confusion. In the pauses between one thunderclap and the next Susanna did indeed collect herself somewhat and tried to calm and comfort her charges, who according to their age were either hanging on to her apron or crouching by themselves with closed eyes in the corners of the room. But suddenly a bluish flame of lightning flashed once more through the cracks of the shutters and the words died on her lips, while the maid, almost as frightened as the youngest child, howled and screamed out, “The good God is angry!” When it was dark again in the room she added with pedagogical moroseness, “You’re all of you good for nothing, anyhow!” These words, no matter how odious the mouth from which they fell, made a deep impression on me; they forced me to look upward, above myself and above everything which surrounded me, and kindled in me the spark of religious emotion.
On my return from school to my father’s house, I found there, too, the horrors of devastation. Our pear-tree had lost not only its young fruit but likewise all its beautiful leaves, and stood there bare as in winter: what is more, a very fruitful plum-tree, which used to supply not only ourselves but half the town besides, and, at the very least, our fairly numerous kinsfolk, had even been despoiled of the richest of its branches, and in its mutilation looked like a man with a broken arm. Though my mother found a sorry comfort in the fact that our pig was now supplied with dainty fare for a week, I could derive none at all from it, and even the pieces of glass lying around in abundance–from which the most excellent mirrors could be made in the easiest way in the world by sticking them together with damp earth–offered scarcely any compensation for the irrecoverably lost autumn pleasures. Now, however, I understood all at once why my father always went to church on Sunday, and, why I was never allowed to put on a clean shirt without saying: “God’s mercy upon us!” when I did so. I had learned to know the Lord of Lords; his angry servants, thunder and lightning, hail and storm, had opened wide the portals of my heart to him, and he had entered in all his majesty.
What had taken place in my soul was made manifest shortly afterward. For one evening when once again the wind blew mightily down the chimney, and the rain beat hard upon the roof as I was being put to bed, the mechanical babbling of my lips was suddenly transformed into a real, anxious prayer, and therewith the spiritual navel-string, which up to that time had bound me exclusively to my parents, was broken. Indeed things soon went so far that I began to complain to God of my father and mother when I thought I had been unjustly treated by them.
Further there is connected with this school-room my first and perhaps most bitter martyrdom. In order to make plain what I would say I must explain a little. Even in the infant-school all the elements are to be found which the maturer man later encounters in an intensified degree, in the world. Brutality, deceit, vulgar cleverness, hypocrisy, all are represented, and a pure mind always stands there, like Adam and Eve in the picture, among the wild beasts. How much of this is to be ascribed to nature, how much to early education, or rather to neglect in the home, must remain undecided here; the fact admits of no doubt. This, then, was likewise the case in Wesselburen. Every species was to be met with, from the brutal boy who plucked the feathers from the living birds and pulled the legs off the flies, down to the light-fingered little rascal, who stole the bright colored book-marks out of the primers of his comrades. The fate which their better-behaved fellow-pupils–who were condemned to suffer on that account–sometimes angrily prophesied for the young sinners, when the good boys had happened to be the object of their jeers or their malicious tricks, was fulfilled to the letter in the case of more than one of them. The gamins always have instinct enough to know whom their sting will strike first and sharpest, and therefore I was, for a time, the one most exposed to their spite. Sometimes a boy pretended to be reading very zealously in the catechism, which he held close before his face, but instead he whispered over the top of the page all sorts of scurrilous things in my ear, and asked me if I were still stupid enough to believe that children came out of the well, and that the stork fetched them up? Sometimes another called to me “If you want an apple, take it out of my pocket, I brought one along for you!” And when I did so, he cried! “Susanna, I am being robbed,” and denied having said anything to me. A third even spat upon his book and then began to howl and declared with a brazen face that I had done it.
Although I was almost the only one exposed to vexations of this kind, partly because I felt them most keenly, and partly because they succeeded best with me on account of my extreme unwariness, there were other annoyances which all, without exception, had to put up with. Foremost among these was the bragging of certain overgrown young rogues who were considerably ahead of us others in years, but in spite of that still sat on the A.B.C. bench, and from time to time played truant. They got nothing out of it at the time but double and threefold boredom, for as they dared not go home and could not find any playmates, there was nothing for them to do but crouch down behind a hedge or lurk in a dried-up ditch until the hour of deliverance struck, and then to mingle with us on the way home as though they really had been where they belonged. But they knew how to make up for it and get some fun for themselves afterward, when they came back to school and related their adventures. They would tell us how once their father had gone by right close to the hedge, the cane with which he used to thrash them in his hand, and yet had not noticed them; how another time their mother, accompanied by the spitz dog, had come up to the ditch, the dog had smelt them out, their mother had discovered them, but the lie that they had been sent there by Susanna herself to pick camomile flowers for her, had helped them through in spite of all. Then they plumed themselves like old soldiers who are telling their heroic deeds to wondering recruits, and the moral always was: we risk the whip and the cane, you at most the switch, and yet you do not dare to do anything.
This was irritating and all the more so as it was not possible absolutely to deny the truth of their assertions. Hence when the son of a cobbler once came to school with his back black and blue, and told us his father had caught him and punished him severely with his shoemaker’s stirrup, but that he was only going to try it now all the oftener, for he was no coward, I also determined to show my courage, and that, too, that very afternoon.
When, therefore, my mother sent me away at the usual hour, provided with two juicy pears to quench my thirst, I did not go to Susanna’s, but crept, with a beating heart and anxiously peering behind me, into the woodshed of our neighbor, the joiner, encouraged and assisted to do so by his son, who was much older than I and already worked in his father’s shop. It was very hot and my hiding place was both dark and close; the two pears did not last long, besides I could not eat them without some twinges of conscience, and an old cat cowering in the background with her young ones, who growled fiercely at my least movement, did not contribute very much to my amusement. The sin carried its punishment along with it; I counted every quarter and every half hour of the clock, the strokes of which penetrated from the high tower to where I was with a harsh, and it seemed to me, threatening sound. I tormented myself wondering whether I could get out of the shed again without being noticed, and I thought only very rarely and fleetingly of the triumph which I hoped to celebrate on the morrow.
It was already getting rather late when my mother came into the garden and glancing gaily and contentedly about her, went over to the well to draw some water. She almost passed directly in front of me, and that in itself arrested my breathing. But how was it with me when my confidant suddenly asked her if she knew where Christian was, and to her astonished reply, “With Susanna!” rejoined half mischievously, half maliciously “No! no, with the cat!” and winking and blinking showed her my hiding place! Beside myself with rage, I sprang out and would have kicked the grinning traitor. My mother, however, her whole face aflame, set her pail down on one side and seized me by the arms and hair to take me to school after all. I tore myself away, I rolled on the ground, I howled and screamed, but in vain. The discovery of such a criminal in her quiet darling, whom every one praised, incensed her so that she would not listen to me, but dragged me away by force; and my continued resistance had no other result than to cause all the windows on the street to be opened and all heads to pop out. When I arrived my companions were just being dismissed; they crowded around me, however, and heaped mockery and derision upon me, while Susanna, who may have realized that the lesson was too severe, tried to pacify me. Since that day I believe I know how the man feels who runs the gauntlet.
VI
I should really have mentioned, above, a third experience, but this last, whether in retrospect one rate it high or low, is, in any case, so unique and incomparable in the life of man that one dares not place it in the same category with any other. In Susanna’s gloomy school-room, namely, I learned to know love, and that, too, in the very same hour in which I entered it; therefore in my fourth year.
The first love! Who does not smile when he reads these words; before whose vision does not an Aennchen or a Gretchen hover, who once seemed to him to wear a starry crown and be arrayed in the blue of heaven and the gold of the morning, and who now perhaps–it would be criminal to paint the reverse of the picture. But who does not say to himself, too, that at that time he was carried, as though on wings, past every honey-cup in the garden of earth, too quickly indeed to become intoxicated, but slowly enough to breathe in the sacred morning fragrance. It is therefore with emotion that I now smile when I think of the beautiful May morning on which actually took place that great event, long since resolved upon, repeatedly deferred, and at last unalterably appointed for a definite day–I mean my departure from the paternal home to school. “He will cry!” said Meta on the evening before, and nodded sibylline fashion, as though she knew everything. “He will not cry, but he will get up too late!” rejoined neighbor Ohl’s wife. “He will behave bravely, and be out of his bed at the right time, too!” threw in the good-natured old man. Then he added, “I have something for him, and I’ll give it to him when he comes in at my door at seven o’clock tomorrow morning, washed and combed.”
At seven o’clock I was at our neighbor’s and as a reward was presented with a little wooden cuckoo. Up to half past seven I was in good spirits and played with our pug-dog, at quarter to eight I began to weaken, but toward eight I was a man again, because Meta entered with a face full of malicious enjoyment, and I sat out courageously, the new primer, with John Ballhorn’s egg-laying cock under my arm. My mother went with me in order to introduce me ceremoniously; the pug followed; I was not yet entirely forsaken, and stood in Susanna’s presence before I realized it. In school-master fashion Susanna patted me on the cheek and stroked back my hair. My mother, in a severe tone which she had great pains in assuming, bade me be industrious and obedient, and departed hastily, so as not to allow her emotion to get the better of her; the pug was undecided for some little time, but at last he went off to join her. I was presented with a gold paper saint, then my place was shown me and I was incorporated into the humming, buzzing child-beehive, which, glad of the interruption, had watched the scene inquisitively.
It was some time before I dared to look up, for I felt that I was being inspected and this embarrassed me. At last I did so, and my first glance fell upon a pale, slender girl who sat directly opposite to me; she was called Emilia and was the daughter of the parish clerk. A thrill of emotion passed through me, the blood rushed to my heart, but a feeling of shame also mingled at once with my first sensation, and I dropped my eyes to the ground again as quickly as though they had committed a crime.
From this hour I could not banish Emilia from my mind. School, formerly so much feared, now became my favorite abiding place, because there only could I see her; Sundays and holidays, which separated me from her, were as hateful to me as they would otherwise have been welcome; I was genuinely unhappy if she happened to stay away. She hovered before me wherever I went and I never grew tired of repeating her name softly to myself when I was alone; her black eyebrows and her very rosy lips, in particular, were always present before me; on the other hand, I do not remember that her voice made any impression upon me, although later everything, for me, depended upon that.
