Johns Hopkins University - Hullabaloo Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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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

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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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above the surtout along an unreasonable length of throttle, and the whole crowned hy an immense collar-immense on Sunday, but gradually hauled in day by day until its successor rose to greet the next I.ord's day with its vast expanse. In my happy year at Gottingen, I had the good fortune to be brought into close relations with one of my professors, Schneidewin, and I have not the heart, even at this distance of time, to classify one who was a personal friend, though perhaps none of my professors was more typically German than he. He was a man ofprodigious memory and knew his Homer and his Sophocles by heart, and impressed us by the subtlety of his acquaintance with the Greek tongue. He was not an eloquent man, and his way of treating his manuscript was something like that of the late Mr. Matthew Arnoldg only, after consulting his notes, he would face the window and not the audience. Karl Friedrich Hermann, the most eminent of the classical philologians at Gottingen, was not an eloquent man either, though he was professor of elo- quence, and it seemed perfectly natural that he should hump himself over his reading desk, hury his big face in his manuscript, and spout forth his long sentences with immense force and with perpetual gyrations of one of his fat hands. There was no love lost between Hermann and Schneidewin -though, I believe, Hermann behaved magnanimously when he was called to Gottingen- and I was somewhat of a partisan and believed in Schneidewing but no one, however prejudiced, could fail to recognize Hermann's wide learning and broad vision, no one could fail to be borne on by the turbulent flow of his discourse. Ritter, the historian of philosophy, read so closely that it almost amounted to dictation. His was the text-book type of lecture and he the text-book type of professor, a type that has its uses, and it is well, for it is a type that will never die. Time would fail me to tell of Yon Leutsch, the most diverting of all the academical oddities I have ever known. He was the type of the professor on whom all the professorial stories are fathered, another undying type. At Bonn, my chief masters were XVelcker, Ritschl and Bernays. Ilernays was then a young man. Young as he was, he had already marked out the lines by which he was to attain to what is in some respects a unique position, and I doubt very much whether, asa teacher, he ever advanced beyond what he was then. As a scholar, he never achieved any work of great bulk, hut what 17