, of such high rank that she may ever 
 remain near her ! " Turba medicorum perdidit Caesarem :" * 
 this epitaph on Adrian is also true of the multitude of 
 " soul curers." 
 
 Many of your regulations for pi inces may be readily 
 guessed, because they must also have a place in the educa- 
 tion of every child ; only that qualities which the latter 
 must use as small coin in every-day life, are required 
 from princes as gold for the mint and for the adornment 
 of the palace. In the first place I rank keeping his word. 
 Princes rarely break their word, except to whole countries : 
 their own and foreign lands. The word given to one 
 man, themselves perhaps excepted, they always keep. 
 Chamfort remarks that, up to the ministry of the Cardinal 
 de Lomenie, fifty-six public breaches of faith were reckoned 
 in Henry IV. These may readily be explained by the 
 rarefying power of space, which, far more than time, 
 immediately decomposes the strongest powers ; as, for 
 instance, electricity, attraction, philanthropj^, freedom, and 
 a promise. Distance, for instance, inconceivably diminishes 
 British freedom even in Ireland, as it formerly did in North 
 America ; but at sea and in the colonies, it is, by distance, 
 rarefied to such a degree that only the quick eye of a 
 captain or a nabob can distinguish it from absolute 
 slavery. In the same way a promise is so weakened by 
 distance that even a peace concluded a centary or so 
 
 * " The multitude of doctors killed Caesar.""
 
 2HAP. I.] LEYANA. 30il 
 
 before, by the naval powers of Europe, could not avert 
 war from India. Physics, as already said, show the cause 
 of this phenomenon. This fact, perhaps, renders a lecture- 
 room and teacher for speaking truth more necessary to 
 an heir-apparent. Indeed, this speech is quite as inrpor- 
 tant as the Lusatian or Italian, which, according to the 
 golden bull,* every future elector, king of Bohemia, and 
 pfalz-graf of the Ehine, had to learn in his seventh year; 
 or even as the French, though no bull has declared that 
 essential. 
 
 Koyal truthfulness towards his own and other nations 
 is not only, as others have said, a monarch's highest 
 policy, but also, and tor that very reason, the most diffi- 
 cult. Upright minds are like straight roads, which seem 
 to the eye scarce half so long as those which wind artfully 
 about; but their true length is found by a nearer exa- 
 mination. Only a prince who cherishes noble and well 
 considered desires will choose to reveal them ; as it is only 
 cut diamonds of the purest water which can be set so that 
 the light may shine through. 
 
 Under all treaties of war and peace there lies a higher 
 bond of union than power — because without it they could 
 not even be formed — it is reliance on a given word, on 
 the power of character, not on land and sea forces. But 
 in history, which else accurately lays before us from 
 month to month the cost of the new triumphal arches for 
 fresh victors, there is nothing more rare than an honour- 
 able niche devoted to a king who speaks truly lor the 
 present, and prophesies truly for the future. Boyal truth- 
 fulness presupposes force of character, resolute courage, 
 and just strength of will. Finally, where this oak forest 
 stands and grows around a throne, there is the ancient 
 German sanctuary ; the throne within its shadow works 
 miracles, and the people round its base pray to heaven for 
 protection. You and I hear such a forest rustling so near 
 our study that we could count its leaves. 
 
 Baireuth, January 1806. 
 I have again unpacked my goods because peace con • 
 tinues ; sc that our meeting, as well as the review and 
 
 * Aur. Bull. c. 30, § 2. 
 I. X
 
 3C6 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. |>RAG. V. 
 
 ratification of my predictions, must be postponed to a 
 more favourable season. In conclusion, and in jest, I 
 append a few aphorisms on education suitable for insertion 
 in albums, which I prepare from time to time for the 
 various royal and noble tutors who visit my study, so as 
 to have a few useful impromptu thoughts ready to be 
 written down when they hand me their albums. The 
 following thoughts have not yet been inserted in such 
 b joks : — ■ 
 
 To form a brave man, educate boldly ! Brave painters 
 alone, says Lavater, can hit a brave face. 
 
 Not without reason do the rarest flowers borrow their 
 names from princes. Power cannot have too gentle an 
 expression. The look of a king is itself a deed. Conse- 
 quently a king can choose whether he will all day kill 
 
 or make alive. The sceptre should not be a rod of 
 
 authority; but, like a magnetic needle, should assume tbe 
 
 form of a lily. It is easier, like the tragic Crebillon, 
 
 to obtain the surname of the terrible, than, like Virgil, to 
 
 merit the epithet of the maidenly. A flute lay side 
 
 by side in his tent with Frederick the Great's baton 
 of command. Let every prince regard this as an 
 allegory.* 
 
 He who mistrusts humanity is quite as often deceived 
 as he who trusts men. The wicked and despotic favourite 
 always advises a king to rule for himself, not to let 
 others govern for him ; to see and hear for himself (at 
 least to see and hear the favourite), and not to be a mere 
 repeater on which an external hammer strikes the time, 
 but to be a church bell, which sounds with its own 
 tongue, and which the favourite rings whether for funerals 
 or weddings. 
 
 Tutor ! Have at heart no work of your pupil so much 
 as love of work : it is this he shoidd learn by that. And, 
 unless he learn to be a lover of work, he will in after 
 
 * Since these four thoughts only express a fifth, which is the same 
 they will be inserted in four different albums.
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 307 
 
 years (as Vopisous tells us the Emperor Carinus did') keep 
 a servant to write bis signature; or, if he write it himself, 
 he will do so like that self-made slave of his own servants, 
 Philip the Fifth of Spain. 
 
 On the throne everything, even time — as in Basle — is 
 wanted to be an hour earlier than it really is : thought, 
 consequently, long before reflection, Koyal impromptus, 
 as the winged seeds of action, are always dangerous ; they 
 often make long diets and long judgment-days necessary, 
 and have to count forced imposts instead of freely granted 
 tributes. How many subjects has a hon mot killed ! How 
 many suggestions of the wicked one have been acted on 
 by baste! He who needs proofs has but to inquire of the 
 chief justice in history. What more excellent object, I 
 ask, can a teacher set before himself than to accustom his 
 pupil never to say an important yes or no, never to express 
 a like or a dislike, without taking an hour's respite to 
 consider the question, request, or sin ? With such a letter 
 of grace (moratorium) he might write himself a brevet of 
 infallibility. But why speak I of princes? Every one is 
 in this position; only that the high rank of monarchs 
 fearfully increases the rolling, avalanche-like, consequences 
 of every sound. And it is precisely in the higher ranks 
 that men perversely attend more to deeds expressed in 
 words — hon mots, impromptus, &c, than to words expressed 
 in deeds — decretals, resolutions, &c. ; and take time to 
 consider a jest, though not a serious matter. Let the 
 teacher invert this inversion. . . . Dear Adelhard, I am 
 myself this moment guilty of improvising ; so difficult is 
 it to be avoided. For this last article for the album I 
 really made for the letter ; the former would require it to 
 be much more compressed. ' So powerful is the influence 
 of the present moment ; one confounds letter, album, and 
 book all together. Fare you well, dear Adelhard ; and, in 
 this respect, fare better than I. 
 
 I wished to add this apophthegm also: "Above all 
 things inspire a prince with the taste for reading — not 
 merely the inscriptions on triumphal arches and in illu- 
 minations — but books and acts ;" but, if I am not mistaken, 
 it is already written in your album. Cabinet secrets, like 
 
 x 2
 
 308 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEE. [FEAG. V. 
 
 the light of the fixed stars, reach us for the first time 
 many years after their emanation ; but the secrets of the 
 study, like the light of the planets, never reach so far as 
 the fixed stars. Yours, 
 
 J. P. F. E. 
 
 Postscript. — As there was no post, this letter to you, 
 excellent prince's tutor, has lain in my desk during the 
 sale of the whole first edition of Levana ; it was printed, 
 but not despatched : luckily, while preparing the second, 
 a young tutor, dismissed from a certain court, visited me 
 and promised to deliver you my letter. For the rest he 
 curses the whole matter for hours every day, and declares 
 he would almost rather be a prince than a prince's tutor ; 
 for the one only spoils himself, whereas the tutor spoils 
 others too. He openly derides my whole letter to you, as 
 a mere waste of paper and ink, and says I have only for- 
 gotten the principal thing, the so-called governor both of 
 prince and tutor. He asked me to teach him " what use 
 it was to be the very best of tutors, as a man must become 
 the very worst if the prince's governor so choose ; who is 
 regarded as the upper-house to the tutor's lower-house, or 
 college rector to his inferior school." But, instead of 
 waiting my instructions, he continued angrily : " The 
 governors, who never permitted him even to be vice- 
 governor to the prince, were as old in rank as in age, 
 and consequently took precedence in every thing of him, 
 who was only perfectly capable of all his duties ; so that 
 the young prince regarded him merely as a subordinate, 
 as a kind of school-fox whose master Eeynard was the 
 governor. The word of a man who sat at the same dinner 
 table with the prince was more esteemed by him and by 
 the whole court, than the sermons of one who might only 
 sit near him at the study table." 
 
 I replied, that on this matter I would take the part of 
 the men of the world. The schoolman has about as much 
 relation to the nobleman as the Abbot Fowler, for instance, 
 has to a fowl. As, according to Kant's observations, we 
 .soon grow weary of the most excellent human singing, 
 but never of the perpetual singing of birds, because it is 
 subject to no rule, and its variations are quite undeter-
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 309 
 
 mined ; so, the scholar, by the monotonous unity of his 
 thoughts and discourses, always aiming at one end, soon 
 drives to sleep ; whereas the courtier, flitting from one 
 subject to another, engages the attention, just because 
 he says nothing very definite, and because variety of 
 mere nothings gives more pleasure than uniformity of 
 something. 
 
 " A governor," continued he, " who only thinks ot 
 king, court and nobility, and orders the prince to be 
 educated only for these, will bar with the collars of his 
 multitudinous orders all the havens into which a tutor 
 would conduct his pupil to the sound of silver flutes. 
 He will throw in his teeth the accurate ' revision ' of his 
 plan of education (none so good as that which is printed) ; 
 and, if the tutored tutor think differently, he has only 
 the choice of being frightened, or being angry." 
 
 ''• Truly, not bad ! " said I, " for by this means the 
 tutor will be educated to be tender and better than he 
 can educate the prince. In the same way, cooks make 
 poultry tender and tasty by putting them into a pond, oi- 
 a turkey by throwing it from a considerable height before 
 killing it — this has the effect of fright on them ; or they 
 irritate them by whistling and shaking red cloths at them 
 — which has the effect of rage." 
 
 " We must then experience," concluded the tutor, 
 " what is the consequence if the governor can use the 
 sceptre as a good school cane to the citizen-teacher ; 
 I do not mean what the governor becomes (for he goes 
 away like myself), but what the innocent prince becomes, 
 in whom, placed as a young master between a flattering 
 upper servant and a kneeling slave, no manly character 
 can possibly be developed, — no bones grow." 
 
 " But," said I, " I do not see the evil of that. I myself 
 know many people of rank whose whole inner man does 
 not contain one whole bone, but who precisely resemble 
 people struck by a thunder-bolt, in whom the lightning 
 generally only breaks the bones, without in the smallest 
 degree burning or injuring the external form. And so it 
 is, my friend ! " 
 
 As, however, we could neither of us quite agree, 
 and I could not become perfectly serious, I think I have
 
 310 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. V. 
 
 adopted a very sensible plan in sending him to yon with 
 this postscript, so that you may either alter or confirm 
 his opinion. You must certainly know whether there is 
 any difference among governors, and whether the course 
 of the little prince may not occasionally describe an 
 accurate ellipse round the two foci. Heaven grant that, 
 and many other things too !
 
 ( 311 ) 
 
 SIXTH FRAGMENT. 
 
 ON THE MORAL EDUCATION OF BOYS. 
 
 Chap. I. Moral Strength, — Physical Strength.— Games of Hurting.— 
 Injuriousness of Fear and of Fright. — Love of Life. — Insufficiency 
 of the mere Passions. — Necessity of a youthful Ideal, § 101 — 108. 
 Chap. II. Truthfulness, Charades, and Children's Plays, § 109 — 113. 
 Chap. III. Education of the Affections. — Means of arousing them. — 
 Love of Animals, § 114 — 119. Chap. IV. Supplemental Appendix 
 on Moral Education. — Various Consolatory Eules. — Stories of 
 Parents for their own Children. — Children's Journeys. — Danger of 
 a premature Feeling of Shame, and on the Modesty of Children, 
 § 120—127. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 § 101. 
 
 Honour, honesty, steadfast will, truthfulness, indifference 
 towards threatening wounds and endurance of those 
 inflicted, openness, self-respect, just sell-appreciation, 
 contempt for the opinion of the world, justice and per- 
 severance — all these and similar words indicate only one 
 half of the moral nature, viz. moral strength and elevation 
 of character. The other half embraces all our connections 
 with others ; the realm of love, gentleness, benevolence 
 — in short, what may be called moral beauty. 
 
 If the one seem to turn inwards, towards itself, the 
 other outwards towards others ; the one to be a repelling, 
 the other an attracting pole ; if the one regard an idea as 
 holy, and the other rather esteem life to be so, yet bo>h 
 are equally elevated above sell, which is only the object 
 of the animal piopen>ities, and of the sins against the 
 twin stars of the heart ; for honour, as well as love,
 
 312 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH FJCHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 sacrifices selfishness. Moreover love does not seek and 
 contemplate in another what it avoids in itself ; but it 
 beholds and embraces therein the image of the divinity. 
 We find God twice ; once within, once without us ; 
 within us as an eye, without us as light. Yet is it every- 
 where the same ethereal fire, indifferent whether it spring 
 up from without or within ; and, indeed, the one pre- 
 supjwses the other, and consequently a third which 
 produces and unites both. Call it the Holy. In the 
 spiritual world there is properly no out and no in. Love 
 is naturally the companion of true moral strength, as 
 we ever find sweet fruits on strong branches ; weakness 
 trembles like a Vesuvius only to destroy. Even so, pure 
 love can not merely do all, but is all. 
 
 § 102. 
 
 But here we are only concerned with the difference of 
 appearances, not with their foundations. The former 
 show us man born and fitted out more for moral strength, 
 or honour, and woman for moral beauty, or love. From 
 our former position, " that woman does not divide and 
 contemplate herself as man does," we might deduce the 
 division of the two moral poles, with varying balance 
 between both sexes, ascribing love to the female and 
 strength to the male, because the former is more occupied 
 with what is external to herself, but the latter in examin- 
 ing what passes within himself. But why reason about 
 facts ? This moral difference between the sexes is repeated, 
 although in miniature, in every individual ; but more of 
 this hereafter. We will now view the educational means 
 of adapting the boy to his destination by developing 
 moral strength of character. 
 
 § 103. 
 
 One age requires men in order to exist, another in 
 order to subsist ; ours needs both ; and yet education 
 dreads nothing more than making boys manly, and, 
 where possible, st lives to unman them. Nurseries and 
 schoolrooms are like altars in the temples which the
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 313 
 
 Romans dedicated to Pavor and Pallor (pale fear). As 
 though the world were now too full of courage, teachers 
 ordinarily engraft fear by punishments and actions, but 
 only recommend courage by words. Not undertaking, 
 but letting alone, receives the victor's crown. 
 
 In Nestor's order of battle* the timid occupied the 
 middle ranks ; it is so also in our states ; and more 
 physical courage is found in the highest and lowest ranks 
 than the scholar or the schoolmaster usually possesses. 
 Hence the latter expects his boys to resemble the Iroquois, 
 who think a bare is a deity ; and even endeavours to raise 
 them to a place among these gods. The ancients, in their 
 veneration for strength, forgot benevolence ; we err in 
 the contrary direction. The effeminate teaching-class 
 may, however, be excused by its disappointment ; for the 
 courage of children, owing to their deficiency in counter- 
 balancing prudence, readily turns to rashness and attacks 
 teacher and fate. But let us remember that years do 
 indeed increase light but not strength, and that it is 
 easier to provide a pilgrim on life's journey with a guide, 
 than to restore to him, like a statue, the legs and wings 
 which have been removed lest he should run or fly away. 
 We will, like warriors, begin with common courage, and 
 proceed upwards to honour. \A 
 
 r 
 
 § 104. 
 
 The body is the coat of mail and breastplate of the soul ; 
 so let this in the first place be hardened into steel by heat 
 and cold. Let every father provide, as well as he can, a 
 little gymnastic school round, his house ; the very street 
 in which the boy plays, runs, falls, clinibs, and bids 
 defiance, is something. Wounds got in the street a>e 
 sooner healed and more wholesome than wounds got at 
 si-hool, and they teach better how to bear pain. Out 
 of the wild English youth there grows a thoughtful 
 member of Parliament ; as out of the early Roman robbers 
 a virtuous self sacrificing senate arose. The Romans bled 
 the r""^ 1 - 1 — --e; the schoolmaster's rod also lets blood; 
 
 * Horn. II. iv. 297.
 
 314 JEAN PAUL FBIEDRICH EICHTEK. TfRAG. VI. 
 
 and the starving method, solitary confinement &c., pales 
 the remainder. .No power should ever be weakened, — one 
 cannot repeat this too often — but only its counterbalancing 
 power strengthened : in squirrels the upper row of teeth 
 often grows painfully long, but only when the lower one 
 is lost. A rash twelve-year-old Dreadnought might soon 
 enough be made thoughtful; you need but read through 
 with him some anatomical or surgical book , but this 
 remedy, like arsenic, is cnly to be used in the most 
 desperate cases and in the smallest possible doses. Bodily 
 weakness makes mental weakness ; and mental weakness 
 leaves deeper, aye, perpetual, traces behind it : the broken 
 arm is much sooner cured than the broken heart of a child. 
 And, lastly, children are spoiled in two different ways in the 
 young sick-room ; the healthy by severity, the sick by weak 
 indulgence. Now the sick would be much better served 
 by the mental excitement of pictures, little games on the 
 pillow and tales, than by physical indulgences. 1 f health 
 be the first step to courage, bodil}' exercise is the second 
 against pain. This in modern times is not only abandoned, 
 but actually contradicted ; and with us the boy is fastened 
 up, not that he may learn but that he may not learn to 
 bear it, and that he may at once begin to confess. Detest- 
 able method ! 
 
 How can the torture-system of the punishing police so 
 far confuse your ideas with regard to education, that you 
 do not value the power of mental strength as opposed to 
 ph}*sical strength, but consider firmness a repetition of the 
 denounced fault ? This is as egregious a mistake as 
 Locke's advice to disgust children with card-playing by 
 compelling them to practise it; for this official change, 
 produced by disgust at the compulsory repetition of the 
 game, would be a worse disease than that it cured. Must 
 we not, in this place, severely attack another error in 
 education — a most repulsive one, though concealed by the 
 showy paint of custom — it is that of harshly punishing 
 children before other children, in order to make them 
 a so-called example? For either the child, as a cold 
 observer, shares the sentiments of the passionate punisher 
 and feels no compassion for the torture-wrung cries of his 
 equal, no disgust at the repulsive sight of the cruelly used
 
 CHAP. I.J LEVANA. 315 
 
 victory of the strong over the weak, — and then, indeed, I 
 know not what more his heart can lose, — or else the child 
 experiences all the pain which the judgment-seat raised in 
 the nursery inflicts, and so, as is the case with grown-up 
 people at executions, thinks the punishment greater than 
 the fault, — and then any advantage to be derived from the 
 painful sight is lost ; or, lastly, he at once pities and 
 comprehends the punishment, and feels the greatest dread 
 of such terrible pain, — and then you certainly do secure 
 obedience, but you increase fear. In short, do not inflict 
 severe punishments in the presence of children ; be satisfied 
 that their invisibility, coupled with what is related of 
 them, will secure the advantages without the disadvan- 
 tages. 
 
 X It would be much more desirable to establish exercises 
 'in bearing pain, schools of the cross in a stoic sense ; and 
 indeed boys themselves have games of a similar nature. 
 Formerly in Mexico one child bound his arm to that ot 
 another child, and placed a live coal between ; both con- 
 tended who should longest bear the burning pain. In 
 Montaigne's childhood the nobility considered fencing- 
 schools mean because, by their aid, victory no longer de- 
 pended solely on courage. The ancient Danes did not 
 even wink the eye at wounds in the face.* What was 
 formerly attained by whole nations and, consequently, 
 was not the gift of birth but of education, — this surely 
 must be sufficiently easy to repeat in individuals. 
 
 Never make lamentation over a child's hurt, but pass it 
 off with a joke. If a liitle child runs to you to show its 
 hurt, let him wait a little before he engages your eye or 
 ear, and in the mean time say quietly to him, " 1 must 
 first finish my writing," or " knit off this needle." Or tell 
 him to go and fetch you something ; nothing draws the 
 thorn from the wound so soon as action • soldiers do not 
 feel their wounds in the heat of battle. " My nose is 
 bleeding," says the youngest child in a doleful tone. 
 " Oh ! look at the pretty red blood, how it drops ; where 
 does it come from ? There was none in your little nose 
 just now," you say ; and the pain is forgotten in the inquiry 
 
 * Bibliotheque universelle, xv. 385
 
 316 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRTOH RICHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 — what is internal in what is external. Further : protect 
 a child's ear even more carefully than his eye. The ear is 
 especially the sense of fear ; hence those animals which 
 hear quickly are timid. As harmony holds the heart en- 
 tranced in delight, so does the scream of fear in horror. 
 An inexplicable sound is the true night for fear. The eye 
 becomes at last reconciled to every monstrous form, if it 
 only remain sufficiently long before it ; but the abyss of 
 sound does not become clearer, but more dreadful, by 
 continuance. A little girl, to whom the colour of the 
 chimney-sweeper had only seemed curious, received the 
 first fright in her life from hearing the uninterrupted 
 nois6 of his sweeping. Give therefore to every strange 
 noise, such as that of the wind, some merry name. Our 
 age is the first that has made it a duty to devise 
 rules against that fear which disarms and fetters man- 
 kind. In every child there lies, side by side with the 
 romantic hope of an infinite Heaven, the equally romantic 
 dread of an infinite Orcus. But you hold this Orcus 
 dreadfully open before the child if you give this ideal fear 
 an object by naming such a thing. The author committed 
 this error by saying to his children, in order to prevent 
 their hating and fearing soldiers or other people, " Only 
 bad men are to be feared." Hereby their fear, previously 
 scattered over various visible objects, was concentrated in 
 the unchanging locus of a single invisible object; and 
 they carried this fancied bug-bear with them every where, 
 and saw it in every thing. In no emotion of the soul — 
 not even in love — does fancy push its creative and ruling 
 power so far as in fear. Children, else religiously be- 
 lieving all their parents say, anxiously desire the word 
 which is to arm them against ghosts, and yet, with that 
 very dictum on their lips, succumb to imagination in 
 their hearts. Further : children who have long since 
 examined, and even themselves made, the object of their 
 alarm, — a cloak, for instance, and a hat hung upon a 
 stick — will yet run away from it with terror. So they 
 fear less what has already hurt them than what their 
 parents, either by looks or words, have mentioned with 
 fear; a mouse, for instance. Therefore, especially avoid 
 and guard against all suddenness of speech, — such as
 
 CHAI\ I.] LEVANA. 317 
 
 exclaiming in the night, "Look!" or even "Listen!" 
 which alarms yet more — and of appearance or action ; for 
 in that case the senses do not restrain, but only inflame, 
 the fancy, and the reality is wildly confused by the ha-ty 
 explanation. Thus, alarm during thunderstorms princi- 
 pally arises from the rapidity with which the lightning 
 momentarily reveals the dark sky to the straining sight. 
 If the whole firmament remained one long flash we should 
 fear it less. 
 
 Do not merely spare children reading any painful 
 stories, but also every verbal description of any unknown 
 physical suffering ; for in children of a lively imagination 
 mental fear easily springs out of bodily fear, and this — 
 which is never considered — even through dreams. These 
 gigantic chaotic painters in the mind form, out of the 
 little terrors of the day, those monstrous masks of the 
 Furies which wake and nourish the fear of ghosts which 
 slumbers in every human being. We should attend far 
 more to the dreams of children than to those of mature 
 persons, especially on account of this difference, — that in 
 ours resound the echoes of our childhood ; what then in 
 theirs ? — Who has not experienced sudden presentiments, 
 an inexplicable and perfectly unexpected fore-taste ot 
 approaching good or ill fortune, wafted upon him like 
 air from some mountain precipice? Or who in new 
 countries, occurrences, or men, has not sometimes found, 
 deep within him, a mirror whereon, from old time, these 
 very things were darkly pictured and beheld ? And to 
 whom, in subsequent dreams and fevers, has not the same 
 serpent form, the same mis-shapen tortuous monster, con- 
 tinually re-appeared, of which, in his whole remembered 
 life, he had beheld no archetype ? Might not these shapes 
 be buried remnants of old childhood's dreams which rise 
 from the deep, like sea-monsters, in the night ? 
 
 Be careful to conceal your own grief about others' 
 necessities or your own. Nothing is more infectious than 
 fear and courage ; but the parent's fear is doubled in the 
 child ; for where the giant trembles the dwarf must surely 
 fall. 
 
 The father especially should never come before hia 
 children with a melancholy, penitential face, or the ap-
 
 318 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH RICHTEE. [FEAG. VT. 
 
 pearance of much suffering, as if there were so much to 
 lose in life that be could even lose himself: at most let 
 him only point out a gloomy future, hut not anxiety con- 
 cerning it ; and at least let him have no other copies of 
 his lamentations and " liber tristium " than one for his 
 wife and friend. Yet the very opposite of this is most 
 generally the case. It is in the house (as though every 
 barricade and city wall must make people cowardl} r ), in 
 some hole in the shore, that the externally armed lobster 
 casts his shell ; and it is in the nest with its poor little 
 ones that the bold eagle moults, thus permitting them 
 only to see its domestic cowardice, not its public courage. 
 Rather let every one resemble the pastor Seider, who, in 
 reading the newspapers, lamented that of all the printed 
 accounts of his sufferings not one was true. 
 
 § 105. 
 
 Since indifference to actual blows, and disregard of 
 anticipated ones, mutually strengthen each other,* I hope 
 I may continue to confound them without reproach. 
 Courage does not consist in blindly overlooking danger, 
 but in meeting it with the eyes open. Therefore do not 
 attempt to make boys brave by saying " It will not hurt 
 you," — for in that case the sheep would fight as bravely 
 as the lion ; — but by saying more truly, " What is it ? 
 Only a hurt." For you may safely reckon on a something 
 in the human breast which no wounds can reach, on a 
 steadfast celestial axle among the mutable earthly axles ; 
 insomuch as man, unlike the beasts, has something more 
 than pain to dread. 
 
