Among the marvels
of education, this was the most marvellous. A prison-wall that
barred his senses on one great side of life, suddenly fell, of its
own accord, without so much as his knowing when it happened. Amid
the fumes of coarse tobacco and poor beer, surrounded by the
commonest of German Haus-frauen, a new sense burst out like a
flower in his life, so superior to the old senses, so bewildering,
so astonished at its own existence, that he could not credit it,
and watched it as something apart, accidental, and not to be
trusted. He slowly came to admit that Beethoven had partly become
intelligible to him, but he was the more inclined to think that
Beethoven must be much overrated as a musician, to be so easily
followed. This could not be called education, for he had never so
much as listened to the music. He had been thinking of other
things. Mere mechanical repetition of certain sounds had stuck to
his unconscious mind. Beethoven might have this power, but not
Wagner, or at all events not the Wagner later than "Tannhauser."
Near forty years passed before he reached the
"Gotterdammerung."
One might talk of the revival of an atrophied sense
- the mechanical reaction of a sleeping consciousness - but no
other sense awoke. His sense of line and color remained as dull as
ever, and as far as ever below the level of an artist. His
metaphysical sense did not spring into life, so that his mind could
leap the bars of German expression into sympathy with the
idealities of Kant and Hegel. Although he insisted that his faith
in German thought and literature was exalted, he failed to approach
German thought, and he shed never a tear of emotion over the pages
of Goethe and Schiller. When his father rashly ventured from time
to time to write him a word of common sense, the young man would
listen to no sense at all, but insisted that Berlin was the best of
educations in the best of Germanies; yet, when, at last, April
came, and some genius suggested a tramp in Thuringen, his heart
sang like a bird; he realized what a nightmare he had suffered, and
he made up his mind that, wherever else he might, in the infinities
of space and time, seek for education, it should not be again in
Berlin.
CHAPTER VI
ROME
(1859-1860)
THE tramp in Thuringen lasted four-and-twenty hours.
By the end of the first walk, his three companions - John Bancroft,
James J. Higginson, and B. W. Crowninshield, all Boston and Harvard
College like himself - were satisfied with what they had seen, and
when they sat down to rest on the spot where Goethe had written
-
"Warte nur! balde
Rubest du auch!" -
the profoundness of the thought and the wisdom of
the advice affected them so strongly that they hired a wagon and
drove to Weimar the same night. They were all quite happy and
lighthearted in the first fresh breath of leafless spring, and the
beer was better than at Berlin, but they were all equally in doubt
why they had come to Germany, and not one of them could say why
they stayed. Adams stayed because he did not want to go home, and
he had fears that his father's patience might be exhausted if he
asked to waste time elsewhere.
They could not think that their education required a
return to Berlin. A few days at Dresden in the spring weather
satisfied them that Dresden was a better spot for general education
than Berlin, and equally good for reading Civil Law. They were
possibly right. There was nothing to study in Dresden, and no
education to be gained, but the Sistine Madonna and the Correggios
were famous; the theatre and opera were sometimes excellent, and
the Elbe was prettier than the Spree. They could always fall back
on the language. So he took a room in the household of the usual
small government clerk with the usual plain daughters, and
continued the study of the language. Possibly one might learn
something more by accident, as one had learned something of
Beethoven. For the next eighteen months the young man pursued
accidental education, since he could pursue no other; and by great
good fortune, Europe and America were too busy with their own
affairs to give much attention to his. Accidental education had
every chance in its favor, especially because nothing came
amiss.
Perhaps the chief obstacle to the youth's education,
now that he had come of age, was his honesty; his simple-minded
faith in his intentions. Even after Berlin had become a nightmare,
he still persuaded himself that his German education was a success.
He loved, or thought he loved the people, but the Germany he loved
was the eighteenth-century which the Germans were ashamed of, and
were destroying as fast as they could. Of the Germany to come, he
knew nothing. Military Germany was his abhorrence. What he liked
was the simple character; the good-natured sentiment; the musical
and metaphysical abstraction; the blundering incapacity of the
German for practical affairs. At that time everyone looked on
Germany as incapable of competing with France, England or America
in any sort of organized energy.
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