The Wild Child

by Jeffrey Masson

  It seemed to me not unimportant to put his taste in colors to the test. In this respect he exhibited the same disposition as children and so-called savages. He liked the color red best of all, especially a loud red. He disliked yellow, except in the form of gold striking the eye, in which case he could not make up his mind between this yellow and the loud red. He was indifferent to white, but green was almost as abhorrent to him as black. This predilection, especially his preference for red, stayed with him for a long time, as the later observations of Professor Daumer were to show, even after his education had progressed considerably. If he had a choice, he would have dressed himself and those he liked in scarlet or purple from head to toe. He took no pleasure in nature because the primary color of its garment was green. To find nature beautiful, he would have had to see her through red-tinted glasses. In Professor Daumer’s house, which he exchanged for the Luginsland Tower shortly after I visited him, he was not very pleased. He explained this by the fact that there his view was of the garden, and of its many, as he said, “nasty” green trees and plants. On the other hand, he was immensely taken by the dwelling of a friend of his teacher, which was on a narrow unappealing street, because the view from there looked out on the pretty red-painted houses opposite and all around it. When somebody pointed out to him a tree full of red apples, he said he liked it enormously, except that the tree, he thought, would be even prettier if the leaves were red as well. When he, who drank only water, saw somebody drinking red wine, he said: “If only I could drink things that are so pretty to look at!” He only wished that his favorite animal, the horse, were scarlet red instead of black, brown, or white.

  The curiosity, the thirst for knowledge, as well as the steadfast tenacity he showed for things he had made up his mind to learn or comprehend, were beyond all imagining and were deeply moving to watch. As I noted earlier, he no longer occupied himself with his toys during the day. He filled the daytime hours with writing, drawing, and other studious activities that Professor Daumer busied him with. He complained bitterly to us that his many visitors left him no peace and that he was unable to study at all. It was touching to hear his often repeated complaint that other people knew so much and there was so much he still had to learn. Besides writing, one of his favorite occupations was drawing, to which he brought as much talent as tenacity. For the last several days he made it his task to copy a lithographic portrait of Mayor Binder. A whole package of half-folio sheets were filled with copies he drew. He laid them out in rows on top of one another in the order in which he finished them. I went through them one by one. The first attempts looked exactly like the drawings of small children who think they have drawn a face when they have scrawled something on paper supposed to be an oval figure by drawing a couple of round flourishes next to some long and cross strokes. But progress was evident in almost every subsequent attempt, so that eventually those lines resembled a human face more and more, and in the end, while still somewhat imperfect and crude, they showed some similarity to the original lithograph he was copying. I expressed my admiration for his last attempts to him, but he declared himself not yet satisfied and gave me to understand that he would have to draw the picture many more times until it was completely right, and then he would give it to the mayor as a present.

  He was by no means happy with his life in the world. He longed to go back to the man with whom he had always been. “At home (in his hole),” he said, “I never had so many headaches, and nobody tormented me the way they do now in the world.” He was referring to the discomforts and pain of the many new impressions that were completely unfamiliar to him, to the many different smells which were disgusting to him, as well as to the numerous visits by the merely curious, their ceaseless questions and some of their thoughtless and not entirely humane experiments. Moreover, the only thing he had to complain about with respect to the man with whom he had always been was the fact that he had not yet come to take him back home, and that he had never shown him or even spoken to him at all about so many of the beautiful things in the world. He wants to live in Nuremberg until he has learned what the mayor and the professor (Daumer) know. Then let the mayor bring him home and he will show the man what he learned in the meantime. When I said to him at this point: “Why would you want to return to this bad, awful man?” he retorted, mildly angered: “The man not bad, the man me no bad done.”

  We soon acquired the most extraordinary proof of his astonishing memory, which was as quick as it was tenacious. For each and every thing in his room, big and little, for each and every picture and drawing, he was able to tell us the name and title of the person who gave it to him as a present. If some of them shared the same last name, he would distinguish them either by their first names or by some other attribute. About an hour after we had left him, we met him again in the street as he was being taken to the mayor’s house. We greeted him and when we asked him if he remembered our names, he greeted each one of us, without thinking or hesitating, with our full names, including all our titles, which could not have meant anything to him. Dr. Osterhausen (the medical doctor), on another occasion, made the following observation: Kaspar was shown a bouquet of flowers and was told the name of each flower. Several days later he recognized each and every flower and was able to give its correct name. But this memory diminished later on, seemingly in inverse proportion as his mind became enriched, as it had greater tasks to perform.

