The first dark years Gustavus spent as yet with his guardian-angel in a chamber above ground, merely keeping him away from those unwholesome coin-clippers of childhood, whom we have to thank for as many lame limbs as lame hearts--maids and nurses. I would rather these (dis-)Graces should educate us in the second decade than in the second year.
After that the Genius repaired with his Gustavus down into an old walled-up cavern in the castle garden, which the Captain only regretted he had not long ago had demolished. A cellar stairway led down, on the left hand, into the rocky cellar, and on the right into this vault, where stood a Carthusian Monastery with three chambers, which, on account of an old tradition, they called the Monastery of the Three Brothers; on its floor lay three stone monks, with their hewn hands crossed forever on their breasts; and perhaps under the effiges the mute originals themselves lay sleeping with their long-sunk and smothered sighs over a fleeting world. Here the fair Genius alone governed his little charge and bent every budding twig upward to the lofty stature of manhood.
Such miserable circumstantialities as, e. g., the purveying of the wash and matters of bed and board, my female readers will gladly spare me; but they will be more curious to know how the Genius educated. Very well--I say; he did not command, but simply accustomed and narrated. He never contradicted either himself or the child; nay, he had the greatest arcanum for making him good--he was so himself. Without this arcanum one might as well hire the Devil for a preceptor as be one himself, as the daughters of bad mothers prove. For the rest, the Genius was convinced the education of the heart began at the first sacrament (Baptism), that of the head at the second (Communion).
To hear of good men is as much as to live among them, and Plutarch's Lives make a deeper impression than the best text-books of moral philosophy for the use of academic teachers. For children especially there is no other moral teaching than example, related or witnessed; and it is an educational folly to think that in giving children reasons, one gives them anything more than these reasons, namely, the will and the power to follow these reasons. Oh! a thousand times happier than I beside my Tertius and Conrector wast thou, Gustavus, lying in the bosom, in the arms and under the lips of thy precious Genius, like a thirsty Alpine flower under its trickling cloud, drinking in nourishment to thy heart from the stories of good men, whom the Genius called uniformly Gustavuses and Blessed ones, of whom we shall soon see why this designation of them is printed in Italic type! As he was a good draughtsman, he gave him, as Chodowiecky does the romance writer, a drawing of every piece of history, and built around the little one this Orbis Pictus of good men, as the Almighty Genius builds around us the world of great Nature. Only he never gave him the drawing before, but only after the description, because hearing attracts children to seeing more strongly than seeing does to hearing. Another would have taken for this pedagogic lever, instead of the drawing-pen, the fiddle-bow or the piano-key; but not so the Genius; the feeling for painting develops itself, like the taste, very late, and needs, therefore, the help of education. It deserves the earliest unfolding, because it takes away the grating which sunders us from Nature, because it drives the phantasying soul out again among external things, and because it turns the German eye to the difficult art of apprehending beautiful forms. Music, on the contrary, finds already in the youngest hearts (as with the rudest peoples) responsive chords: nay, its omnipotence is impaired rather by practice and years. Gustavus learned, therefore, as a deaf mute in his deaf and dumb cavern, to draw so well that even in his 13th year, his tutor sat to him, a beautiful man, who must make his appearance further on in this book.
And so, with both, did life glide softly along in the catacomb like a rill. The little one was happy; for his wishes did not reach out beyond his acquisitions of knowledge, and neither a fear nor a murmur distracted his peaceful soul. The Genius was happy; for the execution of this ten years' building plan was easier for him than the resolving upon it; the resolution conjures up at once all difficulties and deprivations before the soul. But the execution puts them far asunder and gives us the first real interest in it through the peculiar pleasure without which, in a thousand things, one's patience would be exhausted--that of seeing something daily growing under one's hands.
For both of them it was a good thing that down below there in this moral forcing-house dwelt also a schoolmate of Gustavus's, who was at the same time a half collaborator and adjutant of the Genius, who, however, by reason of certain defects of his heart derived from the whole education but a slim advantage, although he, as well as Gustavus, belonged to the class of animals with two heart-chambers and with warm blood. If I say that the greatest fault of the fellow-laborer was, that he would not drink brandy, one sees plainly that he had to be, not like Gustavus, trained up, but trained down,[11] because he was the neatest, blackest of--poodles that ever sprang round over the earth with a white breast. This intelligent dog and assistant teacher often relieved and released the head-master in play hours; besides, most of the virtues could be less well practised by him than by Gustavus upon him, and he kept for that purpose the necessary heteronymous vices ready:--in sleep the school-colleague easily snapped about him at living legs, in his waking hours at those which had been plucked off.
In this subterranean America, the three Antipodes had their day, i. e., a lamp lighted, when with us overhead it was night--their night, i. e., sleep, they had when with us the sun shone. The fair Genius had so arranged it on account of external noises and for the sake of his daily excursions. At that time, while his teacher enjoyed air and society, the little one lay down there in his monastery, with bandaged eyes, for chance and the cellar-door were not to be trusted. Sometimes he carried the sleeping veiled angel up into the fresh air and into the inspiring sunshine, as ants submit their larvæ to the brooding wings of the sun. Verily, were I a second or third Chodowiecky, I would at this moment stand up and engrave the scene for my own book in Swedish copper, not merely to depict how our pale red darling brought out into the open air slumbers under his bandage in a latticed rose-shadow, and like a dead angel lies before us in the infinite Temple of Nature, peacefully reposing with little dreams of his little cavern--there is something still more beautiful--thou still hast thy parents, Gustavus, and dost not see them; thy father, who stands beside thee, his eye bedimmed with love, and rejoices over the pure breathing that heaves thy little breast, and forgets in his joy at that how thou art being educated--and thy mother, who presses to thy face, on which lies the two-fold innocence of solitude and childhood, the love-hungering eyes which remain unsatisfied because they must not speak nor fondle. But she is pressing thee out of thy slumber, and thou must after a short time go down again to thy Plato's Cave.
The Genius had long been preparing him for the resurrection from his holy sepulchre. He said to him: "If thou art very good and not impatient, and lovest me and the poodle right well, then thou mayest die. When thou hast died, then I will die too, and we will go to heaven" (by which he meant the surface of the earth); "there it is right beautiful and magnificent. There they kindle no light in the day time, but one as large as my head stands in the air above thee and moves all day around thee beautifully--the roof of the great room is blue, and so high that no man can reach it with a thousand ladders--and the floor is soft and green, and, what is finer still, the poodles are there as large as our chamber. In heaven all is full of blessed ones, and there are all the good people, of whom I have so often told thee, and thy parents" (whose likenesses he had long since given him), "to whom thou art as dear as thou art to me, and who will give thee everything. But thou must be very good." "Ah! when, then, are we going, at last, to die?" said the little one, and his glowing fancy labored within him, and at every such description he ran up to a landscape painting and touched and interrogated every spear of grass.
Nothing acts so feebly upon children as a threat or a hope which is not fulfilled before evening. Only so long as one talks to them beforehand of a future examination or of their mature age, is it of any avail; hence many repeat this prefatory talk so often that it no longer leaves even