 There is a courage manifested against the future and 
 the imagination, and also a courage manifested against 
 the present and the imagination : the one is opposed to 
 fear, the other to terror. If there must be the one or the 
 other, fear is, for children, preferable to terror, but not so 
 for men ! If fear, as the Cardinal de Retz said, enfeeble 
 and distort the understanding more than all the other 
 
 * Not however exactly as one might assume ; if a boy only have a 
 quick fancy he will fear the wounds of the future whilst he disregard* 
 those of the present.
 
 CHAP. I.J LEVANA. 319 
 
 emotions of the mind, terror entirely destroys it, and puts 
 madness in its place. Fear may be imparted so slowly 
 and in so carefully measured doses, that it will rather act 
 as an incitement than as a poison to thought and reso- 
 lution. Whereas terror — whether inspired by sight or 
 sound — is a flash of lightning shivering the whole man, 
 unarming and slaughtering him at one stroke. Chiarugi * 
 shows, on the authority of Giasone, that children who 
 have been brought up harshly and kept in order by images 
 of terror frequently fall victims to insanity. 
 
 One shock of terror may produce long-lasting fear ; but 
 fear cannot give birth to terror, for its imagination, 
 dwelling on the future, rinds even its present there. 
 
 With the exception of good health, there is no pre- 
 servative from terror save acquaintance with its object 
 it is produced only by what is new. The bravest may 
 be terrified, as the Romans were by elephants, or as the 
 bravest modern European might be by some strange 
 gigantic beast-like form — dropped out of Jupiter, let us 
 suppose — whose poisonous qualities and modes of attack 
 he knew not. 
 
 Then arm the young mind against the thunder-storms 
 of accident by a lightning conductor wjiich you yourself 
 make. The present assembly hall for the sittings of col- 
 leges and societies of learned men unfortunately helps 
 them to pass through their sitting mode of life and death 
 without becoming remarkably brave. It is a significant 
 fact, that all important offices are marked by the appendage 
 of a seat, — the Bench of judges and of bishops, the Chair 
 of divinit}', the Stool of prayer, the Seat of instruction, — 
 and their reward is Rest in Abraham's bosom, or on the 
 Thrones of the twelve apostles. He who sits when attacked 
 by an enemy loses his courage, as is shown by every regi- 
 ment awaiting an attack : and we run away with our 
 heels, where alone the Homeric Achilles was vulnerable. 
 But even in modern times the runner would be brave if 
 no inimical runner pursued him. No Napoleon could spend 
 sufficient money in building golden bridges for a flying 
 enemy. 
 
 As a person can be really terrified only once by tho 
 * See his work on Insanity, b. i. § 282.
 
 320 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTER. [fEAG. VI 
 
 same thing, I think it possible to spare children the 
 reality by sportive representations of alarming circum- 
 stances. For instance : I go with my little nine-year-old 
 Paul to walk in a thick wood. Suddenly three blackened 
 and armed ruffians rush out and fall upon us, because I 
 had hired them for the adventure with a small thieves' 
 premium the day before. We two are only provided with 
 sticks, but the band of robbers are armed with swords 
 and a pistol without bullets. Here nothing is of use but 
 presence of mind and resolution. One is opposed to three 
 (for Paul must be reckoned as nothing, though I call upon 
 him to fight) ; but because I turn away the pistol so that 
 it may miss me, and strike the dagger out of one of the 
 thieves' hand with my stick, and seize upon it to attack 
 the third, I hope that the ruffianly troop may be van- 
 quished and put to flight by one honest man with his son's 
 help. We pursue the routed army for a little distance, 
 but soon desist as many stray shots are fired ; and I main- 
 tain a constant derision of the enemy's line, — which, like 
 an orderly book-shelf, only shows the backs — so that even 
 my little ally can conclude for himself how much courage 
 alone is superior to numbers, especially of'villains, who, 
 according to all experience, are seldom brave. But (I add 
 in this second edition) all such games are of doubtful 
 advantage, because of their falsity ; and only by repetition 
 can they altogether lose the evils attendant even on a 
 fright which ends in nothing. A great many tales of 
 victorious courage are, perhaps, better means of arousing 
 and strengthening that virtue, "x 
 
 Other " cloak and dagger pieces," as Eouterwek tells 
 us the Spaniards call their intriguing comedies, might 
 be tried advantageously in the night, in order to bring 
 the fancies, inspired by a belief in ghosts, to common 
 every-day light ; at the same time I admit that there is 
 always a deep-seated fear of this kind, which only God, 
 or the next world, can thoroughly remove. Even the 
 fear of storms cannot be altogether eradicated, at least by 
 reasoning ; the tranquillity, or, still better, the cheerful- 
 ness of grown-up persons during them is the best cure. 
 Since what is uncommon is most dreaded it may perhaps 
 be numbered among the few advantages of a town-educa-
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 321 
 
 tion, that in it the e3'e and ear of a child ttcome in- 
 different to more objects than they can do in a village. 
 In nothing, fear itself scarcely excepted, does a man make 
 such rapid advances as in courage. Kight marches, the 
 alliance of many boys — for company increases courage as 
 well as fear — and finally the histories of true heroes, such 
 as Charles XII. of Sweden, rivet the shield of courage 
 more and more firmly on the breast. 
 
 § 106. 
 
 Permit me still to add a few ingredients to the tonic 
 medicines of manliness, ere I pass to the mental means of 
 strengthening it. The following reflections may stand in 
 the same relation as branches to the top of a tree. 
 
 What, from the Fakeer to the martyrs of Christianity, 
 of love, of duty, and to those who sacrificed their lives for 
 liberty, has vanquished pain, opinion, desire, torture ,; — 
 One Kuling Idea in the heart. Implant, then, in the boy 
 some such living idea, were it but that of honour, and he 
 is fit to become a man. Every fear may be overcome by 
 placing it clearly before him. 
 
 Every child pictures to himself some position, some 
 trade, as the work- and sorrow-dwelling of life , and some 
 other (usually his father's) as the look-out spot or 
 belvidere of hope. Take from him these erroneous charts 
 of heaven and hell, which, like warrants of arrest, disarm 
 and render him the prisoner of fear and of desire. Brin^ 
 him — not by dead listening, but by living observation — to a 
 knowledge of the happiness of the most various conditions, 
 so that he may look upon life as on the level ground of a 
 pleasure encampment, Avhere even the slave has pitched 
 his tent. It is much more important that a child should 
 not causelessly dread and avoid any condition, however 
 gloomy, than that he should not hopefully desire and 
 labour after any, even the most brilliant ; for hope leaves 
 us more understanding and more happiness than fear. 
 In order to extract from the tear-press of compassion some 
 feeling and pence for a beggar, you choose to crush a 
 power which could sustain itself on the beggar's pallet ! 
 What else do you do than cause the little shocked creature 
 
 L Y
 
 322 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. {FRAG. VI, 
 
 to prefer making a hundred beggars in after life, to being 
 one himself, and perhaps giving something to some other ? 
 Always let oneness of purpose rule over a boy : he wanted, 
 perhaps, to have, or to do, some certain thing ; oblige him, 
 then, to take or to do it. And never command any thing 
 twice. 
 
 Raise up in him by every possible means the conception 
 of a higher tribunal than that of feeling. If he desire any 
 forbidden thing, do not move it further from but rather 
 nearer to him, so that he may overcome that desire by 
 the sense of dirty. Place your command simply before 
 him, without any attractive concomitants which may 
 make it seem lighter than it is; for, by this delicate 
 concealment of the rule, chance, which accustoms to 
 nothing, is made master. The manner in which the 
 command is obeyed is of infinitely more importance than 
 the mere fulfilment of it. Neither veil a refusal, as 
 mothers are too apt to do ; perpetual concealments are 
 impossible. Why will you not spare yourself by a plain 
 No, and accustom your boy to cheerful resignation ? 
 Quiet submission to arbitrary despotism weakens the 
 character, but to necessity strengthens it ; be then a fate 
 to your child ! A child's obedience, without other con- 
 sideration, can be of no advantage to himself, for how if 
 he obeyed all the world ? But it is the motive to it, as 
 reverential loving trust, and the perception of necessity, 
 which ennobles him. Those who are obedient only from 
 fear become mechanical automata, hypocr: + es, flatterers, 
 and are totally ungovernable when behind the back of 
 their drivers. 
 
 You bend (or break) the young mind if, before the age 
 of insight into political inequalities, you teach it to pay 
 other respect than what is due to every human being and 
 to age ; unfettered by order-ribbons, blind to stars and 
 gold, let the child regard both the servant and the 
 master of his father with equal respect. A child is by 
 nature a Diogenes to ever}' Alexander, and a gentle 
 Alexander to every Diogenes ; let him continue so ; never 
 let enervating humility towards rank approach him. 
 
 Only great objects can worthily occupy a boy's heart ; 
 and what, except knowledge, can fill it better than the
 
 CHAP. I.J LEVANA. 323 
 
 love of his country, even though broken in the diamond- 
 mortar of the present age? This holy flame should be 
 fanned in all schools, but certainly not after the method 
 of Tyrtajus, that is, by enthusiasm for a decrepit and 
 justly fallen state, but by inspiration of the " Hermann's 
 Battle" and "Order of Fire" of Klopstock. However, I 
 scarcely expect this from the old humanists, who, in great 
 poems, take most pleasure in that which is most palatable 
 in the elephant — the feet. 
 
 No science has so many teachers as the science of 
 happiness, or pleasure ; as if this had not already planted 
 its throne in the hearts of cats, vultures and, in short, of 
 all other beasts. Will you then teach what the beasts 
 know? Shall the human mind, like a Centaur, enter the 
 world of mind with a body bearing the marks of the 
 spur ? For what reason — save a bad one — are the selfish 
 excesses of children more indulged than those which 
 display obstinacy, the love of eating more than the love 
 of quarrelling, as if the teeth for tearing and those for 
 chewing were not equally important? If you seek to 
 inspire reverence for pure Worth, Justice, and Eeligion by 
 any other means than the simple forms of these children 
 of God, — were it merely by showing as an appendage some 
 advantage thence derivable to the animal propensities, 
 instead of teaching that they are due sacrifices to those 
 goddesses, — then have you sullied the pure spirit, anc) 
 made it little and hypocritical. You, like the cold north, 
 have suffered the lions of the south to shrivel up into cats, 
 its crocodiles into lizards. 
 
 If life is a battle, let the teacher be a poet, who may 
 animate the boy to meet it with needful songs. Ac- 
 custom him to regard his future, not as a path from 
 pleasures (though innocent) to other pleasures : nor even 
 as a gleaning, from spring time to harvest, of flowers and 
 fruits ; but as a time in which he must execute some long 
 plan : in short, let him aim at a long course of activity, 
 not of pleasure. Enjoyment soon wearies both itself and 
 us : effort, never. That man is happy, for instance, who 
 devotes his life to the cultivation of an island, to the 
 discovery of one that is lost, or of the extent of the ocean. 
 In London it is he who was born rich, not he who has 
 
 Y 2
 
 •324 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 made himself rich, that commits suicide ; and, on the 
 other side of the picture, it is not the pocr man, "but he 
 who has become poor, that kills himself. The miser 
 grows old enjoying rather than wearied of life ; but the 
 heir who comes into possession of his active gains sinks 
 into ennui. So I would rather he the court gardener who 
 watches and protects an aloe for fifteen years, until at 
 last it opens to him the heaven of its blossom, than the 
 prince who is hastily called to look at the opened heaven. 
 The writer of a dictionary rises every morning like the 
 sun to move past some little star in his zodiac ; a new 
 letter is to him a new year's festival, the conclusion of the 
 old one a harvest-home ; and, since after each capital 
 letter the whole alphabet follows successively, the author 
 on his paper may perhaps frequently celebrate on one 
 and the same day a Sunday, a Lady-day, and a Crispin's 
 holiday. 
 
 Do not fear the rise of the sentiment of honour, which 
 is nothing worse than the rough husk of self-esteem, or 
 the expanded covers of the tender wings which elevate 
 above the earth and its flowers. But, to raise and en- 
 noble that honour of the individual into honour of the 
 race, and that again into honour for the worth of mind, 
 never praise him who has gained a prize, but those who 
 rank below him ; give the honourable title, not as a dis- 
 tinction for the steps which have been mounted, but as 
 a notification of neighbourhood to what is higher; and, 
 lastly, let your praise afford more pleasure because you 
 are pleased than the enjoyment of the distinction gives. 
 
 § 107. 
 
 If man resemble iron in his strength, he also, by the 
 inflammability of his passions, resembles that metal in 
 connection with sulphur, at whose touch the hot bar of 
 iron dissolves in drops. Does mere passion give strength ? 
 As certainly as a Parisian revolution gives freedom, or a 
 comet bright comet-lighted nights ; only they pass away 
 again. The most powerful men of antiquity, the rulers 
 or judges of their age, and the examples of all other 
 ages, ever sprung from the Stoic school; passions served
 
 CHAP. I.J LEVANA. 325 
 
 them only as supports during storms, n; t as the oeam of 
 a balance ! 
 
 As with the strength, so it is with the light which 
 passions, according to the declaration of Helvetius, ought 
 to throw upon their objects ; it is, forsooth, just as Cha- 
 teaubriand says, that in storms rocks shine with the foam 
 of the waves, and so warn off ships : — very dear, and very 
 changeful, light-houses ! 
 
 / v Admit your boy, then, as much as possible into tho 
 Stoic school ; and that less by instruction than by the 
 example of true Stoics of all ages. But that he may not 
 mistake the Stoic for a lethargic Dutchman, or even a 
 stupid savage, let him see that the true inner fire of the 
 breast glows most intensely in those men who manifest 
 through life a steadfast will, and not, like the slaves 
 of passion, various isolated ebullitions and desires : and 
 name to him such men as Socrates and Cato, who were 
 animated by a constant, but therefore tranquil, inspiration. 
 
 § 108. 
 
 This steadfast volition, which tranquillises every mental 
 tumult, does not presuppose any mere single object, but 
 the grand final aim of life— a high ideal — which is the 
 central sun of all its revolutions. It serves, therefore, to 
 produce a brave or great life; not a great or brave indi- 
 vidual action : of this, indeed, every weakling is capable. 
 And so it never presents the spectacle of a lonely moun- 
 tain, though there are such upon the earth, but it resembles 
 those continuous chains of mountain-like clouds we see in 
 the sky. 
 
 An unchanging will can only aim at what is universal, 
 at what is divine, be it freedom, or religion, or science, or 
 art. The more divided the will is, the more is it liable to 
 be disturbed by the outer world. As man — in opposition 
 to the beasts, which only apprehend the single individuals 
 presented to their senses — extends and resolves the known 
 world into various species, and his thoughts into categories, 
 so does the ideal concentrate the desires in one general 
 all-embracing effort. 
 
 Thia 'deal can be imparted by no education — for it is
 
 326 JEAN TAUL FRIEDPJCH RICHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 our very inmost self — but it must he presupposed, and so 
 may he animated by all. Life is kindled only by life; 
 and the highest life can only be called into existence in a 
 child by example, whether present or historical, or, which 
 unites both, by poetry. 
 
 The present living time cannot so easily purchase, or 
 find, great men as little tin figures for children. But the 
 distant history of the universe can furnish them to us : — • 
 we need but call to mind the soul-stirring contempt of 
 life displayed in Avars for freedom which would have 
 immortalised Plutarch, had he been its historian, as cer- 
 tainly as his ancient heroes ; — -but it has found no Plu- 
 tarch. Greatness, if not misrepresented, is yet forgotten ; 
 and so, in the midst of the best present, time, we yet need 
 the mighty past, as birds of passage do the moonshine, to 
 fly into warm countries. Parents and teachers and a few 
 acquaintances are, unfortunately, placed before the growing 
 boy instead of the saints' images of the ideal— bad and 
 useless ! A lawgiver, or any man, who daily in the child's 
 presence changes from dressing gown to dress coat, can 
 never arouse that purest sentiment (such Chateaubriand 
 considers wonder) in whose heights all the stars of the 
 child's ideal move and shine. If children must pass behind 
 the light of fair examples, why, why, should you give 
 them gloomy instead of glorious ones? 
 
 But Clio, the Muse of the past, stands by you, and 
 calls her father Apollo to her assistance. Only fill the 
 boy's mind with the glorified world of heroes, with 
 lovingly painted pictures of great men of every kind, 
 and his in-born ideal will not first be called to life in the 
 midst of that work-a-day ideal which also sleeps in every 
 one. 
 
 So let every poetic ideal shine free and bright before 
 him ; his eye will not thereby be blinded to two greater 
 ideals, — to that which his own conscience commands him 
 to be, and to the idea of God. 
 
 The educator, Carnpe, rightly recommends the illumined 
 hemisphere of the present human race to be turned towards 
 children : but certainly not that they may thereby learn 
 patience towards the mediocre— impatience Avere better — 
 but that the glory of the world, supposing it to come from
 
 CHAT. I.] LEVANA. 327 
 
 dew-drops rather than jewels, may shine through their 
 morning. What I consider dangerous — even more dan- 
 gerous than the representation of man-devils,* as every 
 child daily hears of their hellish master without injury — 
 is, laying mixed characters before them from which to 
 select those worthy of imitation ; you might as well 
 set a child to imitate his own similarly mixed nature. 
 What else does a boy learn from that many-godded con- 
 federation-morality but to apply the easy balance 
 between victory and defeat to himself? You might 
 also apply much more closely the Gospel doctrine of 
 forbearance towards human infirmities — namely, towards 
 his own. 
 
 Much that is very plausible, and very prolix, will be 
 urged against this idealisation of youth by pedagogic- 
 elephant hunters, who hunt clown what is great in order 
 to have it tame, serviceable, and toothless in their stables. 
 " All this is very fine, but only fit for the world of 
 romance. What can come out of such excessive straining 
 of the young mind but a vain contemplation and useless 
 opposition to the real world, by which, nevertheless, he 
 must live, and which could scarcely be directed by the 
 dreams of a visionary, or of a beardless boy ? There are, 
 to use the language of novel writers, neither Phoenixes 
 nor Basilisks, but there are common land and water birds. 
 In short, the young man must go forth into the world, 
 as the old man has done, and learn to forget his empty 
 giant images. Here again the middle is the right course ; 
 that is to say, the youth may be told that men may 
 possibly become so and so ; however, one must not be 
 too critical if they do not, but live for the state in which 
 one lives : and again, that those ideal notions are only 
 of value and use in so far as they manifest those qualities 
 in connection with the available reality ; so, in a really 
 allegorical sense, every scholar in Zurich, be he professor 
 
 * Yet this should be but rare; for it is dangerous even to think of 
 the deeper crimes; but this granted, a child beholds without injury 
 (tor example) the worst, but to him already known, degrees of hatred, 
 murder, &c. ; but unheard of forms of murder do him harm, f>r the 
 more strangely they horrify him, so much the more do they make him 
 familiar with the small uprisings of emotion.
 
 328 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH PJCHTER. [FEAG. VI. 
 
 '■f divinity, law, or pedagogy, must yet be enrolled 
 member of some guild, that of the sboemakeis, weavers, 
 or some other trade. And only thus, and not otherwise, 
 can citizens be given to their country worthy of their 
 parents and teachers." 
 
 That last I admit. But, good heavens ! would you, 
 then, help to weaken what the age and the world weaken 
 without your aid ? You really act as if from after years, 
 from the valley of life, gradual elevation, instead of 
 depression, were to be expected, and men had not to issue 
 forth and hasten over. Should you not treat the eyes 
 of the mind at least as carefully as those of the body, 
 before which at first you place the concave glasses which 
 diminish in the smallest possible degree, because after- 
 wards their use necessitates such as are more concave and 
 diminish more? The worst that you labour to avoid 
 is only that the youth should exalt some reality into 
 his ideal ; but the still worse thing tbat you endeavour 
 to effect is, that he should darken and incorporate his 
 ideal with reality. Oh ! there is enough of that without 
 you. The ripe sunflower no longer turns its heavy seed- 
 laden head towards the sun. The Rhine soon finds its 
 plain, through which it creeps with no glittering water- 
 falls, and bears its burdens to Holland. What is all the 
 gain the young soul can obtain from the avoidance of 
 a few false steps, compared with the tremendous loss of 
 the holy fire of youth, of its high-soaring wings, its great 
 plans, without which it creeps as nakedly into cold 
 narrow life as most men creep out of it? How can life 
 ripen without the ideal glow of youth, or wine without 
 its August ? The best that men have done, if it have 
 come in the late season of life, has been but a late-growing 
 seed which the tree of life in their childhood's paradise 
 has borne; it is like the realised dreams of their youth. 
 Have you never seen how a man has been governed and 
 conducted thoughout life by the one god-like image of 
 his spring time 'i With what else than the bread-cart of 
 clever selfishness would you replace this guiding Pole- 
 star ? Finally : what is the one thing needful to men ? 
 Certainly not the strength of the sacrifices to what is 
 best, — for let a God but once appear in reality, or, as in
 
 CHAP. II.] LEVANA. 329 
 
 France, a Goddess (liberty), and man willingly divests 
 himself of every thing human which the divinity dues 
 not require : — but man needs something other than 
 strength ; faith in, and contemplation of, a Deity who 
 merits human sacrifices of a nobler kind. Men would 
 show themselves as Gods under the visible leadership 
 of a God. But if you expel that ideal from the heart, 
 there vanish with it, temple, altar, sacrifice, and every 
 thing. 
 
 > 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 TRUTHFULNESS. 
 § 109. 
 
 Truthfulness — I mean the fact of speaking truth 
 intentionally, and even to the injury of self — is less 
 a branch than a blossom of man's moral strength of 
 character. Weaklings must lie, hate it as much as they 
 may. One threatening look drives them into the midst 
 of sin's net. The difference between the present and 
 the middle age consists less in the existence of injustice, 
 cruelty and lust — for these, especially the last, were 
 abundant enough before the discovery of America — than 
 in the want of truthfulness. The first sin on the earth — 
 happily the devil was guilty of it on the tree of know- 
 ledge — was a lie ; and the last will surely be a lie too. 
 The world is punished for the increase of truths by the 
 decrease of truthfulness. 
 
 § 110. 
 
 Lying, that devouring cancer of the inner man, is more 
 severely judged and defined by the feeling of nations, 
 than by philosophers. The Greeks, who suffered their 
 gods to commit as many crimes with impunity as theii 
 present representatives, the gods of the earth, do, yet 
 condemned them for perjury — that root and quintessence 
 of a lie — to pass a vear of lifulessness under the ground
 
 330 JEAX PAUL FEIEDRICH RICHTER. | FEAG. VI. 
 
 hi Tartarus, and then to endure nine years of torments. 
 The ancient Persian taught his child nothing in tho 
 whole circle of morality but truthfulness. The grani- 
 niatic resemblance of his language to the German beauti- 
 fully shows also the moral resemblance of the people. 
 Anton* tells us that lying is originally derived from 
 to lie, i. e. to be prostrate, probably in reference to the 
 abject slave who dare raise neither body nor mind. Lying 
 and stealing, (which, as an acted lie, deprives of honour 
 though murder does not) and a box on the ear, which the 
 ancient German dreaded more than a wound, are brought 
 into close connection by our language in its proverbs : 
 and our near relatives, the English, know of no more 
 abusive epithet than liar. The German tournaments 
 were closed to the liar as well as the murderer.f I grant, 
 however, that in the greatest of all tournaments, war, 
 the greatest lying opened the lists of knightly exercise in 
 war to a prince with whom no true treaty or peace could 
 be made. 
 
 Can this abhorrence of false words be merely grounded 
 on the violation of mutual rights and confidence, and the 
 injury arising from broken contracts ? It is contradicted 
 by the fact that we more readily pardon lying actions 
 than lying words. Action, mimicry and silence lie far 
 oftener than the tongue, which men endeavour as long as 
 possible to preserve pure from the hateful perpetration of 
 a lie, the plague-spot of the inner man. Heavens ! are 
 we not already accustomed, without knowing it, to innu- 
 merable fictions of law and of poetry — to political secret 
 articles, mesne tenures, vice-men, masters of ceremonies, 
 comedians and rehearsals of comedies, false hair, false 
 teeth, false calves, and many other things of a similar 
 kind ; and yet are we thereby in the smallest degree less 
 shocked when a man utters a deliberate lie ? What de- 
 ceptions there are everywhere, from the otherwise lie- 
 hating London, where three-fourths of the current-money 
 is false,:f to Pekin, where wooden hams are sold wrapped 
 up in pig's skin ! § Since an honourable soldier and 
 
 * History of the German Nation, i. 66. 
 
 t Schmidt's History of the Germans, vol. iv. 
 
 X Colquhoun. § Grosier.
 
 CHAP. II. J LEVANA. S3 J 
 
 gentleman is less ashamed of a fraud and a bankruptcy 
 than of a lie, at the bare reproach of which he will shoot 
 himself — and since men of the world, and even moralists, 
 permit themselves ambiguity of action rather than an 
 actual lie — and since, finally, no blush is caused by any 
 sin so burning as that produced by a lie — can words be 
 something higher than deeds, the tongue than the hand ? 
 These questions cannot be perfectly answered by the 
 mimic ambiguity of actions, compared with the simplicity 
 of speech ; for actions are not always ambiguous, and men 
 will often consider before speaking decidedly, when they 
 would not before acting. Men are not ashamed to under- 
 mine and bear ill-will towards other men, but they are 
 ashamed openly to tell a lie. 
 
 § 111. 
 
 What is it that makes it so unholy ? It is this : two 
 individual beings are stationed with regard to each other 
 as upon different islands, and locked up within prison-bars 
 of the bones, and behind the curtain of the skin. Mere 
 motion shows me only life, but not its internal cause. The 
 animated eye of a Raffaelle's Madonna often speaks to us 
 from the canvas, which yet houses no mind ; wax figures 
 are hollow; and the ape, our mocking image, is dumb. 
 In what glorified form, then, does the human soul re- 
 veal itself V In speech only; in reason thus made man; 
 in this audible freedom. 1 speak of universal innate 
 language, without which all its peculiarities, such as 
 modes of verbal expression, were neither comprehensible 
 nor possible. Since instinct and mechanism can imitate 
 all other signs of life, it is by speech only that the freedom 
 of the creative thinker in a free world of thought is re- 
 vealed to another ; and this herald and ambassador (Bath- 
 kol) * of freedom laj's the foundations of morality by 
 announcing individuals, like kings, to one another. Too 
 fetters of the tongue are the fetters of the soul ; and thare 
 are no customs save the customs of language. The testa- 
 
 * Bath-kol, Hebrew, "Daughter of the Voice," which is to say, the 
 Divine revelation after the cessation of the revelation through the 
 prophets.
 
