II.

ACCORDING to Kaspar Hauser's account, all his life had hitherto been passed in a state which was little better than sleep; and his mind remained in an unformed condition, presenting phenomena intensely interesting to students of human nature. Those whose duty it now was to watch closely over him, saw nothing in his behaviour or abilities to contradict this story. They may have been prejudiced by their zeal in the cause of this young wonder of theirs; but they were no doubt honest enough in their observations. Let it be remembered, however, that we are going to look at our hero as seen through the eyes of avowed friends and patrons.

In the first place he is represented as being very docile and affectionate to those in charge of him, a feature of character which helps to explain their good-will towards him, and also quite fell in with the helplessness of his apparent childhood. He cried and laughed almost as readily as a child, expressed his likes and dislikes much in the same way, and, with a beard already sprouting on his chin, showed tastes such as commonly belong to the cradle. In other respects his constitution rather suggested an idiot. He would often be overcome by deep sleep hardly to be distinguished from a swoon; sometimes, when he was puzzled and amazed, his face and limbs became agitated by convulsive spasms; then he might fall into a kind of trance, and stand like a statue, apparently unconscious of all around him. His body presented no evident defect, but a physician who examined his limbs, was of opinion that they bore traces of the crippling attitude in which he was said to have spent nearly all his life. Other doctors, however, did not agree on this point.

His notions of the external world, as we have seen, were most vague and faint. Colours affected him strongly; he preferred bright red and the glittering of gold, but showed a positive aversion to green and black. On having his attention called to a beautiful summer landscape, he turned away with horror, exclaiming, "Ugly! ugly!" and professed to find relief in fixing his eyes on the white wall of his room. When his education was more advanced, he explained that looking out of a window had appeared to him as if a shutter were placed before his eyes,

CHILDISH SIMPLICITY.

351

on which a painter had spattered the contents of his different brushes filled with white, blue, green, yellow, and red paint all mingled together. We have this, as well as the following anecdote, on the authority of Herr von Feuerbach.

"I spoke to him, among other things, of the impending winter, and I told him that the roofs of the houses, and the streets of the city, would then be all white-as white as the walls of his chamber. He said that this would be very pretty; but he plainly insinuated that he should not believe it before he had seen it. The next winter, when the first snow fell, he expressed great joy that the streets, the roofs, and the trees had now been so well painted; and he went quickly down into the yard to fetch some of the white paint; but he soon ran to his preceptor with all his fingers stretched out, crying and blubbering, and bawling out, 'that the white paint had bit his hand.'

He was also understood to be deficient in the sense of perspective, having to feel with his hands to make sure whether a thing were round or angular. Like a savage, he recognised no difference between an object and a painted representation of it; he wondered why the horses, unicorns, ostriches, and other animals which he saw carved or painted upon houses and signposts, did not try to run away. He attributed life to senseless things, such as a statue in the garden of Professor Daumer's house, which excited his displeasure because it was so dirty, and yet did not wash itself—this after he had himself learned the lesson of cleanliness, a matter at first of great indifference to him. If he saw a sheet of paper blown away by the wind, or a child's waggon rolling down hill, he thought them moved by their own will just as he might have been. The balls in a ninepin-alley he spoke of as hurting one another, and stopping because they were tired; and it was only on finding his humming-top would not go when his own arm grew sore with winding it, that he began to suspect himself of having anything to do with the motion. There was the same difficulty in distinguishing between the properties of men and of animals. He tried to teach a cat to take food with its paws, and expressed great indignation that it would not attend to his instructions. Manifestations of force and life were all alike to him; when a tree rustled, it seemed to speak, yet he believed that somebody had made it and stuck it in the ground, leaves and all. All this, of course, is according to the hypothesis of his veracity.

On the other hand, his senses are described as singularly acute. It was a long time before he could be accustomed to eat like other people; the least taste of meat, or beer, or milk, made him very ill; and he had to be slowly weaned upon water gruel from his diet of bread-and-water. Two or three drops of wine, and even fresh grapes, produced on him marked symptoms of drunkenness. He had wonderful keenness of sight; the Daumers observed that he could see at night like a cat, and were astonished by the facility with which he distinguished the numbers of berries on a cluster, of stars in a constellation, of windows in a distant house. His hearing appeared to be equally fine. He took pleasure in musical sounds, but the first time that a big regimental drum was beaten near him, it had the effect of throwing him into convulsions. The most delicate and the most troublesome of his senses was that of smell. Almost everything had its own peculiar smell for him, and almost all smells he found more or less disagreeable. The scent of roses or violets was to him an unsupportable stench; his nerves were painfully affected by odours quite imperceptible to other people. He could hardly bear to pass a garden or a tobacco-field, and coming near a churchyard sent him once into a fit of ague. He turned his face away, shuddering, from a chimney-sweeper a few paces off. The opening of a bottle of champagne drove him from the table or made him sick; so did the smell of an old cheese. Yet it was an odd fact that he showed no great aversion to smells such as most people find unpleasant.

