THE

NORTH BRITISH REVIEW.

JUNE 1865.

ART. I.-Friedrich August Wolf in seinem Verhältnisse zum Schulwesen und zur Pädagogik dargestellt. Von Prof. Dr. J. F. J. ARNOLDT. 2 Bde, 8vo. Braunschweig, 1861-2.

F. A. WOLF is known to us in this country, if at all, in connexion with a certain theory of the origin of the Homeric poems. Here is a German life of him, in two volumes, in which that authorship is barely alluded to. Professor Arnoldt treats of Wolf as a teacher exclusively. If sectional biography be defensible at all, Professor Arnoldt needs no apology for bringing forward Wolf in this capacity. Wolf was eminently the professor; very secondarily the writer. Everything that he wrote, even his famous Prolegomena to Homer, was thrown upon paper under some casual inducement. He left no elaborate work; nothing with which he was himself satisfied. His editions were prepared for the use of his classes. On the other hand, it was he who created, and who himself gave the first example of, that enthusiasm for philological studies, which for sixty years-two generations has been the quickening life of German education. Wolf seized, more completely than any one, since the first teachers of the Renaissance, that side of classical studies by which they are qualified, more completely than any other studies, to form and inspire the opening mind. Equally removed from the grammatical pedantry of the old schoolmaster, and the superficial schön-geisterei of the French Lyceum, Wolf, at once accurate and genial, struck out a new and original path. Wolf is the true author of modern classical culture. It appears to us impossible to find any other material of mental cultivation. which can expand the soul as classical literature can expand it, and equally impossible, in the application of that literature to its purpose, to find any better example of method than that of Wolf. It would require a volume to do justice to what Wolf was

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and effected in this function. We can pretend to do no more than direct the reader's attention to it in the following brief outline of his life and labours. In doing this, we shall have recourse, besides Wolf's own remains, which have never been collected, to an older biography, written by his son-in-law, Körte. It is by no means a well-written book, but it is naïve, simple, unaffected, real. Above all, it is a living book, a natural account of a man by another man. Professor Arnoldt's book, on the other hand, is written by a Prussian official. It is not in any spoken language, but in that written dialect which is current in Prussian bureaux. All imagination, all colouring, all individuality is expelled from these dreary sentences, which average ten lines each, and of which we feel sure that no English or French readers would ever get through ten pages without nausea.

FRIEDRICH AUGUST WOLF was born in 1759, in the same year as Porson, of whom Wolf himself has noted that his birth was (Lit. An. iii. 285) exactly 200 years after that of Casaubon. His father was in very humble circumstances. He was village schoolmaster and organist of Hainrode, a little village at the foot of the Harz, not far from Nordhausen. He was afterwards promoted to be assistant-teacher in the girls' school at Nordhausen, the highest preferment he ever reached. But in the Harz, poverty was not a synonyme for demoralization. The housekeeping of the poor schoolmaster was exemplary. The tone of the family was quiet, high-minded, and aimed at goodbreeding. Of his mother, Wolf always spoke with tender affection. To her he owed the awakening of his intellectual life. She it was who had taught him to aim high. He never forgot her delight with him, when to the question-what he would like to be? the child stammered out, "a superdent" (superintendent, i.e., "a bishop"). He often quoted her favourite axioms: "Poor! no one is poor but the devil; this is why people say, 'Poor devil!"" She would not hear of good disposition unless where the conduct was also good: "Neighbour's cow is welldisposed, but gives no milk." The schoolmaster had also his proverbial philosophy. The secret of happiness, he thought, might be communicated in half a dozen axioms: "Take thankfully whatever Providence sends ;" "Nihil ad nos;" "Optationes tabes sunt animi," characterize the mild wisdom of the muchenduring German.

The father had had a little education; enough to make him ardently desire it for his son. He was so impatient to begin, that before the infant was two years old, it knew a large number of Latin words, and had acquired a sort of notion of declension and conjugation. By the time he was eight years old, the boy had learnt Latin enough to read an easy writer, the rudiments

of Greek and French; could sing and play the piano. His memory was as remarkable as Porson's. At this age he could retain from ten to fifteen lines on hearing them once read over. The father tried on him a variety of experiments which Wolf long afterwards recognised in Quintilian. But his ordinary way was the simple way: continued reading aloud with distinct utterance and exact pronunciation, learning by heart and repeating, combined with mental arithmetic. The removal to Nordhausen brought a grammar school within reach. Nordhausen is now a Prussian town with a manufacturing population of 16,000. It was then a quiet Imperial city, within its own walls, and with perhaps not half that number of inhabitants. But it had its grammar school, the stepping-stone for the very poorest of its citizens to the university and the world. Young Wolf rapidly passed through all the forms to the top of the school. At twelve, he had learnt all the Latin and Greek his masters here could teach. They would teach nothing else. The best of them, Hake, finding the boy reading Wieland's Musarion, snatched the book from his hands, not because it was a bad book, but because it was written in German. Of this Nordhausen we know all about the head-masters, the second-masters, and down to the assistant-masters. Not one of them who had the honour of teaching, or misteaching, F. A. Wolf, but is handed down to posterity at full-length for what he accomplished or what he neglected. Poor old Rector Fabricius, intrepidly teaching Greek grammar on the verge of seventy, and solemnly admonishing his boys to avoid "nefandas libidines, et linguas novicias," was really learned in literary history. His successor in the rectorate, Hake, is described as a first-rate teacher, but was cut off at thirty-eight by a complaint brought on by over-study. Of him Wolf always spoke with gratitude for what he had learned of him in the few months he was under him. The next rector, Albert, was an ignoramus. The best thing he could do was what he did, shut up the school for months together. Wolf now fell into bad hands, or what seemed so. The young musicmaster was fast, if not dissipated, but also variously accomplished, a union of qualities fascinating to a boy of fifteen, eager to learn everything, and know life. Comrading with him, Wolf, it seems, fell into bad habits. But they cannot have been very bad, as we find nothing specified worse than loafing, and playing practical jokes on the rector, whose incapacity for his post was notorious in the city. We suppose the spirits and precocity of the boy were too much for the kleinstädter, in whose eyes the music-master, Frankenstein, was a veritable rip, a "cantor Tigellius." When the schoolmaster's son forsook Greek for French, his ruin must have been half accomplished. These frolics, however, left no traces in Wolf's later life, unless so far

