Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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and nursing his leg from time to time. His type was the type of the oracle, but it was an oracle which one had no inclination to resist as one is wickedly disposed to resist oracles. The wide vision of the seer had been gained from the mountain tops of learning, mountain tops that he had reared, not simply climbed, and it was a privilege to sit in that stuffy lecture-room, and to see the revelation of the great science of antiquity, the very existence of which is called in question to-day. He said IN dw' !7ad, instead of ffl div' 77ml, and had serious weaknesses in the way of jokes, but he was a great man, and though he may he classified as a professor, as a scholar he belongs to an unreturning type. Lachmann, another great light of the l'niversity, died shortly after I went to Berlin, and I never heard him lecture. Franz, his sworn foe, had planted his lectures on I,achmann's hours, and as If'ranz's lectures fitted my scheme of studies better than did I,achmann's, I gave up the great critic for the practical teacher. IVhen I-acl1mann's final illness was announced, and some of us told Franz that his old enemy was about to die, the significant reply was I could not have wished him fluff. His own eud was not far off. But whatever bit- terness Franz may have felt toward his rivals, the little professor, whose face, as I remember it, was lost in goggles and beard, showed great kindness to the knot of students that sat on the benches of his lecture-room in the gray morn- ing hours of a Berlin winter, or gathered round his table in his own house. He was a firm believer in writing Greek and speaking Greek, and looked for the regeneration of Greek studies to practical familiarity with the ancient tongue. He called himself Phrasicles, and gave a Greek name to each of his pupils, mine being Chrysobrachion, which he developed in the twinkling of an eye from the analogy of Scytobrachion. Franz was the type of the teaching professor. the professor who loves to do good and to communicate, but above all to communicate. Immanuel Bekker, the great textual critic, was the type of the professor who abhors teaching, and he did his utmost to deter students from following his courses, which he held only as a matter of obligation, and indeed he gener- ally managed to shake off the few hardy souls who had the courage to enter for his lectures. He glared at us, and scowled at us, and read as rapidly as he could a lot of critical notes, which at that stage I for one could not appreciate, so that I soon dropped out. But years afterwards, Leopold Schmidt, the Piudaric scholar, 157

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with introduce the seminary method so much employed in our I'niversity. This method puts the student, for the time being, in the place of the professor and re- veals to him the difficulties of the situation and its remorseless requirements, so that he who groaned over the profes:,or's dry and tedious disquisitions and point- less jokes, finds, in his turn, that his erudition is not so interesting to others as it is to himself, and that the genuine wit, with which he enlivens his discourse, is not always appreciated. But the evolutionary method would require too much space, as is manifest from the specimen already given, nor do I intend to turn traitor to my own guild and show it up, after the manner of Ar1stotle's Rhetoric and Theo- phrastus' Characters. I am not going to tell you that a professor is a man who is capable ot' doing this absurdity and that absurdity. I am not going to lend a handle to the undergraduates, most of whom will never be professors, and what is left of the space I have promised to till up for the I-Iopkinsian' will be occupied by some slight sketches of some of my own university teachers. They are all in the Elysian fields, and their shades will not object to the use I shall make of their earthly lives. As I think over the chief of them, I recognize the fact that, despite the diversity of human character, the great professional lines are clearly manifest, and while it may not be expedient to divide professors into sheep and goats, or to sort them as styles were sorted by the ancient rhetoricians into three classes, which might be translated by a stretch into the pompous, the dry and the mediocre, still, I fancy that the professors I knew represented fairly the varieties of the species and may serve as a manner of bnrlnx szrfzzx for further study. I was a boy of nineteen when I entered the I'niversity ot Berlin. Of my special preparation for philological work the less said the better. II arf fizvfrzuf F1 fflllffi said the French mother as she urged the claims of her son on the head of the bureau. lf ravi jrrvprr 5 f0llf,' if llitl I'I't'll tIj5fJI'I..8'.U But I had German enough to understand the lectures, and that was something. My first professor was the illustrious Boeckh. He was then sixty-five years old, and the yellow pages from which he read his lectures seemed to be almost as old as the lecturer. There was no attempt at oratory. He sat quietly in his chair, put his nose into his manuscript, fished out what he wanted to say and then said it deliberately, looking out screnely towards l'nter den Linden, 14

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to whom l recounted my experience, told me that he and a mnnher of other young men lionnd themselves to persevere in their attendance on his lectures and, when I-lekker found that they would not let him go, the old scholar surrendered at discretion, spread ont the resources of his wonderful knowledge of the Greek of every- period and every sphere, and made his talks as delightful as they were in- structive. lint l have cited Bekker only as a contrast to Franz, he-cause liekker held a professorship simply in order to draw a salary. His real life was in his lttnrks, ' The eloquent professor is another type, and at that time Berlin did not lack eloquent professors. Stahl, one of the law professors, a politician and a puhlicist of the reactionary school, was the star actor, and held forth to crowded audiences, a fluent and sparkling creature whose memory has well- nigh perished. There was the great geographer, Carl Ritter, who had a lordly port and an impressiye delivery. In him one felt that Mother Earth had a worthy amhassador. Ranke, the historian, was the despair of foreigners, a sputterer and contortionist whom the German students found it hard to follow, how mueh more the foreigners to whom the German yocahles still whizzed and whirred l lforty years ago, Ilerlin was not the world-city the Berlinese call it now, hut it was a great city, and the llerlin professor was more or less suhdued to city life. ln the smaller university towns, the professorial type was not in the same danger of being effaced, and Gottingen, my next nursing mother, was not a had place in which to study the variations of the professorial family. In those days, however, the objects of Heinrich Heine's mocking laughter were not all dead, and it was hard to approach the investigation with perfect sohriety. The list oflectnres was itself a curiosity to an American hoy. So, for example, the an- nouncement that llr. Andreas Thospann would hold forth five times a week on 'lille lfirst journey of llenry the l.ion to linglandf' at such hours as would suit the convenience of the hearers. Surely nothing more than that announcement is needed lo hring hack the figure of llr. Andreas Thospann, who used to crawl around the wall on sunshiny days, apparently in close communion with the ghost ol llenry the l.ion. Such wonderful surtouts as one saw, such portentous stocks, snrh blooming shirtecollarsg snrtonts that hnttoned tight to the figure and hid ex erything that was or was not ht-neath them 3 stocks that reared their shiny silk rdf