 332 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 ment of the soul is opened by the mouth, and its last will 
 made known. It is by the present conversion of mobile 
 speech into quiet writing and painting, by this strict 
 imprisonment of the breath of the soul, that both the 
 power of language and the blackness of a lie are visibly 
 diminished. For, since every thing is but a sign, it follows 
 that every sign can be again signified even to infinity. 
 
 But now if a fellow-being, another living soul, come to 
 me and utter a deliberate lie, how annihilating ! His soul 
 has fled away from me and left but its fleshly house 
 behind ; what he then says, since it is not the soul which 
 speaks, is as meaningless as the wind which, with all its 
 howling, expresses no pain. A word often effaces or 
 explains an action ; but the reverse scarcely ever occurs. 
 It must be a long course of action which will remove the 
 thorn from one word, or restore the trusted use of the 
 tongue. The whole enchanted palace of a man's thoughts 
 is rendered invisible by the single blast of a lie, for one 
 lie is the mother of all lies. What can I say to him who 
 is, or carries about with him, his own talking machine, 
 and may have thoughts quite different from those he 
 sounds on his machine ? Moreover, he gives me — what 
 is no partial but a universal injury — instead of my soul, 
 a machine ; instead of my truths, falsehoods ; and breaks 
 down the bridge of mind, or at least converts it into a 
 1 ridge which he can let down for himself, but draw up 
 against others. 
 
 § 112. 
 
 And now back to our dear children ! During the first 
 five years they say neither what is true, nor what is false 
 — they merely talk. Their talking is thinking aloud ; 
 and since the one half of thought is frequently a yes, and 
 the other a no, and both escape them ( though not us), they 
 seem to lie when they are merely talking to themselves. 
 Further : at first they find great pleasure in exercising 
 their new art of speech, and so they often talk nonsense 
 only for the sake of hearing their acquisitions in language. 
 They frequently do not understand some word that you 
 have said — little children, for instance, often confuse to- 
 day, to-morrDw, yesterday, as well as numbers and degrees
 
 CHAP. II. J LEVANA. 333 
 
 of comparison, and so give rather a mistaken than a false 
 reply. Again, they use their tongues more in sport than 
 earnest, as may be seen in the long discourses they hold 
 with their puppets, as a minister or an author does with 
 his ; and they easily apply this sportive talking to living 
 people. Children always fly to the warm sunny side of 
 hope ; if the bird or the dog have gone away, they will 
 say, without any further reason, It will come back again. 
 And, since they cannot altogether separate their hopes, 
 that is their fancies, from copies or truths, their own self- 
 deception assumes the appearance of a lie. For instance, 
 a truth-speaking little girl related to me frequent appear- 
 ances of the infant Christ,* and what he had said, done, 
 &c. It is worthy of consideration whether children, when 
 they poetise a lie, do not often relate remembered dreams, 
 which must necessarily be confounded by them with real 
 occurrences. To this class belongs that talkative teazing 
 and joking f often seen in eight or ten year old boys, 
 which arises from superabundance of animal spirits. 
 
 In all these cases, when, the form of a lie is not to be 
 shown in any dark glass, say merely, — " Don't talk non- 
 sense, speak seriously." 
 
 Finally, an untruth about what is to come is often 
 confounded with an untruth about what has happened. 
 Now if, in the case of grown-up men, we do not consider 
 the breach of an official oath, having reference to the 
 future only, equally culpable with the black perjury which 
 relates to the past, we should in a still greater degree 
 in the case of children, before whose little ken time and 
 space are magnified and to whom a day is as inscrutable 
 as a year to us, clearly distinguish between the untruth- 
 fulness of promises and the untruthfulness of statements. 
 Something very different, and much worse, is the narra- 
 tive-lie which seeks to gain some future thing by lying. 
 
 Truthfulness, which would offer even a bloody sacrifice 
 
 * The infant Christ is, in Germany, feigned to be the sender of the 
 presents which adorn the Christmas tree. — Trans. 
 
 t For the true liar seldom jokes, and the true wit does not lie, from 
 the sharp open Swift back to Erasmus, who even experienced a 
 physical antipathy to a liar, as also to fish. — Paravicini, Singularia <U 
 Viris Claris., Cent. ii. 38.
 
 334 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VT. 
 
 to its word as its word, is a godlike blossom on an earthl y 
 plant ; therefore, it is not the first but the last virtue 
 in order of time. The simple savage is full of deceit, 
 both in words and actions ; the peasant, under the in- 
 fluence of some trifling danger, will tell a lie about what 
 is past ; but he considers it dishonourable to tell a pro- 
 spective lie, and keeps his word. And yet you can 
 require in a child, whom you have yet to educate, the 
 last and noblest fruits of truth? How much you err is 
 proved by the fact, that lying children — all other circum- 
 stances being equal — have grown up into truthful men : 
 I appeal to the Rousseau's ribbon-lie of every conscience. 
 
 There are, however, two decided lies with regard to 
 the two times : — no other lies are possible than either 
 those which look forward to the future or backward to 
 the past. The first is seen when the child endeavours 
 to secure himself some booty by lying words or deeds ; 
 the second, when he denies, through fear, his own actions. 
 
 What is to be done in both these circumstances ? 
 
 § 113. 
 
 What is to be done before they occur? That is the 
 question. 
 
 The child, blinded and, as it were, imprisoned by his 
 own existence, acquires his first knowledge of morality 
 by observing others ; and only perceives the hatefulness 
 of a heard lie. not of one spoken by himself. Show him, 
 then, the lofty throne of truthfulness in others, compared 
 wjth the abyss of their falsehood; be what you desire 
 him to be ; and frequently repeat that you do even the 
 most indifferent things because you had previously said 
 vou would. It has a powerful effect on the little heart 
 if he occasionally hear his father, who seems to him 
 a kind of free universal monarch, complain ; — but mark, 
 it must only be in true cases, for truthfulness in the child 
 oannot grow at the expense of truthfulness in the parents 
 — that, for instance, he would rather not go out with him, 
 but, having promised to do so, he must now unwillingly 
 keep his word. 
 
 If the child have promised something, remind him
 
 CHAP. II.] LEVANA. 335 
 
 frequently of it as the time approaches, but without using 
 other words than " you said so," and at last compel him 
 to the performance. But if he have done something, you 
 cannot be too sparing in your inquiries, which may easily 
 become so painful. The younger the child is the fewer 
 questions you ought to ask, the more ought you to seem 
 all-knowing or remain ignorant. Do you not consider 
 that you apply a fiery trial, such as Huss and other 
 martyrs have endured, to children — to whom a threaten- 
 ing father is a penal judge, a prince and a fate, his rod 
 a Jove's thunderbolt, and the next questioning moment 
 an eternity of hellish torments — when, by your concealed 
 anger and the prospect of punishment after confession, 
 you place them in the dangerous position of choosing 
 whether they shall obey instinct or an idea ? To truth 
 belongs freedom ; the criminal stands without fetters 
 during trial ; and man, the reverse of Proteus, speaks the 
 truth when free. The more free the education, the more 
 truthful is the child. All truth-loving ages and nations, 
 from the German to the British, have been free ; lying 
 China is a prison, and romanizare (romancing) meant 
 lying when the Romans were slaves. 
 
 At the same time do not let the remission of punish- 
 ment be the incitement and reward of truth : an act of 
 indemnity which can as little make the child good and 
 true as escaped suffering the unpunished thief. If you 
 must inquire, use affectionate words, and apply to the 
 lie the pain you would spare the child. 
 
 But if a lie be proved against the child, solemnly utter 
 the judgment " guilty of lying," with a shocked tone and 
 look, with all the horrror due to this sin against nature 
 and the Holy Ghost, and inflict the punishment. The 
 only punishments I would permit for lying are such as 
 affect the honour, and can be removed as solemnly, suddenly 
 and completely as inflicted, so as not to lose their effect 
 by gradual diminution. The Iroquois blacken the faces 
 of those who celebrate their heroes with lying songs. The 
 biamese sew up the lips of lying women, as if they were 
 wounds. I have nothing to say against the blackening; 
 on the contrary, I have myself occasionally punished a lie 
 severely by marking a spot of ink on the brow, which
 
 336 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICII RICHTER. [FRAG. VL 
 
 was not to be washed off without permission, and which 
 eat deeply into the conscience. But I am more in favour 
 of the Siamese plan of closing the lips, I mean of forbidding 
 speaking to those who have spoken wickedly. The same 
 principle which led the ancient Germans to cut out the 
 tongues of the Eoman advocates sends the misused member, 
 which serves the mind worse than the stomach, into the 
 convent of La Trappe. J think this punishment which 
 petrifies the tongue, as Paul did the serpent at Malta, is 
 juster, lighter and more definite than that which Rousseau 
 and Kant would inflict on a lying child ; namely, not to 
 believe him for a time, which only means to seem not 
 to believe him. For in this case the judge himself lies 
 during the punishment for lying : and will not the little 
 culprit arrive at the knowledge of this pretence by his 
 consciousness of speaking the truth ? Moreover, how and 
 when will you make the necessary return from disbelief 
 to confidence ? At the same time, Kant's punishment 
 may occasionally have a beneficial tendency in the case of 
 grown-up daughters. 
 
 Never tell any child under six years old to conceal 
 anything, even though it were a pleasure you were 
 planning for some one you love. The clear sky of child- 
 like open-heartedness must not be covered even by the 
 morning glow of shame ; and your instructions will soon 
 teach him to add secrets of his own to yours. The heroic 
 virtue of silence requires for its practice the powers of 
 ripening reason. Keason teaches us to be silent ; the 
 heart teaches us to speak. 
 
 For this and other reasons I consider it wrong, at least 
 for the first five years, to forbid a child to ask for any 
 thing ; especially if the mother append the poisonous sugar 
 of a promise to give it afterwards. For, are wishes sins ? 
 cr is the confession of a wish a sin ? During the silence 
 attached to the gift will not a longing for enjoyment and 
 reward, and the power of dissimulation, be maintained and 
 fostered ? And is it not much easier to give an entire 
 refusal after the short question than after the long wait- 
 ing f This mistaken command arises from the maternal 
 inability to utter an immediate and decisive " no." 
 
 Do not despise all kinds of little helps. For instance,
 
 CHAP. n.J LEVANA. 337 
 
 do not press the child for an immediate answer ; a lie 
 easily escapes from haste, and must then be supported by 
 another. Give him a little time for reflection before he 
 speak. Further, remember in your most indifferent pro- 
 mises and declarations — and all the more because they are 
 indifferent to you — that children have a better memory than 
 you about all things, but especially for and against you, 
 and that you must protect them from the dangerous appear- 
 ance of your own innocent over-hasty untruthfulness. 
 
 The author has occasionally asked himself whether 
 children's sense of truth may not be injured by the acting 
 of charades and little comedies. Besides the necessary 
 excitement of instant creation, children's charades have 
 also this advantage over children's comedies, — that mere 
 charades are only a higher imitation of the puppet games 
 which children, even at an earlier age, played extempore 
 with their dolls and their companions without any injury 
 to truthfulness ; as if, even then, they would take refuge 
 from the cold winds of real life behind the shelter of 
 imaginary life. In charades the child lives, — at once 
 poet and player — in a strange character, it is true, but 
 still not in a borrowed one, and uttering the words 
 prompted by the eager moment. In plays he coldly learns 
 by heart the representation (simtdatio) of a character and 
 certain words, in order afterwards to give a lively repre- 
 sentation of both. Truth has also this advantage in cha- 
 rades; that the child must at all events reply from his 
 own mind to the changing questions of the time ; whereas, 
 in a learnt comedy, he brings with him every answer 
 prepared for weeks. And since even great actors do not 
 consider the advantage to be gained by pure universal 
 human nature, without regard to artistic effect, as the 
 matter of chief importance, we should exempt children 
 from an exercise in which the advantage is more doubtful 
 than the injury. 
 
 Our ancestors magnified every lie into perjury by 
 always pointing out to children the universal presence 
 of God : and why should not this warning, which converts 
 every promise into an oath and doubles the sin while 
 rendering it more difficult of commission to a conscience 
 alive to the Divinity, be still ield up to children ? 
 
 I. Z
 
 338 JEAN PAUL PKIEDE1CH EICHTEE. [FEAG. VI. 
 
 Finally, since truthfulness, as a conscious virtue and 
 sacrifice, is the blossom, nay, the pollen, of the whole 
 moral growth, it can only grow with its growth, and open 
 when it has reached its height. You have only to keep 
 away weeds while j-ou give it freedom, s^ave it from over- 
 powering temptations, and forbid all soul-bending customs 
 (such as obliging a child to return thanks for a whipping, 
 and to make compliments to btrangers). \/ 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 EDUCATION OF THE AFFECTIONS. 
 § 114. 
 
 I maid, in the hundred-and-first section, that love is the 
 second hemisphere of the moral world, that it turns to 
 what is external, as honour does to what is internal, and 
 so forth. The holy essence of love has been fathomed 
 neither by the fraternity of novelists who, like selfish 
 women, mingle regard to self with the beloved object, 
 nor by merely intellectual philosophers, who view its 
 depth partly as an instinct utterly without and below 
 their categorical imperative (law of morals), and partly 
 as mere justice, a kind of rational regard; to such men 
 love and poetry seem a pair of superfluous wings dis- 
 figuring the useful arms behind which they are placed. 
 Only Plato, Hemsterhuis, Jaeobi, Herder, and a few like 
 them, have brought to the love of wisdom (philosophy) 
 the wisdom of love. He who called love the positive law 
 of morality, will at least not be condemned by one great 
 man — by Jesus Christ, the founder of the first religion of 
 love in the midst of a Judaism inimical to all other 
 nations, and an age inimical to philanthropy. But the 
 essence of love — this all-sustaining deity, the true divine 
 unity of all, in which the individual soul feels more 
 than it comprehend* — dtmands another place for exa- 
 mination,
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 339 
 
 § 115. 
 
 Love is an innate, but variously apportioned, power 
 and warmth of the heart ; there are cold and warm blooded 
 souls as well as bodies. Many are born knights of the 
 Love of their neighbour,* as Montaigne; many are armed 
 neutrals against humanity Whether this power be a 
 holy burning bush, or only a single kindling spark, edu- 
 cation must care for it in two ways, by protecting and by 
 developing it. 
 
 By protecting it I mean this. The child begins with 
 selfishness which affects us as little as that of animals; 
 because the soul, darkly hidden under its various wants, 
 cannot yet feel its way to another, but incorporates others, 
 sp to speak, with itself. In so far the child finds nothing 
 lifeless without, any more than within, itself; it spreads 
 its soul as a universal soul over every thing. A little 
 girl of two years old — and all children do the same — 
 personified other things than those I mentioned in the 
 earlier part of this work : she said, for instance, of the 
 door which was opened, "It wants to go out." — "I will 
 kiss my hand to the spring." — " Is the moon good ? and 
 does it never cry ? " This animation of all lifeless things, 
 which is peculiar to children, is another reason why we 
 should restrain them from ever harshly alluding to an 
 inanimate object. 
 
 § 116. 
 
 Love in the child, as in the animal, exists as an instinct ; 
 and this central fire frequently, but not always, breaks 
 through its outer crust in the form of compassion. A 
 child is often indifferent, not merely to the sufferings of 
 animals and to those of persons unconnected with himself 
 (except when the cry of pain finds an echo in his own 
 heart), but even to those of relatives. Innocent children 
 will frequently find pleasure in standing on the place 
 where another is to be punished. A second observation, 
 founded on experience, is, that boys, when approaching 
 
 * The order of knighthood to which I allude, was founded by the 
 Queen of Charles III. of Spain. 
 
 z 2
 
 340 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 near to manhood, show the least affection, the most love 
 of teasing, the greatest destmctiveness, the most selfish- 
 ness and cold-henrtedness ; just as the coldness of the 
 night increases twofold shortly before the rising of the 
 sun. 
 
 But the sun comes, and warms the world ; the super- 
 abundance of power becomes love : the strong stem encloses 
 and protects the pith; the teasing lad becomes the 
 affectionate young man. The other observation of childish 
 heartlessness, recorded above, vanishes in the very 
 opposite quality of tenderness, so soon as the visible pain 
 of the culprit, by its increase, affects the child ; every 
 fresh wound makes a tearful eye. 
 
 Consequently, there is not so much need to ingraft the 
 buds of affection, as to remc'e the moss and briars of 
 selfishness which hide them trom the sun. Every body 
 would gladly show affection, might he or dared he but do 
 it. "Wherever a pulse beats, a heart reposes in the back 
 ground ; if there be but some little impulse towards love, 
 the whole essence of love lies behind it. 
 
 But you plant the selfish weed, instead of eradicating 
 it, if, in the presence of children, you pass contemptuous, 
 though just, judgments on your neighbours, or even your 
 town. How else can the child learn to love the world 
 than by learning to love what is daily around him ? And 
 can we love what we despise ? Or will your sermons 
 warm him into love for the objects you have taught him 
 to scorn ? Since every distinction of your children above 
 their neighbours, whether it consist in position, behaviour, 
 or even more brilliant instruction, reminds them of them- 
 selves at the expense of others, this distinction very goon 
 and very easily passes into hatred. Never say to your 
 children that other children are ill hrought-up. I have 
 frequently seen whole families converted, by similar 
 thoughtless and perverse actions, into watchful and 
 blockading troops of hatred ; whole houses built full of 
 pouting corners, where every child, full of itself, regarded 
 its own demands as the weights, those of others as the 
 goods to be weighed, and expected universal love and 
 admiration. If a large town have the injurious effect on 
 children's hearts of compelling them to assume the neu-
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 341 
 
 trality of great people, because so many of whom they 
 are ignorant, and to whom they are indifferent, constantly 
 pass before them, much more must a village harm them 
 if they hate and despise as many people as they know, 
 that is to say, every body. 
 
 The simple command, " Forgive the sinner," means 
 with children, Do not regard him as one : you will 
 succeed better if you teach them to distinguish the guilty 
 accomplice — self, from its stains ; to judge the deed, not 
 the doer ; in order especially, by the comparison of things 
 and rights, to prevent, or to exalt, the comparison of 
 persons. Praise the action, not the child. Parents 
 mention their children too often by name. Do not say, 
 " Ah, the good little Louisa ! " but say, " That is good," — 
 or, at most, " You are as good as Mary." 
 
 § 117. 
 
 But while setting forth the repression of selfishness as 
 the one thing needful for exciting kindliness to others, 
 we must observe — as is just — that love requires nothing, 
 save not to be obstructed. This leads us to the second 
 means of maintaining and exciting love : it is this — place 
 another being in sufficiently close and living contact with 
 your child and he will love it ; because man is so good 
 that the devil, so to speak, has only carved and placed a 
 black frame round the divine image. The stem of the 
 individual heart nourishes with the same sap its own 
 branches and those which are ingrafted on it. 
 
 The means of exciting love consist in identifying the 
 child, as it were, with the life of others, and in reverence 
 for life under every form. 
 
 Concerning this transposition into extraneous life, by 
 which alone the goodness of our nature can unfold all its 
 love, little needs here be printed because I have already 
 printed much about it.* Individuals, yea, whole nations, 
 have often died without having once even thought of 
 themselves in any other position than their own ; how 
 difficult, then, must it be for the child to place himself in 
 
 * la the Life of Siebeuk'as, Buok I.
 
 342 JEAN PAUL FE1EDMCH BICHTEB, [fBAG. VI. 
 
 the position of others ! Man usually opens himself to the 
 reception of another's nature only when, in the contest 
 between two other persons, he must transpose himself 
 from the one into the other ; but not, when he is a party 
 concerned in the contest, by placing himself in the position 
 of his opponent. Moreover, this representative method 
 of viewing our neighbour is a kind of intuition, and, 
 consequently, not always in our own power. I do not 
 attempt to decide whether possibly older children may 
 not be led to attain this intuitive perception at an earlier 
 period than they else would by certain games ; where one 
 child, for instance, assumed the name and imitated the 
 actions of another; or, by coloured pictures calling to 
 mind similar situations. But there is something else 
 which may be done to attain this end with better hope of 
 success. 
 
 § 118. 
 
 It is this : Teach a child to consider all animal life 
 sacred — in short, give him the heart of a Hindoo, not the 
 heart of a Cartesian philosopher. 
 
 I here speak of something higher than compassion for 
 animals, though of that also. Why has it been long re- 
 marked that children's cruelty to animals predicts cruelty 
 to men, as the Old Testament sacrifices of beasts fore- 
 shadowed the New Testament sacrifice of a man ? It is 
 certain that, unless associated with other things, the little 
 human being can only sympathise with those sufferings 
 which speak in tones similar to his own. Consequently, 
 the unusual cry of a tortured animal sounds to him only 
 like the strange and amusing howl of the inanimate wind - 
 but, as he sees life and voluntary motion, and even attri 
 butes them to inanimate forms, he sins against life when 
 he separates them as though they were but machinery. 
 Life itself should be sacred; every life, irrational as 
 well as any other. And does the child, in fact, know of 
 different kinds of life ? Or is the heart, beating under 
 bristles, feathers, or hard wing-covers, therefore any the 
 less a heart ? 
 
 Permit me a few words about the love of animals, and 
 universal reverence for life !
 
 CHAP, III. J LEVANA. o4o 
 
 Once, when man, a new and fresh creature, lived in the 
 full world where one stream flows into another, he recog- 
 nised in every thing the universal life of the Godhead, 
 resembling an infinite tree of life which spreads the lowest 
 insects, like roots, into the earth and sea, stands firm and 
 strong with a trunk of huge powerful beasts, shoots into 
 the air with boughs full of waving leaves, and finally puts 
 forth men, — its tender blossoms — towards the sky. Then 
 had not arisen that stupid human egotism which thinks 
 that the whole animal kingdom, the peopled seas and de- 
 serts full of all their various happy living creatures, were 
 given by God to men as tributary beasts, Michaelmas geese 
 and tithe hens for their stomachs. The earth, Kepler's 
 animal, had not yet become the metallic cow and the 
 Balaam's ass of little man. But the old vanished world 
 —some remnants of which are yet visible in eastern India 
 — finding more life and more divinity in the flower, fast 
 chained by its roots, than we now do in the free-moving 
 beast, worshipped, in animal arabesques, in the living, 
 moving, distorted images of the human form, the infinite 
 Baffaelle who perfected man. The forms of animals, 
 repuhive to us, revealed to them the veil of Isis, or the 
 Moses' covering of a deity. Hence the lower, but wonder- 
 ful, beast* was worshipped much sooner than the human 
 being ; hence the Egyptians crowned human bodies with 
 the heads of animals. The more childlike, simple and 
 pious a nation, the greater its love of animals. In Surat 
 theie is a hospital for animals. The hero who had taken 
 Kineveh saved it from desti uction because of the multitude 
 of its animals. The mercifulness of the Jews f towards 
 animals was rewarded with long life. Even the punish- 
 ment of animals, if they had participated with men in any 
 crime, the thunders of excommunication hurled against 
 them, and the weighing of their designs J in inflicting 
 punishment, show the early regard felt for these eighth 
 parts, and likenesses, of man. The Indian adoration of 
 
 * Vide Meiners. f Michaelis, Mosaic law, v. iii. 
 
 X An ox which, among the Jews [according to the Gemara), was put 
 to death for killing a Jew, but left unhurt utter killing three heathens, 
 was equally unpunished if he aimed at goriug a heathen but kilted a 
 Jew. — Mischna, 6. Bafa kauia, c. 4.
 
 344 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 vegetable life passed into Greece under the form of Hama- 
 dryads and other deities dwelling in trees, and into the 
 north under the form of punishment to all who injured 
 trees. 
 
 I have often pictured to myself situations which would 
 remove the common daily view of animals which, like 
 mis-shapen human bodies, have fallen on to our globe 
 from other worlds producing different forms. For instance ; 
 I have fancied an uninhabited island on which one man, 
 nourished only by the bread fruit tree, had seen no living 
 thing, nothing but waves and sky and his own reflection 
 in the water, and from which he was suddenly transported 
 to a country peopled with animated beings. 
 
 What an enchanted island full of embodied sprites and 
 fairies ! To the islander who knows no other form than 
 his own, a hairy monkey grinning at him from a bough 
 would seem a wicked spirit, or a misshapen man. The 
 elephant approaches, — a shapeless, living mass ; a whole 
 family compressed into one huge two-eyed body, — a walk- 
 ing island of flesh : the lion comes like anger: the horse 
 flies like victorious pride : little mad sprites, red, green, 
 yellow, and six-footed, flutter about the island. A glorious 
 wonder drops from the clouds, in which the two strong 
 useful human arms are changed into burni shed-gold hair 
 or feathers, and its lips drawn out into a horn. Grey 
 shapeless substances, with scarce formed limbs, swim in 
 the Avaters : yellow creatures, like the masks of the furies, 
 crawl about in the marshes : a single, long, smooth limb 
 creeps up and pricks the wicked spirit on the bough, and 
 he falls down : and then, when these strange dream-like 
 figures began to speak each the language of an unknown 
 world — as we might suppose the various nations of its 
 planets assembled in the market-place of their sun — hum- 
 ming, screaming, howling, laughing — there, on the bough 
 of a tree, sweet sounds from heaver:, at its root wrathful 
 hissings from Erebus : and then the battles and struggles 
 of these animals, the injuries inflicted on them by each 
 other, and yet their continued existence : and, finally, this 
 mingled, fluttering, hurting, killing, caressing, repro- 
 ducing life becomes an infinite breath of life, wherein 
 the individual life flies like a tiny zephyrette ....
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 345 
 
 The one human soul forgets in itself the human race of 
 the past, the present and the future, and places itself as 
 the first figure before all others. How much more does 
 it forget the inferior race of animals, the mouches vulautes 
 before an angel's eyes ! 
 
 The so-called instinct of animals— this ass which per- 
 ceives the angel's presence sooner than the prophet — ought 
 to be regarded as the greatest miracle of creation, and 
 also as the key and index to all other miracles; in so 
 much as the riddle of the universe resembles those riddles 
 which both describe the riddle and signify it. Animals 
 should be rendered familiar to children in every possible 
 way ; for instance, by representing them as an anagram 
 of a human being : thus the poor dog may be regarded as 
 an old hairy man, whose mouth has become blackened 
 and elongated, his ears pulled out, long nails appended to 
 his shaggy paws, and so forth. Little animals must be 
 brought nearer to the eye and heart by means of a 
 magnifying glass. Thus we may become the friends of 
 the denizens of a leaf. The prejudice which values life 
 by the yard — why, then, are not elephants and whales 
 ranked higher than ourselves? — disappears by the con- 
 templation of the infinity which is the same in every 
 living creature, and, like an infinite series in numbers, is 
 increased by no finite additions ; which is not affected, for 
 instance, by the two million joints of a centipede, or the 
 many thousand muscles of the willow-caterpillar. " How 
 you would take care of a butterfly as big as an eagle, or 
 of a grasshopper as large as a horse! And are not you 
 little too ? " Speak thus to the child. 
 
