31 JULY 1886, Page 12

THE " HEIDELBERG " QUINCE NTENARY.

OF the great German "High-Schools," as they are called, by far and away the most interesting is undoubtedly the Ruperto-Carola " Hochschule," generally spoken of as the Heidelberg University, and which celebrates in the course of the ensuing week the five hundredth anniversary of its opening. Founded in 1386 by the Pfalzgraf Rupert of Hohenstaufen, it is at once the oldest and the most distinguished academic institution of the Fatherland, and in this country has long been regarded as the very type of a German Univer- sity. But though the notions of German University life and discipline current among Englishmen and Americans are mainly derived from the seat of learning in the romantic Rhineland, it is none the less a fact that the Ruperto-Carola foundation differs in many important points from the rival " High-Schools " on Teutonic soil. In some respects, indeed, it is absolutely unique. From the beginning, it has taken an enlarged view of its func- tions, thus raising itself far above the level of a mere teaching University like Leipzig or Berlin. Its history is really the literary history of modern Germany. For nearly five centuries, Heidelberg has been the true centre of German intellectual life and culture ; and directly, as well as indirectly, it has influenced the literature and politics of the Teutonic peoples in a degree to which no other school throughout the length and breadth of the Fatherland can for an instant pretend. The ilcusenstadt on the Neckar was the seat of the old Rhine Literary Society, estab- lished by Conrad Celters, which laid the foundation of later German literature. To Heidelberg Germany is indebted not alone for her earliest historian, Joannes Avantin, but also for the father of the modern historical school, Schlosser. A Heidelberg Professor, Vosz, the friend of Schiller, was the first to make Homer known to Germany ; and the same University produced the most learned Shakespeare commentator of the age, Gervinus, as well as the profoundest interpreter of Dante, Schlosser. In the last century, German romanticism found a congenial home amid the picturesque surroundings of the old Neckar city, and the glory of the old" Ruperta," Creutzer, was the intellectual head of the neo-romantic movement, which gave form and colour to the newer literature of Germany. In politics, too, the old " Hochschule " has played no obscure or insignificant part. Liberal to the core, when Liberalism was not actually pro- hibited, its Professors were ever found on the side of progress and tolerance, and threw themselves into what must to strangers seem the uncongenial arena of party warfare with the same zeal and fearlessness they displayed in the lecture-room. The first attempt to form a National Liberal Party in Germany was made by the knot of Heidelberg savants that founded and edited the short-lived Deuteche Zeitung. Professor Gervinus was the first publicist of modern Germany who dreamed of a reconstituted German Empire, and there are still many living who remember the criticism it provoked,—a caricature representing two Heidelberg Professors pulling an Emperor out of an inkpot ! It was the same writer's "Open Letter to the Holsteiners "that brought the question of the Duchies to the front in 1861, and led to the Danish War, as well as the subsequent Austro-Prussian conflict. But apart from its historic and political associations, the broader culture and cosmopolitan tendencies of Heidelberg have combined to give the University an international character; and, under any circumstances, the celebration of the fifth centenary of the great law school where Puffendorf, Thibaut, and Blunteschli have presided, could hardly be other than an interesting event.

Founded at a period when internal disorders were rife in the Pfalz, and the whole of the Rhineland was infested by the leagued robber-knights against whom Rupert L waged constant war, the old " High-School " started into existence under con- ditions the reverse of promising. Nor was the Pfalzgraf a man under whose patronage art and learning would have been ex- pected to flourish. It is recorded of him that when some sixty of the ruffians who pillaged the district fell into his hands, he had the whole batch thrown into an enormous bakm's oven, and slowly roasted to death. Such a ruler would scarcely be regarded—at all events, by moderns—as one likely to prove a friend of the humanities. He undoubtedly did a great deal for the embryo University. He secured the services of Marsilius of Inghen—the Paris Professor of Scholastic Philosophy— together with two other notabilities, Hellmann Wonnenberg and Reginald von Alba. But considering the times, it is by no means surprising that for quite a century after its foundation, Heidelberg was little more than a superior high-school. With the advent, however, of the sixteenth century, a marked change came over the institution. Scholasticism was driven from its entrenchments there ; the humanities took their rightful place ; and the Ruperta was brought into close contact with an awakening world. Scholars like Erastus, Xylander, Petras Ramus, Eisner, and Gruterus began to teach, and students gathered there from every part of the Continent. The Calvinism of Frederick IH. led him into intercommunion with many of the leading men of France and the Netherlands, who found a warm welcome in Heidelberg, and helped to widen the mental horizon of the German thinkers with whom they came into contact. The "literary society" of Celtes—of which Reuchlin and Dahlberg of Mayence were both members—enhanced still further the repu- tation of the University in the seventeenth century ; and subse- quently, under Karl Ludwig—whose sister Sophia was the mother of our George I.—it became a model of academic freedom. All dogmatic tests were abolished in the case of the incumbents of professorial seats, excepting those of theology ; a chair of international law was founded for Paffendorf, and it was even desired to call Spinoza, the Jew, from Amsterdam to lecture on philosophy. But with the death of Ludwig, the star of Heidel- berg went down. The Peace of Ryswick handed the University over to a clerical hierarchy. The professorial chairs, excepting that of Protestant theology, were filled by Jesuits, and for four generations clericalism was rampant on the banks of the Neckar. Then came even dark days ushered in by the French Revolution, when the old "Hochshule " was forgotten and deserted. Its income from land fell off, a debt of 100,000 gulden weighed upon it, and, hopelessly sick, its younger rivals awaited with exultant anticipation the dissolution of the older foundation. But with the need came the man. A petition from the Heidel- berger burgesses was presented to Maximilian of Bavaria, and through the intercession of Professor von Centner, of Munich, the oldest University on German soil was saved.

