Part 5 (2/2)
notes on the margin by Melanchthon.”
Promising, this, for an American youth who was expected to go into business or study a profession!
While at Hurlbut's school I took lessons in Spanish. There was a Spanish boy from Malaga, a kind of half-servant, _half-protege_ in a family near us, with whom I practised speaking the language, and also had some opportunity with a few Cubans who visited our family. One of them had been a governor-general. He was a Gallician by birth, but I did not know this, and innocently asked him one day if _los Gallegos no son los Irlandeses d'Espana_?--if the Gallicians were not the Irish of Spain--which drew a grave caution from my brother, who knew better than I how the land lay. I really attained some skill in Spanish, albeit to this day ”Don Quixote” demands from me a great deal of dictionary. But, as I said before, I learn languages with _incredible_ difficulty, a fact which I cannot reconcile with the extreme interest which I take in philology and linguistics, and the discoveries which I have made; as, for instance, that of _Shelta_ in England, or my labours in jargons, such as Pidgin-English, Slang, and Romany. But, as the reader has probably perceived, I was a boy with an inherited good const.i.tution only from the paternal side, and a not very robust one from my mother, while my mind, weakened by long illness, had been strangely stimulated by many disorders, nervous fevers being frequent among them. In those days I was, as my mother said, almost brought up on calomel--and she might have added quinine. The result of so much nervousness, excessive stimulating by medicine, and rapid growth was a too great susceptibility to poetry, humour, art, and all that was romantic, quaint, and mysterious, while I found it very hard to master any really dry subject. What would have set me all right would have been careful physical culture, boxing, so as to protect me from my school persecutors, and _amus.e.m.e.nt_ in a healthy sense, of which I had almost none whatever.
Hurlbut's became at last simply intolerable, and my parents, finding out in some way that I was worse for being there, removed me to a far better school kept by E. C. Wines, who had written books on education, and attained some fame thereby. This was in 1839-'40, and I was there to be prepared for college. We were soon introduced to an old French gentleman, who was to teach us, and who asked the other boys what French works they had read. Some had gone through _Telemaque_, or _Paul et Virginie_, _Florian_, _etcetera_. The good-goody nature of such reading awoke in me my sense of humour. When it came to my turn, and I was asked, I replied, ”_La Pucelle d'Orleans_ and _Dictionnaire Philosophique_ of Voltaire, the Confessions of Rousseau, the Poems of Villon, _Charles d'Orleans_, _Clotilde de Surville_, and more or less of Helvetius, D'Holbach, and Condillac.” Here the professor, feeling himself quizzed, cast forth his hands as in disgust and horror, and cried, ”_a.s.sez_! _a.s.sez_! Unhappy boy, you have raked through the library of the devil down to the dregs!” Nor was I ”selling” him, for I certainly had read the works, as the records of the Philadelphia Library can in a great measure prove, and did not speak by hearsay.
I had at this time several severe long attacks of illness with much pain, which I always bore well, as a matter of course or habit. But rather oddly, while in the midst of my Transcendentalism, and reading every sc.r.a.p of everything about Germany which I could get, and metaphysics, and study--I was very far gone then, and used to go home from school and light a pipe with a long wooden stem, and study the beloved ”Critic of Pure Reason” or Carlyle's Miscellanies, having discovered that smoking was absolutely necessary in such reading--[De Quincey required a quart of laudanum to enable him to enjoy German metaphysics]--there came a strange gleam of worldly dissipation, of which I never think without pleasure. I had pa.s.sed one summer vacation on a farm near Philadelphia, where I learned something in wood-ranging about wild herbs and catching land-tortoises and ”c.o.o.n-hunting,” and had been allowed to hire and ride a horse.
I did not know it, but this horse had thrown over his head everybody who had ever mounted him. He was a perfect devil, but also a perfect gentleman. He soon took my measure, and resolved to treat me kindly as a _protege_. When we both wanted a gallop, he made such time as n.o.body before had dreamed was in him; when he was lazy, he only had to turn his head and look at me, and I knew what that meant and conformed unto him.