  His obedience toward those who exercised fatherlike authority over him, especially the mayor, Professor Daumer and his jailer, Hiltel, was strict and without limits. “Because the mayor or the professor said so” was for him the only reason for doing or not doing something, and made all further questions or considerations unnecessary. When I asked him why he believed that he had to obey so completely, he gave the following answer: “The man with whom I have always been taught me that I had to do everything I was told.”43

  However, Kaspar Hauser’s subjection to external authority was confined exclusively to doing or not doing something. It did not extend to knowledge, beliefs, and opinions. In order to accept something as certain and true, he had to be personally convinced, either through direct sensory mediation or through any other means that was compatible with his still almost totally empty head and his capacity for understanding. If one was unable to convince him by sensual experience or other means, he did not exactly object, but he would allow the matter to rest until he had learned more, as he was in the habit of saying. Among other things, I spoke to him of the coming winter, telling him that the roofs of the houses and all the streets of the city would often look totally white, white as the walls of his little room. He thought this would be quite lovely but made it clear that he would not really believe it until he had seen it. When the first snow fell the following winter, he displayed great joy that now the streets, the roofs, the trees, were so nicely “painted” and rushed down to the courtyard to get some of the “white paint.” He quickly returned crying and bawling to his teacher, fingers outspread, screaming that the white paint had “bitten” his hand.

  Most noticeable and completely inexplicable was his love of order and cleanliness, carried to pedantic extremes. Each of the many hundreds of things in his little household had its preordained place and was meticulously put away or carefully spread out, symmetrically arranged, and so forth. Uncleanliness, or what he took to be unclean, he found disgusting in himself just as in others. He noticed virtually every speck of dust on our clothes, and when he saw some grains of snuff tobacco on my collar, he indignantly drew my attention to it, hastily letting me know that I should get rid of those awful things.

  Only some years later was I able to understand fully the importance of the most extraordinary experience of all. It came about through a test I am about to describe, which occurred to me through an obvious association between Kaspar, who spent his early years in a dark cellar and only emerged into the light of day when he was an adolescent boy, and the famous case of a blind man related by Cheselden. This man was blinded a
few weeks after birth, and only when he was an adolescent did a fortunately successful cataract operation allow him to see again. In my experiment I told Kaspar to look in the direction of the window and pointed to the wide expansive view of beautiful summer landscape, resplendent and jewellike. I asked him whether what he saw outside was a beautiful sight. He obeyed, but immediately turned away from the window with obvious disgust, crying out: “Nasty! Nasty!” Then he pointed to the white wall of his little room and said: “There not nasty!” When I further inquired: “What there nasty,” nothing came out beyond “Nasty, nasty!” At the time there seemed nothing to do but carefully notice this circumstance and wait for later explanation when Kaspar would be better able to make himself understood. I believed I clearly determined that his turning away from that landscape could not be explained solely by the irritating impression that the light made on his optic nerves. This time his facial expressions did not just reflect pain but disgust and horror. Moreover, he was standing at some distance from the window, to the side, so that he could see the scenery, but no direct ray of light could have fallen upon him. In 1831 Kaspar came to my house as a guest for a few weeks, when I had the uninterrupted opportunity to observe him in the closest possible way and so could complete or correct my earlier observations. Among other things I was able to return to this topic. I asked him if he still remembered my visit to him in the tower, and in particular the time I asked him how he liked the landscape outside the window? I reminded him that at the time he had turned away from this view with a look of disgust, and had repeated: “Nasty, nasty!” Why had he done that, I asked him. What had occurred to him? “It is true,” he answered me,

  that what I saw at that time was nasty. When I looked toward the window, it was always as if a window blind had been pulled down right in front of my eyes, and a painter had taken his brushes, and shaking them, provided a colorful mix of white, blue, green, yellow, red. Things I now see as separate and individual, then I could not recognize and distinguish. At the time, it was terrible to look at. I felt anxious because I thought that the window had been closed with these gaudy shutters to prevent me from being able to look out freely. The fact that what I was looking at were fields, mountains, houses, that something that then seemed to me bigger than something else was actually much smaller, that is, that something big was actually small, all of this I was easily able to convince myself of only later when I was able to walk outdoors, and I finally saw nothing of that shutter.

  When I inquired further, he remarked: “In the beginning I was unable to distinguish what was really round and triangular, from something that was only painted round or triangular. The horses and men that were painted in my pictures appeared to me to be just like those horses and people carved in wood. The former seemed as round as the latter, and those appeared as flat as these.” Still, when he was putting his things away, or taking them out, he soon felt a difference and so he rarely confused things in this way, and finally not at all.