 Leibnitz replaced a little insect which he had examined 
 for long time uninjured on its leaf : be this a command 
 for a child. The Stoic school declared that a man who 
 killed a bird without any reason would just as readily kill 
 his father : and the Egyptian priest considered it impious 
 to destroy any animal except for sacrifice. These embody 
 all the commandments of regard for life. Let animals be 
 put to death only from necessity, as sacrifices, accidentally, 
 hastily, involuntarily, defensively. If the long observa- 
 tion of some animal — say a frog — of its breathing, jump- 
 ing mode of life and agunies, have converted this little
 
 346 JEAN PAUL FEIEDFJCH EICHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 aiiiraal, previously indifferent to the child, into a really 
 living thing, he would, by killing it, destroy with its life 
 his reverence for all life. Hence no domestic animal, a 
 sheep, a cow, should ever be killed in a child's presence ; 
 at all events, if his rising love of animals is to be en- 
 couraged instead of repressed (as some nations have been 
 led to eat men from eating monkeys) ; the hard necessity 
 of the case, the careful tending previously, and the sudden 
 easy death, must be cast as a veil of darkness over the 
 slaughtering hand. Even a hunter should never punish 
 his hounds with true hunters' cruelty before a child, 
 especially because their cries express their pain so clearly. 
 Cooks say you should show no pity in killing an animal, 
 for else it dies harder : this superstition at once reveals 
 and hides the true woman's sympathy which it forbids. 
 
 To the child's eye admit all living things into the 
 human family ; so the greater reveals to him the less. 
 Breathe a living soul into every thing ; and even describe 
 the lily, which he wantonly tears from its organic exist- 
 ence, as the daughter of a fair mother who stands in the bed 
 and nourishes her little white child with sap and dew. 
 
 I do not refer to any mere empty exercise of compassion 
 in the school of others' sufferings, but to an exercise of 
 religion in the consecration of life, of the deity ever 
 present in the trees and in the human brain. The love of 
 animals, like maternal love, arises from no expectation 
 of reciprocated advantage, still less from selfishness, and 
 has the further advantage of always finding an object on 
 which to manifest itself. 
 
 Oh ! the beautiful time will, must come, when the 
 beast-loving Brahmins shall dwell in the cold north and 
 make it warm ; when the heart, having rejected its worst 
 and cruellest sins, shall also lay aside those which slowly 
 poison it ; when man, who now honours the multiform part 
 of humanity, shall also begin to spare, and finally to pro- 
 tect, the animated ascending and descending scale of living 
 creatures, so as no more to offer to the Great First Cause 
 the hateful sight of thickly veiled, it is true, but wide- 
 extended, animal suffering. And wherefore must such 
 times come? Because worse times have passed away: 
 time carries away the national debts (mostly bloody debts]
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 347 
 
 of humanity : strand-right is now strand-wrong ; the 
 traffic in negroes is gradually becoming unlawful. Only 
 the toughest, harshest barbarism of past ages — war — 
 remains yet to be vanquished by our innate anti-bar- 
 barism. 
 
 § 119. 
 
 The third love-potion, like the third degree of compari- 
 son which admits of no more, is love for love. If love be 
 the highest, what further can it seek than itself, the 
 highest ? A heart can only be held by a heart, the fairest 
 setting of the loveliest jewel. Only the tumult and con- 
 fusion in the nest of self can so darken us that we value 
 pure love for another less than that for ourselves. 
 
 But do not attempt to found this love in children by 
 caresses, the thirsty springs of love. These soon both 
 grow cold and make cold. I have often seen children, 
 especially young ones, suddenly start away from the 
 caresses of love to the quietest observation of some mere 
 trifle, just like the old epic poets of early nations in their 
 descriptions. In grown-up persons that would betray a 
 withered heart which in children only shows that its 
 buds are still closed. 
 
 You reveal the form of love to a child less by self- 
 sacrificing actions — for these he, as yet unreasoning and 
 selfish, does not regard — than by the mother tongue of 
 love, affectionate words and looks. Love, to appear un- 
 troubled, must be embodied in nothing save the tender 
 mimicry taught by Nature herself: a look, a word, 
 expresses it directly, a gift only indirectly, by transla- 
 tion. And just so in marriage : love is not preserved 
 by gifts, pleasures and sacrifices, whose influence soon 
 disappears, but by words and looks of love. Moreover, 
 children manifest more love towards present-giving 
 strangers than to present-giving parents; but* on the 
 contrary, not so much to caressing strangers as to caress- 
 ing parents. 
 
 Let the child occasionally see the fiery pillar of love 
 move before strangers. Contemplation of the mutual 
 love of others sanctifies the beholder, because it cannot 
 be accompanied by selfish desires. But there is one evil
 
 348 JEAN PAUL FR1EDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 attending this ; namely, that the undeveloped hearts of 
 children either behold the altar flame of others' love with 
 indifference, or frequently, if their parents kindle it, even 
 with jealousy. But this only teaches us that in educa- 
 tion, as well as in art, every violent expression, even of 
 what is most excellent, must be shunned (because the 
 injudicious excess makes a durable impression, but the 
 beautiful fugitive idea is lost) and that quietness and 
 gentleness reflect the affectionate heart most clearly. 
 And I can assure brides, and still more certainly bride- 
 grooms, that they will only find the children of affec- 
 tionate paients affectionate; and especially that a kind 
 or an unkind father propagates love or hatred in his 
 children. 
 
 If love were not natural to us we could never hate. 
 It is true that in us, as in other animals, hate manifests 
 itself earlier, and at first more powerfully than love. 
 This may in part be thus accounted for : in attraction or 
 resemblance some portion of another's excellence is lost 
 to sight by its mixture with our own, whereas the repul- 
 sion of what is dissimilar at once markedly separates our 
 good from others' evil qualities ; the heart, full of ideal 
 light, feels the cold shadow of another's worthlessness 
 more sensibly than the light whicli is lost in the blaze of 
 his own. But if love be innate, and if the heart be, as 
 Descartes calls the earth, an encrusted sun (soleil encroute) 
 you have but to break away the crust and the glowing 
 warmth is there. In other words, let the child learn to 
 know love by his own actions, as, reversedly, to under- 
 stand your actions by love ; that is to say, let him do 
 something for you so that he may love something ; for in 
 children action awakens desire, though the opposite is the 
 case with men. 
 
 You may teach a higher than Ovid's Art of Love, by 
 requesting your child to do something without cor lmand- 
 ing or rewarding performance, or punishing neglect ; 
 only depict beforehand, if it be for another, or afterwards 
 if for yourself, the pleasure which the little actor's atten- 
 tion to your wish affords. You excite the benevolence 
 of children less by pictures of people's necessities than of 
 the joy produced by relieving them. For the little heart
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 349 
 
 conceals so great a treasure of love that he is less deficient 
 in willingness to make sacrifices than in the certainty 
 that they would give pleasure. Hence, when children 
 have once begun to make presents they would never cease 
 giving. The parents may give them the reward of certain 
 happiness by a gladly praising approval ; an educational 
 lever whose power has not been sufficiently estimated. 
 For children, accustomed only to parental bidding and 
 forbidding, are made happy by permission to do some extra 
 service, and by the recognition of their having done it. 
 This affectionate acknowledgment of pleasure renders 
 them neither vain nor empty, but full ; not proud, but 
 warm. 
 
 " It does the poor man, or dog, or whatever it may be, 
 good, or harm ! " These few words, said in a proper tone 
 of voice, are worth a whole sermon : and fie ! said to a 
 girl, will abundantly fill the place of half a volume of 
 Ehrenberg's Lectures to the female sex. 
 
 Moreo*ver, the author does not attempt to hide from the 
 police that, in the presence of his children, he has fre- 
 quently given to beggars ; first, because the appearance of 
 cruelty cannot be removed by any political reasons, nor is 
 attempted to be ; and, secondly, because a child's heart, 
 excited by compassion for suffering, should not be chilled. 
 
 Yet a few fragments within the fragment! Do not 
 apprehend too great danger to the affections from children's 
 quarrels. The circumscribed heart of children, their 
 incapacity to place themselves in another's position, and 
 their Adam-like innocence of belief that the whole world 
 is made for them, not they for the world ; all these things 
 combine to raise the inflated bubbles which soon break of 
 themselves. They may speak harshly, or even fly into a 
 passion, with one another, but must not continue it ! You 
 must do many more things to be hated than to be loved 
 by children : hated parents must themselves have hated 
 for a long time. Advancing years rarely awaken a re- 
 pressed or dormant love ; the individual's own selfishness 
 doubles that of others, and this again redoubles that; 
 and so layer upon layer of ice is frozen. You falsify 
 love by commanding its outward expression ; — kissing the 
 Land, for instance. Such things, unlike kind actions, are
 
 350 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VL 
 
 not the causes, but only the effects, of love. Do not in any 
 instance require love : among grown-up persons would 
 a declaration of affection, if commanded and prescribed by 
 the highest authorities, be well received ? It may be 
 again repeated without deserving blame, that the quickest 
 alternation between punishment or refusal and previous 
 love is the true, though (to the fair sex) a difficult art of 
 educating the affections. No love is sweeter than that 
 which follows severity ; so from the bitter olive is sweet, 
 soft oil expressed. 
 
 And, finally, ye parents, teach to love, and you will 
 need no ten commandments ; teach to love, and a rich, 
 winning life is opened to your child : for man (if this 
 simile be permitted) resembles Austria, which increases 
 its territory by marriage but loses its acquisitions by war: 
 teach to love, in this age which is the winter of time, and 
 which can more easily conquer every thing than a heart 
 by a heart ; teach to love, so that when your eyes are old, 
 and their sense almost extinguished, you may yet find 
 round your sick couch and dying bed no greedy, covetous 
 looks, but anxious weeping eyes, which strive to warm 
 your freezing life, and lighten the darkness of your last 
 hour by thanks for their first : teach to love, I repeat ; 
 that means —do you love ! 
 
 CHArTER IV. 
 
 SUPPLEMENTARY APPENDIX TO MORAL EDUCATION. 
 § 120. 
 
 What is the third which unites love and honour, which 
 does not suffer love weakly to sacrifice the sacred rights 
 of the individual soul, nor honour to disregard that of 
 others in the cold contemplation of its own ? — Religion. 
 
 Since every distinguishing quality is again subdivided, 
 we find that the natural distinctions of the sexes, the one 
 inclining more to honour, the other to love, are repeated 
 in the same sex. This is a very important point iD female
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 351 
 
 education. One girl is all quickness of perception and 
 action, full of truthfulness and impatience, her personal 
 and her public honour is ever before her eyes— forgiving 
 only her own severity, not that of others, but even that 
 more readily than any unworthy attack on her honour — 
 reflecting on her own worth rather than duly weighing it, 
 placing justice higher than love, and so forth. Another 
 girl is full of affection, often even to the prejudice of her 
 honour, desirous of approbation, not proud, less obedient 
 to the dictates of propriety than to inclination, sacrificing 
 external form to internal sentiment, eager to lend assist- 
 ance and sympathy, less truthful than patient, and so 
 forth. A perfect soul is to be formed from the union of 
 these two. Hardness of character in a woman is more 
 easily corrected than want of honour in a man : a woman's 
 want of honour is as difficult to correct as a man's harsh- 
 ness. A boy utterly without honour, and a girl without 
 love, deserve nothing else at the end of ten years than 
 to be married to each other. The female sex, however, 
 resembles the ocean, or water in general, which contains 
 both greater and smaller beasts than the firm land. 
 
 Since a theory of education is a moral science of food 
 (dietetics) but not a science of healing, receipts against 
 anger, selfishness, &c, find no place in my treatise, though 
 they are, indeed, implied in what has gone before. And, 
 truly, what a work of giant folios must be written to 
 embrace a description of all the diseases, and all the 
 remedies for the million shades of disease, which the 
 combinations of different characters and years, various 
 degrees of activity, and external circumstances can 
 produce ! 
 
 The technical part of morality, such as order, clean- 
 liness, politeness, has already found teachers in larger 
 books than this. 
 
 It. is well that a treatise on education be occasionally 
 written in pamphlet-form, and completed in three little 
 volumes. Long talking begets short hearing, for people 
 go away. An educational library — unless, indeed, a 
 pocket library be invented — would soon cause men to 
 attend to the first plan which offered itself, rather than 
 be at the trouble of reading a whole host of books.
 
 352 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEB. [FEAG. VL 
 
 § 121. 
 
 But a few more paragraphs may be added without too 
 much endangering the sruallness of the book, or the 
 facility of reading it. 
 
 Would you devote hours to moral instruction? I would 
 rather recommend years, and a never-ending course of 
 that study. No lesson here avails but that founded on 
 living facts, and even it is but as one incident in a fable. 
 Advancing life is a perpetual preacher, home a domestic 
 chaplain, and, instead of morning and evening prayers, 
 life-long prayers must exert their influence. [Sciences can 
 be taught ; so in them you may give lessons : genius can 
 only be aroused ; provide it, then, with motives and oppor- 
 tunities. Can the heart of a corpse send forth living 
 blood? — The heart is the genius of virtue; morality its 
 theory of aesthetics. If you wish any thing to be forgotten, 
 write it on the inner side of the study door ; if you want 
 to desecrate the holy, hang a table of commandments per- 
 petually before the eyes. Lavater said, " Every man has 
 his devil's moments." Consequently be not lost in sur- 
 prise if the child also have his Satan's seconds as well as 
 angel's minutes. Rather despair of grown men than of 
 children. For these confuse you so much by the beautiful 
 revelation of all their feelings and desires, and by their un- 
 premeditated echo of all sounds, that the key-note remains 
 unknown to you. With the former, on the contrary, one 
 treble-discord presupposes an instrument thoroughly out 
 of tune. And yet again : if a man be so unfathomable to 
 a man, how much more so must his unequal, a child, be 
 which not merely conceals its fruit in its leaves, but those 
 in their buds, and within them the flowers. Hence when 
 new and necessary developments take place, even though 
 they be for the worse, do not blame previous innocent 
 mistakes in the plan of education. For instance; how- 
 ever much you endeavour to conceal and repress the long 
 dormant sexual instinct it will yet finally start up armed 
 where you least expect it, like Minerva from the head of 
 Jupiter. 
 
 1 think that we parents, especially we modern parents,
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 353 
 
 separate our children too anxiously from other children ; 
 as gardeners do flowers to preserve the pollen unmixed. 
 Can we very highly value any good or lovely thing which 
 withers at the slightest touch ? If we have educated truly 
 and implanted right principles in a child until his sixth 
 year a few bad examples will not so much drive away 
 what is good as fan it into new life : if the water in the 
 tea-urn be really boiling a little spirit flame will keep it 
 so all tea-time. Not the badness, but the long continuance, 
 of examples injures children. And, again, the examples 
 of strange children and indifferent people have less effect 
 than those of the persons they most respect, — their 
 parents and teachers ; because the latter, like the external 
 conscience of children, so break or darken their internal 
 conscience, that the devil finds it prepared for his 
 residence. 
 
 Yes, I go still further, and declare the preponderating 
 influence of a good example over a bad one — or the victory 
 of the angel Michael over the devil — to be so great that I 
 believe the poor children of a thoroughly unmarriage-like 
 union, where one parent is the ally of the devil and the 
 other of the angel, will be gathered hardly, and at great 
 cost, but all the more certainly under the white flag. 
 
 The younger the children are the more rapidly may 
 we pass before them from jest to earnest ; for they do so 
 themselves. All their modes of going from one thing to 
 another are leaps. How quickly they forget and forgive ! 
 Then do so to them, especially in cases of punishment ; 
 and always inflict short punishments, so that they may 
 never be thought unfounded and unjust. God be thanked 
 for the memory of children which is less retentive of 
 sorrows than of joys ! Else what a prickly chain, formed 
 by the uninterrupted series of punishments, would sur- 
 round these little beings ! But children are capable of 
 being delighted twenty times even on the worst of days. 
 It is as difficult to arouse them from their sweet god- 
 like slumber by domestic or European wars, as to awaken 
 flowers out of their sleep by noise and motion. God grant 
 the dear little ones may awake, like the flowers, to feel 
 the aunshine and behold the day ! 
 
 There are confused, obstinate hours in which the child 
 i. 2 a
 
 354 JEAN PAUL FEIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 positively cannot pronounce certain words, nor obey certain 
 commands : but he will do so the next hour. Do not 
 consider this as stubbornness. I know men who have 
 laboured for years to get rid of some expression of the 
 face, mode of writing, or odd word to which they have 
 become habituated, without any particular result. Apply 
 this to children, who are often commanded to abandon 
 some thousand habits at once, and do not exclaim so 
 bitterly against their disobedience, which is often nothing 
 but the impossibility of an overburdened attention. 
 
 The fruits of the right education of the first three years 
 (a higher triennium than the academic) cannot be reaped 
 during the sowing ; — and you will often be unable to 
 understand why, after doing so much, so much still 
 remains to be done; — but in a few years the growing 
 harvest will surprise and reward you ; for the numerous 
 earthy crusts which covered the flower-shoots, but did 
 not crush them, have at last burst before them. 
 
 § 122. 
 
 Physical nature makes many little steps before taking a 
 leap, and then begins the same process over again : the 
 law of continuity is animated by the law of advancing 
 and retreating efforts. We find the last law most strongly 
 expressed in the leap to sexual power ; but of these leaps, 
 like the bud or knot-severances of the shooting stalk, there 
 are many more ; and for the most part they are closely 
 collected round about the embryo ; even as failing age 
 sets them at wide intervals one from the other. The leap 
 from the Graafian vesicles into the uterus — the settling 
 of the head before the birth — the entry into the atmo- 
 sphere of earth — the first milk — the teething— the grow- 
 ing-fever, and so on, are my evidences. So, in old age, 
 the feeble copy of childhood, nature has sometimes re- 
 commenced her sudden efforts of power in pushing forth 
 teeth, hair, &c. 
 
 But the mind must always be the companion of the 
 body ; it is the strophe, the other the antistrophe, though 
 occasionally their positions are reversed. The heavy 
 cloud? of the body must break in thunder showers ; the
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 355 
 
 growth of the physical powers must produce growth in 
 the mental powers also ; and they, again, necessitate thr 
 former. But then the teacher stands petrified to behold 
 a new inimical — really friendly — division in the child's 
 nature, and believes the former world to have vanished 
 because a new world has sprung into existence. Accus- 
 tomed to the old, he would rather see the child's growth a 
 mere growing old ; in short, he would wish it to be always 
 the same, or, at most, to exhibit no greater change than that 
 from the print to the coloured painting : — the child must 
 not drop his first seed-leaves in the beams of the sharp- 
 cutting world, but yet. must push forth new growing 
 leaves. But since this can never be ; since every applica- 
 tion of the flute to the lips produces a new incorporeal 
 sound, the teacher ought to be of good courage and onl} r 
 say, " The parts developed last must grow upon the first, 
 and why need I fear for these if there be nothing I would 
 wish to recall in the others ? " 
 
 § 123. 
 
 Parents possess a very easy and excellent means of 
 preaching, and at the same time interesting and improving 
 their children, by relating to them how they passed their 
 own childhood with their parents. Independent of all 
 other considerations, whatever is little is, on that very 
 account, most pleasing to a child, himself a little thing; 
 the author's children have sometimes begged him for a 
 little sea, nay, even for a little God.* Now if the father 
 or mother will descend from their lofty height and speak 
 of themselves, the parents, as having once been children, 
 the little people can scarcely comprehend it, and look, 
 with the anxious desire of learning, into the diminishing 
 glass in which their present giant-parents move about as 
 little children. There they see grand-parents now command 
 little parents, and the very people obey whom now the 
 
 * Perhaps this — apart from Love, which likes to express itself with 
 tender diminutives — is one reason more why nurses, &c., make pet- 
 names for every thing for children, even to excess ; and in fact for all 
 parts of speech, e.g. sehonde instead of sehon (pretty), even so'chen foi 
 so indeed). 
 
 2 a 2
 
 356 JEAN PAUL FR1EDKICH EICHTEE. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 child has to obey. In this relation he will only discover 
 the continuation of a previously acquired right, not of a 
 mere accident ; — here he finds that his father commands 
 now what formerly, when a child, he obeyed; that he 
 dearly loved, and was dearly loved by his parents, in 
 whose breast the little grandchild now nestles all the more 
 closely and warmly from the recollection of former love. 
 Since the history of his parents' childhood must have such 
 fresh and unceasing interest for the child, how great a 
 weight and charm may there not be given by means of this 
 interest to every word, every instruction and, in short, to 
 every thing embraced in that relation ? If it chance that 
 parents, thus describing their own life, were brought up 
 as children in other circumstances, in other dwelling- 
 places, the seed-field of instruction is vastly extended. 
 In short, parents in relating the incidents of their own 
 childhood simply and truly may lay seeds which in the 
 warm soil of their children's childhood will grow and 
 bear fruit. Even the little faults of their parents, and 
 the consequent punishments of the grand-parents, will 
 not in relation lessen the children's reverence for their 
 parents, unless its foundation be grievously hollow, and 
 the superstructure most poorly built. 
 
 We have here approached so very near the question, 
 What is the best kind of stories for children ? that we 
 may as well reply to it forthwith. Oriental and romantic 
 tales seem the most suitable ; such as many of the Arabian 
 Nights' Entertainment, Herder's Palm Leaves and Krum- 
 macher's Parables. Children are little Orientals. Dazzle 
 them with the wide plains of the east, with brillant dew- 
 drops and bright-tinted flowers. Give them, at least in 
 stories, the impulse which shall carry them over our cold 
 northern rocks and North Capes into the warm gardens of 
 the south. Let your first miracle be, like Christ's, a turn- 
 ing of water into wine, of fact into poetry. Therefore do 
 not shut up every thing you permit to approach your child 
 in a pulpit with a sermon before it, nor suffer that morbid 
 seeking after " the moral " which deforms most printed 
 children's tales, and by which, precisely when they are on 
 the way to the highest, they lose the path ; just as Charles 
 XII. of Sweden generally lost at chess because he moved
 
 OHAr. IV.] LF.VANA. 35'rf 
 
 out his king. Every good tale, like every good poem, is 
 necessarily surrounded with instruction. But the im- 
 portant thing is — to paint a romantic morning-glow on 
 the earth-kissing sky which, as age advances, may deepen 
 into a pure evening-red. Tell of terrible wild beasts, but 
 let them be always at last overcome — (still let children be 
 the most frequent actors on your stage) — also of long 
 caverns which lead to heavenly gardens — of being happy, 
 and of making happy — of great dangers, and still more 
 wonderful deliverances — and even the strange adventures 
 of mischievous children ; but always remember in your 
 tales that tears are sooner drawn from children than smiles. 
 For instance, the author has frequently carried this so far as 
 to represent the infant Christ* (he never even mentioned 
 a Rupert*) seated on the moon, surrounded with none but 
 good children ; and the evening glow in the December sky 
 he could only account for by supposing it the reflection of 
 the carriages full of Christmas gifts. In after years, when 
 the children gaze upon the moon and the redness of the 
 evening sky, a wonderful delight will gently fill their 
 souls, and they will not know what strange ethereal air 
 they breathe : The morning breeze of your childhood fans 
 you, my children ! 
 
 These fictions, when translated into reality, lead to no 
 accusations of parental untruthfulness, as our own ex- 
 amplest and those of our forefathers, else grounded fast 
 in truth, abundantly prove. 
 
 And after all this, shall not the freedom which mak^* 
 children citizens of the divine city of romance not open for 
 them the theatre : I do not mean that where comedies and 
 tragedies are played, which only stun, excite, or deceive 
 them, nor yet the little stage where they are themselves 
 the actors — but the opera-house ? Does not the opera reveal 
 romantic fairy-land to their eyes, and yet, by the im- 
 
 * Vide previous notes. 
 
 t The rosy pictures yet bloom in the author's heart which his father 
 once painted there, on coming out of the study into the December 
 twilight, with the insignificant words, he had seen the infant Christ 
 with golden beams pass through the dark night clouds. Who now 
 could replace for him this rosy blessed beam, this heavenly treasure 
 ■till shining in the clouds ?
 
 358 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH RICHTEE. [FRAG. VI. 
 
 possibility of understanding the singing, which, throws a 
 wholesome darkness over the intrigue, preserve their ears 
 from every moral taint ? And does not what is glaringly 
 low in close connection with what is noble (as, for instance, 
 in the Zauberflote), like the union of a monkey and a nun, 
 strengthen the love for excellence and the detestation of 
 depravity ? It seems to me that the opera, this acting, 
 living fairy-tale, which the music makes metrical and the 
 brillant scenery romantic, might change the heavy plough- 
 like motion and creaking of the present into smooth flying, 
 and is all the more necessary because prose may be taught 
 but not poetry, and wings can more easily find feet than 
 feet wings. At the same time, these suggestions are 
 offered rather interrogatively than affirmatively ; since 
 j ou may venture every thing and replace every thing 
 more easily than a child's innocence. 
 
 § 124. 
 
 1 would wish to say a few words about long journeys 
 for children. Short ones of a few weeks are with justice 
 considered to be physically and mentally improving trans- 
 plantings of these young trees; because the exchange of 
 their old dull corner for the w T ide airy landscape full 
 of different people and new customs must necessarily 
 enliven and improve them. But something very dif- 
 ferent are children's travels with town-dwellers and land- 
 scourers, who make the grand tour of half Europe — (a» 
 expedition through his native town is one to a child) — 
 during which the daily transplanted tree is merely ex- 
 hausted. If even grown-up people bring back from 
 their journeys round the world full heads and empty 
 hearts ; because daily walks through streets full of men 
 only presenting the gauntlet, or, at all events, never 
 offering a brother's kiss, must at last make the heart 
 as cold as life at court does, where, as in a country 
 dance, the dancer goes down the middle and up again 
 giving his hand indifferently to all ; how much must 
 early long journeys — bringing only the ripeness of autumn 
 to matured men — destroy a child by producing such 
 ripeness in spring. Living long in close connection with
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 359 
 
 the same people cherishes in children the warmth of the 
 affections. The uniform sameness of people, dwellings, 
 play-grounds, and even domestic furniture, hangs lovingly 
 on a child, and strengthens that magnetic attraction, as a 
 weight does suspended from a magnet : and thus in the 
 spring-time of life is prepared the rich magnetic burst of 
 the future affections, because the child naturally learns to 
 love what he daily sees — an easy matter in a village — the 
 hewer of wood for the family, the woman carrier, old Peter, 
 who comes every Saturday to beg for Sunday ; yes, even 
 the more distinguished persons of his acquaintance who 
 live far away. With a childhood full of affection we may 
 endure half a life in the cold world. If, now, instead of 
 such environments, a child be taken on long journeys — say 
 half over Europe — and must, since it is impossible to pack 
 up market-places with their inhabitants in the carriage or 
 to crowd them into the hotels of large cities, everyday fall 
 upon new people, new rooms, new servants, new guests, 
 towards whom it is impossible, from mere lack of time, for 
 the young heart to experience any burst of sympathy : — 
 what, then, can grow out of this little creature ? A 
 courtier without a court, cool, polite, elegant, languid, 
 ennuye, sweet and pretty. 
 
