ABSTRACT
By all biographical accounts, Christian Gauss of Princeton was a riveting professor and, later, an energizing dean. The tributes to him toward the end of his life and after his death attest with impressive regularity to the talents of a man for whom pedagogy assumed especially the form of a radiant inspiration. Here the activity oflearning is less an attaining of specific ideas than a full and effective captivation by aura. The language of the tributes is a physical, even sensuous one. For his student, Edmund Wilson, for example, Gauss cut through the artificialities of rhetoric to offer up the things to be learned in their full presence: “Such an incident [Rousseau's discovery of the Academy of Dijon essay competition] Gauss made memorable, invested with reverberating significance, by a series of incisive strokes that involved no embroidery, or dramatics. It was, in fact, as if the glamor of legend, the grandeur of history, had evaporated and left him [Rousseau] exposed to our passing gaze…. In the same way, [Gauss] made us feel the pathos” (Wilson 1952, 10).
