University of Vermont - Ariel Yearbook (Burlington, VT)

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28 THE ARIEL, 1907 Now for the German professor! The last generation has seen the passing of the old type that appears in Fliegende Blatter and Jugend, grimly bespectacled, long-haired, absent-minded. He is now usually a capable, practical and responsible man of affairs, whom the dust of the schools has not blinded. He has'made sacrifices for the higher end, for his upward progress has been slow. After his doctor's examination, following three years of advanced work, he decided to forego an oberlehrerls or higher school teacher's position with its seemingly princely salary of thirty-six hundred marks Qnine hundred dollarsj, and to take his place on the lowest rung of the university ladder, as Private- docent, with fees of perhaps eight hundred marks. His undoubted ability and enthusiasm attracted students Qperhaps too much stress is laid on his drawing powerj, and after some two or three years of very lean kine, he became extraordinary or associate professor. In the meantime he scorns delights and lives laborious days. He can take no steps towards soliciting a vacant professorshipg but his opus, on which he has labored so faithfully appears. His name is up from Freiburg to Konigsberg. A call to a chair in a larger university, Berlin or Munich, comes, and he is a made man of social rank and comfortable income. He is, henceforth, an oracle among men, and his fame draws many wandering students to his university. The fields of usefulness of 'the professor are three: His lectures, his personal association with students and his research. As a rule he is not a good lecturer, immeasurably inferior to his compatriot of the Sorbonne, who is nearly always a golden talker, and not approaching the best American or even English standards. There are, of course, many exceptions. Harnack and Willaiiiowitz-Mollendorf drew and still draw large crowds to the publicum or public lectures, and few of us will forget the delight with which we listened to Dessoir discourse for many hours on Fine Arts. But Harnack and VVillamowitz were giants and Dessoir had French blood. I think my statement holds-the lectures are often well planned, but they are too heavily burdened with fact, are poorly delivered and lack inspiration. Mountains of method, a thousand details, but few vistas and little illumination. The German professor is a social being. I remember how one great-hearted, deeply learned scholar affected young men. At the kneipes or feasts of his students

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THE ARIEL, 1907 27 elements that German gentlemen seldom have. He was a modest, gentle, kindly soul. Rudolf Biach, whom I met at the University of Munich, was a very different person. His father, a merchant prince of Vienna, out of his plenty, allowed his son some forty dollars a month for ex- penses. On this, with characteristic German thrift, he fared well, he dined heartily for a mark or less, he wore good clothes, and his dickey or false bosom fthe Teutonic substitute for a shirtj was always a thing of beauty. I-Ie was at once young, irresponsible, idle and conceited. He knew as few men as Jurgen, but for another reason, a true Austrian, he despised the thick-witted Baeatians, the Bavarians. He seldom went near a lecture-room, conceiving in the pride of his youth that he knew more than many doctors, during the session he was fond of ranging far afield, and I have wandered with him, west to Augsburg, north to Nuremberg, south tothe Tyrol. Finally, he was as clever a boy as I have ever met - a wide reader, with fixed views on all the arts, a brilliant talker and a linguist of surprising gifts. After a few months' training, he spoke English with fatal fluency. At Oxford, where I encountered him a year later, his command of the language, his wonderful self- possession, and his Austrian audacity won for him the suffrages of our littleecolony. Then there was Kuno von Eisenberg, a noble, whose people had been for five hundred years welcome at court, and a fair type of the aristocratic student, who never reads and who has no life outside of his corps. His cap of red, white and blue, and the gay riband that crossed his chest were his distinguishing marks. He had lived in an atmosphere of duels and beer drinkings, until his fat face was seamed with scars, and his body surfeit-swollen. He was always as full of quarrels as an egg of meat. The two proudest moments of his bibulous and bloody existence were the time when his mother led him forth to exhibit his first gashes to less fortunate mammas, and the joyous season when he was fixed or stared at and thus invited to a conflict by some famous swordsman. To a foreigner, who could not and would not fight, his manners were genial, gentle and kindly-in a word, charming. I can recall now, how his heels went together, his elbow curved, and his hat was jerked stiflly to the side when he bowed. In the University of Berlin there were many men like von Eisenberg, for each of the seventy fighting corps and vereins boasts fifteen or twenty members. 1

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THE ARIEL, 1907 29 he sat at the head of the table Q wherever he sat would have been the headj directing the talk and joining lustily in the songs. The reverence for him was great, a quarrel in his presence was felt to be sacrilege, and the love of clash and conflict was nobly repressed. Then he drew men to his home, opening up to them in his study great stores of special knowledge, stimulating, quickening them by the force of his personality and example. I shall always recall long walks with him in the 4' Thier- gartenf' His lectures and readings -from Shakspere and the English poets Q Vair is voul and voul is vair, I could not lofe dee, dear, so mooch D sometimes appealed to an American sense of humor, but roads traversed with him in private led always to treasures at the foot of the rainbow, and one was very grateful. In research, the German professor is pre-eminent. The way that he cuts is often very narrow, the path that he blazes through the wood of recondite scholarship is wide enough for only one man, but he sets those with whom he has to do journeying in this or that direction with ax and torch. Lights flash and steel rings everywhere, until the forest becomes known ground. Though others may range more extensively and with far better perspective, he has in accurate, painstaking, intensive scholarship, no equal on earth. And he attains and leads others to the goal in the face of at least one tremendous difficulty, a library system unparalleled in impracticability and inefficiency. Lack of catalogues and a poor library staff necessitate an interval of twenty-four hours between the time of ordering a book and its receipt, or rather the time due for its receipt, for, in many cases, when it is not on the shelves, its whereabouts are so uncertain that it may be reclaimed only when its usefulness is passed. All sufferers from this will doff their hats to the men who have triumphed over such conditions. A university lecture room is perhaps the best place to study the students. It is I2 o'clock and the famous Erich Schmidt is to lecture on Goethe and Schiller. But every German class-hour has 'its aca- demisches viertel or quarter-hour of grace. And this noon one is passed by the men either in refreshing themselves at the wine-and-beer shop kept by Frau Pudelf' the janitor's wife, in the first lobby-room on the left of the entrance, or in procuring orders for theatre-tickets in the first room on the right. But by 12.15 the lecture-hall is ,filled with students, many of them munching rolls or sandwiches Cone never knows when Semmel