It can easily be understood that I soon gained out of all this the reputation of being the most constant attendant at school and the best pupil. I felt rather strangely about it though, for I knew very well that it was not the primer which attracted me to Susanna’s, and that it was not in order to learn to read quickly that I spelled away so busily. However, no one must ever be allowed to divine what was going on with me, and least of all Emilia. I avoided her most anxiously, so as, by any and all means, to keep from betraying myself. When the games in common nevertheless brought us together, I was hostile toward her rather than in the least friendly. I pulled her back hair in order to touch her at least for once, and hurt her in doing it, so as not to arouse suspicion. Once, however, nature forcibly asserted itself, because put to too severe a test. One afternoon in the romping hour which always preceded lessons–for the children assembled slowly and Susanna liked to take a midday nap–a distressing sight greeted me as I entered the school-room; Emilia was being ill-treated by a boy, and he was one of my best comrades. He pulled her about and buffeted her lustily, and I bore it, though not without great difficulty and with ever increasing, silent exasperation. At last, however, he drove her into a corner, and when he let her out again, her mouth was bleeding, probably because he had scratched her somewhere. Then I could control myself no longer, the sight of the blood drove me mad, I fell upon him, threw him to the ground and gave him back his thumps and slaps double and threefold. But Emilia, far from being grateful to me, herself called for aid and assistance for her enemy when I showed no signs of desisting, and thus betrayed involuntarily that she liked him better than the avenger. Susanna, awakened from her slumbers by the noise, hurried to the scene and, naturally being cross and angry, demanded strict account of my sudden outburst of rage. What I stammered and stuttered forth in excuse was incomprehensible and foolish, and thus I received a rude chastisement as a reward for my first gallant service. My affection for Emilia lasted until my eighteenth year and passed through very many phases; I must therefore often refer to it again.
VII
Even in my earliest years my imagination was very vivid. When I was put to bed in the evening the rafters above me began to crawl, from every nook and corner of the room distorted visages made grimaces, and the most familiar objects, such as the cane on which I myself used to ride, the foot of the table, yes, even the coverlet on my bed with its flowers and figures, grew strange and filled me with terror. I believe it is well to distinguish here between the vague general fear, which is natural to all children without exception, and a greater one which embodies its terrifying images in clear-cut distinct forms and really makes them objective to the young soul. The former fear was shared by my brother, who lay beside me, but his eyes always closed very soon and then he slept quietly until bright daylight; the latter tormented me alone, and not only did it keep sleep far from me, but when sleep finally came, often frightened it away again and made me call for help in the middle of the night. How deeply the phantasms of this same fear impressed themselves upon me can be gathered from the fact that they return in full force in every serious illness. As soon as the feverishly seething blood rushes over my brain and drowns my consciousness, the oldest devils, driving out and disarming all laterborn ones, come back again, and that best shows, without doubt, how they must once have tortured me.
But by day, as well, my imagination was unusually, and perhaps unhealthily, active. Ugly people, for example, whom my brother laughed at and mimicked, filled me with dread. A little hunch-backed tailor–on either side of whose triangular, deathly-pale face, immoderately long ears stood out, ears moreover which were bright red and transparent–could not pass by without my running with screams into the house; and it almost caused my death when he once, in a passion, followed me, scolding and calling me a stupid youngster, and upbraiding my mother because he thought she was making him play the bug-bear in her domestic discipline. I could not endure the sight of a bone and buried even the smallest one that came to light in our garden; nay later, when in Susanna’s school, I obliterated with my nails the word “rib” in my catechism, because it always brought before me the disgusting object which it designated as vividly as though the object itself lay there in repulsive decay before my eyes. On the other hand, a rose-leaf, which a breeze blew to me over the hedge, was as much to me as–nay, more than the rose itself was to others, and words like tulip and lily, cherry and apricot, apple and pear, immediately transplanted me into spring, summer, and autumn; so that in the primer I liked to spell aloud the pieces in which they occurred better than any others, and grew angry each time when it was not my turn to do so. Only, unhappily, in the world one needs the diminishing glass much oftener than the magnifying, and this holds good even of the beautiful days of youth, except in very rare cases. For as it is said of horses that they respect man only because, on account of the construction of their eye, they see in him a giant, so the child endowed with imagination stands still before a grain of sand only because it seems to him an insuperable mountain. Things in themselves therefore cannot set the standard here; on the contrary, one must inquire about the shadows which they cast; hence the father can often laugh while the son is enduring the tortures of hell because the scales by which they weigh are fundamentally different.
An incident, comical in itself, belongs in this place because it throws a very clear light precisely on this point, so important for education. I was once sent to get a roll for dinner. The baker’s wife handed it to me and good-humoredly gave me at the same time an old nut-cracker, which had probably turned up somewhere when she was cleaning house. I had never seen a nut-cracker before. I was not acquainted with any of its hidden qualities, and took it like any other doll which appealed to me by reason of its red cheeks and staring eyes. Joyously starting on my way home and pressing the nut-cracker, like a newly acquired favorite, tenderly to my breast, I noticed all of a sudden that it opened its jaws and in gratitude for my caresses showed me its cruel white teeth. One may imagine my fright! I shrieked loudly, I ran across the street as though pursued, but I had not sense or courage enough to throw the demon away, and as it naturally sometimes closed its mouth and sometimes opened it again, according to the movements I made while running, I could not help considering it alive, and arrived home half dead. Here I was, of course, laughed at and enlightened as to the truth, at last even scolded. It was all of no avail. It was impossible for me to become reconciled again to the monster although I recognized its innocence, and I did not rest until I had received permission to give it away to another boy. When my father learned of the matter he was of the opinion that there was no other youngster alive to whom such a thing could happen. That was very possible, for there was perhaps no other at whom the cousins of the nut-cracker had made faces from the floor and from the walls in the evening when he was just going to sleep. This very night the activity of my seething imagination culminated in a dream, which was so monstrous and left such an impression upon me that for that very reason it returned seven times in succession. It seemed to me as though the dear Lord, of whom I had already heard so much, had stretched a rope between heaven and earth, had set me upon it, and placed Himself beside it to swing me. Then without rest or pause I flew up and down with dizzy speed; now I was high up among the clouds, my hair fluttering in the wind, and I held on convulsively and closed my eyes; now I was so near the earth again that I could plainly see the yellow sand and the little red and white stones–indeed could even reach them with my toes. I wished to throw myself off; that, however, required resolution, and before I succeeded, I went up in the air again, and there was nothing for me to do but seize the rope once more so as not to fall and be dashed to pieces. The week in which this dream occurred was perhaps the most terrible one of all my childhood, for the memory of it did not leave me the whole day. When, in spite of my struggles, I was put to bed I carried the fear of its return with me, even immediately into my sleep so that it was no wonder the dream continually recurred, until by degrees it faded out.
VIII
I remained in Susanna’s school until my sixth year and learned there to read fluently. I was not permitted to learn to write yet on account of my youth, as it was said; it was the last thing that Susanna had to teach and therefore she prudently held it in reserve. But I had already started with the first necessary exercises in memory; for as soon as the youngster had been promoted from the sexless frock to trousers, and from the primer to the catechism, he had to learn by heart the ten commandments and the chief articles of the Christian Faith as Doctor Martin Luther, the great reformer, formulated them three hundred years ago for the guidance of the Protestant Church. Memorizing went no farther and the tremendous dogmas, which without explanation or elucidation passed from the book into the undeveloped childish brain, became transformed into wonderful and in part grotesque pictures. These, however, did the young mind no manner of harm, but gave it a healthy impetus and stirred it up to prophetic activity. For what does it matter if the child, when it hears of original sin, or of death and the devil, forms a conception or a fantastic image of those profound symbols? To fathom them is the task of our whole lifetime, but the developing man is warned at the very beginning of an all-disposing higher power, and I doubt if the same end could be reached by early initiation into the mysteries of the rule of three or into the wisdom of AEsop’s fables. The remarkable part of it was, to be sure, that in my imagination Luther came to stand almost directly beside Moses and Jesus Christ, but without doubt the reason was that his thundering “What is that?” always resounded immediately after the majestic laconic utterances of Jehovah, and that moreover his rough, expressive face, out of which the spirit speaks all the more forcibly because it must manifestly first gain the victory over the thick resisting flesh, was reproduced in the front of the catechism in heavy black ink. But so far as I know that had no more injurious consequences for me than my belief in the real horns and claws of the devil, or in the scythe of death, and I learned, as soon as there was any necessity for it, to distinguish perfectly between the Saviour and the reformer.
For the rest the modest acquisitions that I had made at Susanna’s sufficed to procure for me a certain respect at home. To Master Ohl it was immensely impressive that I soon knew better than he himself all that the true Christian believes, and my mother was almost moved to tears when for the first time I read the evening blessing aloud by lamp-light, without faltering or stammering. Indeed she felt so edified that she gave over to me forever the office of reader, the duties of which I hereafter performed for a considerable length of time with much zeal and not without self-complacency.
Toward the end of my sixth year a great change, nay a complete transformation, took place in the school-system in Holstein, and consequently in that of my own little fatherland. Up to that time the State had not interfered at all in primary instruction and but little in the secondary. Parents could send their children wherever they wished and the primary schools were purely private institutions, about which even the ministers scarcely troubled themselves, and which often sprang up in the most curious manner. Thus Susanna had arrived in Wesselburen one stormy autumn evening, in wooden shoes, without a penny, and an entire stranger. She had been given a night’s lodging, for sweet charity’s sake, by the compassionate widow of a pastor. The latter discovers that the pilgrim can read and write and also knows quite a little about the Bible and thereupon makes her on the spot the proposition to remain in the town, in her very house, and teach. The youth of the place, or at least the crawling part of the same, had, as it happened, just been orphaned. The former teacher, for a long time highly praised on account of his strict discipline, had undressed a saucy little girl and set her upon a hot stove in punishment for some naughtiness, perhaps in order to procure still greater praise thereby, and that had been too much for even the most unqualified reverers of the rod. Susanna was quite alone in the world, and did not know where she should turn or what she should take up. She therefore gladly, although according to her own words not without misgivings, exchanged the accustomed labor with her hands for the difficult labor with her head, and the speculation succeeded perfectly, and in the shortest space of time imaginable.