 §125. 
 
 Since in appendices, as in prefaces, things may be re- 
 peated which are contained in the book, I say again, Let 
 there be rules for children ; it is immaterial what, but 
 only as the centre of innumerable rays ! Law is 
 unity, unity is deity. The devil only is changeable. 
 Unity of rule at once strengthens and controls both the too 
 delicately sensitive girl and the rough active boy ; for the 
 very same reason that we patiently endure the discomfort 
 of frost and the unbroken desolateness of the earth in 
 winter, whereas a few snow flakes in spring make us angry 
 and gloomy : only because in winter the white enamel of 
 snow is the rule, but in spring the various tinted flowers. 
 No command seems harsher than the new one ; no necessity 
 than that which is freshly imposed. If you would picture 
 to yourself the most unhappy and most unfortunately
 
 360 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH R1CHTER. [FRAG. VL 
 
 circumstanced child, think of one who has heen brought 
 up by chance merely, without rule, irritated and appeased 
 without reason — destitute of confidence in the future — 
 finding in every minute a driving storm — wishing nothing 
 else than the fulfilment of his momentary desires — a ball 
 thrown sportively from love to hate — with sorrows that 
 bring no strength, and joys which produce no love. 
 Happily I see no such being near me ! Have not even 
 unjust rules a beneficial tendency in producing obedience 
 to rule? When punishments were attached to the un- 
 intentional dropping of the hat, or even falling in riding 
 through the streets of a town, both happened much more 
 rarely : and in brotherhoods or sisterhoods where every 
 snorer is awakened no one snores : and where punishment 
 is threatened even for the accidental breaking of china less 
 is broken. But the threatening must be a year older than 
 the fault or the punishment, else the rule fails. 
 
 § 126. 
 
 Give reasons for your requests more readily, and even 
 at an earlier period, than reasons for your assertions : in 
 the first place, it is easier to teach obedience than under- 
 standing ; in the second, a child's trust must never be 
 weakened by reasons which only lead to doubt; in the 
 third, action requires external quickness, belief demands 
 time ; and, in the fourth, the former is usually more opposed 
 to previous wishes than the latter (for children are seldom 
 orthodox) : at the same time that you smooth the way for 
 your commands, as the French kings did, by gentle reasons, 
 insist, like them, on obedience, if the reasons do not induce 
 it. In a second edition of these rules, even as to giving 
 reasons for commands, we find that the line must be drawn 
 still tighter. Mothers, partly from kindness, partly from 
 an inherent love of the healthy movement of the tongue, 
 give as many reasons for their orders as may overcome 
 the opposing arguments of the child ; and, if at last they 
 should be unable to produce more, finish by asserting their 
 authority. It were better to have begun with it. And 
 certainly, after compliance, the reasons will tind readier 
 admittance into the open impartial ears. This is most 
 markedly the case in the earliest jears; each ad-
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 361 
 
 vancing year requires an additional reason. The united 
 care both for a child's obedience and freedom is one of the 
 most difficult requirements of education. The parental 
 breath must only move the branch towards the fructifying 
 pollen, but not bend or break the trunk. 
 
 §127. 
 
 Teachers generally desire an appendix to the chapter on 
 moral education containing a treatise on the prevention of 
 sensual faults. Why do we find no such lamentations 
 and remedies among the ancients or in the middle ages ? 
 Adults in those days were different from those of present 
 times in this, that the latter by reason of their peniten- 
 tial straw-crowns become bald sooner than grey, but the 
 former the reverse— the pagan and catholic priesthood 
 were a committee of uncleanness ; — and the pure vestal 
 virgins of the Eomans had to make offerings to Priapus 
 as well as to Vesta, predecessors as it were of the self- 
 offering nuns before the Reformation. Must we suppose 
 that the youth of those periods was better than the present? 
 Scarcely so. Vogel reckons amongst the incitements to 
 secret sins eating of meat, solid food, spices, warm rooms, 
 beds and clothing, and the swaddling of children : — but 
 did not the middle ages take such means of pleasure in 
 still greater measure : for instance, the spices, the fourfold 
 stronger beer, the thicker beds, &c. ? — Even rude health 
 and rough work do not forearm peasant children (as he 
 who understands, if not he who instructs the people well 
 knows) against this youth-cancer. The reason why so 
 much more is said and taught about such matters now — 
 always remembering also that books are now made and a 
 book-trade established about every action — can only lie in 
 this, that in the healthful past, as now among the vigo- 
 rous commonalty or unrestrained animals, many ill-regu- 
 lated actions passed unpunished because the fortifications 
 of these unpolished times were not so easily demolished. 
 But, at all events, the morbid, sickly imagination attend- 
 ant on civilisation is quite as much cause as effect ; to 
 which must be added the acceleration of maturity due to 
 larger towns and better warmed countries. 
 
 Luther says, Contemptus frangit diabolum, observatia
 
 302 JEAN PAUL FPJEDEICH EICHTEE. FRAG. VI 
 
 inflat ;* which means, that to combat sin you must know 
 it, and that is in itself a kind of defeat. A feeling of 
 shame artificially taught before duly awakened by nature, 
 is a sewing together of the fig-leaves conducting to the fall 
 which in Eden they only covered. The modesty which 
 naturally arises at a later period is like the fig-tree itself, 
 which only hides under its leaves the unripe fruit which 
 contains no poison. 
 
 Many persons even say that a child should learn to be 
 ashamed of seeing himself. Himself! Gracious heaven ! 
 how much must the young mind have been poisoned before 
 it would blush at the form it cannot change and did not 
 choose ? before, in fact it would blush at its Creator ? To 
 insure modesty I would advise the educating of the sexes 
 together ; for two boys will preserve twelve girls, or two 
 girls twelve boys, innocent amidst winks, jokes and im- 
 proprieties, merely by that instinctive sense which is the 
 forerunner of matured modesty. But I will guarantee 
 nothing in a school where girls are alone together, and 
 still less where boys are. Boys do harm to boys far more 
 than girls to girls ; for they are bolder, opener, rougher, 
 more sociable, more curious about matters, as girls are 
 about persons. 
 
 The imaginary walls and glass bed-screens which 
 teachers put before the mental eyes of children are part 
 of the mistaken instruction in modesty ; a kind of incom- 
 prehensible covering of a cover, the sheep's clothing of a 
 
 sheep. He who admits that he has a secret to keep 
 
 has, by doing so, revealed one half of it, and the other 
 will speedily follow. Children's questions about birth — 
 about where a little baby comes from— show nothing what- 
 ever more than a blameless desire of knowing and asking 
 about strange things. A child's questions about his 
 mother's confinement have no more connection with sex- 
 instinct than his asking why the sun, which goes to bed 
 in the west, rises in the east. But if those about him 
 attach a foolish mystification to the event, instinct, which 
 lies in the back ground, united with accidental expressiois 
 which he will treasure up, will prematurely clear away 
 the darkness. To this really injurious secrecy belong such 
 * Contempt vanquishetk the devil ; inspection puffeth him up.
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEV ANA. 363 
 
 expressions as, " This is only for grown up-people," or, 
 " When you are older, you will know all about it," &c. 
 Secret articles always give rise to war; and secret alli- 
 ance with sin is not very far from secret instructions 
 of this kind. 
 
 But how is the questioning child to be answered ? 
 With as much truth as he wants : " As the little grub 
 grows inside the nut, so the little infant grows within 
 its mother and is nourished by her flesh and blood ; hence 
 she is ill," &c. Since children understand ten times less 
 of what is said than we suppose and, like grown-up 
 people, ask a thousand times less about the final when 
 they know the secondary cause, it will probably be several 
 years before the child again asks whence the little crea- 
 ture comes. Then give him this answer : " From the 
 great God, who sends these little babies to married people 
 who sleep together." We grown-up philosophers know 
 nothing more about it ; and you say with perfect truth to 
 the child, " A human being can carve a statue, or em- 
 broider a flower, but he can make no living thing ; that 
 grows." And so, by help of the pure word sleep,* children 
 receive from the greatest incomprehensibility no more 
 defilement or disclosure than the edifices of physiologic- 
 lore have heretofore afforded us ; to which, howbeit, the 
 sharp- and deerj- and many-minded Oken f has constructed 
 
 * J. B. Heidegger, Burgomaster in Zurich, from the time that as a 
 boy he heard of the sin of sleeping with a woman, used, as he lay near 
 his nurse, to keep his eyes opeu the night through. {Bauer's Gallery 
 of Hist. Pictures, v. 2.) 
 
 t " Die Zeugung," by D. Oken, 1805. By ' sacristy,' I mean that 
 he treats of and displays life as incomprehensible in his "Primitive 
 Forms of Life of the Infusoria," in which, in point of fact, he less 
 illustrates conception and life than growth and existence. I also refer 
 to his pleasantly bold hypothesis that in the infusorial chaos (the only 
 one in the universe) several existences become one; and that this 
 unity of pluralities again condeuses itself into a more distinct plural 
 unity in a higher life-grade. For the rest I read all that is written 
 about the infusion-creations with an old shrinking; and all the 
 successive grades of the existences which have been developed from 
 the grand infusorium of the whole world. I am also fully persuaded 
 that as there is no bridge of steps between mechanism and vitality, so 
 the riddle of the widely extended revivification and quickening will 
 be eolved in any other wise rather tha* in chemistry.
 
 364 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VI 
 
 i fair sacristy. How easily a child's curiosity may be 
 restrained and yet satisfied is very clearly shown in the 
 fact that during the last three centuries millions of Chris- 
 tians have died who have regularly every Sunday heard 
 that baptism took the place of the ancient Jewish rite of 
 circumcision, and yet have never thought, far less asked, 
 what circumcision is. Children learn and ask in the same 
 way. The author received his first instruction in this 
 article of Christian faith after eighteen years' study of 
 Jewish works. Ye teachers of religion, schoolmasters, 
 tutors and preachers, think ye of circumcision in such wise 
 that ye accomplish on yourselves that Jean-Pauline rite 
 of the foreskin of the lips and of the heart ! 
 
 On the other hand such words, like these, Gebaren 
 (delivery), Hochzeitnacht (wedding-night), &c, prove how 
 un-significant and pure, even holy in all senses, the thing 
 indicated is and appears, so long as the manner of indicating 
 is equally so. But if indeed an older child ask a ques- 
 tion; in that case I quietly begin a regular anatomy- 
 lecture, for example, on the heart (just as a Frenchwoman, 
 with the opposite intention, might do) — and proceed : I 
 give him seriousness, calmness and tediousness, and then 
 an answer. 
 
 One other remark may perhaps afford consolation to 
 some parents : children at an immature and hobbledehoy 
 age have, simply out of awkwardness and ignorance, or 
 even heedlessness about all puzzle of sex, a particular 
 inclination — which by repeated instruction and correction 
 duly disappears — to do and to say improper things. This 
 is sometimes very strangely manifested. I once heard 
 some really pure-minded good children beg their father 
 to repeat some ugly words (referring to rudeness of speech 
 more than sex) which he had forbidden them to use, be- 
 cause, they said, they liked to hear such words. Be not 
 afraid, if you educate your children carefully, of evil 
 results. In the case of healthy children, especially, you 
 need have no fear ; but physical indisposition too easily 
 induces a morbid sickliness of the mind. 
 
 Only upon one point, with all possible frankness of 
 explanation one must be careful, and adhere closely to the 
 most anxious-minded preacher on training : namelj on the
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 365 
 
 external action-similitude between men and beasts. Hap- 
 pily it is only an un-similitude. Never allow the modest 
 half-grown youth to dream of or to find out bit by bit any 
 sort of likeness between his revered ones and the beasts of 
 the field. The pure child-like though presaging nature 
 trembles before this likeness. If it is freely displayed to 
 him, and the holy awe is overcome, then the child has 
 grown old by too many years at once: — thought now 
 works in favour of act, as otherwise against it — away 
 from truth and the repeated sight of her impulse still 
 lessens the burning hues — and the storms of his spring 
 rage and afflict. 
 
 In short, if there be any time when one person's aid is 
 needed in the development of another, it is when the 
 ripening youth (or maiden) first discovers his new Ame- 
 rica-world of sex, when the fresh blooming man bursts 
 away from the fading child. Happily nature herself has 
 provided a counterpoise to these spiritual spring-storms, 
 in the season of fairest dreams, of ideal excellence, and 
 the highest enthusiasm for all that is great. The watch- 
 ful teacher also may add a balancing weight to the heart, 
 namely, the head ; that is, let him reserve for that season 
 some new science, some new object of engrossing interest, 
 some new path in life. It is true this will not extinguish 
 the volcano ; but the lava pouring into this sea will merely 
 harden into a rock, and the evil will be less than the 
 anxiety. For, out of all the yawning and dreaded preci- 
 pices of this age, does not a majority of healthy living 
 voices arise which have not been silenced and which do 
 not stammer or complain ? It is but a very small number 
 which is silent, without throat — without lungs — without 
 limbs of any sort — without mind — without body — mere 
 unburied corpses of hovering ghosts — Heaven grant them 
 a grave !
 
 366 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. VIL 
 
 SEVENTH FRAGMENT. 
 
 Chap. I. More accurate definition of the desire for intellectual 
 progress, § 128. Chap. II. Speech and writing, §§ 129, 130. 
 Chap. III. Attention, and the power of adaptive combination ; 
 Pestalozzi ; difference between mathematics and philosophy, §§ 131 
 —133. Chap. IV. Development of wit, §§ 134— 130. Chap. V. 
 Development of reflection, abstraction, and self-knowledge ; together 
 with an extra paragraph on the powers of action and business, 
 §§ 137, 138. Chap. VI. On the education of the recollection, not of 
 the memory, §§ 139—142. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE DESIRE FOR INTELLECTUAL 
 PROGRESS. 
 
 § 128. 
 
 Other writers on education name the intellectual forming- 
 impulse ' the faculty of knowledge ' — that is to say, they 
 call painting seeing — or ' the intellectual powers,' but 
 think of the senses and the memory as also exerting 
 an educational influence ; or they speak of the develop- 
 ment of spontaneous activity, as if the will itself were 
 not such a developing power. The majority (before 
 Pestalozzi) only attempted to pour into the mind a vast 
 amount of knowledge of ever} 7 kind, and thought an intel- 
 ligent man must be the necessary result. Learned fools, 
 with mind neither for the present nor the future, who 
 (like finite beings in another sense) are continuously 
 created, but never able to create ; heirs of all ideas, but 
 originators of none, they are indeed samples of their 
 education, but no proofs of its excellence ! 
 
 We will take the straight path which leads to the centre, 
 instead of wandering round and round the circle.
 
 CHAP I.] LEVANA. ' 3()7 
 
 The will reproduce.* itself only, and acts only within, 
 not without, itself ; fcr the external action is as little the 
 new act of the particular volition, as are the words signi- 
 fying it of the particular thought. The desire of mental 
 progress, on the contrary, enlarges its world for the recep- 
 tion of new creatures, and is as dependent on objects as 
 the pure will is independent of them. The will could 
 reach its ideal, but finds a strange opposition to it — Kant's 
 radical-evil— whereas no power stands opposed to thought 
 — as sin does to virtue — but only the difference between 
 its steps, and the impossibility of seeing whither they 
 reach. To know nothing is not so bad as to do nothing ; 
 and error is less the opponent than the accompaniment 
 of truth ; for to miscalculate means merely to obtain 
 something different from what it should be, but still to 
 calculate ; whereas immorality stands directly opposed to 
 morality. 
 
 The mental desire of advancement which, in a higher 
 sense than the physical, works by means of and in accord- 
 ance with the will, that is to say, creates new ideas out of 
 old ideas, is the distinguishing characteristic of man. No 
 will restrains the order of a beast's actions. In our 
 waking moments we are actually conscious that we think ; 
 in our dreams we receive, if I may so express it, that 
 consciousness. In the man of genius the formation of 
 ideas appears actually creative; in ordinary men, merely 
 recollective and necessary : the precise shades of difference 
 are, however, difficult to define. The developments of this 
 formative power are, first, language ; and secondly, obser- 
 vation ; both of which by defining and marking an idea 
 bring it more accurately before the mind : thirdly, ima- 
 gination, which is capable of retaining a whole series of 
 ideas, so as to obtain from it the unknown, but sought for 
 and, consequentl} T , anticipated greatness, either as part, 
 consequence, foundation, symbol, or image : fourthly, wit : 
 fifthly, reflection : sixthly, remembrance. 
 
 From this almost genealogical gradation it is readily 
 perceived that all instruction naturally falls into two 
 distinct classes, one of which — mathematics, for example 
 — provides organic material for the intellectual energies ; 
 the other — such as natural history — only inanimate objects.
 
 368 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VII. 
 
 For all cumulative preliminary instruction, be it in natural 
 history, geography, history, antiquities, only provides the 
 intellect with materials, not with incitements tc labour 
 and power. The old division into knowledge of words 
 and knowledge of things is certainly correct ; but the 
 inventory of what belongs to one class, and what to the 
 other, is about as erroneous as that of diseases before the 
 time of Brown, which, as by him, were divided into 
 sthenic and asthenic, diarrhoea and plague being placed 
 in the former, and the truly sthenic complaints of coughs, 
 catarrhs, &c, in the latter class. Language, for instance, 
 was ranked as a knowledge of words ; the history of nature 
 and of nations, as a knowledge of things : it ought to be 
 reversed. 
 
 One word in this place on the abuse, or too great use, of 
 natural history. This seems to be the wishing-cap of those 
 teachers who have little of that on which the hat is usually 
 placed ; or the purveyor of those who are deficient in sci- 
 entific knowledge. The author was gratified by finding, 
 in Goethe's Elective Affinities, accordance with a thought 
 which he had noted down in his children's diary in January 
 1808 ; namely, what advantage can children obtain from 
 the description of an unknown foreign animal which would 
 not equally result from that of any casual monster ? At 
 most this unverified account can but serve as honey on 
 wholesome bread, or as the bill of sale of some animal to 
 be seen ; and is altogether a mere home-reading by the 
 light of the embers. But, on the contrary, the most minute 
 family history, with representations the size of life, should 
 be given about all domestic and native animals. Yea, how 
 very much would botany and mineralogy, not only as 
 exercising the observation, but also as enriching the 
 present, exceed the small advantages of foreign zoology ! 
 Just in the same way might the modern expensively 
 painted worlds (orbis pidus) be advantageously replaced 
 by workshops, in which one artificer after another could 
 actually show and explain his trade to his children-guests.
 
 CHAP. Ii'.j LEVANA. 369 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 SPEECH AND WRITING. 
 
 § 129. 
 
 To learn to speak is something higher than to learn to 
 speak languages ; and all the advantages which are as- 
 cribed to the ancient languages, as educational media, apply 
 with double force to the mother-tongue. Every new lan- 
 guage is only understood by connecting and balancing it 
 with the first : the original primary sign merely acquires 
 another sign ; and so the new language is not formed on 
 the one last learned, nor is one dependent on another, but 
 all on the first native tongue. 
 
 Name to the child every object, every sensation, every 
 action, in case of exigency even by a foreign word (for to 
 the child, as yet, there is none); and always, where it is 
 possible, arouse his attention and give accuracy to his per- 
 ceptions by naming all the individual parts of whatever 
 you may have in hand. A child has invariably so great 
 a love of hearing that he will constantly ask questions 
 about matters which he knows, merely in order to hear 
 you speak ; or will even tell you some little story, so as to 
 have the pleasure of hearing you afterwards talk about 
 it to him. By the fact of naming, external objects, like 
 islands, are taken possession of, and animals are tamed by 
 accustoming them to answer to a name. Without a de- 
 fining word — the mental index-finger — unlimited nature 
 stands before a child like a column of quicksilver without 
 a barometric scale (to the beast it is even without the ball 
 of quicksilver) and by it no movement can be obseived. 
 Speech is the finest line-drawer of infinity, the dividing- 
 water of chaos : the importance of its minute subdivisions 
 is shown in savages, with whom frequently a single word 
 signifies a whole sentence- A village child is inferior to a 
 town child merely by his poverty of speech. To the dumb 
 beast the whole world gives but one impression, and so 
 from want of two he does not even count one. 
 
 Let every material substance be both mentally and 
 
 L 2 B
 
 37 J JEAN PAUL FRIEDR1CH RICHTER. [FRAG. VII. 
 
 physically divided and analysed before the child during 
 the first ten years of his life ; but suffer nothing spiritual 
 to undergo the same process, for this, which exists only 
 once and that within the child, soon dies, without the 
 chance of resurrection, under the severing-knife ; bodies, 
 on the contrary, return new-born every day. 
 
 The mother-tongue affords the most innocent philosophy 
 and exercise of reflection for children. Speak very much 
 and very clearly ; and oblige them to be definite in the 
 affairs of every-day life. Wiry do you leave mental de- 
 velopment by means of language to a foreign tongue ? 
 
 Occasionally attempt longer sentences than the short 
 childish ones of many teachers, or the hackneyed ones of 
 most French writers: an unintelligibleness which brings 
 its own solution by mere unaltered repetition exercises and 
 strengthens the mind. Sometimes exercise even little 
 children with riddles of contradictory words: such as, I 
 heard this with my eyes ; this is very prettily ugly. 
 
 Do not fear the unintelligibleness even of whole sentences; 
 your mien, your accent, and the forestalling effort to under- 
 stand explain one half, and this, with the assistance of time, 
 explains the other. With children, as with the Chinese and 
 men of the world, accent is half the language. Eemember 
 than they learn to understand your language much sooner 
 that to speak it, just as we do Greek or any foreign tongue. 
 Trust to the deciphering aid of time and of the context. 
 A. child of five years old understands the words " but, 
 indeed, now, on the contrary, certainly ; " but, if you desire 
 an explanation of them, ask the father, not the child. The 
 word indeed alone would puzzle a little philosopher. If 
 the child of eight years old finds his improved language 
 understood by a child of three, why should you contract 
 yours to his vocabulary ? Always employ a language some 
 years in advance of the child (men of genius in their books 
 speak to us from the vantage ground of centuries) : speak 
 to the one-year-old child as though he were two, and to 
 him as though he were six; for the difference of progress 
 diminishes in the inverse proportion , of years. Let the 
 teacher, especially he who is too much in the habit of attri- 
 buting all learning to teaching, consider that the child 
 already carries half his world, that of mind — the objects,
 
 «JHAP. II.] LEVANA. 371 
 
 for instance, of moral and metaphysical contemplation — 
 ready formed within him ; and hence that language, being 
 provided only with physical images, cannot give, can 
 merely illumine, bis mental conceptions. 
 
 Cheerfulness, like distinctness in conversation with 
 children, should be imparted to us by their cheerfulness 
 and distinctness. We may learn to speak from them, as 
 well as teach them by speaking ; for instance, such bold 
 and yet correctly formed words as I have heard from three 
 and four-year-old children : " the beer-casker, the stringer, 
 the bottler," instead of the maker of casks, strings, and 
 bottles — " the flying mouse," certainly much better than 
 our word bat — " the music fiddles — to ausscheeren * the 
 candle [from Lichtscheere, snuffers] — dreschflegeln, dreschelu 
 [to thresh, from Dreschfiegel, fl^il] — I am the look-through 
 man (when standing behind a telescope; — I wish I had 
 an appointment as gingerbreadnuteater, or gingerbread- 
 nutter — After all I shall be quite too wiser — He has joked 
 me down from off the chair — Look (at the clock) how 
 one it is already," &c. 
 
 In later years it becomes part of instruction in language 
 to show the living foundation of the colourless images of 
 every- day speech. A young man uses the expressions, " all 
 made on the same last," or " fishing in troubled waters ; " 
 and when he finds that the shoemaker really uses such a 
 last, and that fishing in troubled water is practised, he is 
 astonished to discover that a real fact is the foundation of 
 the transparent image. 
 
 Pestalozzi commences the division of the universe into 
 parts by that of the body into limbs ; because it is in 
 closest and most important connection with the child, and 
 is every where composed of similar parts, which is not the 
 case with plants or utensils. A still more important ad- 
 vantage is, that there are always two examples of it in the 
 study ; and that the child, between 1 and thou, between 
 the larger visible limbs of his teacher and his own smaller 
 "mes, sensible only to the touch, can always pass from one 
 object to another and compare them together. At the 
 same time, Pestalozzi will not only divide and illumine the 
 waste ether with clearly marked names, as with stars, but, 
 * Some of these expressions lose their effect in translation.
 
 372 JEAN PAUL FRlEDKtCH KICHTEB. [~FBAG. VII. 
 
 while he teaches the child to collect the subdivisions under 
 their division, the lesser under the greater whole, he de- 
 velopes the capacity of retaining whole series, or the power 
 of adaptive combination — of which hereafter. 
 
 Fichte, in his Discourses to the German nation, attaches 
 too little value to the naming and, as it were, A B C, of 
 external objects and observations, requiring them merely 
 for what is internal, for sensations ; because he thinks that 
 jthe naming of the former class only serves the child for 
 communication, not for the better understanding of it. 
 But. it seems to me that, as the speechless animal floats 
 about in the external world as in a dark bewildering 
 ocean, so man would be equally lost in the starry firma- 
 ment of external perceptions, did he not, by means of lan- 
 guage, divide the confused stars into constellations, and 
 thus reveal the whole in parts to the comprehension. Lan- 
 guage alone illumines the vast monotonously coloured 
 chart of the universe. 
 