He had a queer fancy at times to quietly steal up and put his hoof on my foot so as to hurt me, and then there was an impish laugh in his eye. For he laughed at me, and I knew it. There is really such a thing as a horse- laugh. One day we pa.s.sed through a drove of sheep, and he did not like it--no horse does. After a while I wanted to go by a certain road, but he refused sternly to take it. I found soon after that if I had done so we must have met the sheep again. He had, in fact, understood the route far better than I. I once got a mile out of him in three minutes--more or less; but he had seen me look at my watch, and knew that I wanted to see what he could do. He never did it again. I _may_ have been mistaken here, but it was my impression at the time. Perhaps if I had gone on much longer in intimacy with him I might have profited mentally by it, and acquired what Americans call ”horse-sense,” of which I had some need.
It is the sixth--or the first--sense of all Yankees and Scotchmen. When I returned to the city I was allowed to hire a horse for a few times from a livery stable, and went out riding with a friend. This friend was a rather precociously dissipated youth, and with him I had actually now and then--very rarely--a gla.s.s at a bar and oysters. He soon left me for wilder a.s.sociates, and I relapsed into my old sober habits. Strange as it may seem, I believe that I was really on the brink of becoming like other boys. But it all faded away. Now it became imperative that I should study in earnest. I used to rise at three or four in the morning.
What with hard work and great fear of not pa.s.sing my matriculation, I contrived to get up so much Latin, Greek, and mathematics, that Mr. Wines thought I might attempt it, and so one fine summer day my father went with me to Princeton. I was in a fearful state of nervous anxiety.
COLLEGE LIFE.
PRINCETON.
We went to Princeton, where I presented my letters of introduction, pa.s.sed a by no means severe examination for the Freshman's cla.s.s, was very courteously received by the professors to whom I was commended, and, to my inexpressible delight, found myself a college student. Rooms were secured for me at a Mrs. Burroughs', opposite Na.s.sau Hall; the adjoining apartment was occupied by Mr. Craig Biddle, now a judge. George H. Boker was then at the end of his Soph.o.m.ore year, the term having but a few days to run. He had rooms in college and lived in unexampled style, having actually a carpet on his floor and superior furniture, also a good collection of books, chiefly standard English poets. He at once took me in hand and gave me a character.
Princeton College was entirely in the hands of the strictest of ”Old School” Presbyterian theologians. Piety and mathematics rated extravagantly high in the course. The latter study was literally reckoned in the grades as being of more account than all the rest collectively. Thus, as eventually happened to me, a student might excel in Latin, English, and Natural Philosophy--in fact, in almost everything, good conduct included--and yet be the last in the cla.s.s if he neglected mathematics. There was no teaching of French, because, as was naively said, students might read the irreligious works extant in that language, and of course no other modern language; as for German, one would as soon have proposed to raise the devil there as a cla.s.s in it. If there had been an optional course, as at Cambridge, Ma.s.sachusetts, by which German was accepted in lieu of mathematics, I should probably have taken the first honour, instead of the last. And yet, with a little more Latin, I was really qualified, on the day when I matriculated at Princeton, to have pa.s.sed for a Doctor of Philosophy in Heidelberg, as I subsequently accurately ascertained.
There were three or four men of great ability in the Faculty of the University. One of these was Professor Joseph Henry, in those days the first natural philosopher and lecturer on science in America. I had the fortune in time to become quite a special _protege_ of his. Another was Professor James Alexander, who taught Latin, rhetoric, and mental philosophy. He was so clear-headed and liberally learned, that I always felt sure that he must at heart have been far beyond the bounds of Old School theology, but he had an iron Roman-like sternness of glance which quite suited a Covenanter. The most remarkable of all was Albert Dodd, Professor of Mathematics and Lecturer on Architecture. This man was a genius of such a high order, that had it not been for the false position in which he was placed, he would have given to the world great works. The false position was this: he was the chief pulpit orator of the old school, and had made war on the Transcendentalist movement in an able article in the _Princeton Review_ (which, by the way, was useful in guiding me to certain prohibited works, before unknown to me). But as he was a man of poetic genial feeling, he found himself irresistibly fascinated by what he had hunted down, and so read Plato, and when he died actually left behind him a ma.n.u.script translation of Spinoza's works!