To the boys and girls of more advanced age severe, sombre gymnasiums and grammar-schools did indeed open their doors. These were under a sort of supervision and in case of necessity were recruited by the secular arm, if new comers did not enlist of their own accord. But in these institutions too, only the merest manual training was given, in spite of the pompous sounding names which they flaunted, and which to this hour have remained a mystery to me. A brother of my mother’s, universally admired on account of his talents–whom the principal, though by no means over modest, had dismissed with the solemn declaration that he could teach him nothing further because he knew as much as he himself–was indeed a mighty calligrapher, and decorated his New Year’s cards with tints and flourishes in India ink as the old printers Fust and Schoeffer did their incunabula, but nevertheless he could not achieve a single grammatical sentence.
These conditions, undeniably defective and much in need of improvement, were now once and for all to be brought to an end. The people were to be educated from the cradle up, superstition was to be exterminated root and branch. Whether thorough consideration was given to that which should have been considered above everything else must remain in doubt; for the conception of culture is extremely relative, and just as the most disgusting intoxication follows the nipping from every bottle, so superficial encyclopedical knowledge, which at the most can be made broad, engenders precisely the most repulsive kind of arrogance. It will no longer bow to any authority and yet never penetrates to the depths in which the multifarious logical inconsistencies and contradictions find their own solution.
Probably the right method was adopted when they founded normal schools on the one hand and primary schools on the other, so that the essence which had been distilled in the former and poured into the empty schoolmaster heads in the form of rationalism, could from the latter spread itself immediately over the whole land. The result was that a somewhat superstitious generation was followed by an excessively overwise one; for it is astonishing how the grandchild feels when he knows that a nocturnal fiery meteor is composed merely of inflammable gases, while his grandfather sees in it the devil trying to enter some chimney or other with his shining money bags.
But however the matter may have stood in general,–and I repeat my conviction that in this case the happy medium is hard to find,–to me the reform was a great blessing. For Wesselburen, like the other towns, acquired an elementary school and a man was chosen as teacher of it whose name I cannot write down without a feeling of the deepest gratitude, because in spite of his modest position, he exercised an immeasurable influence on my development. He was called Franz Christian Detlefsen and came to us from the neighboring town of Eiderstedt, where he had already held a small official position.
IX
No house is so small as not to seem to the child who has been born in it like a world whose wonders and mysteries he discovers only little by little. Even the poorest cottage has at least a garret to which a ladder leads up, and with what feelings is this climbed for the first time! Some old rubbish is sure to be found up there, which, useless and forgotten, points back to days long past, and reminds us of men whose last bone has already moldered to dust. Behind the chimney there is surely a worm-eaten, wooden chest which excites curiosity. The dust is lying on it hand high, the lock is still there, but there is no need to look for the key; for one can forage in it wherever one wants, and when with fear and trembling the child does so, he pulls out a torn boot, or the broken distaff of a spinning wheel which was laid aside half a century ago. Shuddering he flings away the double find, because involuntarily he asks himself where is the leg that wore the boot and where is the hand that set the wheel in motion. But the mother carefully picks up the one or the other because she happens to need a strap which can be cut out of grandfather’s boot, or because she believes that she can start the fire again with great-aunt’s distaff.
[Illustration: THE DEATH OF KRIEMHILD _From the Painting by Schnorr von Carolsfeld_]
Even though the chest had found its way into the tiled stove during the last hard winter, when people were even forced to burn dried cakes of dung, there is still hidden away in the garret a rusty sickle which once went off to the fields, shining and merry, and stretched low at one swing of the arm a thousand golden-green stalks; and above it hangs the uncanny scythe which a farm-hand once ran into a long time ago, so that he cut off his nose–it having hung too far down over the garret hatch, and he having mounted the ladder too quickly. Beside them the mice are squeaking in the corners, a couple perhaps jump out of their holes and after executing a short dance creep back into them again; a little shiny white weasel is visible for a moment, lifting its clever little head and forepaws in the air, peering and sniffing; and the single sunbeam that enters through some hidden chink is so perfectly like a gold thread that one would like to wind it around one’s finger at once.
The cottage is not provided with a cellar but the burgher-house is, though not indeed on account of the wine but of the potatoes and turnips. The poorer classes keep these out doors under a goodly pile of earth, which they raise above them in the autumn, and in winter, in time of hard frost, carefully cover over with straw or dung as well.
Now to reach the cellar is really much more difficult than to climb to the attic, but where is the child who does not know how to satisfy this longing too in one way or another! He can go to the neighbors and hang on coaxingly to the maid’s apron when she goes down to get something, or can even watch for the moment when the door is left open by mistake, and venture down on his own account. That is dangerous to be sure, for the door may be suddenly closed, and the sixteen-legged spiders, that crawl around the walls in the most hideous deformed shapes, as well as the trickling greenish water that gathers in the cavities intentionally left here and there, do not invite one to tarry long. But what does it matter? One has one’s throat after all, and whoever screams lustily will be heard sooner or later. Now if the house itself suffices, under all circumstances, to make such an impression upon the child, how must the town strike him! When he is taken along by mother or father for the first time, he surely does not start to walk through the tangle of streets without a feeling of astonishment, and it is still less likely that he reaches home again without experiencing a sensation of giddiness. Nay, be perhaps brings back lasting typical conceptions of many objects, lasting in the sense that in after life they imperceptibly stretch and widen _ad infinitum_, but never allow themselves to be effaced; for the primitive impressions of things are indestructible and maintain themselves against all later ones, no matter how far these, in themselves, may surpass the old. For me too, then, it was a moment never to be forgotten, and one whose influence continues to be felt to the present day, when my mother took me with her for the first time on the evening walk which she indulged in on Sundays and holidays during the beautiful summer months. Good gracious, how large this Wesselburen was! Five-year old legs were nearly tired out before they had made the entire round! And what did one not meet on the road! The very names of the streets and squares sounded so puzzling and fantastic! “Now we are on the Lollard’s Foot! That is White Meadow! This way goes over to Bell Mountain! There stands the Oak Nest!” The less apparent reason there was for these names, the more certain it seemed that they concealed some mystery! And then the objects themselves! The church whose pealing voice I had already heard so often; the graveyard with its dark trees and its crosses and tombstones; a very old house, in which a, “forty-eighter” had lived, and in the cellar of which a treasure was said to lie buried, over which the devil kept watch; and, finally, a big fish-pond: all these details coalesced in my mind, as though like the limbs of a gigantic animal they were organically related, into one huge general picture, and the autumn moon shed a bluish light over it. Since that time I have seen St. Peter’s and every German cathedral, I have been to Pere la Chaise and the Pyramid of Cestius, but whenever I think in general of churches, graveyards and the like, they still hover before me today in the shape in which I saw them on that evening.
X
About the same time that I exchanged Susanna’s gloomy room for the newly-built bright and pleasant primary-school, my father also had to leave his little house and move into a hired lodging. That was a strange contrast for me. School had broadened: I gazed out of clear windows with wide frames of fir wood, instead of trying my curious eyes on green glass bottle panes with dirty leaden rims; and the daylight, which at Susanna’s always commenced later and stopped earlier than it should, now came into its full rights. I sat at a comfortable table with a desk and an ink bottle; the odor of fresh wood and paint, which still has some charm for me, threw me into a sort of joyous ecstasy, and when, on account of my reading, I was told by the inspecting minister, to exchange the third bench, which I had modestly chosen, for the first, and moreover to take one of the highest places on the latter, my cup of felicity was nearly full.
Our home, on the contrary, had shrunk and grown darker; there was no more garden now in which I could romp with my comrades when the weather was fine, no hallway to receive us hospitably when it rained and blew. I was restricted to a narrow room in which I myself could hardly move around and into which I dared not bring any playmates, and to the space before the door, where it was seldom that any one would stay with me very long, as the street ran directly past it.
The reason for this change, which brought about such serious consequences, was strange enough. My father at the time of his marriage had, by going security, laden himself with another’s debt, and would no doubt have been driven out much earlier if his creditor had not fortunately had to serve a long term in the penitentiary in punishment for an act of incendiarism. He was one of those terrible men who do evil for evil’s sake, and prefer the crooked path even when the straight one would lead them more quickly and surely to the goal. He had that lowering, wicked, diabolical look in his eyes which no one can endure, and which in a childlike age may have begotten belief in witches and sorcerers, because enjoyment of evil finds expression in it, indeed it seems of necessity to be forced to increase evil. A tavern and general store-keeper by profession and more than prosperous for his station, he might have led the most peaceful and merry existence possible, but he absolutely had to be at enmity with God and the world, and to give free rein to a truly devilish humor, such as I have never come across elsewhere, even in detective stories.
Thus he once, with the greatest friendliness, allowed his wife, at her request, to go to confession on Saturday, but forbade her to take the communion on Sunday, in accordance with the Protestant custom, because she had not asked his permission to do so. When any one of his neighbors happened to be raising a fine young horse, he would go to him and offer an absurdly low price for the animal. If the other refused it, he would say: “I would think about it, and bear in mind the old rule, that one should hand over everything that has once been bargained for; who knows what may happen!” And surely enough the horse, in spite of careful watching, would sooner or later be found in the meadow or in the stable with the tendons of its feet cut and would have to be stabbed to death; so that in the end he could buy whatever happened to please his fancy. He willingly assisted his son-in-law in declaring a fraudulent bankruptcy, and perhaps even beguiled him into it, but when the latter, after having perjured himself, demanded the embezzled goods back again, he laughed him to scorn and dared him to go to law. However he was surprised by his own maid-servant while committing arson and taken in the very act, in spite of his cleverness and his equally great luck, and it was to this circumstance that my father, who had been talked into going security by all sorts of cunning deceptive promises, owed the few years of quiet possession which he enjoyed during his short lifetime.