 Our forefathers, from pedantic and economic reasons, 
 but with advantageous results as a mental gymnastic and 
 excitement, ranked a foreign language, such as Latin, 
 among the great powers of education. Certainly the 
 dictionary of foreign words developes little, except by 
 teaching the fine shades of difference among our own : but 
 the grammar, as the logic of the tongue — the first philo- 
 sophy of reflection — does much ; for it carries the signs of 
 things back to the things themselves and compels the 
 mind, turned upon itself, to observe the method of its 
 observations, that is, to reflect, or at least to take firmer 
 possession of the sign and not to confuse it, as a mere 
 expression, with the sensation itself. During immaturity 
 this kind of knowledge is better obtained through the 
 grammar of a foreign language than through that of our 
 own, which is more indissolubly blended with the sensa- 
 tion ; hence logically-cultivated people first learned to con- 
 struct their own language by a foreign one, and Cicero 
 went to a Greek sooner than to a Latin school ; and hence, 
 in those centuries when the Greek and Latin languages 
 formed the whole subject of learning, the intellect became 
 more formal, and unsubstantial logic filled the mind, as 
 the whole scholastic philosophy proves. When Huart 
 asserts that a a"ood head learns grammar with the most
 
 CHAP. II.] LEVANA. 373 
 
 difficulty, he can only mean, unless he confuses dictionary 
 with grammar, a head formed for business or art rather 
 than for thought. Every good grammarian, the Hebrew 
 Tacitus Danz for instance, is partly a philosopher ; and 
 he must be a philosopher who writes the best grammar. 
 The grammatic analysis of the old schools only differs in 
 its object from Pestalozzi's visible series. Consequently 
 a foreign language, particularly the Latin, is among 
 the healthiest early exercises of the power of thinking. 
 
 §130. 
 
 Since writing signifies but the sign of tilings, and 
 brings us through it to the things themselves, it is a 
 stricter isolator and clearer collector of the ideas than 
 even speech itself. Sound teaches quickly and generally ; 
 writing, uninterruptedly and with more accuracy. Writing, 
 from that which the writing-master teaches to that which 
 approaches the province of the author, gives clearness to 
 the ideas. We will not here lay too great stress on the 
 fact that the letters which Sevigne wrote are much more 
 elegant than those she dictated ; or that Montesquieu, 
 who could not himself write, frequently passed three hours 
 before any thing worthy of preservation occurred to him, 
 whence many deduce the curt style of his writings ; but it 
 is certain that our representation is much more a mental 
 seeing than hearing, and that our metaphors play far 
 more on an instrument of colour than of sound, and 
 therefore writing which lingers under the eyes must assist 
 the formation of ideas to a much greater extent than the 
 rapid flight of sound. The scholar, indeed, carries it so 
 far that, when he reflects, he really seems to read a printed 
 page; and when he speaks, to give a little declamation 
 out of a quickly and well written pamphlet. 
 
 Let boys write out their own thoughts sooner than copy 
 yours, so that they may learn to exchange the heavy- 
 ringing coin of sound into more convenient paper money. 
 And let them be spared the writing-texts of schoolmasters, 
 containing the praises of industry, of writing, of their 
 master, or of some old prince ; in short, subjects about 
 which the teacher can produce nothing better than his 
 pupils. Every representation without some actual object
 
 •374 JEAN PAUL FKTEDRICH KICHTER. [FRAG. VII. 
 
 or motive is poison. Since some real occurrence always 
 suggested to men of genius, such as Lessing, Bousseau and 
 others, the subject of their fictions, thus occasional in the 
 highest sense of that word ; how can you require a boy tc 
 dip his pencil in the airy blue of indefiniteness, and there- 
 with so paint the vault of heaven that the invisible tint 
 shall produce the colour of Prussian blue ? I cannot 
 understand schoolmasters ! Must the man, even in child- 
 hood, preach from the appointed Sunday text, and never 
 choose one for himself in nature's bible ? Something 
 similar may be said about the writing of open letters (an 
 unsealed one is almost inevitably half untrue) which the 
 teachers of girls' schools require in order, say they, to 
 exercise their pupils in epistolary style. A nothing 
 writes to a nothing : the whole affair, undertaken by the 
 desire of the teacher not of the heart, is a certificate of the 
 death of thoughts, an announcement of the burning of 
 the materials. Happy is it if the commanded volubility 
 of the child, arising from coldness and addressed to 
 emptiness, do not accustom her to insincerity. If letters 
 must be forthcoming, let them be written to some fixed 
 person, about some definite thing. But what need of so 
 much ado about nothing, since — not even excepting poli- 
 tical or literary newspapers — nothing can be written .so 
 easily as letters on any subject when there is a motive for 
 them, and the mind is fully informed of the matter ? 
 
 The writing of one page excites the desire of learning 
 more strongly than the reading of a whole book. Many 
 readers of select school libraries are scarcely able to write 
 a clear and good account of a fatal accident and a request 
 for charitable assistance for a weekly newspaper. And it 
 is equally true that many writers are just as indifferent 
 speakers : they resemble many great merchants in Am- 
 sterdam who have no warehouse, but only a writing-room ; 
 give them time, however, and they will procure the goods 
 by writing. Corneille spoke badly, but he made his 
 heroes declaim excellently. Kegard every pupil for ex- 
 amination as a stammering dumb Corneille, and provide 
 him a room, time, and a pen ; he will speak by these and 
 so pass a very good examination. I close this chapter as a 
 certain Indian begins his book — Blessed be the man who 
 invented writing; !
 
 CHAP. III.] LEVANA. 375 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ATTENTION, AND THK POWEIl OF ADAPTIVE COMBINATION. 
 
 § 131- 
 
 Bonnet calls Attention the mother of Genius, but she is in 
 fact her daughter ; from whence does she derive her origin, 
 save from the marriage contracted in heaven between the 
 object and the desire for it ? Hence attention can really 
 be as little preached or flogged into a person as ability. 
 Swift in a musical academy — Mozart in a philosophical 
 lecture-room — Eaffaelle in a political club — Frederick the 
 Great in a cour d'amour — could you give an attentive ear 
 to these different men, all of whom possess genius, are of 
 mature years, and have thoughts about the important 
 matters of art, science, love, and politics ? And do you 
 expect and desire it in children, in persons of unripe age 
 and inferior capacity for much more trifling objects ? But, 
 in fact, you desire that your individual attention, which 
 exhibits as much caprice with regard to its objects as that 
 of a man of genius, should be acquired by the child, and 
 that your narrowness of view should be shared by him. 
 
 If you attach reward or punishment to the child's 
 attention to any object, you have put another, that of self- 
 interest, in its place, rather than strengthened the mental 
 power or excited the desire of improvement; at most you 
 have but laboured for the memory. No sensuous pleasure 
 lines the path into the empire of mind ; hence studying 
 for a livelihood resembles the stone by whose aid the diver 
 sinks more rapidly to seek pearls for his master, and which 
 the aeronaut takes with him for the very different pur- 
 pose of rising higher towards heaven when he casts it 
 overboard. 
 
 But what is to be done? So teachers always ask 
 instead of first asking, what is to be avoided ? The laws 
 of their order forbid the Jesuits to study longer than two 
 hours ; but your school laws command little children to 
 study, that is to be attentive, as long as older people can 
 teach : it is quite too much ; especially when one con- 
 siders the child's senses open to every influence, the cheerful
 
 376 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VII. 
 
 sounds of the busy market-place, the blossoming: boughs 
 waving round the schoolroom windows, the narrow strip 
 of sunshine on the dull schoolroom floor, and the delicious 
 certainty on Saturday that there will be no lessons in the 
 afternoon. 
 
 There have been many cases in which the author of 
 Levana himself has resolved to lend an attentive ear to 
 some story, not more than a quarter of an hour long, so 
 as to be able to relate it afterwards : he did inwardly 
 what he could, and laboured to maintain the closest 
 attention; but this very labour gave rise to incidental 
 thoughts ; he was compelled to request a repetition 
 in order to catch the thread of the story ; and then, at 
 last, after all this resolute anxiety, determination and 
 design, he had obtained nothing more than a table of 
 contents of the story, which he could enlarge upon in the 
 proper place. Do you think it easier for a child to 
 command his attention and repress weariness than for a 
 grown-up man who addresses him? It is possible for a 
 child to take the greatest interest in your instruction, but 
 not just to-day, nor at this particular window; or, per- 
 haps, because he has seen or tasted some novelty ; or, 
 perhaps, because his father has announced either a country 
 ramble or a confinement ; or because his former inattention 
 has met its punishment, and the child now thinks far 
 more of the punishment than of the means of avoiding it. 
 Human beings, in fact, are incapable of uninterrupted 
 attention (eternal longing may be much more truly 
 promised than eternal loving), and the child's attention 
 is not always identical with that of his parents. 
 
 If novelty be confessedly the keenest sharpener of the 
 inner ear, the forcing-house of every plant, why do 
 teachers, after constant repetitions, require the first 
 eagerness of attention from the young souls everywhere 
 surrounded by new worlds ? Do you suppose their 
 pillow is a gilded cushion on which the glass is rubbed 
 to obtain electricity ? 
 
 If it be difficult to place ourselves in the position of 
 persons similarly circumstanced, how much more difficult 
 must it be to do so with regard to persons unlike our- 
 selves ! How many instances are there of teachers having 
 warmed themselves for years by the schoolroom stove,
 
 CHAP. III.J uEVANA. 377 
 
 without remarking or remembering anything about the 
 raised figures, by which the manufacturer endeavoured to 
 display his taste and skill. Let every reader alter the 
 perusal of these lines examine h s apartment, and observe 
 whether he does not become conscious of twenty new 
 objects, among which he has constantly lived without 
 hitherto being aware of their presence ! Were we 
 inclined to enter into more minute particulars, it would, 
 among other examples, be easy to show the different 
 effects of mere writing-copies on a child's attention. If he 
 have the same words to copy throughout the whole page, 
 each line will be worse written than its predecessor , but 
 if the copy change frequently, he will have a new source 
 of interest and attention from line to line ; still, even in 
 this case, novelty will exert its power over the attention, 
 and the first word, like the first line, will be the best 
 written. Repetition, else the main-spring of instruction, 
 is the chief destroyer of attention : because, in order to 
 give attention to what is repeated, you must first have 
 found it worthy of a still greater exertion of that "acuity. 
 
 A very important distinction must be drawn between 
 the power of attention diffused among the generality of 
 men and that appertaining solely to men of genius. 
 
 The latter can only be recognised, protected and 
 cherished, but not created. Pay attention, O teachers ! 
 to the attention manifested by your children, so that you 
 may not, to the injury of his whole future life, demand 
 from the genius who astonishes you with his power and 
 his brilliancy the very opposite qualities to those he 
 possesses : do not expect a painter's eye in a Haydn, nor 
 a poem from an Aristotle. Pay attention to this, and 
 you will not offer to immortal Love an ape instead 
 of a Psyche. 
 
 This instinct-like attention, waiting till its proper 
 object is manifested, explains some apparent anomalies, 
 such as that the deep -thinking Thomas Aquinas in his 
 youth was called a cow, and that the mathematician 
 tSchmidt, from incapacity for study or business, continued 
 a mere labourer for thirty-eight years. Good trees at 
 first produce only wood, not fruit. Pure silver when 
 broken 6eems black. Afterwards, the work advances all
 
 378 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VII. 
 
 the easier and the quicker ; and while information and 
 talent have to raise their gifts laboriously, like gold out 
 of deep mines, genius presents his like jewels gathered 
 out of loose sand. 
 
 On the other hand, common every-day attention needs 
 not so much to be aroused, as to be distributed and 
 condensed ; even careless, inattentive children possess the 
 faculty, but it is dissipated upon all passing objects. The 
 child in his new world resembles a German in IJome, a 
 pilgrim in the Holy Land. Attention to every thing is 
 impossible : the whole of no ball can be seen. You 
 elevate the passive being, before whom the world moves 
 unnoticed, into an active one, by placing some one object 
 in a prominent position : by displaying its wonders you 
 excite his interest. Perpetually ask children Why ? 
 The questions of the teacher find more open ears than his- 
 answers. You can elevate him also, as Pestalozzi recom- 
 mends, by the magnifying glass of separation ; and then 
 again hy restoring it as before. As God, according to the 
 schoolmen, knows every thing because He made it, teach 
 the child his power of mental creation ; readiness of 
 attention in recognising things will then follow naturally. 
 And this brings me to the succeeding paragraphs on the 
 power of adaptive combination. 
 
 § 132. 
 
 The old notion that mathematics exercises and requires 
 philosophical accuracy and depth of thought, and that 
 mathematics and philosophy are sisters, has, I hope, 
 disappeared. With the exception of the all-powerful 
 Leibnitz, great mathematicians, such as Euler, D'Alembert 
 and even Newton, have been poor philosophers. The 
 French have obtained more and greater mathematical 
 than philosophical prizes : great masters of numbers and 
 great mechanicians have been frequently found among th 
 people, but equally great philosophers never ; and, on the 
 other hand, powerful and profound philosophers, after the 
 most arduous endeavours, have frequently remained but 
 indifferent mathematicians. Among children we find 
 Home open to philosophical instruction, some only to
 
 CEA.P. III.] LEVANA, 379 
 
 mathematical. This judgment of experience is explained 
 and verified by Kant's Critique. The mathematician con- 
 templates quantities, the philosopher reflects upon and 
 abstracts from them. The certainty of the former is, Hkw 
 that of the external world, a present reality, brought 
 about by no logical conclusion : it cannot prove any thing, 
 but merely show that it is so ; and if the quantities 
 exceed the power of instantaneous apprehension (as is 
 generally the case even in the simplest arithmetic) they 
 are proved in a merely mechanical manner by the 
 method.* In philosophy there is uo such conviction by 
 the truth of the method, but only by perceiving the truth 
 of the idea. Malebranche said rightl}', the geometrician 
 does not love truth, but the discernment of it (1. i. ch. 2.); 
 or, to express it more clearly, not its existence, but its 
 proportions. Philosophy, on the contrary, will search 
 into existence ; it places itself and the mathematician — - 
 which is what he is incapable of doing — the whole world 
 within, around and above, before its gaze. Hence religion 
 and poetry, but not dead mathematics, spread living 
 fibres far and deep into philosophy ; hence the great 
 Kant admitted the possibility that the sciences of number 
 and measurement, as exponents of earthly time and 
 observation, might have no more truth beyond this life, 
 whereas he never supposed this to be possible with regard 
 to the ideas of reason and morality. 
 
 § 133. 
 
 The former paragraph, with its distinction of mathe- 
 matics from philosophy, is meant to introduce nothing 
 but the praise of Pestalozzi's method of teaching, which 
 leads the child's mind straight between the parallels of 
 numbers and lines.f For in what other manner can you 
 
 * I at once perceive that 2x2 = 4; but confidence in the rule 
 tiiakes me believe that 319x5011 = 1598509. 
 
 t I have read nothing about Pestalozzi but himself, except the little 
 that reviewing critics have extracted from his criticisers : yet his 
 *• Lienhard und Gertrud " already announced the antidote-dispenser 
 of his age ; and long may he remain and find a goodly number of 
 apprentices, master workman as he is ! In " Die unsichtbare Lege
 
 380 JEAN PAUL FRIEbnICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VII. 
 
 arouse the innate desire of mental progress? The 
 impulses of the senses excite and then stupefy, but help 
 not to produce it. To overwhelm the mind with lessons, 
 that is with mere summaries of accounts, resembles the 
 Siberian custom of giving the sacrament of the Lord's 
 Supper to infants : to teach reflection and abstraction is, 
 in faet. to tear the body to pieces, and lay open the 
 springs of love and faith in order to anatomize the child's 
 heart and blood. Moreover, philosophy begins with what 
 is highest and most difficult ; mathematics with what is 
 nearest and easiest. What then remains? The meta- 
 physics of the eye ; the knowledge forming the boundary 
 between experience and abstraction ; that cool, tranquil 
 calculation which does not yet enquire about the three 
 giant rulers of knowledge — God, the Universe, and our 
 own Soul ; which rewards every momentary sowing with 
 a harvest ; which neither excites nor represses desires and 
 wishes, and yet finds on every spot of earth, as in a copy 
 book, examples and exercises ; which, unlike thought and 
 poetry, needs fear no difference of result from differences 
 in heart and mind ; and for which no child is too young, 
 for it, like him, grows up from the smallest beginning. 
 
 Therefore Pestalozzi's gradual and luminous accumula- 
 tion of arithmetical and geometrical proportions is right: it 
 is teaching to carry an increasing weight, like Milo's calf,* 
 which may at last serve for the thank-offering of an Archi- 
 medes. What Pope Sixtus V. roughly said, " that, after 
 all, asses might be taught arithmetic," and the well-known 
 remark in the French Encyclopaedia, that some imbecile 
 persons have learnt to play chess well — for chess is a 
 mathematical combination, and the chess-board may serve 
 as a test of mathematical power — all this commends the 
 wisdom by which Pestalozzi wrote over life, as Plato over 
 his stud}% " The geometrician alone may enter here." 
 
 Consequently, the reproaches cast against the Swiss, 
 " that his school is no school of the prophets, nor even ot 
 
 (v. complete works of J. P. Richter, vol. ii. 2nd edition, pp. 119, 12(T 
 the advantage of mathematics over philosophy as a means of training 
 was recognised some time before Pestalozzi. 
 
 * The athlete Milo, by daily carrying a growing calf, became at last 
 etrong enough to carry the full-grown ox.
 
 JHAP. III. J LEV AN A. 381 
 
 philosophers," are, in fact, eulogies ; and it were ro be 
 regretted if he could show the falsity of the reproaches. 
 Our hazy and inconstant age, fuller of dreams than of 
 poems, of phantasms than of imagination, has great need 
 of the clear, accurate eye of mathematics and of firm hold 
 upon reality. 
 
 And what, then, has it done towards the development of 
 the mental faculties? A great thing in childhood : it has 
 unfolded the power of adaptive combination. Since the 
 simple beam of mental activity has been already broken 
 into the colours of many intellectual powers, it may be 
 permitted me to name one more. I mean that power 
 which is as different from imagination, which only 
 partially embraces a subject, as from fancy, which creates ; 
 that power which assists the philosopher in his chains of 
 reasoning, the mathematician in his calculations, and 
 every inventor in his efforts, by retaining in connection 
 and presenting in order, the daily increasing masses of 
 ideas, numbers, lines and images. The pupil of Pestalozzi 
 exercises no creative power in his long numerical equa- 
 tions (that belongs only to the discoverer of the method) 
 but he calls into play his faculties of examining and 
 surveying. These are capable of unlimited growth : but 
 what would Newton, the mathematical pole-star, have 
 become in an ocean of books ? Probably as incomprehen- 
 sible to others in their best years, as he was to himself in 
 his old age! If many measure the course of ideas by 
 seconds ; — Bonnet required half a second for a clear idea, 
 Ghladen only three thirds to recall an old one, according 
 to Haller's Physiology ; — they seem only to reckon in that 
 the mental perusal of previously impressed thoughts ; for 
 is it possible to mark thought, to divide the soft breath of 
 heaven into waves? And is not the vastest idea— God, or 
 the Universe — as truly an instantaneous tiash of light as 
 the poorest idea, even nothing ? 
 
 The strengthening of the power in que*tion might 
 afterwards be renewed with advantage to many sciences. 
 In home cases, for instance, what great advantage would 
 be gained from having thoroughly understood, and being 
 able to recall, the various parts of a watch — from such as 
 were the playthings of our childhood to the accurate
 
 382 JEAN PAUL FRIEDKICn IilCHTEK. [fKAO. VII. 
 
 repeater of half-quarters — the masterly echo of time. This 
 power may be prepared for the most opposite efforts by 
 means of two very different sciences; by astronomy, for 
 the comprehension of vast masses ; by anatomy, for that 
 of the smallest portions of matter : the latter requires an 
 unexpectedly great effort, for it is physically as difficult 
 either for the finger or the eye to embrace the smallest as 
 the largest object. 
 
 The power we aie speaking of may also be strengthened 
 by gradually compressing a long historical or philosophical 
 paragraph into an epigram. For instance, suppose this 
 to be the sentence : " Popular authors do not make a 
 selection among their thoughts, but write them down as 
 they arise, just as, in most states, the monarchs are not 
 elected, but rule in order of birth." You might compress 
 it thus : " Popular authors do not permit their ideas to 
 rule according to the choice of reason, but according to the 
 natural succession of birth." And you might conclude it 
 proverbially thus : " In the popular brain the empire of 
 ideas is hereditary, not elective." Of course, this only 
 applies in the education of children ; for to educated 
 readers such brevity would be wearisome. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OK WIT. 
 § 134. 
 
 " Until the human body is developed, every artificial de- 
 velopment of the mind is injurious. Philosophical strain- 
 ings of the understanding, poetical ones of the fancy, 
 destroy those very faculties in the young mind, and others 
 along with them. But the development of wit, which is 
 scareoby ever thought of for children, is the least hurtful, 
 because its efforts are easy and momentary ; the most 
 useful, because it compels the new machinery of ideas to 
 quicker motion ; because, by the pleasure of discover* , 
 it gives increased power of command over those idea*
 
 CIIAI\ IV.J LEVANA. oS3 
 
 and because in early years, this quality, either in our- 
 selves or others, particularly delights by its brilliancy. 
 Why are there so few inventors, and so many learned men, 
 whose heads contain nothing but immoveable furniture, 
 in which the ideas peculiar to each scienco lie separately 
 as in monks' colls, so that when their possessor writes 
 about one science, he remembers nothing that he knows 
 about the rest? Why? Solely because children are 
 taught more ideas than command over those ideas, and 
 because in school they are exacted to have their 
 thoughts as immoveably fixed as their persons. 
 
 " Schlozer's historical style should be imitated in other 
 sciences. I have accustomed my Gustavus to hear and to 
 understand, and so himself to discover, the resemblances 
 among dissimilar sciences. For instance, all great or 
 heavy things move slowly ; hence Oriental monarchs, the 
 Dalai-Lama, the Sun, do not move at all. \\ inckelmann 
 tells us that the wise Greeks walked slowly ; also the hour 
 finger of a clock, the ocean, and tho clouds in fino weather 
 move slowly. Again, men, the earth and pendulums go 
 quicker in winter. Or, again, the name of Jehovah, of 
 eastern princes, and of home's guardian deity, as well as 
 the Sybillino books, the most ancient Christian and the 
 Catholic Bible, and the Veda, were concealed. It is in- 
 describable what great readiness and pliability of thought 
 children thus attain. Of course the information which 
 you wish to combine must first be in the head. But 
 enough ! tho pedant understands and does not approve ; 
 and the less prejudiced reader also says, Enough ! " 
 
 This paragraph follows some introductory arguments in 
 the invisible Lodge, book i. p. 131. 
 
 § 135. 
 
 After the severe rule and lesson-time of mathematics the 
 sans-culottish freedom and play-time of wit best follows; 
 anc 1 if tho former, like the Neptunist, forms all things 
 coldly and slowly, the latter, like the \ ulcanist, ascribes 
 to them a rapid and fiery origin. Tho glance of wit passes 
 over long and dark series of ideas, acquired by the power 
 of preliminary education, in order afterwards to create
 
 384 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTER. [FRAG. VII. 
 
 The first efforts of intellectual growth are witty. And 
 the passage from geometry to the electric art of wit, 
 as Lichtenberg, Kastner, D'Alembert and the French 
 in general, prove, is a natural and an easy, rather than 
 a forced march. The Spartans, Cato, Seneca. Tacitus, 
 Bacon, Young, Lessing, Lichtenberg, are examples how the 
 full, heavj^ thunder-clouds of knowledge break out in the 
 lightning of wit. Every discovery is at first an incidence ; 
 and from this moving point is developed a progressive 
 living form. The intellectual effort doubles and trebles 
 itself; one witty idea produces another, as the new-born 
 Diana assisted at the birth of her twin brother Apollo. 
 
 § 136. 
 
 It is easier to perceive that wit precedes reflection and 
 imagination in the nursery and the schoolroom, than to 
 see how to produce it. The great majority of teachers 
 will object that they do not themselves possess it, and 
 that it is very difficult to imitate the French language- 
 master who helped out his German pupils with their 
 German and yet knewnothing of it. Kiemeyer recommends 
 for this purpose charades and anagrams — but these only 
 serve for reflection upon language; — and riddles — which, 
 though better, are yet but witty definitions ; — and games 
 in company, the majority of which, however, tend to 
 excite a spirit of rational talking rather than wit. But 
 can no witty poems, no witty anecdotes, no play upon 
 words, be discovered? And is it not at first an easy 
 matter to let children seek moral resemblances in phj-sical 
 substances, until their pinions have grown sufficiently 
 strong to reach from mental to bodily resemblances? 
 (Vide my Introduction to ^Esthetics, ii.) 
 
 The author once presided for three years over a small 
 school comprising ten children of his friends ; the best 
 head among his pupils, of different ages and sexes, had 
 only mastered Cornelius Nepos. So, along with the Latin 
 language, German, French and English had to be begun, 
 as well as the so-called practical sciences. The diaries of 
 this eccentric school — during whose holiday hours the 
 Invisible Lodge and Hesperus were composed— along
 
 CHAP. IV.] LEVANA. 385 
 
 with the confession of all his mistaken views, belong to 
 the account of the author's life hereafter to be published. 
 But what follows will find its right place here. After 
 half a year's daily instruction for five hours, in the repe- 
 titions of which such witty resemblances as accident 
 offered were sought, and during which the children had 
 the Spartan permission to attack one another, — by which 
 means when out of school they were preserved from the 
 German fault of over-sensitiveness, — the author, to en- 
 courage the children and confirm the habit, made a 
 manuscript book, entitled " Anthology of my Pupils' 
 Bon-mots," in which he wrote in their presence every 
 idea of a not merely local character. A few examples 
 
 may serve to show his method. A boy, G , twelve 
 
 years old, the cleverest of the children, endowed with 
 mathematical and satirical talents, said as follows : — 
 " Man is imitated by four things, an echo, a shadow, an 
 ape, and a mirror ; — the windpipe, the bigoted Spaniards, 
 and ants, surfer no foreign substance within their limits, 
 but drive it out; — the air-bag of the whale, out of which 
 it breathes when under water, is the water stomach of 
 the camel, whence it drinks when there is no other water ; 
 — the concealment of the Greeks in the Trojan horse 
 was a living transmigration of souls ;— when calculations 
 become longer, logarithms must be made of logarithms ; — ■ 
 mercury is poison, and the mythological Mercury con- 
 ducted souls both into heaven and hell," &c. &c. The 
 same boy's younger brother, ten and a half years old, 
 said, — "God is the only perpetuum mobile; — the Hun- 
 garians preserve both their wane and their beehives in the 
 earth ; — Constantinople looks beautiful from a distance, 
 but ugly when near, and it stands upon seven hills; so 
 the planet Venus shines gloriously from a distance, but 
 on approaching nearer you find it uneven and full of 
 steep mountains," &c. &c. His sister, seven years old, 
 said, — " Every night we are seized with apoplexy, but in 
 the morning we are w^ell again; — the world is the b'dy 
 of God ; — when the pulse beats quickly we are ill ; when 
 slowly, well : so when the cluuds move fast, they betoken 
 foul weather; when slowly, fair weather; — when the 
 Spartans were in battle they wore led cloaks, so that the 
 I. 2 c
 
 386 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH EICHTEE. [FEAG. VII. 
 
 blood might not be seen ; and certain Italians wear black 
 ones, so that you may not see the fleas ; — my school is a 
 Quaker's meeting-house where every one may speak ; — 
 the stupidest people dress themselves the most showily , 
 so the stupidest animals, insects, are the gaudiest," &c. 
 Sometimes there were several fathers and mothers to the 
 same idea ; one spark drew out the rest too quickly, and 
 then they all justly insisted on a community of honour in 
 the " Anthology of Bon-mots." 
 