as they may have contributed, together with his own native vein of humour, to save him from starching into a Prussian martinet. In Wolf the man was never extinguished under the Doctor. He himself always maintained that he owed much to the cynical precentor, whom he called "a rough diamond." Frankenstein knew little Latin and Greek, but he was a good French scholar, and could read Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and English. Under his auspices Wolf took up French and Italian together; pushed these with his characteristic impetuosity as far as to read Molière and the Jerusalem Delivered, and then began Spanish. As Frankenstein's housekeeper had mislaid the Spanish dictionary in her lodger's bed, Wolf was obliged to get through Don Quixote with help of a Dutch translation, thus pulling a pair of sculls. Dictionaries were not to be had at the Nordhausen stationer's. Frankenstein had to lend his pupil his own wretched Italian vocabulary; and as he could only part with it for a short time, Wolf set to work and copied out all the words to which neither Latin nor French would help him. He got the loan of a 'Bailey' for one month, wrote out one-third, and committed the rest to memory. He found a Jew in the city to teach him the rudiments of Hebrew grammar, and then threw himself with all his might into music, learning five or six instruments, and studying general bass, as if he had been designed, like his younger brother Theodore, for the musical profession. He took dancing lessons, and of course fell in love, not with any of the young ladies-little girls, and beneath the notice of a man of sixteen-but with a charining widow who superintended the class.

Such was Wolf's idle time, in Nordhausen eyes. It was not long before he began to think so himself. He returned with more zest than ever to classics. Having fared so ill in the way of teachers, he resolved, like Scaliger, to begin again, and be his own teacher. Had his tutors been better, there was something in Wolf's nature which would not be taught. He thought it some peculiarity of his mind that he never could bear a teacher three days together. He was still nominally at school. But the masters connived at his absence, judging, like Gibbon's Magdalen tutors, that his time would be better employed elsewhere. He always maintained that the character is formed between twelve and fifteen. Of himself he said, that all that he afterwards became he was at thirteen. Certainly the bent his studies now took was that which they ever afterwards obeyed. He resolved to devote himself to classics, and drew out an extensive scheme of self-education. An idea possessed him that, owing to the incompetency of his masters, he had been fundamentally mistaught. What if all he had been told as history should turn out mere fable? Beginning again with

the declensions, he read with new eyes the Latin and Greek classics, some carefully, others more cursorily; learnt by heart whole books of Homer, much of the Tragedians and Cicero, and went through the whole of Scapula and Faber's Thesaurus. He early saw how important it is to know in what books required information is to be looked for. He had long exhausted the scanty school library, of which he exercised, as by natural right, the guardianship. He borrowed of the two ministers and the physician, the only persons in the Imperial free city who had books. In Ilfeld, a neighbouring town, he found, besides another school library, a collection of books belonging to one of the masters, Leopold, who had edited some Lives of Plutarch. From his frequent visits here, himself and his mother would return home both loaded with books. When he got hold of a book which he had not time to read, he committed the title to memory, and ran over the preface and table of contents. In this way he laid the foundation of his extensive knowledge of the literature of Philology. An instinct of good sense kept him in his youth to the best authors, and in their proper order. As his horizon widened, his ambition to exhaust it grew. He used to look back with a shudder at what he exacted from his constitution in those two years, between school and university. He would sit up the whole night in a room without a stove, his feet in a pan of cold water, and one of his eyes bound up to rest the other. It was high time that this suicidal process should cease, when, in April 1777, it was brought to a close by his removal to the university.

GÖTTINGEN, 1777-1779.-He had already been to Göttingen, trudging from Nordhausen on foot, in March of the previous year, to secure a lodging and make the necessary arrangements. The second journey he had the luxury of an Einspanner to carry his clothes and books, and might himself mount on the top when tired. Though they left Nordhausen at dawn, it was dark before they reached the last village, where they had to put up for the night. Wolf's first act on entering Göttingen was to recruit himself with a good sleep, after which he set out to be matriculated. Wolf insisted on being inscribed in the matriculation-book as "Student of Philology." The prorector, Baldinger, an M.D. of some celebrity, laughed at the absurdity, and informed him there was no such faculty. Medicine, Law, Arts, and Theology were the four faculties; if he wanted (God forbid he should!) to become a schoolmaster, the way was to enter as student of Theology. Wolf, with his habitual obstinacy, refused to see the force of this. He meant to study Philology, and did not intend to study Theology; why should he be called what he was not? The pro-rector gave up the