As soon as the penitentiary had given its charge back to the community we were obliged to leave the abode in which our grandparents had shared joy and sorrow for over half a century. It seemed like the end of the world to my brother and myself when the old pieces of furniture, which up till then had scarcely been moved from their places even when the rooms were whitewashed, suddenly emigrated into the street; when the respectable old Dutch striking-clock that never went correctly and always caused confusion, all at once found itself hanging on a branch of the pear tree, brightly illuminated by the beams of the May sun, while under it stood insecurely the round worm-eaten dining-table which, when there happened to be very little on it, had so often elicited from us the wish that we could have everything that had ever been eaten off it. However, the whole affair was also, quite naturally, in the nature of a spectacle for us, and as in the course of clearing out, a bright colored pipe-head that I had lost a long time before came to light again in some rat hole or other, and, moreover, various odds and ends, which the other families who were moving out with us had come across when dusting in the corners and did not consider worth taking along, fell to our share–since we could make use of the least thing–the day soon began to seem like a holiday. We parted, not indeed without emotion but still without sorrow, from the house in which we had been born.
I did not learn what it really meant until later, though to be sure it was soon enough. Without realizing it myself I had, up to that time, been a little aristocrat, and now ceased to be one. This is how it was. In the same way that the peasant proprietor and the rich burgher look down However, in the end, all this had a very good effect upon me. I had been up to that time a dreamer, who in the daytime liked to creep away behind the hedge or the well, and in the evening cowered in my mother’s lap, or in that of one of our women neighbors, and begged to be told fairy and ghost stories. Now I was driven out into active life. It was a question of defending one’s skin, and though I engaged in my first scuffle only “after long hesitation and many, by no means heroic efforts to escape,” yet the result was such, that I no longer tried to avoid the second, and began at the third or fourth quite to relish the idea. Our declarations of war were even more laconic than those of the Romans or Spartans. The challenger looked over at his opponent during school-hours, when the teacher had turned his back for a moment, clenched his right fist and laid it over his mouth, or rather over his jaw; the opponent repeated the symbolic sign the next moment that it was safe to do so, without by even so much as a look requiring a more specific manifesto, and at midday, in the churchyard, in the vicinity of an old vault, before which there, was a grass plot, the affair was settled in the presence of the whole school, with natural weapons, by wrestling and pounding, in extreme cases also by biting and scratching. I never indeed rose to the rank of a genuine triarian, who made it a point of honor to go about the whole year with a black eye or a swollen nose, but I very soon lost the reputation for being a good child, which I owed to my mother and which up to that time had meant so much to me, and, to make up for it, rose in my father’s estimation, who behaved toward his sons as Frederick the Great did toward his officers, punishing them if they fought and mocking them if they allowed themselves to be trifled with. Once my opponent, while I was lying on top of him pounding him at my ease, bit my finger through to the bone, so that for weeks I could not use my hand for writing. That was, however, the most dangerous wound that I can remember, and, as sometimes happens later in life also, it led to the forming of an intimate friendship.
EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF FRIEDRICH
HEBBEL
Reflections on the world, life, and books, but chiefly on myself, in the form of a journal.
TRANSLATED BY FRANCES A. KING
(1836)
At the moment in which we conceive an ideal, there arises in God the thought of creating it.
Social life in all its _nuances_ is no mere confluence of meaningless accidents; it is the product of the experience of whole millenniums, and our task is to apprehend the correctness of these experiences.
A poetic idea cannot be expressed allegorically; allegory is the ebb-tide at once of the intellect and of the productive power.
Nature eternally repeats the same thought in ever widening expansion; therefore the drop is an image of the sea.
Poetic and plastic art are alike in being both formative; that is to say, they are intended to bring to view a limited amount of matter in definite relations which are fixed by nature; and when the poet gives expression to an idea, the process is exactly the same as when a painter or sculptor represents the noble or beautiful outlines of a body.
“Throw away so that thou shalt not lose!” is the best rule of life.
There are said to have been people who, when a limb had been amputated, still felt pain in the severed member. Twofold mode of all being: what has _been_ from the beginning and what has only _become_. _Cogito ergo sum_; am I not much more under the dominion of the thinking faculty within me than the latter is under my dominion? Individuality is not so much the goal as the way, and not so much the best way as the only one.
Two human beings are always two extremes.
Words are monuments not of what mankind has thought for centuries about certain subjects but only of the fact that it has thought about them. The difference is considerable.
A really great genius can never chance upon an age which would make it impossible for him to allow free play to his superior powers. If he chances upon a dull, exhausted, empty century,–well then, this century is his problem.
Most of my knowledge about myself I have gained in moments when I perceived the peculiarities of other people.
It is a sign of mediocre intelligence to be able to fix one’s attention upon details when contemplating a great work of art; on the other hand, it is a sign of the mediocrity of a work of art (poetic or plastic) if one cannot get beyond the details, if they, so to speak, impede the way to the whole.
Goethe says in regard to _Michael Kohlhaas_ that one should not single out such cases in the general course of human events. That is true in so far as one should not draw any conclusions therefrom to the detriment of mankind. But it seems to me that it is precisely to exceptions of this sort that the poet must turn his attention, in order to show that they, as well as common-place events, have their origin in what is most genuinely human.
Man cannot abstract his ego from the universe. As firmly as he is interwoven with the universe and life, just so firmly does he believe that life and the universe are interwoven with him.
(1837)
It takes a great deal of time merely to perceive where the enigmatical in many things is actually located. Many simply introduce logic into their poetry and believe this is equivalent to motivation.
All reasoning (and here belongs what Schiller, under the trade mark of the sentimental, would smuggle in as poetry) is onesided and allows the heart and mind no further activity than simply to deny or affirm. On the contrary, all that is actual and objective (and here belong the so-called natural sounds, which reveal the innermost essence of a state or a human personality) is infinite, and offers to those who are in sympathy and to those who are not the widest scope for the employment of all their powers.
Philosophy strives ever and always for the absolute, and yet that is properly speaking the task of poetry.
With every human being (let him be who he will) disappears from the world a mystery, that, owing to his peculiar construction, he alone could reveal, and that no one will reveal after him.
It is dangerous to think in images, but it cannot always be avoided; for often, especially in regard to the highest things, image and thought are identical.
A miracle is easier to repeat than to explain. Thus the artist continues the act of creation in the highest sense, without being able to comprehend it.
(1838)
God Himself when, in order to attain great ends, He exerts a direct influence upon an individual, and thus allows Himself an arbitrary interference (if we put the case we must use expressions that fit it) in the world’s machinery, cannot protect His tool from being crushed by the same wheel which this individual has arrested for a moment or has turned in another direction. This is surely the principal tragic motif which underlies the history of the Maid of Orleans. A tragedy which should reflect this idea would produce a great impression through the glimpse it would afford into the eternal order of nature, which God Himself may not disturb with impunity.
When the poet attempts to delineate characters by making them speak, he must be careful not to allow them to speak about their own inner life. All their utterances must relate to something external; only then does their inner nature come out vividly and expressively, for it fashions itself only in reflections of the world and of life.
To depict two kindred characters one by means of the other, to have them mutually reflect one another without their becoming aware of it, would surely be the triumph of delineation.
It is a masterly trait in the _Prince of Homburg_ that the suspicion that the Elector has had the Prince condemned to death, not so much on account of the act of overhastiness committed on the battlefield as for another reason, does not arise spontaneously in the Prince’s soul, but is first awakened by Hohenzollern’s questioning.
A double process must take place in the mind of the true poet before it can evolve anything. The crude matter must be resolved into an idea, and the idea must condense again into a form. Man is the continuation of the act of creation, an eternally growing, never completed creation, which prevents the termination of the world and keeps it from congealing and hardening. It is highly significant (this thought led me to the one I have just expressed) that everything which exists as a human conception is never wholly and perfectly–only fragmentarily–embodied in nature, and everything which exists perfectly and completely in nature eludes human conception, man’s own nature not excepted. Thus we know and define right and wrong, virtue and innocence (the latter as soon as we have lost it), but not life itself, etc. Where knowledge has been vouchsafed us, there nature requires our cooeperation.
The first and last aim of art is to render intuitively perceptible the process of life itself, to show how the soul of man develops in the atmosphere surrounding him, let it be suited to him or not, how good engenders evil within him, and evil in turn produces something less evil, and how this eternal growth has a limit so far as our apprehension is concerned, but none at all in reality; this is symbolization. It is an error when men say that only the fully developed is matter for the poet; on the contrary, what is in process of development, what is first begotten in conflict with the elements of creation, that is matter for him. What is finished can be only a plaything of the waves, it can only be destroyed and devoured by them; can art have anything to do with that which is most common, in other words, most universal? But what is in process of development must pass from one form into another at the hands of the poet, it must never as formless soft clay dissolve before our eyes into chaos and confusion; it must always, in a certain sense, be at the same time a finished product, just as in the universe we never encounter naked raw material. Man exists only because of his future; an inexplicable mystery, but one that may not be denied. Man, therefore, cannot be brought before us as something complete in himself; for not how he affects the world but how the world affects him arouses our interest and is of importance to us; the great forces and powers outside of him find embodiment by exerting an influence over him, and thus lose their formidableness, the riddle of the universe is solved as soon as it finds utterance, and even though at the end a question remains, we can bear this much easier than an empty nothing.
Not only in art but in history as well life sometimes assumes a form, and art should not seek her subjects and her themes where this has occurred.
God was a mystery to Himself before the creation; He had to create in order to understand Himself. If only some one thing had been completely explained, then everything would be explained.
The motives before a deed are usually transformed during the deed, and at least seem quite different after the deed: this is an important circumstance which most dramatists overlook.
Lyric poetry has something childlike about it, dramatic poetry something manly, epic poetry something senile.
Two hands can indeed clasp one another but cannot grow together. This is the relation of one individuality to another.
(1840)
From my conception of form many consequences ensue of the most varied kind. In reference to lyric poetry: the whole emotional life is a shower, the emotion which is singled out is a drop illumined by the sun. Dramatic poetry: form is the point where divine and human strength neutralize one another.
The true idyll results when a man is represented as happy and complete in himself within his own appointed sphere. So long as he remains within this sphere fate has no power over him.
Poetry of the highest kind is the true historiography. It grasps the result of historical processes and holds it fast in imperishable images as, for example, Sophocles has done with the idea of Hellenism.
All life is a struggle of the individual with the universe.