 Slavishness darkens and hides all the salt-springs of 
 wit ; hence those teachers who, like weak princes, can 
 only maintain their position by the censorship of the 
 press will probably do wisely to choose walks, and leave 
 the children at liberty in order to make them witty. 
 The writer of the " Anthology of Bon-mots " permitted 
 his scholars to exercise their wit upon, but not against, 
 himself. 
 
 A learned gentleman* fears danger to the sense of 
 truth from these exercises of the wit, though he has no 
 fault to find with the things themselves ; but if so, he 
 must also dread that something better — sentiment — 
 which takes the place of truth in our dark age, will be 
 falsiHod by the forms of speech which teach and analyse 
 its expression and its cause. And for what reason shall 
 witty similes be held incompatible with truth, as if they 
 also did not really, though not so obviously, illustrate it ? 
 We do not recommend children any Olympic games of 
 wit but such as are German ; and the northern nature 
 itself is so excellent a check to all over-excitement, that 
 even a German university could redress the balance of 
 the strong and pungent wit of two such men as Kastner 
 and Lichtenberg, and learnedly held out against them in 
 the learned journal of Gottingen. 
 
 * A reviewer of Levana in the " Gottinger Gelehrte-Anzeige," a 
 literary journal so called, and still published at Gottingen.
 
 CHAP. V.j LEVANA. 387 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF REFLECTION, ABSTRACTION, AND SELF-KNOW 
 LEDGE; TOGETHER WITH AN EXTRA PARAGRAPH ON THE 
 POWERS OF ACTION AND BUSINESS. 
 
 § 137. 
 
 I may be most brief about what is most important ; 
 for time and libraries are sufficiently prolix about it. 
 The reflective contemplation of self which conceals and 
 annihilates the external and superterrene universe by- 
 guiding and lowering man into his own inner world, now 
 finds its mining ladders in every book shop. Moreover 
 our modern life, broken up into particles by the search 
 after pleasure, and destitute of any great, active aims t<? 
 unite mind and matter, is enough, without further 
 cause, to make every one live within himself, and forget 
 the universe until some shock to his nerves of feeling 
 painfully reminds him of existence. If any men of the 
 present age be of a poetical nature life quickly becomes 
 a desert to them, in whose undulating air, as in that of 
 other deserts, objects appear both wavering and gigantic. 
 If they be of a philosophical disposition they fancy the 
 ideal garden-ladder against which they lean to be a fruit 
 tree, its dead steps living branches, and mount'uz them 
 to be gathering fruit. Hence self-destruction soon follows 
 the philosophical destruction of the world. Hence there 
 are more lunatics and fewer poets than formerly : the 
 philosopher and the madman ceaselessly point with the 
 left-hand index finger to the right hand, and cry out 
 "Object— Subject!" 
 
 Consequently, in philosophical and poetical natures, 
 always endeavour to postpone the reflecting observation 
 of self until the glowing season of the passions, so that 
 the child may garner and preserve a fresh, steadfast and 
 earnest life. 
 
 Children of common and merely active dispositions, 
 who do not so readily lose sight of the outer works of 
 the world, may be advanced five years earlier, by the 
 
 2 c 2
 
 388 JEAN PAUL FEIEDEICH EICHTEE. [FEAG. VII. 
 
 wheels of logic, physiology and transcendental philosophy, 
 into the citadel of the soul, so that they may learn thence 
 to contemplate their course of life. The inner world is 
 the remedy or antidote for the man of business ; as the 
 external universe is for the philosopher. Poetry, as the 
 happy union of both worlds, promotes the higher welfare 
 of both; as, by it, that healthful reflection and abstraction 
 are attained which raise man above want and time to a 
 nobler view of life. 
 
 § 138. 
 
 This is a suitable place to speak of the development of 
 the faculties for business, the sense of the man of the 
 world, which, in contradistinction to reflection, is a me- 
 diator between matter and mind; but it serves to mix 
 rather than to combine them indissolubly. This sense for 
 the objects of sense, this presence of mind for what is ex- 
 ternally present, a quality so gloriously perfect in heroes, 
 creates or annihilates things by the quickest combinations 
 of such dissimilar materials as external and internal 
 observations, or sensations and ideas, by a simultaneous 
 exercise of comprehension, foresight and physical power. 
 Like the two-headed eagle in the fable, which watched 
 with one head while it took nourishment with the other, 
 the man of the world must look at once within and with- 
 out, unblinded by what is within, unalarmed by what is 
 without ; and he must stand upon a point which, though 
 he himself move, yet never alters the circle nor changes 
 its position. 
 
 But it is difficult to provide a palaestra for the develop- 
 ment of this power suited to boys ; they must contend 
 with the only world they have about them — that of edu- 
 cation. It is not a fighting school they must pass through 
 — for as yet they should have no enemies — but they may 
 run a practising gauntlet against what lies in their way, 
 And war upon things, not men. It is to be hoped that 
 the teacher may find them the needful opportunities.
 
 CHAP. VI.] LEVANA. 389 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 ON THE EDUCATION OF THE RECOLLECTION — NOT OF THE 
 MEMORY. 
 
 § 139. 
 
 The difference between recollection and memory is 
 insisted upon by moralists more than by writers on edu- 
 cation. Memory, a receptive not a creative faculty, is 
 subjected to physical conditions more than all other 
 mental powers ; for every kind of weakness (direct and 
 indirect, as well bleeding as intoxication) impairs it, and 
 dreams interrupt it ; it is not subject to the will, is 
 possessed by us in common with the beasts ;* and can be 
 most effectually strengthened by the physician : a bitter 
 stomachic will increase it more than a whole dictionary 
 learnt by heart. For if it gained strength by what it 
 receives, it would grow with increasing years, that is, in 
 proportion to its wealth in hoarded names ; but it can 
 carry the heaviest burdens most easily in unpractised 
 youth, and it holds those so firmly that they appear above 
 the grey hairs of age as the evergreens of childhood. 
 
 §140. 
 
 On the contrary, recollection, the creative power, as free 
 to call forth or to discover a consequence from the given 
 ideas of memory, as wit or imagination are from their own 
 stores ; this exercise of the will denied to beasts, which 
 belongs chiefly to the mind, and therefore grows with its 
 growth; this faculty comes within the sphere of the 
 educator. Hence, memory can be iron, recollection only 
 quicksilver, and the giaving-tool acts corrosively only on 
 the former. The division of this power into memory for 
 words and memory for things is, therefore, erroneous, at 
 least in expression. He who can retain in his head a page 
 
 * During moulting (a disorder of birds) the bull-finch forgets his 
 song, and the hawk his cunning : just as at an earlier stage each loses 
 Mb nature through a debilitating want of sleep.
 
 390 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VII. 
 
 of Hottentot words will certainly much more easily retain 
 a volume of Kant ; for either he understands it — and then 
 every idea calls up an associated idea more readily than 
 a word can a perfectly dissimilar word — or he does not 
 understand it ; and then he merely retains a philosophical 
 vocabulary, and uses it as well in every disputation, or 
 for every combination, as many renowned students of the 
 Critique already prove. But memory for things does not 
 presuppose memory for names ; but only because instead 
 of b'^'ng called memory for things it ought to be called 
 recollection. 
 
 Eecollection, like every other mental power, can only 
 work according to the laws of association ; not sounds, but 
 things, that is to say, thoughts, educate. Bead a volume 
 of history to a boy, and compare the copious abstract he 
 can furnish of that with the miserable remnant he could 
 collect from a page of Humboldt's Mexican words which 
 you had read aloud to him. Plattner remarks in his 
 Anthropology that things merely in juxtaposition are 
 retained with more difficulty than things coming in 
 sequence : an animal , as it seems to me, would experience 
 the very reverse ; and for this reason : memory applies to 
 juxtaposition, recollection to sequence, because it, and not 
 the former, excites to mental activity by causation, or 
 some other association of ideas. Pythagoras recommended 
 his pupils each evening to recall the events of the day, not 
 solely as an act of self-mortification, but also as a means 
 of strengthening the recollection. Kalov knew the whole 
 Bible by heart; Barthius, when but in his ninth year, 
 Terence ; Sallust, Demosthenes ; and Scaliger learned 
 Homer in twenty-one days : but then these are books full 
 of intimately associated words, not mere dictionaries; a 
 whole library with all its volumes is easier to retain — for 
 the connection assists the recollection — than a short list of 
 them. When D'Alembert makes the easy retention of a 
 poem a proof of its excellence, his position loses something 
 of novelty, but gains in truth by the versus memoriales, 
 mnemonic verses, and the laws of the ancient lawgivers 
 promulgated in verse. He, in other words, observes that 
 the recollection is assisted by the close connection of 
 the parts, a quality peculiarly possessed by good poems.
 
 CHAP. VI.] LEV ANA. 391 
 
 Hence the Abbe Delille rightly regards his poems as better 
 than, for instance, his translated originals ; not only 
 because he has them in his mind before he transcribes 
 them, and so can sell the publisher his manuscript full of 
 the final rhymes, to which he afterwards attaches the rest 
 of the verse, — but also because he cannot remember much of 
 Milton or Virgil, although he has read both several times. 
 
 To strengthen the combining power of the recollection, 
 accustom your children from their earliest years to relate 
 to you some passage in history, or a tale ; and for this 
 purpose the most diffusely told story is the best. Fur- 
 ther, if you wish your child to advance rapidly, both in 
 a foreign language and in power of recollection, do not 
 set him to learn words, but a chapter which he has trans- 
 lated a few times : here recollection assists the memory ; 
 words are remarked in their verbal connection, and the 
 best dictionary is a favourite book. 
 
 It is more difficult to remember a single thing than 
 many joined together. The example of Lessing, who always 
 devoted himself exclusively for a time to one particular 
 branch of knowledge, proves the truth of Locke's remark, 
 that the way to become learned is to pursue one subject 
 only for a considerable period. The reason lies in the 
 systematic nature of the recollection ; it is certain that a 
 science will adhere more closely which has had time to 
 spread its roots in the soil. Hence nothing so much en- 
 feebles the recollection as leaps from one branch of the tree 
 of knowledge to another ; as men become forgetful who 
 have the management of several dissimilar offices. Let 
 your child pursue one and the same branch of knowledge 
 uninterruptedly for a month ; what a probability of 
 growth in twelve branches during the year ! The dislike 
 of the sameness will soon be lost in the pleasure of progress ; 
 and the science thus grounded and daily increasing its 
 limits will in time present a variety of flowers. Certainly 
 the foundations of every science should be laid and worked 
 upon for sometime without the intermixture of any other ;* 
 
 * Even in mechanical handwriting a month's practice in large hand 
 is desirable — interrupted by no running-hand : so that the more 
 firmly acquired character may better withstand the later detriments cf 
 haste.
 
 392 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTER. [FRAG. VII. 
 
 then a new one may be commenced, and the other re- 
 peated for a change ; and thus we may proceed, until, 
 after the careful erection of the scaffolding, we may begin 
 the building, and not till many of these are completed can 
 a street be formed. For a contemporaneous multiplicity 
 of .sciences is not adapted to early youth, which is only 
 capable of embracing an individual subject, — but to 
 maturer age, which can compare them together. 
 
 Recollection by association of place — falsely called 
 memoria localis — this play-room of the so-called arts of 
 memory — shows the necessity of connection. For this 
 reason travelling enfeebles local recollection. A prison, 
 said a Frenchman, is a memoria localis ; and many, Bassom- 
 pierre for example, have therein written their memoirs 
 solely on the walls— of the skull. 
 
 § 141. 
 
 But there is one mental talisman even for the memory 
 — I mean the charm of the object. A woman retains the 
 titles of books with as much difficulty as her learned 
 husband does the names of fashionable dresses ; an old 
 philologist, oblivious of other things, does not suffer an 
 unknown word that adds to his word-treasures to escape 
 him. 
 
 No one has a memory for eveiy thing, because no ono 
 feels an interest in every tiling. And the physical powers 
 set bounds even to the strengthening influence of desire 
 on the memory — think of that when with children : — for 
 instance, if a Hebrew bill of exchange for a thousand 
 pounds were promised, on condition of demanding its 
 payment in the very words of the document, as once read 
 aload, everybody would try to remember them, but unless 
 he were a Jew, the words and the form would fail him. 
 
 If grown-up people find italics and German-text useful 
 to ;i.ark their memoranda, I should think it possible that 
 little children also might require some such assistance. 
 But teachers ply them with uninterrupted notation, and 
 then, when they have printed whole books (or lessons) in 
 italic and German-text, ask, with wonder, " whether it is 
 possible a thing can be overlooked, when printed in different
 
 cnAP. vi.J LrvANA. 393 
 
 or large text ?" Permit something to be forgotten, when 
 you desire them to remember so much. 
 
 Resemblance, the rudder of recollection, is the dangerous 
 rock of memory. Among related objects only one can 
 exert the charm of novelty or priority. Thus, the correct 
 spelling of very similar words, such usahnen (to forbode), 
 ahnden (to revenge); malen (to paint), maiden (to grind); 
 das (the) and dass (that) ; Katheder (professor's chair), and 
 catheter (although the last two are found occasionally 
 together), is more difficult than that of totally different 
 ones. There are few aged men who remain at home and 
 are able to remember or relate the little circumstances of 
 their monotonous life for a fortnight : by the constant re- 
 currence of the daily echo the history of their lives is as 
 much shortened as life itself is piolonged. The history of 
 the fourth or fifth ten years of life shrivels up into a note 
 compared with the chapter on the fourth or fifth year. 
 An eternity might, at last, become shorter than a moment. 
 
 It is incomprehensible to me how people fancy they 
 can teach children to read or write the letters easily by 
 pointing out their resemblances, and laying before them 
 at once i y, c e, or, in writing, i r, h k, &c. The very 
 opposite plan ought to be pursued ; i should be placed 
 next g, v next z, o next r ; the contrast, like li^ht and 
 shadow, make both prominent, until reflected lights and 
 half shades can separate them anew from each other. 
 The fast-rooted dissimilarities serve at last to hold fast 
 the resemblance that exists among them. So the old plan 
 of teaching spelling by lists of words alphabetically 
 arranged is bad, on account of the difficulty of distinguish- 
 ing similar sounds ; whereas that of classing together 
 derivatives from the same Latin or Greek word assists the 
 remembrance, because the radical word does not alter. 
 If instruction in arts of memory had a place in the Levana, 
 I might suggest the following sportive methods . daily 
 drawing tickets in a spelling lottery, where each child 
 would not only observe his own, but his companions' 
 words ; every pupil might each day receive a foreign word 
 of parole, wherewith to greet his teacher: or the scholar 
 might be set to print a short Latin sentence with its 
 translation ; or he might be told to write the same word
 
 394 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. XII 
 
 in various styles of penmanship : in dates, for which theso 
 methods are much more necessary than for words, the 
 teacher might give the years written merely with conso- 
 nants, because the addition of the necessary vowels would 
 impress the whole line on the memory ; and he might cut 
 worthless maps into sections, allow his pupils to take them 
 home, and expect them to be brought back joined together 
 in the fashion of architectural games ; and so forth : it 
 were, indeed, a miserable prospect if hundreds of such 
 arts did not occur to the teacher. I myself, however, 
 would not choose any of these proposed methods of catch- 
 ing and yoking attention, but would adopt that of down- 
 right force and industry. I do believe that a rod would 
 help a creeping child to walk better than crutches under 
 his arms, which at first carry but afterwards are carried 
 by him. Let yea yea, and nay nay, or warmth and fire 
 be your double watchword. 
 
 § 142. 
 
 Artemidorus, the grammarian, forgot every thing when 
 he was terrified. Fear cripples the memory, both by 
 producing physical weakness and mental irritation ; the 
 frost of cold fear chains every living power which it 
 approaches. The bonds are removed even from the 
 criminal when he is to speak and be judged ! And yet 
 many teachers put fresh fetters on their pupils before they 
 hear, and threaten before they teach them. Do they 
 suppose the terrified soul can observe or remember any 
 thing better than the pain of fear, and the blows of the 
 stick ? Can the free glance of the mental eye co-exist 
 with the abject slavery of the heart? Will the poor 
 sinner on the scaffold embrace the beauties of the sur- 
 rounding landscape and, in contemplating them, forget 
 the impending axe ?
 
 ( *>5 ) 
 
 EIGHTH FRAGMENT. 
 
 Chap. I. Beauty limited to the outward Sense, §§ 143, 144 ; to the 
 inner Seuse, §§ 145, 146. Chap. II. Classical Education, §§ 147, 
 148. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 DEVELOPMENT OF THE SENSE OF BEAUTY. 
 
 §143. 
 
 I use the expression sense of beauty instead of taste ; taste 
 for the sublime sounds as badly as smell for the sublime. 
 The French publish one of the best instructions on taste 
 under the title Almanach des Gourmands. Farther; the 
 sense of beauty is not the same as the instinctive desire to 
 express beauty ; the development and improvement of this 
 latter faculty belongs properly to schools of art. If your 
 boy, even in the school- room, be taught to produce instead 
 of only to feel and see beautiful forms and beautiful 
 thoughts, he is as much spoiled as if he were a father 
 before being a lover. Nothing is more dangerous, either 
 for art or heart, than the premature expression of feeling ; 
 many a poetic genius has been fatally chilled by delicious 
 draughts of Hippocrene in the warm season of youth. The 
 feelings of the poet, especially, should be closely and coolly 
 covered, and the hardest and driest sciences should retard 
 the bursting blossoms till the due spring-time. Pope, when 
 a boy, wrote poems of sentiment ; when a man, epigrams. 
 It is said that every clever man, such as Leibnitz and 
 Kant, for instance, must have written verses in his youth : 
 this may be very true of him who writes none in mature 
 life ; the philosopher, the mathematician, the statesman, 
 may begin where the poet ends, and vice versa ! Is the poet 
 the only one who reveals the secret, — the holiest, and the 
 tenderest of humanity ; then must he guard and keep it
 
 396 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VIII. 
 
 in the soul, as tenderly as if he were the Blessed Virgin, 
 from every carpenter, until the Holy Spirit give her the 
 Son. Let the poet first, then, attain the full stature of his 
 model before he copies it. Let him, like the beautiful 
 white butterfly, first live on the leaves of the schools, and 
 unfold his wings when the flowers hold honey. 
 
 § 144. 
 
 Children, like women, always kindly disposed towards 
 pedants, would not think it utterly ridiculous if one 
 attempted, for instance, to instil into a boy admiration 
 for a girl's beautiful features by displaying drawings ol 
 hideous noses, lips and necks, and along with them beauti- 
 ful paintings of the same parts, so that when the young 
 man left the school of design he might at once fall in love 
 with a beautiful woman as judiciously as a simpleton who 
 had never been to school. 
 
 Something very similar is done by those teachers who 
 try to educate the sense of the sublime ; which, however, 
 is not increased, but diminished, by the given examples of 
 sublimity. The circumnavigator of the world does not 
 think the sea so sublime as does his wife, who views it 
 only from the coast ; the stars come at last to look smaller 
 in the naked eye of an astronomer than in ours. 
 
 In fact, men want to educate every thing (themselves 
 excepted) which will certainly educate itself; and they do 
 this the more earnestly because the result is certain and 
 irresistible, as in walking, seeing, tasting, &c. : but for the 
 sense of artLtic beauty, which peculiarly needs education, 
 schools are rarely built. 
 
 A child may be conducted into the artistic realm ot 
 beauties appreciable by the outward senses, such as paint- 
 ing, music, architecture, earlier than into that of beauties 
 appreciable only by the mind, such as poetry. Above all 
 things educate the German eye, which is so far behind the 
 German ear. Conceal from him every distortion of shape 
 or drawing — one might add of the streets, if it were possible 
 to hide the grotesque appearance of our houses, dresses and 
 ornaments, or rather disfigurements— and surround his 
 beauteous age with beauty. The example of the critically 
 correct Italians proves that an artist's hand is not th«
 
 CHAP. 1. 1 LEVANA. 397 
 
 necessary accompaniment of an artist's eye. Open a child's 
 eye, more than his heart, to the beauties of nature ; the 
 latter opens naturally in its proper season, and sees farther 
 and more beauties than those you place before it. Unfor- 
 tunately little can be accomplished in this direction by 
 your unaided efforts ; only the state — which, however, 
 loves better to carve its wood into parade-beds than cradles 
 of art — can provide true education for the eye, which is 
 best taught by streets, temples and gardens. May the 
 generous and noble plan for an Art-school of the powerful 
 author of " Die reisende Maler " (The Travelling Painters) 
 soon come into the hands of a prince who will not think that 
 he buys too dearly with his regalia the more worthy crown- 
 jewels of Art. Must royalty and art be everywhere as 
 far distant from each other as the Sun and Venus — a space 
 which a cannon ball would require seventeen years to 
 traverse?* The former paragraph clearly excludes poets 
 from the proposed school of art. A great poetic gallery, 
 filled with novices gathered together for the express pur- 
 pose of poetising, could at most but furnish poems upon 
 poetry and poets, in short, but mock-heroic imitations ; an 
 evil which the acquirement of technical facility, the great 
 advantage of a school for art, does not compensate. A true 
 poet must, like Shakspeare and Cervantes, have struggled 
 with life and all its conditions ; then he may take the 
 pencil, not merely to lay colour by colour, but to paint his 
 soul upon the canvas. If an intimate acquaintance with 
 poems led to writing poems, actors ought to have written 
 the best plays. 
 
 An artistic school for the ear is less required from defi- 
 ciency of teachers, patterns and energy, than from a super- 
 fluity of them, for sometimes the teachers will drown one 
 another, though at the risk of being themselves out of tune. 
 Fortunately it is more difficult to change or destroy the 
 simple taste of the hearing, than of the seeing or reading, 
 public. Behind the most sensitive ear the heart always 
 remains open to the simplest melodies : the virtuoso alone 
 is his own empoisoner. 
 
 * The times, unfortunately, have compelled an affirmative answer r 
 the school of art remains still in the celestial realm of the Beautiful : 
 and its architect has flown away to it — the man of great heart, tha 
 pious man, the richly gifted poet.
 
 398 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VIII, 
 
 §145. 
 
 If the art of poetry have been pronounced, and with 
 justice, to embrace all human nature, to be the Venus- 
 girdle which enchantingly combines the most opposite 
 powers, the most graceful alternate transformation of form 
 into subject, and this again into that, like the candle 
 whose flame assumes a shape, and yet through which the 
 wick is visible ; if this be so, we must indeed wonder that 
 the study of this unity in plurality should be appointed for 
 that time of life in which variety is small, and the power 
 of combining it weak or even erring. Must not children 
 resemble nations on whom the sun of beauty first shone 
 after the tempest of their wants was stilled ? And does 
 not poetry, the bridal ornament of Psyche, require her to 
 be full-grown and a bride ? Before the thirteenth or 
 fourteenth year, before the time of opening manhood, 
 which throws a romantic splendour round sun, and moon, 
 and spring, and sex, and poetry, the child regards poetical 
 flowers as so many dried medicinal herbs. The error of 
 prematurely introducing a child to the treasures of poetry 
 can only arise from the agsthetie mistake of believing the 
 spirit of poetry to consist less in the whole than in its 
 variously-scattered, dazzling charms of sound, pictures, 
 events and feelings ; for these a child has naturally a 
 ready ear. Rhymers and verse writers may, indeed, play 
 a useful part at an early age. Ehyme delights both the 
 most uncultivated and the youngest ear ; and the harmony 
 of full-sounding prose will soon melt the little soul. In- 
 structive poetry, resembling circular light-holders, also 
 is good. Songs, too, are passable. Tales, particularly 
 Oriental tales, the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, (those 
 romantic summer nights, so short whether to men or 
 children !) will arouse the dreaming poetic heart with 
 gentle charms until it is afterwards strong enough to 
 comprehend the lofty lyric ode, the wide-extended level 
 epic, the thronging passions of tragedy. 
 
 When manhood and womanhood have kindled the 
 transitory joy-fires of life, and all their powers seek unity 
 and the future, then let the poet approach, and be the
 
 CHAP. I.] LEVANA. 399 
 
 Orpheus who animates dead bodies, as well as tames wild 
 beasts. But what poets shall the teacher bring ? 
 
 § 146. 
 
 Our own ! Neither Greek, nor Roman, nor Hebrew, 
 nor Indian, nor Fi ench, but German. Let the Englishman 
 select English poets, and every nation its own. Only when 
 we call to mind the poverty of the dark ages, whose 
 seeming corpse the miracles of Greece and Rome re- 
 animated, can we comprehend the existing absurdity of 
 not educating and preparing the mind by means of native, 
 related and young beauties for those of foreign and distant 
 ages ; but of precisely reversing the matter and placing 
 him among strangers instead of those who speak his 
 mother- tongue. The quickest comprehension and percep- 
 tion of all the secondary tints in a poet's work, the 
 intensest feeling for its subject, the widest embrace of its 
 aim, and of its humour — all this is only possible to the 
 reader of his own countryman, not of any foreign wonderful 
 being; if the actual conditions of his native country help 
 the poet to colour, they also help the reader to see : she 
 was a Roman who at once inspired Raffaelle— the Roman — 
 as a mistress and a Madonna. Must we in the North dig 
 all our beauties and hopes, like vases and urns, out of 
 sepulchres ? 
 
 We may do so rightly if we speak only of vases and 
 similar objects ; that is to say, of the artistic education of 
 the eye. The most beautiful forms should be first pre- 
 sented to the eye — a Grecian Venus to a Chinese. But if 
 the education of the inner sense be the object, offer the 
 nearest first. The outer sense accustoms itself, by degrees, 
 to the most preposterous forms, as all journals of fashion 
 show, and becomes attached to them by length of time; 
 the inner sense is formed by the contemplation of childish 
 beauties to the comprehension of mental beauty. Begin 
 with Raffaelle and Gluck, but not with Sophocles. 
 
