Dreary months followed. Aside from the great disappointment the climate
contributed to his misery. The damp autumn, the cold early winter days,
the northern winds were not to his taste. He was a child of sunshine,
not a child of the mild sunshine of the Acropolis, as he thought he was,
but of the burning rays baking the plains of Jehosophat, and the
scorching heat of Jericho. Protest though he might, he was a child of
Canaan. And everything around him was bleak and cold and dismal, and his
heart was burning with a fire of its own, the blood in his veins
seething tumultuously. He wrote much to give expression to his turbulent
thoughts, walked much to dissipate his restlessness, and people called
him an idler, a _Gassenjunge_! He did not care. He shunned people. He
only wished to be a spectator of the passing show of life, and when the
procession provoked laughter in him he laughed with the tears rolling
down his cheeks. For there was pity in his laughter, but those around
him only heard the laughter with no ear for the pitiful undertone.
Albert always hated Prussianism—he had learned to hate it in his
childhood—and Prussianism was the spirit of Hamburg of that day.
Brought up in a Rhenish town under French occupation it was inevitable
that a boy with such keen sensibilities should perceive the difference
between Prussian ponderousness and vulgarity and French sprightliness
and delicacy. His present environment brought back to him his earlier
perceptions.
Albert found himself pondering on Goethe and Lessing. In Goethe he saw
the Spinoza of poetry. He understood what Herder meant when he said, “I
wish that Goethe would for once take some other Latin book in hand
besides that of Spinoza.”
The more he pondered on Goethe and Lessing and Spinoza the more he
revolted against the Philistinism of his environment His unrequited love
added bitterness. He saw the faults of the people around him with the
eyes of an enemy.
And there was hatred all around him. Lessing’s preachments against
hatred had made no impression upon his people. Indeed, they had erected
monuments to his memory but went on hating more than ever. They wanted
none of Lessing’s tolerance, none of the Pantheistic harmony of Goethe.
They wanted strife. Not the strife that begets liberty—liberty of mind
and body—but the strife that begets religious bigotry. Albert wanted to
continue, and combine, the noble work of Lessing and Goethe. He wanted
to teach his countrymen the truth of Lessing and the harmony of Goethe,
but he was as yet too young to know that the reward for such efforts are
loose stones during one’s life and stones cemented into the shape of a
monument when loose stones can no longer do any harm.
He found himself like a nightingale in a crow’s nest. Every time he
began to sing the crows caw-cawed; and the masses have always understood
the caw-caw better than the song of the nightingale.
He was no philosopher content with metaphysical speculations. He was no
Spinoza to be content to grind lenses and subsist on a penny’s worth of
Dutch bread and raisins. Unlike the philosopher’s passion for abstract
truth, truth was meaningless to Albert unless it colored human life. His
asceticism was not that of the monk wilfully denying himself the
pleasures of the body but rather that of the pleasure-seeking maiden who
silently broods in her chamber because she was left out of a festivity.
The world to him was a playground, and he wished to do part of the
playing.
Of late he had tried to get his first poems published in book form but
the publishers could see no merit in them. The verses were too simple to
strike the publishers as extraordinary; and though Goethe had given them
a lesson in simplicity the Germans were still too bombastic to
appreciate any writing unless tumid. Albert felt that as soon as his
poems were published the world would be at his feet. He had been to see
a publisher who was specializing in books that provoked the censor, but
as yet there was nothing in Albert’s poems to provoke any one except a
lovesick maiden.
One day he decided to have his poems published at any cost, and show his
uncle—and Hilda—that he was no mere clerk. But where could he get the
money? He only received a salary sufficient for his board and lodgings.
Besides, he did not know how to economize. He soon thought of the
lottery, the living hope, and the despair, of his father’s existence.
Perhaps he might win—somebody won at every drawing! One night he dreamt
that he played the lottery and won. He thought this a good omen and the
following morning gambled away his last _Pfennig_.