Then he exhibited curious sensibilities of the kind that have often seemed to link human nature here and there to an occult world. Contact with a magnet, we are told, the sight of a rattlesnake, the passage of a thunderstorm, a visit to a somnambulist, the full moon, all affected him with strong symptoms of physical agitation. There are marvellous stories of his distinguishing one metal from another without seeing them, simply by their attractive influence on his nerves; of his feeling "a drawing in his whole body" when he went into an ironmonger's shop; of his detecting a needle under an oil-cloth when no one else could feel it. The veins of his hand, testifies Daumer, were visibly swollen when exposed to this kind of metallic excitation. It may here be remarked that the worthy professor was a follower of homoeopathy, mesmerism, and other bye

paths of physical science, who may therefore be understood to have a temptation to exaggerating and insisting upon these minute susceptibilities.

As might be expected from his history, Kaspar had no knowledge of religion, and it was a matter of great difficulty to explain to him the principles of Christianity, a difficulty said to be increased by the fact that while still in the custody of the police, four clergymen had set upon him all at once with such a strong dose of metaphysical doctrine, as left him quite bewildered and disgusted for a long time afterwards. But he was not without moral instincts. The first thing he came to read intelligently was the story of Joseph, upon which he remarked that Joseph had treated his brethren with great harshness in playing on their feelings; in his place, Kaspar would have frankly forgiven them at once and let them go, keeping only Reuben, who had saved his life. He could not bear to see inhumanity to animals-he would not kill even the fleas that troubled him in the police prison! He was angry with a boy for beating a tree with a stick; he cried when he saw a child whipped; and he earnestly begged Professor Daumer to reprieve a fowl condemned to the spit. The sight of the crucifixes in the churches caused him great pain; he entreated that the man who was being so grievously tormented might be taken down, nor was it easy to persuade him that this was an image which could not feel. According to Von Feuerbach and Daumer, this supposed savage was not long in both conceiving and expressing sentiments of no small delicacy.

"It was in the month of August, 1829, when, on a fine summer evening, his instructor showed him the starry heavens. His astonishment and transport surpassed all description. He could not be satiated with the sight, and was ever returning to gaze upon it; at the same time accurately fixing with his eye the different groups that were pointed out to him, remarking the stars most distinguished for their brightness, and observing the differences of their respective colour. 'That,' he exclaimed, 'is, indeed, the most beautiful sight that I have ever yet seen in the world. But who has placed all these numerous beautiful candles there? Who lights them? Who puts them out?' When he was told that, like the sun, with which he was already acquainted, they always continue to give light, he asked again, Who placed them there above, that they may always

continue to give light?' At length, standing motionless, with his head bowed down, and his eyes staring, he fell into a train of deep and serious meditation.

"When he again recovered his recollection, his transport had been succeeded by deep sadness. He sank trembling upon a chair, and asked why the wicked man had kept him always locked up, and had never shown him any of these beautiful things? He (Kaspar) had never done any harm. He then broke out into a fit of crying, which lasted for a long time, and which could with difficulty be soothed, and said that 'the man with whom he had always been' might now also be locked up for a few days, that he might learn to know how hard it is to be treated so. Before seeing this beautiful celestial display, Kaspar had never shown anything like indignation against that man, and much less had he ever been willing to hear that he ought to be punished. Only weariness and slumber were able to quiet his sensations; and he did not fall asleep—a thing that had never happened to him before—until it was about eleven o'clock.

"Indeed, it was in Mr. Daumer's family that he began more and more to reflect upon his unhappy fate, and to become painfully sensible of what had been withheld and taken from him. It was only there that the idea of family, of relationship, of friendship, of those human ties that bind parents and children, brothers and sisters, to each other, were brought home to his feelings; it was only there that the names 'mother,'' sister,' and 'brother,' were rendered intelligible to him, when he saw how mother, sister, brother, were reciprocally united to each other by mutual affection, and by mutual endeavours to make each other happy. He would often ask for an explanation of what is meant by 'mother,' by 'brother,' and by sister;' and endeavours were made to satisfy him by appropriate answers. Soon after he was found sitting in his chair, apparently immersed in deep meditations. When he was asked what was now again the matter with him, he replied with tears, he had been thinking about what was the reason why he had not a mother, a brother, and a sister, for it was so very pretty a thing to have them.'

The reader must always bear in mind that he has been hearing the case from one side only, since it is impossible to tell such a story from both points of view at once.

Unbe