“So we went gaily from town to town, visiting everything…meeting with such adventures as befell all wandering students in those old-fashioned, merry times.”
-from Memoirs, Vol. I, by Charles Godfrey Leland (1894)
Wild as it may seem, Charles Godfrey Leland did not begin his career as a model student. His Princeton years—for the most part—were not comprised of goody two-shoes, apple-on-the-desk experiences. They instead were marked by subpar grades (Leland never “got” mathematics) and frequent clashes with Princeton’s administrators. The most consequential of these conflicts was a student protest that resulted in his suspension. Fortunately for him, he was eventually brought back into the Princetonian fold. Despite this and other setbacks, Leland managed to graduate by the skin of his teeth in 1845.
In his Memoirs, Leland reflected on his Princeton days with disappointment. He attributed his poor performance to a restrictive curriculum that deemphasised the arts and humanities. “The college was simply a mathematical school,” he wrote, “run on Old Presbyterian principles.” Luckily, Leland got a second chance to pull himself together when he chose to embark on a European tour. His decision to study abroad primarily arose from a feverish wanderlust that, as Leland put it, threatened to cause his early demise:
“At this time I had, as indeed for many years before, such a desire to visit Europe that I might almost have died of it.”
To remedy this affliction of deathly pining, Leland and his cousin Samuel Godfrey decided to set sail for the Continent. Backed by their family’s generous funding, the kinsmen assembled in New York City and secured places on a vessel bound for Marseilles.
On the high seas, Leland had his first taste of the rootless wild ways of the people who floated like driftwood between occupations. A few of the itinerants they encountered were true reprobates. One man, whom Leland met in Gibraltar, even admitted to being a former slaver. He unrepentantly told Leland stories of his “business” trips to Guinea, boasting that he had taken possession of a magical ritual object. While in Spain, Leland also made the acquaintance of Spanish smugglers who called him their “brother”. In retrospect, the fact that Leland could easily engage with piratical persons was a clear foreshadowing of the life of errantry that lay ahead of him.
Shortly after their arrival in Marseilles, Leland and his cousin parted ways. Leland carried on with his journey, making a number of stops in Italy. Eventually, he found his way to Württemberg and enrolled at the University of Heidelberg, immersing himself into what he called “German studentism”. This way of life had its beginnings in the culture of scholastici vagantes or “wandering scholars”, the mad, bad, and dangerous to know intellectuals of Renaissance times. Thus Leland, who raffishly wore his hat tipped to the side over his long hair a l’étudiant (as he called it), inherited the mantle of this order of academic vagabonds.
Sabre-fighting clubs were popular at the time, but Leland—though repeatedly invited to join several—had no interest in fencing. Guns were his thing. Although he personally affected the Epicurean “jolly good fellow” persona, Leland—like many nineteenth-century duellists—did lend his pistols to friends who went off to settle scores. Yet, what really got him going was Heidelberg’s pervasive drinking and smoking culture.
Between lectures on chemistry and history, Leland practised the “when in Rome” philosophy. He sprang from one tavern to the next and sometimes watched his own tutors drink themselves under the table. Letters gathered by Leland’s niece, Elizabeth Pennell, give evidence of his love for Rhenish fare and his fascination with German literature:
“I wear a student’s costume, and drink beer, smoke pipes, eat one o’clock dinners and heavy suppers. I visit old castles and read awful stories of bloody daggers and all manner of hexerey. I have fully got hold of the idea of Germany.”
While in the vicinity of Heidelberg, Leland also was fortunate enough to meet with Justinus Kerner, then Württemberg’s most famous mystic. Apparently Kerner “took to him greatly” and compared him to the poet Ludwig Uhland. It would be an understatement to say that Leland enjoyed his visit. In his Memoirs, the young enthusiast likened Kerner’s village Weinsberg to a fairyland. For Leland, the locus was so phantasmic that he could not help picturing the townspeople as ghosts who could vanish into thin air in the blink of an eye.
Keeping to the scholar-errant tradition, Leland departed degreeless from Heidelberg in 1847 and settled in an apartment near the Karlstor in Munich. After a few months in the city, he and friend hit the road again. Their cross-country journey took them to places like Bohemia, Austria, and Holland, but the companions were not allowed to cross the Russian border. Leland privately suspected it was because border guards believed he was a spy.
Leland then came to Paris, where in 1848 he vacated the classrooms of the Sorbonne and took part in the February Revolution. It was a kind of final examination, the culmination of a three-year “general studies” course in the byways and backstreets of life. Leland proved to be a brilliant gunfighter, but this was in spite of his Princeton education. His knack for intelligence-gathering and inspiring morale was obviously not something he picked up from his geometry and theology professors. Rather, Leland’s courage, real-world know-how, and adaptability—so excellently displayed in the Paris uprisings—were all skills he acquired over the course of his nomadic wanderings in Europe.
When Leland returned to the States without so much as a measly certificate, his father—who was a banker—must have felt slightly dismayed. On paper nothing had changed; his son was still a jobless graduate with no bankable prospects. But his father could not know then what we know now: that Leland’s adolescent years in Europe would serve as the cornerstone of his future career. Book learning and conformity to norms were not what shaped Leland into the towering belletrist and folklorist who was praised by Abraham Lincoln and who hobnobbed with the likes of Oscar Wilde and Lola Montez.
In Rienzi, Last of the Tribunes (written by Leland’s friend, Lord Edward Bulwer-Lytton) the eponymous protagonist Rienzi asserts that an individual may achieve greatness “by a kind of sorcery in his own soul”. For Leland, this sorcery—this self-making—was accelerated both by his chaotic exploits in foreign lands and by his willingness to follow in the gallivanting footsteps of the long-departed scholastici vagantes.
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This would make a fun movie!
Yes — it sure would!