The reader may imagine what a marvellous _find_ I was to him. George Boker, who was ages beyond me in knowledge of the world--man and woman--said one day that he could imagine how Dodd sat and chuckled to hear me talk, which remark I did not at all understand and thought rather stupid. I remember that during my first call on him we discussed _Sartor Resartus_, and I expressed it as my firm conviction that the idea of the Clothes Philosophy had been taken from the Treatise on Fire and Salt by the Rosicrucian Lord Blaise. Then, in all _naivete_ and innocence of effect, I discussed some point in Kant's ”Critic,” and a few other trifles not usually familiar to sub-Freshmen, and took my departure, very much pleased at having entered on a life where my favourite reading did not really seem to be quite silly or disreputable. I remember, however, being very much surprised indeed at finding that the other students, in whom I expected to encounter miracles of learning, or youth far superior to myself in erudition and critical knowledge, did not quite come up to my antic.i.p.ations. However, as they were all far beyond me in mathematics, I supposed their genius had all gone in that direction, for well I knew that the toughest page in Fichte was a mere trifle compared to the awful terrors of the Rule of Three, and so treated them as young men who were my superiors in other and greater things.
There were wearisome morning prayers in the chapel, and roll-call every morning, and then an hour of recitation before breakfast, study till ten or eleven, study and recitation in the afternoon, and evening prayers again and study in the evening. The Sabbath was anything but a day of rest, for we had the same prayers; morning attendance at church; afternoon, the learning and reciting of _four chapters_ in the Bible; while we were expected in the evening to master one or two chapters in the Greek Testament. I am not sorry that I used to read books during sermon-time. It kept me from, or from me, a great deal of wickedness.
_Videlicet_:
The sermons consisted princ.i.p.ally of a.s.sertion that man himself consisted chiefly of original sin. As evil communications corrupt good manners, I myself, being young and impressionable, began to believe that I too was an awful sinner. Not knowing where else to look for it, I concluded that it consisted in my inability to learn mathematics. I do not distinctly remember whether I prayed to Heaven that I might be able to cross the Pons Asinorum, but ”anyway” my prayer was granted when I graduated.
Another stock-piece in the _repertoire_ consisted of attacks on Voltaire, Tom Paine, and other antiquated Deists or infidels. I had read with great contempt a copy of ”The Rights of Man” belonging to my genial uncle Amos. I say with great contempt, for I always despised that kind of free thought which consisted chiefly of enmity to Christianity. Now I can see that Voltaire and his followers were quite in the right in warring on terrible and immediate abuses which oppressed mankind; but I had learned from Spinoza to believe that every form of faith was good in its way or according to its mission or time, and that it was silly to ridicule Christianity because the tale of Balaam's a.s.s was incredible. Paine was to me just what a Positivist now is to a Darwinian or Agnostic, and such preaching against ”infidels” seemed to me like pouring water on a drowned mouse. There had always been in Mr. Furness's teaching a very decided degree of Rationalism, and I had advanced far more boldly on the track. I remember reading translations from Schleiermacher and buying Strauss's ”Life of Jesus” before I went to Princeton--I saw Strauss himself in after years at Weinsberg, in Germany--but at Princeton the slightest approach to explaining the most absurd story in the Old Testament was regarded as out-and-out atheism. It had all happened, we were told, just as it is described.
I may as well note here the fact that for many years in my early life such a thing as only reading a book through once rarely happened, when I could obtain it long enough. Even the translations of the Neo-Platonists, with Campanella, Vanini, or the Italian naturalists, were read and reread, while the princ.i.p.al English poets, and such books as I owned, were perused daily.
And here in this great infant arithmetic school I was in due time set down to study Paley's ”Evidences of Christianity” and Locke on the Understanding--like Carlyle's young lion invited to a feast of chickweed.
