Page:Historical Essays and Studies.djvu/383

Rh and its inaccessible information, he sternly turned his back. He loved to settle on a space he could hope to exhaust by giving his life to it, unmindful of Godfrey Hermann and his dictum: "Est quaedam etiam nesciendi ars et scientia." Like Hegel, who comfortably finished his book at Jena during the battle, and, starting for the publisher's in the morning, was surprised to observe that the streets were full of Frenchmen, he did not allow the voices of the striving world to distract him. Often he had risen, by mere energy and conduct, from crushing poverty, had gone barefoot to school, or had begged his way like Hase across the Fatherland; and he remained frugal and austere, cultivating humble obscurity and the golden gift of silence, and marrying, as Feuerbach did, upon an income of forty pounds. With that genius for taking trouble which Ritschl called the way to everything, he was not sensitive to genius of any other sort. The extreme subdivision of labour narrowed his view, and gave an unusual scope and value to diligent mediocrity. Dull men built themselves an everlasting name at which we wonder as we wonder at the glory of Grant; and the excessive talent of Stahl and Lassalle was suspected, as a Jewish glitter, wanting substance. Walter, standing still on the old ground of Niebuhr, scoffed at that marvel of ability, the Geist des rŏmischen Rechts; and W. Sickel's Verfassungsgeschichte, the most brilliant account of early institutions ever written, is scorned by the accepted teachers. "Too clever to make a good administrator" is a judgment of Napoleon's; and Metternich invokes the international epigram, " L'esprit sert à tout et ne mène à rien."

The scholar of the old school was an open adversary and a candid friend. Aristotelian Brandis, who was remarkable for social amenity, writes of his early fellowship with Bunsen that they disputed "without effeminate sensibility" (ohne wehleidige Schonung); and the Breslau students were gratified with the sight of Passow in the Professorencarcer for insulting Menzel. Thiers said to Senior: "I may call my opponent a villain, though I