 At home and at school let the native poets be first 
 p.aced on the altar as gods of the household and the 
 country ; let the little child rise from the lesser to the 
 greater gods. What love of country must not that hanging
 
 400 JEAN PAUL FKIEDEICH K1CHTEE. [FRAG. VIII 
 
 on the lips of native poets inspire ! And to what beau- 
 tiful slow reading should we not he accustomed, (for tha 
 German reads every thing quickly that, is not very far 
 removed in distance, a^re and language) if one of Klopstock's 
 odes, for instance, were as critically dissected as one of 
 Horace's ! What power should we not obtain over our 
 own language, if, at the age when schoolmasters usually 
 discourse about Pindar and Aristophanes, we were intro- 
 duced to the sonorous odes of Klopstock and Voss, into 
 the antique temple of Goethe, the lofty dome of Schiller ! 
 For even our own language must speak to us according 
 to a model, if it is to produce any effect. Hence the old 
 humanists (and some modern ones too) wrote Latin best, 
 and both old and new worldlings write French best, and 
 both parties often wrote miserable German : Leibnitz and 
 the Rectors on the one side, and Frederick the Great on 
 the other, confirm my observation. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 CLASSICAL EDUCATION. 
 
 § 147. 
 
 For the sake of brevity I begin this chapter with the 
 request that the reader will first peruse, in the Invisible 
 Lodge, Book First, the supplement headed " Why I give 
 my Gustavus witty and bad authors, but forbid the 
 classical, I mean Greek and Latin writers;" thereby I 
 shall be spared both copying and printing it over again ; 
 and also the bad attempt to clothe the same thoughts, or 
 soul, with another body. I have not yet met with any 
 refutation of that paragraph ; nor, during the twenty 
 years which have elapsed since its publication, have 1 
 been able to refute myself. 
 
 What follows might be appended to a second or third 
 edition. 
 
 I ask whether those men who have given us "W ieland'n
 
 CHAP. H.] LEVANA. 401 
 
 explanation of the sai.re3 of Horace, Voss's translation of 
 Homer, Schleiermacher's introductory translations of 
 Plato's discourses, have sprung from that Latin town 
 which Maupertuis recommended to be founded ? Only 
 men of mind, of power, and of education, completed by 
 more and higher studies than mere philology, only chil- 
 dren born on fortunate days, such as Goethe and Herder, 
 have ever seen the spirit of antiquity ; the rest have 
 only beheld, instead, treasures of words and gleanings of 
 flowers. Is it not madness to think it even possible that 
 a boy of fourteen or sixteen, however great his abilities, 
 can comprehend the harmony of poetry and deep thou gut 
 contained in one of Plato's discourses, or the worldly 
 persiflage of Horace's satires, when the genius itself has 
 not conducted the men I name to the pure cold heights 
 of antiquity until long after the fiery season of youth ? 
 Why do teachers demand what they can so seldom do 
 themselves ? I entreat them to think partly of the in- 
 difference with which they and the Italian savans await 
 the unrolling of the eight hundred manuscripts in 
 Herculaneum ; partly of the stupidity with which they 
 first mistook, and afterwards criticised, the new Greek 
 spirit of Goethe in his elegies on the antique at Weimar 
 partly of the numberless mistakes they have made in 
 attributing a Grecian resemblance to many a flat produc- 
 tion, merely on account of its German dulness and French 
 form,* and denying it to such pure, powerful works as 
 those of Herder. And does not the preference which the 
 youth of our universities manifests towards every new 
 hairy comet really show what is effected by the ancient 
 astronomy in our youthful training places ? And is it 
 possible, even if all other things were different, that the 
 tender, indivisible form of beauty can be appreciated if 
 grammatic divisions break it, like the Medicean Venus, 
 into thirteen fragments and thirty smaller pieces. What, 
 in this case, the youth may gladly confound with the 
 enjoyment of the whole, and with the goddess of flowers, 
 is the pleasure derived from some wayside flower in the 
 sandy desert of philological exercises; and the ordinary 
 
 * E.g. to many a one of Wieland's, wherein there is often nothing 
 Greek nut the scene and the month-name. 
 
 i. 2d
 
 402 JEAN PAUL FFJEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VIII. 
 
 teacher mistakes his sand bath for the floral deity. This 
 perversity causes the study of the ancients, which must 
 present its casket of phrases at every boy's toilet, to give 
 his concetti to the Italian, his host of synonymes to the 
 English, and to the German every taste which he can 
 find. And thus the new age is lost to us by the wounds 
 of beauty. 
 
 § 148. 
 
 Let antiquity be the Venus and morning star which 
 rises over the evening of our North. It depends on our 
 position with regard to the star of beauty whether it 
 shall shine upon us with a full or only a partial light. 
 The language of the ancients is a very different thing. 
 So, again, is the spirit of their history, or subject; and, 
 thirdly, the spirit of their form, or poetry. 
 
 The learning of the ancient languages and their 
 harmonic beauty has no prematurity to dread ; but why 
 are these canonical writings of the spirit desecrated into 
 books for teaching the alphabet and reading ? Do not 
 people understand that no mind, least of all a child's, can 
 turn at once in such opposite directions as language and 
 subject, even though it be a poet's subject, require? 
 
 Especial care should be taken never to reduce a reality 
 to a mere arrangement of words, particularly because the 
 recollection rejects as indigestible all single, isolated 
 matters. If the fact stands prominently forth, the word 
 or name is often lost sight of. Thus it has frequently 
 been remarked that those boys find it most difficult to 
 remember the names of the heroes in ancient Greek or 
 Eoman story, who have their deeds impressed most 
 vividly on their minds. So, in novels, the interest of the 
 story and of the hero will sometimes make a young lady 
 read the whole without knowing the names of the hero 
 or heroine, which yet stand upon every page, and cause 
 her to forget them in their lives as completely as the 
 Greeks who, according to Lessing, named their tragedies 
 after persons who did not appear in them. 
 
 What Greek or Latin books are the most suitable for 
 teaching those languages ? Partly imitations, which may 
 be made in order not to lead a deaf and dumb spirit to
 
 CHAP, n.] LEYANA. 403 
 
 the divine oracles of the ancients ; partly also those 
 ancient books which possess most interest for the youth- 
 ful mind: for instance, the younger Pliny (as a forerunner 
 of the French letter writers), and even the elder Pliny ; 
 at least he is much more suitable than Tacitus, so full of 
 poison, the world and life ; also Lucan, Seneca, Ovid, 
 Martial, Quintilian, Cicero's youthful orations, &c. 
 
 In Greek the romantic Odyssey, in spite of its im- 
 portance, might occupy an early place, then Plutarch, 
 iElian, and even the Plutarch of philosophers, Diogenes 
 Laertius. The ages of iron and brass, like the metals 
 after which they are named, should be laid at once on the 
 surface, and the nobler metals raised afterwards upon 
 them. In short, to obtain strength, observe the Grecian 
 law which forbade athletes even to look upon beauties. 
 
 The fortifications round the city of God have been laid 
 by the ancients for every age in the history of their own. 
 The present ranks of humanity would sink irrecoverably 
 if the youth did not take its way through the silent 
 temple of the mighty past into the market-place of after- 
 life. The names of Socrates, Cato, Epaminondas, and 
 others, are pyramids of the power of will. Rome, Athens, 
 Sparta, are the three crowning cities of the giant Geryon ; 
 and after-ages fix their eyes on the youth as on the 
 primitive mountains of humanity. Not to know the 
 ancients is to be an ephemeron which neither sees the 
 sun rise nor set. But do not expose this antique temple 
 as though it were a receptacle for cast-off customs and 
 phrases, and as though its holy relics, instead of being 
 worshipped, might, like warriors' bones, be converted into 
 knife-handles and the like. The man can draw the 
 history of the ancients from their own springs ; the child 
 may draw them from the man : one ancient alone I would 
 except, Plutarch, from whose hand the young may receive 
 the animating palm wine of the mighty past. But school- 
 masters willingly sacrifice the purification of the soul by 
 ancient history to a pure Grecian. So Demosthenes, 
 destitute of ornament, poor in flowery garlands, rich in 
 chains of argument, and rich in ands, is sacrificed to 
 sounding, flowery Cicero. 
 
 It were surely well to consult the age and advance- 
 
 2 d 2
 
 404 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER. [FRAG. VIII. 
 
 raent of the pupils in schools, and begin with the easier 
 classical authors, Cicero, Virgil, Livy, Herodotus, Ana- 
 creon, Tyrtaeus, E\iripides ; afterwards advancing to the 
 more difficult, Horace, Caesar, Lucretius, Sophocles, Plato, 
 Aristophanes. Here, as is natural, that orderly disorder 
 is scorned by which masters place the difficulty of under- 
 standing an author in the phrases, rather than in the 
 higher spirit ; just similarly in a French school Goethe 
 would be read by the lower classes, Schiller by the second, 
 Haller by the first, and I by nobody. I call Virgil an 
 easy classical author ; Caesar a difficult one ; the odes of 
 Horace are easy, his eatires difficult ; Klopstock is oftener 
 easy than Goethe, because merely verbal difficulties may 
 be overcome by teaching and industry, but mental diffi- 
 culties only by the maturity of thought, which comes 
 with years. 
 
 If it be asked where time is to be found for the so- 
 called knowledge of things, and the studies whereby a 
 livelihood is to be obtained, since their subjects constantly 
 increase, and we resemble an army, the last ranks of which 
 must march quickest — I tranquilly answer, Give natural 
 philosophy and natural history, astronomy and geometry, 
 and abundant supplies of " bread studies," in the school- 
 rooms and lecture-rooms of your gymnasiums ; and in so 
 doing you will give the boys ten times more pleasure 
 than they receive from the unfolding of the mummy 
 bandages of the ancient graces ; thus, too, you impart 
 the common nourishment needed by both the future 
 divisions of your pupils into sons of the muses and sons 
 of labour. Then the higher schools are reserved for the 
 instructions of the greatest teachers, the ancients.
 
 ( 405 ) 
 
 NINTH FEAGMENT, 
 
 OR 
 
 KEY-STONE. 
 
 § 149. 
 
 A treatise on education does not include the theory of 
 instruction, whose wide realm embraces the mistakes 
 of all sciences and arts ; nor the theory of remedies, 
 which would require libraries instead of volumes for 
 the complication of mistakes, years, positions and relations. 
 At the same time no science is entirely disconnected from 
 the rest ; the feet cannot move without the hands. 
 
 § 150. 
 
 Lavater, in a painted series of four-and-twenty faces, 
 converted a frog's head into an Apollo's : I would that a 
 poem could, in a similar way, depict the restoration of 
 some naturally gifted but ruined child to the pure features 
 of humanity, instead of taking a sun-god to school as 
 Xenophon and Rousseau did. Yes, one might exhibit an 
 educational history of many false cures effected on the 
 same human limb ; and it would be nothing else than 
 useful and difficult. How often has not the ill-set arm of 
 humanity to be broken afresh so as to be rightly healed ! 
 
 § 151. 
 
 The best and most complete education cannot exhibit 
 its true power upon one child, but upon a number of united 
 children; — romantic Cyropedagogues of one individual
 
 406 JEAN PAUL FKIEDRICH EICHTER. [FEAG. IX. 
 
 should think of this : — a lawgiver influences multitudes 
 by multitudes ; one Jew alone could not produce a Moses. 
 But this very Mosaic people — which has spread unaltered 
 through the ocean of all time, as sea-plants in all the zones 
 of the ocean, and has retained its Mosaic colouring even 
 when burning Africa has changed its bodily hue — is the 
 strongest witness to the power of education, for, during its 
 dispersion, the Mosaic education of the people can only be 
 maintained by private education. Let this fact inspire 
 all parents with courage to disregard all that is malignant 
 in the future into which they must send their children. 
 
 § 152. 
 
 For the same reason this courage should not be lessened 
 by a well-known contradictory appearance ; namely, that 
 children, like plants acclimatised to the nursery and school- 
 room, can scarcely be recognised in a strange apartment, 
 in a carriage, in the country, or at midnight. " It was 
 all forced fruit," says then the good, vexed father, " and I 
 have lost my labour and my hope." But if the angry man 
 will then sit down and consider that he, a plant equally 
 acclimatised to his position, has frequently been made 
 unlike himself by strangeness of place or circumstances, 
 yet with very transitory injury to his powers, he may 
 cool his wrath by applying the same observation, though 
 in a stronger degree, to his children who, being more 
 excitable, feeble and inexperienced, must naturally obey 
 and succumb to every new presence. 
 
 § 153. 
 
 In some circumstances we cannot be sufficiently diffuse 
 with children, in others not sufficiently short. Speak at 
 greatest length in tales, and when you wish to give the 
 passions time to cool, as a kind of rhetorical signal that 
 something important is to come. The utmost brevity 
 should be used in confronting logical sentences for exercise 
 — in forbidding — and further, in necessary punishments ; 
 then, after the billows are laid, loquacity may be advan- 
 tageously resumed.
 
 PRA.a. IX.] LEVANA. 407 
 
 § 154. 
 
 If a father be boldly obedient to the right rule of letting 
 a boy, especially one destined to a learned profession, lie 
 fallow during the first five years of life, only learning what 
 he teaches himself, so thar, his body may become strong 
 enough to bear its future mental treasures, let him be 
 prepared when the child first goes to school for a difficulty 
 which may, perhaps, last some months; it is this, — that 
 the boy, hitherto accustomed only to his own mental 
 teaching, cannot immediately apply with ease to instruc- 
 tion from without, but receives the foreign rays at first as 
 in a dispersing concave glass. But by and by they will 
 be collected and combined by a convex mirror. 
 
 Since I have again fallen on the subject of instruction 
 which, especially in later years, becomes continually more 
 and more closely combined with education, I know not 
 how better to make amends for my digression than by 
 pursuing it and here recording the opinion of an excellent 
 scholar of my acquaintance rich alike in feeling, learning, 
 and genius,* that a boy of five years old can be sent 
 to no better preparator}' school for a learned education, 
 though but for a few hours daily, than to one of only 
 three classes, Latin, mathematics, and history. In fact, 
 these three kinds of knowledge attune the mind to the 
 threefold harmony of education. First, the Latin 
 language, by its brevity and great dissimilarity to our 
 own, exercises the child's mind in logic, and is, therefore, 
 a preparatory school of philosophy. Brevity of speech 
 gives comprehensiveness of thought. Secondly, mathe- 
 matics, as a mediator between the intuitions of the senses 
 and of the mind, excites and forms a power distinct from 
 philosophy, and not sufficiently esteemed in its connection 
 with the material universe ; which, by the analysing of 
 space from without and time from within, brings the 
 ultimate conclusions of numbers within the power of 
 thought. Thirdly, history, like religion, unites all 
 learning and power; especially ancient history, that is, 
 the history of the nations of the youthful world, Grecian 
 
 * Prof. L. H. Wagner in Barreuth, already favourably known to 
 the learned public by his lopic, physiology, and his wide attainment*
 
 408 JEAN PAUL FRIEDEICH RICHTER. [FRAG. IX. 
 
 and Roman, Jewish and early Christian. As the epic 
 poem and the romance may be made to contain the float- 
 ing materials of all knowledge, their mother, history, may 
 still more easily be made into the firm pulpit of every 
 moral and religious opinion ; and every department of 
 morality, moral theology, moral philosophy and casuistry, 
 finds its leader in ancient history. The young heart lives 
 in the mighty youthful past, and, by this active art of 
 poetry, buried centuries are raised from the dead in a few 
 school-hours. The devils removed into historic distance 
 grieve less, and tempt far less, than when standing in our 
 presence : the angels, on the contrary, cleared by distance 
 from neighbouring mists, shine and sparkle more bril- 
 liantly than ever ; and they tell us what there is yet 
 to do in the future which may be worthy of the past. 
 History — if you are not determined to make it into the 
 biography of the devil — is the third Bible ; for the book 
 of nature is the second ; and ancient history alone can 
 convert and improve modern history. 
 
 The father of Levana — although in the case of a 
 goddess this name would be more humbly and appropri- 
 ately changed into worshipper — has (he ventures now to 
 recall to himself) kept the promise of the preface to jest 
 but little. He has wanted room — but that another book 
 will furnish — rather than occasion for two satires, both 
 directed against one evil — the affliction of children — 
 teaching. A short serious epitome must be permitted. 
 
 Certainly, as regards children's sufferings, we must 
 admit that nature, which makes them cry sooner than 
 laugh, has the precedence of us. Not the human egg, but 
 the bee's, is laid upon honey. Among all entrances into 
 new circumstances none is so important as that into life, 
 and there also the new apprentice must pay his footing ; 
 or, as a novice in life's mysteries, he, like the ancient 
 Greek, must be severely scourged ; or he must receive that 
 which in prisons — and such Plato esteemed the earth to 
 be — is called a welcome, which does not consist in the old 
 German sparkling goblet {that his mother's breast offers 
 him), but in what most would think a flogging. Accord- 
 ing to the Catholic church, children, those of Bethlehem 
 under Herod, were the first martyrs ; it is the emblem of
 
 FRAG. IX.] LEVANA. 409 
 
 what still exists. According to the same church the un- 
 baptized passed either into hell or into purgatory; but 
 they pass between two fires upon earth if they pursue 
 the way from the first to the second sacrament. If 
 baptism be necessary to salvation, so also is the sacrament 
 of the Eucharist ; therefore before the Lord's Supper, the 
 feast of love, you justly repress whatever seems rather to 
 resemble hate. And so the tears which Garrick could 
 draw by the mere repetition of the alphabet, the child soon 
 learns to shed by itself. But among all the schoolmasters 
 who have flogged either the author or his readers, and 
 endeavoured to enlighten their minds with the cane as 
 with a pedagogic lamp-post, or who have understood how 
 to use their fists like players on the French horn, who 
 apply theirs to the wide mouth of the horn and draw 
 forth its delicate semi-tones ; yet among all schoolmasters, 
 I say, it is a rare and difficult thing to find a John 
 Jacob Hauberle. Which of us can boast, like Hauberle, 
 of having administered, during his schoolmastei ship of 
 fifty-one years and seven months, 911,527* strokes of the 
 cane and' 124,000 of the rod; also 20,989 blows with the 
 ruler; not only 10,235 boxes on the ear, but also 7905 
 tugs at the same member; and a sum total of 1,115,800 
 blows with the knuckles on the head? Who besides 
 Jacob Hauberle has given 22,763 impositions, partly in 
 the Bible, partly in the catechism, partly in the Psalm 
 book, partly in the grammar, as with four syllogistic 
 logical figures, or a sonate a quatre mains ? And did he not 
 threaten the rod to 1707 children who did not receive 
 it, and make 777 kneel upon round hard peas, and 631 
 upon a sharp-edged piece of wood, to which are to be 
 added a corps of 500 1 riders on the wooden horse ? For if 
 any one had done this why did he not keep an account of 
 his blows, like Hauberle, from whom alone we have to 
 learn this interesting intelligence as from a Flogging 
 Diary, or Martyrologium, or Imperial School Flogging 
 Journal? But 1 fear most teachers only deserve the con- 
 temptuous surname of Ca3sarius,"j" who was called " the 
 
 * These numbers are to be found in the fourth quarterly number 
 of the third year of the Pedagogic Entertainment for Teachers. 
 
 t See the very learned notes to the drama ' Fust of Stromberg,' by 
 Maier.
 
 410 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RIOHTER. [ FRAG. IX. 
 
 Mild" beca-A. lie suffered no nun to receive more than 
 six-and-thirty lashes. 
 
 If the benefit to be derived from thus converting life 
 into a hell be any thing more than seeming, good infernal 
 machines — in which we always succeed better than in 
 celestial machines — ought to be made for the purpose, and 
 people attached to them expressly to torment. No one 
 torments better than one who has himself been tormented 
 —monks, for instance. If you wish me to weep, says 
 Horace, you must first weep yourself. And the school- 
 master can do the last ; no one could have better sat to an 
 Albert Diirer, who loved to paint crucifixions, than the 
 united body of German schoolmasters ; and if the cruci- 
 fixion came at the conclusion of Christ's ministry, with us 
 they accompany each other. England, which gives a sub- 
 rector a yearly salary of a thousand pounds, will apparently 
 attain this end less quickly — although in all its schools it 
 will exalt the rod to the post of educational honour — than 
 countries where, as in Prussia, the whole average salaries 
 of schoolmasters amount only to 250 thalers ; so we may 
 fairly reckon that 184 masters may be pointed out, who 
 only receive from five to ten thalers.* Five thalers! — 
 Certainly it might be less, and in Baireuth it is so ; for 
 there a village schoolmaster receives from every pupil, for 
 the months of November, December, January, February, 
 March and April, twenty-four kreuzers, or a monthly 
 stipend of four kreuzers. But the schoolmaster — which 
 perhaps would not be expected — grows fat in the summer 
 holidays, because he goes out to pasture with the cattle 
 (it is only in winter that he is a shepherd of souls). The 
 evil effects of this system soon break out in him, for he 
 drives the cattle away from wrong roads with much fewer 
 blows than the children. The receipt of four kreuzers 
 repaid by pain ! 
 
 Isocrates wept from shame to receive college fees, 
 amounting to three thousand pounds, from his hundred 
 pupils : might not shame and weeping find a more ap- 
 propriate place here ? Happily the state, which converts 
 schools into industrial schools, for the pupils rather than 
 
 * Alg. Lit. Zeitun-. No. 267. 1805.
 
 FRAG. IX.] LEVANA. 411 
 
 the masters, declares that none hut clergymen shall he 
 schoolmasters, and students of divinity house-tutors for 
 the higher classes of pupils (as the Dalai-Lama niay only 
 he attended hy priests). Theologians are active Theo- 
 p&schists, and every Bible comes into their hands sooner 
 than the Biblia in nummis ; fur it has ever heen a Pro- 
 testant principle, in order not to separate them too far 
 from the Catholic clergy, to compel the Lutheran minis- 
 ters strictly to keep the vows of poverty. In short, they 
 have little ; therefore, all the more is to he taken from 
 them by giving them the office of schoolmasters. 
 
 If we ascend to the higher scholastic positions we find 
 that where the young men, having attained the honour of 
 the gymnasium, need fewer mortifications, there also the 
 teachers require fewer ; thus, a head master always receives 
 a trifle more pay than his subordinate. To which is to he 
 added a second reason ; that the latter has more work and, 
 consequently, requires more spurring, more oil in the 
 joints and wheels, to accomplish his heavier movements— 
 that is to say, more unemployed gastric juice. For, ac- 
 cording to an ancient political law, the labour and trouble 
 of an office increase in inverse proportion to its remunera- 
 tion ; and, where the former are altogether wanting, there 
 that law of the artisans is acted upon, according to which 
 every travelling journeyman who cannot find work in a 
 place receives a present. 
 
 It is, however, so ordered that even in the highest school 
 offices, as in fruitful Hindostan, where thei'e are yearly 
 three harvests and a famine, the four quarterly harvests 
 shall not always exclude a famine. As regards drink, we 
 know, from Langen's clerical law, that Karpzov bestowed 
 on all school teachers the privilege of exemption from tax 
 on all liquors. In this the state has not had so much 
 regard, as at first appears, to the wants and thirst. of the 
 profession, but has followed the old custom of giving still 
 greater privileges to schoolmasters ; such as, exemption 
 from the taxes on Tokay wine and pheasants, and license 
 for all their pearls and jewels to enjoy the immunities oi 
 students' goods !
 
 412 JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH EICHTEE. I FRAG. IX. 
 
 § 155. 
 
 But enough of this ! I spoke above of a hostile future 
 for our children : every father holds out this prospect, 
 which he has inherited from his own. Who, indeed, has 
 been so blessed, when finally closing his eyes, as to con- 
 template two fair worlds, his own yet hidden and one left 
 behind for his children ? The whole of humanity always 
 seems to us a salt sea which the sweet showers and streams 
 of individuals do not sweeten ; yet the pure water on the 
 rarth is as little dried up as the salt sea ; nay. it even rises 
 from it. Therefore, father, the higher thou thinkest 
 thyself, whether truly or not, exalted above thy age, 
 (consequently above its daughters, whom yet thou must, 
 however unwillingly, see thy sons marry,; all tbe more 
 thank-offerings hast thou to lay on the altar of the past 
 which has made thee so noble ; and how canst thou better 
 present tbem to thy parents than by the hands of thy 
 children ? 
 
 What, then, are children really? Their constant pre- 
 sence, and their often disturbing wants, conceal from us 
 the charms of these angelic forms, which we know not 
 how to name with sufficient beauty and tenderness — blos- 
 soms, dew-drops, stars, butterflies. But when you kiss 
 and love them, you give and feel all their names ! A single 
 child upon the earth would seem to us a wonderful angel, 
 come from some distant home, who, unaccustomed to our 
 strange language, manners and air, looked at us speechless 
 and inquisitive, but pure as a Baffaelle's infant Jesus ; 
 and hence, we can always adopt every new child into the 
 child's place, but not every new friend into the friend's 
 place. And daily from the unknown world these pure 
 beings are sent upon the wild earth; and sometimes they 
 alight on slave-coasts, or battle-fields, or in prison for 
 execution ; and sometimes in flowery valleys, and on lofty 
 mountains ; sometimes in a most baleful, sometimes in a 
 most holy age ; and after the loss of their only father they 
 seek an adopted one here below. 
 
 I once composed a poem on the Last Day and the two 
 last children : — its latter part will serve for a conclusion.
 
 FRAG. IX.] LEV ANA. 413 
 
 " So go down to the earth," said the angel to two little 
 naked souls, "and be born as brother and sister!" It will 
 be very pretty down there, said they both, and flew hand 
 in hand to the earth, which was already enveloped in the 
 flames of the last day and from which the dead were 
 rising. " Look there! " said the brother, " these are very 
 big, tall children ; the flowers, compared to them, are 
 quite little : they will certainly carry us about every 
 where and tell us about every thing ; they are very large 
 angels, sister!" "But see," answered she, "that great 
 angel and every one has clothing round him, and the 
 morning-red glows over the whole earth." " But look," 
 said he, " the sun has fallen upon the earth and it burns 
 every where ; and there a gigantic dew-drop makes fiery 
 waves, and look how the great angels plunge into it." 
 " They stretch their hands upwards," said she, " and kiss 
 them to us." " And hark ! " he said, " how the thunder 
 sings, and the stars dance about among those great child- 
 ren." " Which are the great children," asked she, " who 
 are to be our two parents?" " Dost thou not see," replied 
 he, " how these angels sleep under the earth and then rise 
 up from it? Let us fly quickly!" And the children 
 approached nearer to the flaming earth and said, " Look 
 kindly upon us, ye parents, and do not hurt us, and play 
 with us a long, long time, and tell us many tales, and 
 kiss us ! " 
 
 They were born just as the world, full of sins, vanished, 
 and they remained alone ; their little hands played with 
 the flames, and at last they also, like Adam and Eve, were 
 driven away, and the world closed with the Paradise oi 
 Children. 
 
 TIiE END.
 
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