Apropos of the first, I have a droll reminiscence. There had been in Philadelphia two years before a sale of a fine library, and I had been heart-broken because my means had not permitted me to buy the works of Sir Kenelm Digby. However, I found them in the Princeton College Library. The first thing I came to in Paley was his famous simile of the watch--taken bodily and without acknowledgment from Digby. The theft disgusted me. ”These be your Christian champions!” I thought--
”Would any of the stock of infidels Had been my evidence ere such a Christian!”
And, moreover, Paley forgets to inform us what conclusion the finder might draw if he had picked up a badly made watch which did not keep good time--like this our turnip of a world at times!
As we were obliged to attend divine service strictly on Sunday, I was allowed to go to the Episcopal church in the village, which agreed very well with my parents' views. I quite fell into the sentiment of the sect, and so went to Professor Dodd to ask for permission from the Faculty to change my religion. When he asked me how it was that I had renegaded into Trinitarianism, I replied that it was due to reflection on the perfectly obvious and usual road of the Platonic hypostases eked out with Gnosticism. I had found in the College Library, and read with great pleasure almost as soon as I got there, Cudworth's ”Intellectual System”
(I raided a copy as _loot_ from a house in Tennessee in after years, during the war), and learned from it that ”it was a religious instinct of man to begin with a Trinity, in which I was much aided by Sch.e.l.ling, and that there was no trace of a Trinity in the Bible, or rather the contrary, yet that it _ought_ consistently to have been there”--a sentiment which provoked from Professor Dodd a long whistle like that of Uncle Toby with Lilliburlero. ”For,” as I ingeniously represented, ”man or G.o.d consists of the Monad from which developed spirit or intellect and soul; for _toto enim in mundo lucet Trias cujus Monas est princeps_, as the creed of the Rosicrucians begins (which is taken from the Zoroastrian oracles)”--here there was another long subdued whistle--”and it is set forth on the face of every Egyptian temple as the ball, the wings of the spirit which rusheth into all worlds, and the serpent, which is the _Logos_.” Here the whistle became more sympathetic, for Egypt was the professor's great point in his lectures on architecture. And having thus explained the true grounds of the Trinity to the most learned theologian of the Presbyterian sect, I took my leave, quite unconscious that I had said anything out of the common, for all I meant was to give my reasons for going back to the Episcopal Church. As for Professor Dodd, he had given me up from the very first interview to follow my idols as I pleased, only just throwing in argument enough to keep me well going. He would have been the last man on earth to throw down such a marvellous fairy castle, goblin-built and elfin-tenanted, from whose windows rang AEolian harps, and which was lit by night with undying Rosicrucian lamps, to erect on its ruin a plain brick, Old School Presbyterian slated chapel. I was far more amusing as I was, and so I was let alone.
I had pa.s.sed my examination about the end of June, and I was to remain in Princeton until the autumn, reading under a tutor, in the hope of being able to join the Soph.o.m.ore cla.s.s when the college course should begin.
There I was utterly alone, and rambled by myself in the woods. I believed myself to be a very good Christian in those days; but I was really as unaffected and sincere a Poly-Pantheist or Old Nature heathen as ever lived in Etrusco-Roman or early German days. A book very dear to my heart at that time was the _Curiositez Inouyes_ of Gaffarel (Trollope was under the impression that he was the only man in Europe who ever read it), in which there is an exquisite theory that the stars of heaven in their courses and the lines of winding rivers and bending corn, the curves of sh.e.l.ls and minerals, rocks and trees, yes, of all the shapes of all created things, form the trace and letters of a stupendous _writing_ or characters spread all over the universe, which writing becomes little by little legible to the one who by communion with Nature and earnest faith seeks to penetrate the secret. I had found in the lonely woods a small pond by a high rock, where I often sat in order to attain this blessed illumination, and if I did not get quite so far as I hoped, I did in reality attain to a deep unconscious familiarity with birds and leafy shades, still waters, and high rising trees; in short, with all the sweet solemnity of sylvan nature, which has ever since influenced all my life.
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