Duality pervades all our intuitions and thoughts and every moment of our being, and is our supreme, our last idea. Beside it we, have absolutely no fundamental idea. Life and death, health and sickness, time and eternity: we can imagine and picture to ourselves how one gradually shades off into the other, but not that which lies behind these divided dualities as a common solvent and reconciliation. (1841)
_Antigone_, representing as it does a romantic individual subject in a classical form, is the masterpiece of tragic art.
Life is the attempt of the defiantly refractory part to tear itself loose from the whole and to exist for itself, an attempt that succeeds just so long as the strength endures which was robbed from the whole by the individual separation.
“What a man can become, that he is already.” God will not lay the decisive weight on the sins committed by sinful individuals against one another but only on the sins committed against the idea itself, and there actual and merely possible sins are one and the same.
(1843)
Expiation in tragedy occurs in the interest of the community, not in that of the individual, the hero, and it is not at all necessary, although it is better, that he himself should be conscious of it. Life is the great river, individualities are drops; tragic individualities are, however, blocks of ice which must be liquefied again, and in order that this may be possible they must break and wear themselves away one against the other.
There is only one necessity, which is that the world should continue to exist; what happens to individuals in the world is of no consequence. The evil that they commit must be punished because it endangers the existence of the world; but there is no reason why they should be indemnified for the misfortune that befalls them.
(1844)
Absolutely everything depends upon a right conception of guilt. Guilt must not, in any direction, be confounded with the subordinate conception of sin, which even in the modern drama–where indeed it finds, for reasons which are not far to seek, a wider scope than in the ancient–must always be merged again into the conception of guilt, if the drama is to rise above the anecdotal to the symbolical. For the conception of tragic guilt can be developed only from life itself, from the original incongruity between idea and phenomenon–which incongruity manifests itself in the phenomenon as extravagance, the natural consequence of the instinct of self-preservation and self-assertion, the first and most legitimate of all instincts. But it cannot be developed from one of the many consequences of this original incongruity, which lead us too far down into the errors and aberrations of the individual to allow the working out of the highest dramatic possibilities. So, too, the conception of tragic expiation should be developed only from extravagance, which, since it is irrepressible in the phenomenon, represses the phenomenon, and thus frees the idea again from its imperfect form. It is true the original incongruity between idea and phenomenon remains unremoved and unovercome; but it is evident that in the sphere of life, which art, so long as it understands itself, will never go beyond, nothing can be removed that lies outside this sphere, and that art reaches its supreme goal when it seizes upon the immediate consequence of this incongruity, extravagance, and points out in it the element of self-destruction; but leaves the incongruity enshrouded in the darkness of creation, unexplained, as a fact immediately posited.
(1845)
A genuine drama may be compared to one of those great buildings which have almost as many passages and rooms below the earth as above it. Ordinary people only know the former; the architect knows the latter also.
A king has less right than any other person to be an individual.
(1846)
In the poet humanity dreams. Decidedly, a dream is for the spirit what sleep is for the body.
As every crystallization is dependent upon certain physical conditions, so every individualization of human nature depends upon the state of the historical epoch in which it occurs. To represent these modifications of human nature in their relative necessity is the main task which poetry has to fulfill in contradistinction to history, and here it can, if it attains to pure form, render a supreme service. But it is difficult to separate the merely incidental from the main task and then besides to avoid subjective moods; so that we scarcely have even the beginnings of such poems as now hover before my mind.
(1847)
To present the necessary, but in the form of the accidental: that is the whole secret of dramatic style.
If the characters do not negate the moral idea, what does it matter that the piece affirms it? The negation of the individual factors must be so very decided, precisely in order to give emphasis to the affirmation of the whole.
Human institutions require a man to be a man like other men; but man, whoever and whatever he may be, wishes to be an individual, indeed is, as such, individualized. Hence the rupture.
Let the understanding question in a work of art, but do not let it answer.
(1848)
The understanding no more makes poetry than salt makes food, but it is necessary to poetry as salt is to food.
(1849)
One does not sit down to play on the piano in order to verify mathematical laws. Just as little does one write poetry in order to demonstrate something. Oh, if people would only learn to comprehend that! Indeed the beauty of all the higher activity of man is precisely the fact, that ends which the individual never even thinks of are attained thereby.
(1853)
The process of dramatic individualization is perhaps best illustrated by comparison to water. Everywhere water is water and man is man, but as the former acquires a mysterious flavor from every stratum of earth that it flows or trickles through, so man acquires a peculiarity from his time, his nation, history, and fate.
(1857) Man would perhaps still have as acute senses as animals, if thinking did not divert him from the outer world.
(1859)
Ideas are the same thing in the drama that counterpoint is in music; nothing in themselves but the primary condition for everything.
(1861)
(Concerning my _Nibelungen_.)
It seems to me that a purely human tragedy, natural in all its motifs, can be constructed upon the mythical foundation inseparable from this subject, and that so far as my powers permit I have constructed one. The mysticism of the background should at most remind us that what we hear in this poem is not the seconds’ clock, which measures off the existence of gnats and ants, but the clock that marks the hours only. Let the reader who is nevertheless disturbed by the mythical foundation consider that, if he examines closely, he will also discover such a basis in man himself, and that, too, in the mere man, in the representative of the species, and not only in the more specific branch of the same, in the individual. Or may man’s fundamental qualities, either physical or mental, be accounted for, that is to say, can they be deduced from any other organic canon than the one which has been posited once for all with man himself, and which cannot be traced farther back to a final primitive cause of things, or be critically resolved into its components? Are they not in part, as for example most of the passions, opposed to reason and conscience, therefore to the very faculties of man which, being quite general and disinterested, may most safely be designated as those which connect him immediately with the universe, and has this contradiction ever been explained away? Why, then, in art negate an act upon which is founded even our view of nature?
Otto Prechtler related to me the following incident. When Grillparzer made my acquaintance upon my arrival in Vienna he said to Prechtler: “No one on earth will be able to influence this man. One person might have done so, but he is dead; I mean Goethe.” A few years later he added, “I was mistaken, not even Goethe would have been able to influence him.”
(1863)
I do not know the world, for although I myself represent a piece of it, this is such a minutely small part that no conclusion as to the true nature of the world can be deduced therefrom. Man, however, I know, for I am myself a man, and even though I do not know how he originates in the world, yet I know very well how, having once originated, he reacts upon it. I therefore conscientiously respect the laws of the human soul; in reference to everything else, however, I believe that imagination draws inspiration from the same depths out of which the world itself arose, that is to say, the multifarious series of phenomena which exists at present, but which at some future time, may perhaps be replaced by another.
(To Siegmund Englaender.)
–You wish to believe in the poet as you believe in the Deity; why ascend so high into the region of clouds, where everything ceases to be, even analogy? Would you not probably attain more if you descended to the beast and ascribed to the artistic faculty an intermediate stage between the instinct of the beast and the consciousness of man? There at least we are in the sphere of experience, and have the prospect of ascertaining something real by applying two known quantities to an unknown one. The beast leads a dream life which nature herself immediately regulates and strictly adapts to those purposes, by the attainment of which, on the one hand, the creature itself subsists, but, on the other, the world continues. The artist leads a similar dream life, naturally only as an artist, and probably from the same cause; for the cosmic laws hardly come any more clearly into his field of vision than the organic laws come into that of the beast, and yet he cannot round off and complete any of his images without going back to them. Why then should nature not do for him what she does for the beast? You will, however, find in general–to go still deeper–that the processes of life have nothing to do with consciousness, and artistic generation is the highest of all processes; they differ from the logical precisely in that they absolutely cannot be traced back to definite factors. Who has ever closely watched evolution in any of its phases, and what has the impregnation theory of physiology, in spite of the microscopic detailed description of the working apparatus, done for the solution of the fundamental mystery? Can it explain even a humpback? On the other hand, there can be no complex which it would not be possible to follow up in all its involutions and finally to resolve. The structure of the universe is revealed to us, we can, if we like, play the fiddle for the dance of the heavenly bodies; but the sprouting blade of grass is a riddle and will always remain one. You would therefore be perfectly right in laughing at Newton if he wanted to “play the naive child” and declare that the falling apple had inspired him with the idea of the system of gravitation, whereas it may very well have given him the impetus which started him to reflect upon the subject. On the other hand, you would wrong Dante if you should doubt that Heaven and Hell had arisen in colossal outline before his soul at the mere sight of a wood, half in light and half in shadow. For systems are not dreamed, but neither are works of art made by minute calculations, nor, what amounts to the same thing, since thinking is only a higher kind of arithmetic, thought out. The artistic imagination is the organ which drains those depths of the world which are inaccessible to the other faculties, and in accordance herewith, my mode of viewing things puts, in place of the false realism which takes the part for the whole, only the true realism, which also comprises what does not lie on the surface. For the rest, this false realism is not curtailed thereby, for even though one can no more prepare oneself for writing poetry than for dreaming, yet dreams will always reflect daily and yearly impressions, and no less do poems reflect the sympathies and antipathies of the author. I believe all these propositions are simple and comprehensible. Whoever refuses to recognize them must throw the half of literature overboard, for example _Edipus at Colonus_ (for geography knows nothing of sacred groves), Shakespeare’s _Tempest_ (for there is no such thing as magic), _Hamlet_ and _Macbeth_ (for only a fool is afraid of ghosts, etc.); nay he must also–and this even he who might be ready to make the other sacrifices would find it hard to bring himself to do–he must also place the French at the head of what remains; for where can one find realists like Voltaire, etc.? This, to me, seems to demonstrate my proposition, at least the counter-test is made.
THE LIFE OF OTTO LUDWIG
By A.R. HOHLFELD, Ph.D.
Professor of German Literature, University of Wisconsin
The career of Otto Ludwig belongs to a sad period in nineteenth century literature in Germany. Sad not because of any lack of works of originality and power, but sad because of the wanton neglect with which the German public of those years treated its ablest and most forceful writers. The historian Treitschke, in an essay probably written not long after the death of Otto Ludwig, sarcastically says in direct reference to the latter’s tragic life: “No nation reads more books than ours, none buys fewer.” To be sure, Germany was then a poor country and its readers had some excuse for being economical in supplying their literary wants. But there was no excuse for the notorious narrowness of vision and judgment shown by many of the leading critics, theatres, and literary journals of that time. Writers of mediocre talent were praised to the skies. But old Grillparzer, Hebbel and Ludwig, Keller, Raabe, Storm, and others who brought a really new and vital message were left to bear the burden of neglect, if not of animosity. No wonder that in foreign lands, after the middle of the nineteenth century, contemporary German literature fell into an almost universal disrepute from which it is only slowly recovering at present. Foreign critics were justified in judging the significance of the literary output of Germany by those writers on whom the Germans themselves were placing the seal of national approval. Zschokke, Gerstaecker, Auerbach, Spielhagen, not to mention the ubiquitous Muehlbach or Marlitt or Polko–these were the names which in America, for instance, figured most prominently in the magazines between 1850 and 1880. [Illustration: OTTO LUDWIG] [Blank Page] Their works were reviewed and translated. They were considered as the representatives of Germany in the literary parliament of nations, while those of her men of letters whom we have since learned to recognize as the real forces of her mid-century literature remained unknown. Of Ludwig, who clearly belongs to this more select group, the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _North American Review_, for obvious reasons, reviewed at some length his _Studies in Shakespeare_; but, as far as the present writer’s knowledge goes, not one of his works was ever translated in this country until the _Hereditary Forester_ appeared in _Poet Lore_ only a few years ago.
Otto Ludwig was born in 1813 in Eisfeld, a small town picturesquely situated in the foothills of the southern slope of the Thuringian Forest, and his entire life was spent within the limited confines of Thuringia and Saxony. Leipzig and Dresden, not much over one hundred English miles to the northeastward of Eisfeld, were the only two larger cities with which he ever became acquainted, and, even when living there, it was characteristic of him to take refuge in some rustic suburb or near-by village. Ludwig’s parents belonged to the “leading families” of their town and were in very comfortable circumstances at the time of his birth and early childhood. Sudden reverses, however, soon interfered with the boy’s prospects in life. At the age of twelve, he lost his father, six years later his mother. After the father’s death a well-to-do uncle took it upon himself to care for the boy, whom he intended to be his heir and his successor in business. But neither the imaginative, nervously sensitive mother, nor the well-meaning but happy-go-lucky uncle were able to furnish that guidance which the delicate and prematurely contemplative youth needed. After only a short period of irregular schooling, Ludwig, sixteen years old, had to enter his uncle’s business; but a few years of apprenticeship convinced even the uncle that the young man was hardly on his right track as a salesman of groceries. A renewed effort to take up systematic school work with the view of preparing for one of the learned professions did not prove any more successful, and, in 1833, Ludwig, who had always shown an unusual talent for music and enjoyed excellent instruction in it, decided to become a musician. Continuing his secluded life at Eisfeld he devoted himself for years to the leisurely study and composition of music, until a few successful amateur performances of some operatic compositions of his attracted attention to him in musical circles in Meiningen, the near-by ducal residence. He was granted a scholarship amply sufficient to permit him to perfect his musical education at Leipzig under Mendelssohn, then the renowned director of the famous _Gewandhaus_ concerts. But the large city only deterred the shy recluse, Mendelssohn showed little appreciation for Ludwig’s efforts to cultivate a realistically characteristic style of musical expression, and finally a severe spell of illness came to make the Leipzig venture a complete failure.
After a year’s absence we thus find Ludwig again at home. But his experiences in the great world were not to be without consequences. While he was at Leipzig his homesickness had made him paint in rosy colors the dreamy hermit-life at Eisfeld. Now, however, after his return, he became keenly conscious of the pettiness and inadequacy of his surroundings and of the lack of well-defined purpose in his life thus far. It was during this period of introspection and doubt that he finally decided to devote himself to a literary career. He took up the study of English, plunged into Shakespeare and Goethe, and worked assiduously on a number of dramatic and novelistic ventures. In 1843 he again left Eisfeld, this time for good, and first turned to Leipzig and then to Dresden. Efforts to get some of his dramas accepted by the Leipzig and Dresden theatres continued to prove fruitless. But in 1844, after his uncle’s death, he had come into possession of a small fortune, and as his habits were always exceedingly frugal, he now saw before himself the assurance of a few years free from all care. In characteristic fashion he again created for himself a quiet retreat, partly in the idyllic surroundings of Meissen, partly in Meissen itself, the charmingly picturesque town of historic fame not far from Dresden, on the Elbe. He soon became engaged to a lovable young woman, who entered heart and soul into all of his hopes and plans, and with but brief interruptions he continued to live here in rustic retirement, until the year 1850 at last was destined to bring him recognition and fame.
Thus far none of Ludwig’s writings, aside from a mere trifle or two, had found their way before the public. As many as five or six regular dramas had been completed, but none had been printed, none performed. But now he finished his _Hereditary Forester_ and with it made a deep impression upon his influential friend Eduard Devrient, the famous actor of the Dresden court theatre. Through Devrient’s mediation the drama was accepted at Dresden and, although its reception by the public was at first a divided one, it was at once recognized by friend and foe as a literary and theatrical event of great significance. Though late, yet all of a sudden, Ludwig, like Byron, awoke to find himself famous. When, in 1852, he at last felt able to marry the woman of his love, his life battle seemed to have been won for good. In the same year, 1852, he published his second great drama, _The Maccabeans_, which, though not attaining the popularity of the _Hereditary Forester_, did even more perhaps to enhance the poet’s fame. He could now count among the steadily widening circle of his friends and admirers men like Julian Schmidt, the prominent critic and editor, Gustav Freytag, and Berthold Auerbach. At Auerbach’s suggestion, Ludwig for awhile turned to narrative literature and in the years 1855 and 1856 published his two best stories, the _Heiterethei_ and _Between Heaven and Earth_–the former again the more popular, the latter of higher literary merit. These brief years from 1850 to 1856 were the zenith of Ludwig’s career, the height of his productivity as an artist and of his success and happiness as a man. But already the shadows were gathering which were to cast such a deep gloom over the last years of the poet’s life.
In 1856 he was again stricken by what seemed to be the same mysterious illness, never fully explained, that had befallen him in Leipzig. He recovered, to be sure, for the time being, but his ailments returned again and again. From about 1860 Ludwig practically never was a well man. Confined to the house and soon to his bed, he slowly wasted away. The tenderest care of his devoted wife and the affection of a few loyal friends could do but little to relieve the most excruciating pain or to keep away the actual want that began to knock at his door. Ludwig had never learned to look upon his art as a commercial asset; his few published works had never brought him much return, and his own slender means had for some time been exhausted. Some gifts of honor were bestowed upon the invalid by authors’ societies and princely patrons, but they came too late to prevent the inevitable. As late as 1859 Ludwig still had hope for the future. “I see before me,” he wrote in his diary, “a veritable world of conceptions and forms which I might conquer if, freed from the weight that keeps me down, I could take wings again. I believe it would not be too late yet.” It was not to be. Successful production of a high order would probably have been impossible under such circumstances in any case. With Ludwig it was further prevented by an obstacle of a psychological nature. As the feeling of health and strength and ease of mind departed from him, there came in its place an ever growing, almost morbid, spirit of self-questioning criticism and doubt. As the springs of creative energy ceased flowing, Ludwig thought he could replenish them by turning to theory and analysis. In the free intervals between the attacks of his illness, when his mind worked as vigorously as ever, the luckless poet filled volume upon volume with esthetic and ethical reflections upon poetry and literature. From Shakespeare especially he thought he might be able to wrest those last secrets of an art which tantalizingly hovered before his vision. In these studies, fragmentary, ill-organized, not prepared for publication as they are, we nevertheless possess a veritable treasure-house of soundest reflection and subtlest intuition on many of the fundamental questions of poetry, especially of the drama. They have often been compared with Lessing’s _Hamburg Dramaturgy_, of which, in many respects, they are the worthiest continuation. But in this unequal struggle Ludwig became less and less able to give life and color to his own conceptions or to be satisfied with his results when he had done so. How many could safely try to measure up to a standard taken directly from Shakespeare! Plan upon plan was started and laid aside. A field of ruins, disquieting, threatening, piled up around the lonesome fighter who slowly succumbed beneath the crushing greatness of his vision. Noble, but also tragic beyond words it is when, shortly before his death, Ludwig declared to one of his friends that even in his suffering no poet had ever been to him such a source of strength as Shakespeare, to whom he owed far more than the clarification of his ideals of art. Thus the mariner sang the praises of the ocean as it was about to engulf his shipwrecked craft. Ludwig died in Dresden in February, 1865, fifty-two years of age. Of his three surviving children, two sons came to this western hemisphere and attained, in successful business and professional life, to positions of honor and influence among the German element of Southern Brazil.
Aside from the posthumous _Studies_ just spoken of, Ludwig’s fame as a writer rests entirely on the two dramas, the _Hereditary Forester_ and _The Maccabaeans_, and on the two long novel-like stories, the _Heiterethei_ and _Between Heaven and Earth_. They represent practically everything that he ever published during his lifetime. The few insignificant lyrics, the additional dramas and stories, partly completed and partly fragmentary, which have become known after his death, have added no new traits to the picture of Ludwig as it will remain in the history of German literature, and they can well be omitted from consideration in this brief appreciation. It must be admitted that it is a rare phenomenon to see lasting fame and influence built on such a slender amount of work and on so brief a period of productivity. But within this limited range Ludwig must be recognized as a writer of unusual powers of observation and sympathy, of imagination and embodying execution. Truthful to himself and to the ideals of his art, uninfluenced by the popular demands of the day or by any desire for gain or fame, free from everything that smacks of sham or artifice, he succeeded in creating works that speak to us with the robustness and authority of life itself and yet are ennobled by the graces of a selective and restraining art.
In his _Hereditary Forester_ Ludwig produced one of the best middle-class tragedies of modern literature, combining in it, as indeed he had set out to do, highest literary merit with impelling effectiveness upon the stage. “It is exceedingly easy,” he said, “to write a poetic drama if one does not care to keep an eye upon the stage, or one that is a successful stage play, but without poetry. * * * I shall do what I can to help create that really healthy condition of the drama which consists in the intimate union of poetry and the stage.” Following in the footsteps of Schiller in his _Intrigue and Love_ and of Hebbel in his _Maria Magdalena_, he has not attained, it is true, the massive solidity of the latter, nor has he breathed into his drama that lofty spirit of social challenge that wings the former. On close inspection, the construction of Ludwig’s drama shows undeniable flaws of motivation. The playwright has allowed too free a play to chance and slender probability. The spirit of the revolutionary unrest of 1848 is in the background, especially in the tavern scene of the third act, but it does not in any way organically connect the family tragedy which we witness with the broad movements of contemporary public life. But the play is indeed, as Ludwig desired it to be, “a declaration of war against the unnaturalness and conventionalities of our latter-day stage literature.” The life-like characters which it portrays, the convincing language which they speak, the carefully drawn _milieu_ in which they move, the intense struggle of passions in which they are engaged-these are all handled with a skill as rare as it is artistically true to life. And even though the atmosphere enveloping it all seems to combine the realism of Ludwig’s maturity with the romantic pre-disposition of his earlier works, it remains in fine keeping with that shadowy forest-world which forms the setting of the play.
Ludwig’s next drama, _The Maccabaeans_, was of a radically different mold. From prose we pass to verse, from humble middle-class life to the traditional grandeur of classical tragedy, from the narrow circle of domestic happenings to a Shakespearean canvas of broad historical associations, from contemporary Germany to those heroic struggles in which, in the second century, B.C., the Jews under the leadership of Judas Maccabaeus defended their national and religious freedom against Syrian oppression. In this drama also, certain faults of construction are evident. There is a lack of central unity of interest, in part due, no doubt, to the long processes of development which the play underwent before completion. But again, there is the same masterly technique in all matters of detail, a wonderful strength and beauty of language, subtle and convincing character-portrayal and a splendid realization of that ethnic atmosphere of Jewish life and character in which the drama moves and from which its conflicts spring.
Of the two stories of Ludwig, the _Heiterethei_ is in every way the lighter; nevertheless, it is one of the best of those famous stories from peasant life in which German literature is so rich. More artistic than Jeremias Gotthelf and in a deeper sense truer to life than Auerbach, Ludwig has here created a popular tale of great charm and power. The “poetic realism” of his manner and the subdued ethical didacticism of his purpose have been skillfully united in forming an excellent example of truly popular art. The story is that of the gradual mellowing and final happy marriage of two young people who, with the best of hearts, are veritable firebrands of self-willed defiance to everything suggesting outside interference. The nickname of the girl, “Heiterethei,” given her on account of her bright and sunny disposition, explains the title of the story. And it must not be left unsaid that, despite the underlying seriousness of the character-development portrayed, the story as a whole is characterized by a sovereign play of humor, at times a bit grotesque and boisterous, maybe, but none the less irresistible in its quaint charm and deeper meaning.
In _Between Heaven and Earth_, Ludwig finally achieved his masterpiece, creating a work in which vision and workmanship are both on the highest level and thoroughly worthy of each other. No “hero” in the traditional sense, no glamor of what is commonly regarded as “poetic,” no broad social background, no philosophic outlook, but within a narrow, and if you will, commonplace range, the author here permits us to get same of the profoundest glimpses of human life and character. It is a story of slaters working on steep roofs and tall church spires; and as does their scaffolding, so the poet tries to move along “between heaven and earth,” his feet and eyes firmly fastened to life’s realities, his heart and soul lifted into the realm of the ideal, the eternal. Thus interpreted, the title of the story may indeed be taken as a symbol of that principle of “poetic realism” which Ludwig strove for and of which the story is one of the best embodiments. The technique of the work, to be sure, is that of Ludwig’s day, not of our own. There are long descriptions and reflections and a good deal of direct psychological analysis, in all of which the narrator does not hesitate to speak from his subjective point of view. Such a method modern theorists would feign stamp as a crime against the spirit of epic art, as though a novel were a drama, and genuine narration did not by nature participate of both the objective and subjective manner of presentation. But even if these things were undeniable flaws of technique, which we are far from admitting, they certainly cannot mar genuine art in its essential beauty and appeal. The Thuringian landscape and the life of the small town embedded in it, the tragic happenings in the Nettenmair family, the slow processes of soul-life in the two hostile brothers and the martyred woman between them–all this is made to live before our eyes with such simple and yet absolutely adequate means that we get from it that deep and satisfying feeling of harmony of content and form that characterizes a true masterpiece of art. Character drawing and milieu painting, always Ludwig’s strong points, have again been most felicitously handled. With equal success the author has developed the plot of the story which, in a few memorable scenes, attains to truly dramatic scope and power. More admirable than everything else, however, is the subtly realistic treatment of the psychological processes in Fritz Nettenmair. His gradual deterioration, step by step, from self-indulgent joviality, through envy and jealousy, to the hatred of despair that does not even shrink from fratricide, is depicted with masterly insight and consistency. This phase of Ludwig’s art strikes us as fresh and modern today, and it must have appeared like a revelation to a generation that did not yet, know Flaubert’s _Madame Bovary_ or George Eliot’s _Adam Bede_.
Considered in his totality as man and as artist, Ludwig cannot be counted among the names of the very first rank in German nineteenth century literature. To him cannot be assigned the unequivocal greatness of a Kleist, a Hebbel, a Keller. The narrowness of the circumstances of his life and the invalidism of his mature years combined with, and no doubt were aided by, an apparent lack of robustness and forcefulness of character and temperament, and thus conspired to keep him from attaining that victorious self-assertion, that sovereign balance between volition and power, without which true greatness in the full sense of the word is impossible. But among the leading names of second rank, his will always occupy a place of distinction. If his was not the work of a Messiah, it was that of a John the Baptist. Having been nurtured in the traditions of the romanticism of Tieck, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, he was one of the first to experience the artistic charm and possibilities of unidealized reality and to respond to its call. It was he who seems to have coined the phrase, even if he was not first to formulate the principle, of that restrained or “artistic realism” that tries to set its standards half-way between subjectively idealistic and objectively naturalistic art. Even his extravagant admiration for Shakespeare was chiefly due to the fact that he saw in his art the supreme embodiment of this principle. Ludwig did not renounce beauty of art except where it infringed upon the one thing needful–essential truthfulness to reality, especially in all that pertains to what Hebbel called “the laws of the human soul.” Many of the utterances of Ludwig’s _Studies_ are as startlingly modern, not to say Ibsenesque, as similar ones in Hebbel’s _Diaries_, in their frank recognition of the solemn claims of reality, even ugly reality, upon the honest artist who endeavors to interpret life in its entirety. For art, too, like all other achievements of human culture, according to Ludwig, must render service unto life. It is its function to furnish insight into life, mastery over life. “Rather no poetry at all,” he exclaims, “than a poetry that robs us of the joy of living, that makes us unproductive in life, that, instead of nerving us for life, unnerves us for it.”
In German literature Ludwig thus occupies a not unimportant place. Far more penetrating and far more artistic than “realists” like Auerbach or Spielhagen he paved the way for the coming of Anzengruber who, in turn, anticipated the realism of the moderns in more, ways than is generally recognized. Ludwig will always be a figure of prominence in the history of the modern middle-class tragedy, in the development of the story dealing with village life, in the efforts to emphasize the value of a literature close to the native soil, in the attempts of German criticism to fathom the secret of Shakespearean art. More than that, however. When the final account of the gradual evolution of nineteenth century realism will some time be written from another than a one-sidedly French point of view, a place of honorable recognition will be due to the thoughtful and forceful author of the _Studies_ and _Between Heaven and Earth_.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 6: The extracts from _The Prince of Homburg_ are taken from Mr. Hagedorn’s translation, Volume IV of THE GERMAN CLASSICS.]
* * * * *
OTTO LUDWIG
* * * * *
THE HEREDITARY FORESTER
A TRAGEDY IN FIVE ACTS
* * * * *
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
STEIN, _a rich manufacturer and country gentleman_.
ROBERT, _his son_.
CHRISTIAN ULRICH, _forester on the estate of Duesterwalde, called “The Hereditary Forester_.”
SOPHY, _his wife_.
ANDREW, _forester’s assistant _}
MARY } _their children_. WILLIAM }
WILKENS, _a wealthy farmer, uncle of_ SOPHY.
_The Pastor of Waldenrode_.
MOeLLER, _Stein’s bookkeeper_.
GODFREY, _a hunter_.
WEILER, _keeper in Ulrich’s forest_.
_The proprietor of the “Boundary Inn.”_
FREI }
LINDENSCHMIED} _Poachers_.
KATHARINE }
BASTIAN, _Stein’s valet_.
_Two porters._
_The scene is alternately the forester’s house at Duesterwalde and Stein’s mansion at Waldenrode; once, in Act III, the Frontier Inn and the Dell._
THE HEREDITARY FORESTER (1850)
TRANSLATED BY ALFRED REMY, A.M.
Professor of Modern Languages, Brooklyn Commercial High School.
ACT I
_The_ FORESTER’S _house at Duesterwalde_.
_In the back of the room a folding door and a closet; at either side ordinary doors. On the right, a window; on the left, in the rear, the stove; more to the front a cuckoo-clock; then a rack where several rifles are hanging, among them two double-barreled ones, hunter’s bags and similar utensils; and a book shelf on which are a Bible and hymn-books._
SCENE I
_Behind the scenes musicians are heard playing._ WEILER, _looking about him, slowly through the centre door; the_ FORESTER’S _wife at the same time from the left with an air of being very busy. Then_ ANDREW, WILLIAM, _and finally_ MARY.
SOPHY. There, the musicians have come already. I wonder where I put the cellar-key. The musicians must have something to drink. You here, Weiler?
WEILER.
Yes, I’m here. But where is the old man–the forester?
SOPHY.
My husband? Isn’t he outside?
WEILER.
I want to see him about the wood-cutters.
SOPHY.
Can’t you wait?
WEILER.
Wait? Bless you, no. I have my hands full.
SOPHY.
Then get along with you!
WEILER (_quietly filling his short clay pipe with tobacco_).
Yes.
SOPHY.
Is he perhaps already with Herr Stein–
WEILER.
Yes; the sand was already strewn on Tuesday. And the garlands outside at the door. If I do not mistake we are today celebrating the engagement of Miss Mary to Mr. Robert Stein? Then they will be even more chummy when he can say “my father-in-law, Mr. Stein.” And that is by no means all. Now Stein has also bought the estate where Ulrich is forester. The fat lawyer from town fixed up the deeds yesterday. And this morning Stein got out of bed as proprietor of Duesterwalde.
SOPHY.
The table here–
WEILER (_while they carry the table together, on the left_).
Won’t Ulrich have an easy time of it, now that his old friend has become his master, and is going to be his father-in-law into the bargain!
SOPHY.
Nearer the stove. We must get in one more table.
WEILER (_chuckling to himself_).
Regular ale-house politicians those two, Stein and Ulrich. Every day they have a row.
SOPHY.
What are you talking there about a row? They’re only fooling.
[_Exit in a hurry; reenters immediately afterward_.]
WEILER (_going as far as the door, gesticulating behind her_).
Fooling? Don’t you believe it! The one is hot-headed, the other obstinate. Ever since there was talk of buying the estate, the clearing of the forest has been the daily apple of discord. Rich people always pretend to know something, even if they don’t know the first thing. Now Stein thinks that by cutting down every other row of trees in the forest the first would have more light and room for growing. Maybe Godfrey has hunted that up in some old book. But when he comes with that theory to Ulrich he strikes the wrong man. Only day before yesterday I thought they were going to eat each other up, so that nothing would remain of either of them. Stein says: “The forest will be _cleared_.” The forester: “The forest will _not_ be cleared.” Stein: “But it _shall_ be cleared.” The forester: “It _shall not_ be cleared.” Stein jumps up, buttons his coat, two buttons at a time, knocks down two chairs, and is gone. Well, I thought, that is the end of the friendship! But Lord bless my soul! That happened the night before last, and early yesterday morning–it was scarcely dawn–who comes whistling from the castle and knocks at the forester’s window, as though nothing had happened? That’s Stein. And who has already been waiting for a quarter of an hour and grunts forth from under his white moustache, “I’m coming?” That’s Ulrich. And now both of them, without asking each other’s pardon, go together out into the forest, as though there never had been a quarrel! Nobody takes any notice of it any longer. At night they quarrel, in the morning they go together into the forest, as though it could not be otherwise. But does he treat his boy any differently? Robert? Does he? Didn’t he want to leave home half a dozen times? And afterward he is too good. Queer business that!
[During the last words he has retreated step by step before the table which ANDREW and WILLIAM are carrying in and placing against the table which already stands on the left in the direction from the footlights to the back of stage.]
SOPHY.
Put it here. That’s it. And now chairs, boys. From the upper room. Weiler might–
[ANDREW and WILLIAM exeunt.]
WEILER (in a hurry, making ready to go).
Well, if Weiler did not have his hands full! Outside with the wood-cutters–then with the fir-seed and with the salt–there–I don’t know where my head’s standing with all the work. And the old man–
[A pantomime expressive of ULRICH’S severity.]
SOPHY.
Well, I don’t want to be to blame if you neglect anything.
[Exit.]
WEILER (very calmly).
All right!
[Laying his finger against his nose.]
But I wonder whether he will still always be the first to patch up differences? I mean Stein. Now that he is the forester’s master? Well; I don’t want to prophesy, but–the master is always right because he is the master. Humph! I wish something serious would come to pass. At any rate, I am getting tired of merry faces again.
[Enter ANDREW and WILLIAM, carrying chairs.]
SOPHY. Seven, eight, nine, ten, chairs.
[Counts once more, softly.]
Correct!
WEILER.
That was a queer expression that Godfrey had on his face yesterday, Mr. Andrew. I bet you had another quarrel with him.
SOPHY.
With that vindictive brutal fellow?
[_She sets the table._]
ANDREW.
Who can live in peace with him?
SOPHY.
Well, what’s done can’t be undone. But you’d better look out for him.
WEILER.
So say I. For there is not a muscle in that fellow’s body which is not wicked.
ANDREW.
I am not afraid of him.
SOPHY.
Come, William; run into the garden. Get me some crown-imperials, snap-dragons, larkspurs–something big, so that it will look like something in the glass. The Steins will soon be here with Mr. Moeller, the bookkeeper.
WEILER.
The old bachelor–
SOPHY.
Just look, Andrew, whether cousin Wilkens isn’t coming yet.
[_ANDREW and WILLIAM exeunt._]
WEILER.
Wilkens is coming too?
SOPHY (with emphasis).
Mr. Wilkens? He will not stay away when his niece’s daughter announces her engagement.
WEILER.
No, indeed. He has money, has Mr. Wilkens. The richest farmer for miles around. I also was Mr. Weiler once, before my creditors closed up my coffee store. Then they jammed the “Mr.” in the door and there it is still. Now people say simply “Weiler”–“Weiler might”–“As long as Weiler is here,” etc. Sometimes, when I am in the humor, I get angry over it. A strange pleasure, to get angry, but it is a pleasure. Hey! There comes the bride-to-be.
[_MARY appears; during the following dialogue the women set the table._]
WEILER.
My! Like a squirrel!
SOPHY.
Weiler means to pay you a compliment, Mary. He has a peculiar manner.
WEILER.
That is true. It does not matter whether the flattery is coarse or fine. If a woman only notices that one means to flatter her, she is satisfied. It is just as when boys stroke a kitten. Whether they pet it gently or roughly, whether it likes it or not, it cannot help purring.
MARY.
And I presume you mean to pet me with this comparison.
WEILER.
If you feel obliged to purr it must have been a petting.
MARY (looking out of the window).
He is coming, mother.
SOPHY.
Who? Robert?
WEILER.
I had better be off to my wood-cutters. Otherwise the old man will make a row.
[Exit.]
SOPHY (calling after him).
If you cannot come in I will save your portion. An uncomfortable fellow! And it is not likely that he will acquire polite manners at this late day. That is a relic of his better days. And for that reason your father is indulgent with him because they were old comrades. Godfrey also was one of them. When he had wasted his property in drink he fell in with Stein.
[_Surveying the table_.]
Here at the head the father of the bridegroom; next to him your father; then the good droll pastor. If it had not been for him, Robert would have gone long ago.
MARY.
Mother, at that time Robert was so wild, so impetuous–
SOPHY.
You are right. At that time the pastor and we could scarcely keep him. [_Counts once more the afore-mentioned persons_.] Then here Mr. Moeller; and there your godfather, my cousin Mr. Wilkens; then I myself here; there Robert and you; finally, at the foot, Andrew and William. How the time passes! If I think back to my engagement day! Then I was not as happy as I am today.
MARY.
Mother, I wonder whether every girl that is to become a bride feels as I do? SOPHY. Not every one has such good cause to be glad as you have.
MARY.
But is it gladness that I feel? I am so depressed, mother, so–
SOPHY.
Of course. You are like the flower on which clings a dewdrop. It hangs its head, and yet the dew is no burden.
MARY.
I feel as if it were wrong of me to leave my father, even if it is to go with Robert.
SOPHY.
The Bible says, “A woman shall leave father and mother and cleave to her husband.”–But my case was quite different from yours. Your father was a stately man, no longer quite young, but tall and straight like a pine. At that time his beard was still black as coal. Many a girl that would gladly have married him set her cap at him; that I knew. But to me he seemed too serious, too severe. He took everything so seriously, and he cared nothing for amusements. It was no easy matter to accommodate myself to him. I never had to worry about the means of subsistence; and if I should say that he ever treated me harshly, I should be telling a lie; even if he pretended to be harsh.
MARY.
And that was all you had expected? Was that all.
SOPHY.
As if the good Lord could grant everything that is dreamt of by the heart of a girl who herself does not know what she desires! But here comes Robert. We will be quite merry, so that no gloomy thoughts will come to him.
SCENE II
_Enter_ ROBERT.
ROBERT.
Good morning, mother dear. Good morning, Mary.
SOPHY.
Good morning, Mr. Bridegroom-to-be.
ROBERT.
How glad I am to see you so cheerful. But you Mary? You are sad, Mary? And I am so joyful, so over-joyful. The whole morning I have been in the forest. Where the bushes glistened brightest with the dew, there I penetrated, so that the moist branches should strike my heated face. There I threw myself down on the grass. But I could not stay anywhere. It seemed that nothing could relieve me but weeping aloud. And you–at other times as blithe and gay as a deer–you are sad? Sad on this day?
SOPHY. She surely is glad, dear Robert. But you have known her ever since she was a little child; when others proclaim their happiness, she hides hers in silence. MARY. No, Robert. Sad I surely am not. I only have a feeling of solemnity; it has been upon me the whole morning. Wherever I go, it seems to me as though I were in church. And–
ROBERT.
And what?
MARY.
And that now my life is soon to be broken off behind me, as if it were sinking away from under me, and that a new life is to begin, one so entirely new–don’t be offended, good Robert! This to me is so strange–gives me such a feeling of anxiety!
ROBERT.
A new life? A life so entirely new? Why, Mary, it is still the old life, only more beautiful. It is still the dear old tree under which we are sitting, only it is in bloom now.
MARY.
Besides, the thought that I am to leave my father and my mother! The old I see passing away, the new I do not see coming; the old I must leave, the new I cannot reach.
ROBERT.
Must you indeed leave your father? Do we not all remain together? Has not my father for this very reason bought the estate of Duesterwalde?
SOPHY.
That is the anxiety which comes over one in spring; one knows not whence it comes, nor why. And yet in spring one knows that everything will become more and more beautiful, and still one feels anxious. One is merely afraid of happiness. Now that my dearest wishes are about to be fulfilled–do I not experience the same sensation? I might almost wish that a roast were burnt, or that a piece of the fine china were broken. Happiness is like the sun: There must be a little shade if man is to be comfortable. I will just go to see whether a little shade of that sort has not been cast in the kitchen.
[_Exit to the left_.]
MARY (_after she and_ ROBERT _have been standing in silence facing each other_).
Is anything wrong with you, Robert?
ROBERT.
With me? No. Perhaps–
MARY.
You are still angry with your father? And he is so good!
ROBERT.
That is just the trouble, that he is so good. Oh, his kindness is almost more difficult to bear than his violent temper! His anger only hurts, his kindness humiliates; over against his anger I set my pride–but what