Four generations of clerical administration had, however, so completely demoralised the foundation, that a thorough re- organisation was indispensable in order to put the University on a sound basis at the beginning of the present century. The old Rhenish Pfalz had in the interval been merged in the new Grand Duchy of Baden, and the Grand Duke Karl Augustus took an active part in the resuscitation of the school so closely connected with the ancient Kurpfalz. He played the part of a second Rupert, and upon the ruins of the old "Hochschule " he raised the new Ruperto-Carola University, which soon ex- celled its former reputation, and reassumed. its high position as an academic seat of international standing. In bringing about this result, two men were mainly instrumental,—Thibaut, the great jurist, and Creutzer, the Professor of Philosophy. Thibaut made Heidelberg the great law school of modern Ger- many; Creutzer made it the literary centre of the Fatherland, and the seat of the German Mime. Thibant's brilliant expo- sition of Roman law drew to the Neckar city every budding legist and ambitious advocate, so that the terms " jurist " and " student " became synonymous there ; Creutzer made it the home of the romantic school, which comprised in those days the choicest spirits of young Germany, Gorres, Brentano, and Arnim, Schlegel and Tieck, Windischman and Eichendorf. So powerful was the influence exercised by this band of writers, that the veteran Goethe was tempted to leave his beloved Weimar in order to take up his residence for a time under the shadow of the old University ; while Mdme. de Steel actually settled down in the Neckar city to study, from the life, the sentimental " MicheL" The first outcome of the Heidelberger renaissance was the " Jahrbiicher der Litera- tur," published under the auspices of the University. Edited by Creutzer and Daub, it included among its contributors Schlegel and Jean Paul, Brentano and the brothers Grimm, and for half-a-century constituted the leading literary organ, as well as the great literary tribunal of Germany. The publication subsequently of Thibaut's system of German " Burger-Recht " —which provoked the well-known controversy with Savigny, the Frenchman—ranged the whole of thinking Germany on the side of the Heidelberg jurist, to the great advantage of the University ; while Professor Schlosser's "History of the Eighteenth Century" gave a new impulse to another branch of study. Daring the forty-five or fifty years that followed the recon- struction of the schools under Thibaut, a succession of brilliant scholars, including Vangerow, the greatest legal light of modern Germany, Gervinus, Renaud, Mittermaier, the criminal lawyer, • Philip Jolly, the physicist, Reichlin, Paulus, the theologian, Haiissen, who dealt with the Tell legend, Dahlmann, Roszhirt, and Kuno Fisher, fully maintained the ancient reputation of the Ruperto-Carola. In the reaction that ensued after the occur- rence of 1848, Heidelberg came temporarily under a cloud, and the University paid the penalty of its advanced Liberalism. Bat this soon passed over, and the last of the German worthies whose names need be mentioned here, Helmholtz, Bunsen, and Blunteschli, are certainly not among the least of the brilliant brotherhood that helped to make the seat of learning on the Neckar what it is.

As a teaching university, Heidelberg possesses a strongly marked individuality of its own. It has never favoured the narrow specialism which is the chief and distinguishing feature of other German "High-Schools." The mental atmosphere of the Neckar city has always been faller and freer than that of Prussia,

• its culture broader and more humanising. Avoiding on the one hand the aimless superficiality of the English schools, it has -contrived on the other to steer clear of the formless profundity which is the fashion in most German seats of learning. The romantic surroundings of the place, and the literary traditions -which have made it the resort of nearly all the great writers of the Fatherland, from Brentano to Scheffel and Auerbach, have determined to a great extent the character of the old University, in the same way as its historic asso- oiations and the close connection of the Grand Duchy with France, gave it a cosmopolitan tone. University life, too, is altogether less constrained in Heidelberg than in other German centres ; there is more liveliness and sociability, and the decorous dullness that reigns in other German University towns has never been known there, even among .the " dons " of the place. Jolly, the great physicist, did not disdain to attire himself in the dress of a street musician, and amuse an evening party with his improvised organ-grinding. Von Leonard, the geologist, devoted all his leisure time to amateur theatricals for the benefit of the burgers. On one occasion he gravely assured a colleague that "people had only seen him play heroic characters, but he hoped ere long to show them that he could act the foolish old man." Sparring between rival Professors was always particularly lively. Mor- stadt once entered his lecture-room with a book in his hands, and addressing the students, remarked :—" Here is a -work so vile that you'd think Zopfel mast have written it. But he didn't, for the author is our friend, Mittermaier." On another occasion he pitched one of his opponent's publications against the wall of the College Hall, with the observation that ' if there was anything good in it, it would stick" there. The Professors' Kneipe is not an unknown institution in Heidelberg, and the relations between teacher and pupil are much more cordial than usual abroad. Hence, in part, the attraction the place undoubtedly possesses for foreign students. Among -the latter, the Ruperto-Carola can boast three of the greatest Frenchmen of the present century,—Victor Cousin, Edward Laboulave, and Edgar Quinet. Our compatriots, William and Mary Howitt, have not spoken too kindly of the place in their -"Reminiscences," and in the minds of a good many Englishmen Heidelberg is inseparably connected with Bier-keller gather- ings, and Confiners. But though a deal of deep drinking goes on there, as in all German University towns, there is more than a reasonable amount of deep thinking done. The vener- able " Hochschnle" has attained a position second to none as a centre of Western culture, and ranks among the great .civilising agencies of the modern world. Its past record is of happy augury for its future ; and Englishmen, who are justly proud of their own ancient seats of learning, will be among the foremost to join in the gratulations that will greet the oldest German University on completing next week the five hundredth year of its existence.