  We have here in Kaspar, then, a reincarnation of the blind man of Cheselden, blind from childhood, who regained his vision. Let us hear what Voltaire44 (and Diderot,45 who in this is at one with Voltaire) has to say about this blind man:

  The young man whose cataracts were removed by the skillful surgeon Cheselden was unable to distinguish sizes, distances, situations, even figures for a long time. An object just one inch tall held before his eyes, which concealed a house from his view, appeared to him as tall as the house. All objects were present to his eye, and appeared to him to apply to that organ, as objects of touch apply to the skin. He could not distinguish (by sight) an object he had determined to be round by touching it with his hand, from objects he had determined were square; nor could he distinguish whether what he had determined to be above or below (by feel) was in fact above or below. He was finally able, with difficulty, to become convinced through his senses that his house was larger than his room, but he never grasped how his eyes could give him this information. It took many repeated experiences for him to convince himself that paintings represented real objects. As a result of repeatedly studying paintings, when he was fully convinced that he was not looking at just flat surfaces, he reached his hand out to touch them and was surprised to find a plane surface with no projections. Then he asked whether his touch or sight deceived him. Painting had the same effect on savages: The first time they saw them, they took the painted figures for living men, questioned them, and were surprised to get no answer! This error certainly did not derive from being unaccustomed to seeing [Translators note: my translation from the French].

  Children, too, in the first few weeks and months after their birth, see everything as if it were close up. They reach out to seize the shining ball of a distant church steeple, cannot distinguish what is really large or small from what is only apparently so, nor can they distinguish painted objects from real ones. This is because when it comes to objects of sight and touch, both senses must interact, one with the other, so that what is touched, or comprehended with the eyes can be recognized for the object that it really is. This experience is based on the elementary law of sight, about which the renowned Englishman Berkeley said the following:

  It is, I think, agreed by all that distance of itself, and immediately cannot be seen. For distance being a line directed end-wise to the eye, it projects only one point in the fund of the eye. Which point remains invariably the same, whether the distance be longer or shorter.—I find it also acknowledged, that the estimate we make of the distance of objects considerably remote, is rather an act of judgment grounded on experience, than of sense. For example: When I perceive a great number of intermediate objects, such as houses, field, rivers, and the like, which I have experienced to take up a considerable space; I thence form a judgment or conclusion, that the object I see beyond them is at a great distance. Again, when an object appears faint and small, which at a near distance I have experienced to make a vigorous and large appearance, I instantly conclude it to be far off. And this, it is evident, is the result of experience, without which, from the faintness and littleness, I should not have inferred any thing concerning the distance of objects [Translator’s note: original English from Berkeley].

  The application of this optical law and its underlying experience to Kaspar’s delusion of the senses is obvious. Since Kaspar had never gone any farther than from the tower to the mayor’s house, or at most one or two other streets, and since his eyes were so sensitive, and since he was also afraid of falling, when he walked he kept his eyes always focused on his feet and constantly avoided looking directly into the ocean of light because he was hypersensitive to light, he therefore had no occasion to experience seeing objects in perspective and at a distance for a long time. All the various things in the world around him, including the somewhat small strip of blue sky that filled the window frame from bottom to top, must have seemed to him formless appearances, close to, next to, or on top of one another. He must have seen it to be like a blackboard covering his window, upon which multicolored objects, big and small, indistinguishable from one another, appeared as formless colorful blots.

  Chapter VI

  Kaspar Hauser became acquainted with a great variety of things and words in a short time. Soon he was making relatively good progress in speaking and understanding. This was the undeniable advantage of the almost constant company of the many people who thronged to see him all day long. Nonetheless it became clear that the medley of people to whom Kaspar Hauser was exposed in droves was probably not really suitable for furthering the natural development of this neglected youth.

  Hardly an hour of the day went by without its bringing him something new from one person or another. But what he learned this way did not form even a small whole. On the contrary, it formed one disorderly, scattered, and colorful heap of hundreds and thousands of ideas-really only half ideas, or even quarter ideas carelessly piled on top of one another.

  If the blank slate of his soul was soon written upon in this way, it was at the s
ame time all too quickly marred and muddled, overflowing as it was with things that were, at least in part, worthless.

  The unaccustomed effect of light and fresh air, the strange and often painful variety of impressions that crowded his senses constantly and all at once, the massive effort of his soul, thirsting for knowledge, to create a self out of itself, his attempt to grasp everything new that was offered (and everything was new!), to seize it, to take it in as if he were starved to the point of exhausting himself—all this was more than a frail body and a fragile, constantly excited and overexcited nervous system could bear.

  From my visit to Kaspar on July 11, I took with me the conviction, which I attempted to convey to the appropriate authorities, that Kaspar Hauser would die of nervous fever, or would descend into insanity or idiocy, if his situation were not changed soon. After a few days my concerns proved largely justified. Kaspar became sick, or at least so sickly that a dangerous illness was feared.

  His physician, Dr. Osterhausen, wrote in his first court-ordered expert opinion, reporting to the municipal magistrate on the current condition of Hauser’s health, as follows: