At the close of February, 1848, I was in Nuremberg. My original
intention had been to pass a couple of days there on my way to
Munich, that being, I thought, as much time as could reasonably be
spared for so small a city, beckoned as my footsteps were to the
Bavarian Athens, of whose glories of ancient art and German
Renaissance I had formed expectations the most exaggerated--
expectations fatal to any perfect enjoyment, and certain to be
disappointed, however great the actual merit of Munich might be.
But after two days at Nuremberg I was so deeply interested in its
antique sequestered life, the charms of which had not been deadened
by previous anticipations, that I resolved to remain there until I
had mastered every detail and knew the place by heart.
I have a story to tell which will move amidst tragic circumstances
of too engrossing a nature to be disturbed by archaeological
interests, and shall not, therefore, minutely describe here what I
observed in Nuremberg, although no adequate description of that
wonderful city has yet fallen in my way. To readers unacquainted
with this antique place, it will be enough to say that in it the
old German life seems still to a great extent rescued from the all-
devouring, all-equalizing tendencies of European civilization. The
houses are either of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or are
constructed after those ancient models. The citizens have
preserved much of the simple manners and customs of their
ancestors. The hurrying feet of commerce and curiosity pass
rapidly by, leaving it sequestered from the agitations and the
turmoils of metropolitan existence. It is as quiet as a village.
During my stay there rose in its quiet streets the startled echoes
of horror at a crime unparalleled in its annals, which, gathering
increased horror from the very peacefulness and serenity of the
scene, arrested the attention and the sympathy in a degree seldom
experienced. Before narrating that, it will be necessary to go
back a little, that my own connection with it may be intelligible,
especially in the fanciful weaving together of remote conjectures
which strangely involved me in the story.
The table d'hote at the Bayerischer Hof had about thirty visitors--
all, with one exception, of that local commonplace which escapes
remark. Indeed this may almost always be said of tables d'hote;
though there is a current belief, which I cannot share, of a table
d'hote being very delightful--of one being certain to meet pleasant
people there." It may be so. For many years I believed it was so.
The general verdict received my assent. I had never met those
delightful people, but was always expecting to meet them. Hitherto
they had been conspicuous by their absence. According to my
experience in Spain, France, and Germany, such dinners had been
dreary or noisy and vapid. If the guests were English, they were
chillingly silent, or surlily monosyllabic: to their neighbors they
were frigid; amongst each other they spoke in low undertones. And
if the guests were foreigners, they were noisy, clattering, and
chattering, foolish for the most part, and vivaciously commonplace.
I don't know which made me feel most dreary. The predominance of
my countrymen gave the dinner the gayety of a funeral; the
predominance of the Mossoo gave it the fatigue of got-up
enthusiasm, of trivial expansiveness. To hear strangers imparting
the scraps of erudition and connoisseurship which they had that
morning gathered from their valets de place and guide-books, or
describing the sights they had just seen, to you, who either saw
them yesterday, or would see them to-morrow, could not be
permanently attractive. My mind refuses to pasture on such food
with gusto. I cannot be made to care what the Herr Baron's
sentiments about Albert Durer or Lucas Cranach may be. I can
digest my rindfleisch without the aid of the commis voyageur's
criticisms on Gothic architecture. This may be my misfortune. In
spite of the Italian blood which I inherit, I am a shy man--shy as
the purest Briton. But, like other shy men, I make up in obstinacy
what may be deficient in expansiveness. I can be frightened into
silence, but I won't be dictated to. You might as well attempt the
persuasive effect of your eloquence upon a snail who has withdrawn
into his shell at your approach, and will not emerge till his
confidence is restored. To be told that I MUST see this, and ought
to go there, because my casual neighbor was charme, has never
presented itself to me as an adequate motive.
From this you readily gather that I am severely taciturn at a table
d'hote. I refrain from joining in the "delightful conversation"
which flies across the table, and know that my reticence is
attributed to "insular pride." It is really and truly nothing but
impatience of commonplace. I thoroughly enjoy good talk; but, ask
yourself, what are the probabilities of hearing that rare thing in
the casual assemblage of forty or fifty people, not brought
together by any natural affinities or interests, but thrown
together by the accident of being in the same district, and in the
same hotel? They are not "forty feeding like one," but like forty.
They have no community, except the community of commonplace. No,
tables d'hote are not delightful, and do not gather interesting
people together.
Such has been my extensive experience. But this at Nuremberg is a
conspicuous exception. At that table there was one guest who, on
various grounds, personal and incidental, remains the most
memorable man I ever met. From the first he riveted my attention
in an unusual degree. He had not, as yet, induced me to emerge
from my habitual reserve, for in truth, although he riveted my
attention, he inspired me with a strange feeling of repulsion. I
could scarcely keep my eyes from him; yet, except the formal bow on
sitting down and rising from the table, I had interchanged no sign
of fellowship with him. He was a young Russian, named Bourgonef,
as I at once learned; rather handsome, and peculiarly arresting to
the eye, partly from an air of settled melancholy, especially in
his smile, the amiability of which seemed breaking from under
clouds of grief, and still more so from the mute appeal to sympathy
in the empty sleeve of his right arm, which was looped to the
breast-button of his coat. His eyes were large and soft. He had
no beard or whisker, and only delicate moustaches. The sorrow,
quiet but profound, the amiable smile and the lost arm, were
appealing details which at once arrested attention and excited
sympathy. But to me this sympathy was mingled with a vague
repulsion, occasioned by a certain falseness in the amiable smile,
and a furtiveness in the eyes, which I saw--or fancied--and which,
with an inexplicable reserve, forming as it were the impregnable
citadel in the center of his outwardly polite and engaging manner,
gave me something of that vague impression which we express by the
words "instinctive antipathy."
It was, when calmly considered, eminently absurd. To see one so
young, and by his conversation so highly cultured and intelligent,
condemned to early helplessness, his food cut up for him by a
servant, as if he were a child, naturally engaged pity, and, on the
first day, I cudgeled my brains during the greater part of dinner
in the effort to account for his lost arm. He was obviously not a
military man; the unmistakable look and stoop of a student told
that plainly enough. Nor was the loss one dating from early life:
he used his left arm too awkwardly for the event not to have had a
recent date. Had it anything to do with his melancholy? Here was
a topic for my vagabond imagination, and endless were the romances
woven by it during my silent dinner. For the reader must be told
of one peculiarity in me, because to it much of the strange
complications of my story are due; complications into which a mind
less active in weaving imaginary hypotheses to interpret casual and
trifling facts would never have been drawn. From my childhood I
have been the victim of my constructive imagination, which has led
me into many mistakes and some scrapes; because, instead of
contenting myself with plain, obvious evidence, I have allowed
myself to frame hypothetical interpretations, which, to acts simple
in themselves, and explicable on ordinary motives, render the
simple-seeming acts portentous. With bitter pangs of self-reproach
I have at times discovered that a long and plausible history
constructed by me, relating to personal friends, has crumpled into
a ruin of absurdity, by the disclosure of the primary misconception
on which the whole history was based. I have gone, let us say, on
the supposition that two people were secretly lovers; on this
supposition my imagination has constructed a whole scheme to
explain certain acts, and one fine day I have discovered
indubitably that the supposed lovers were not lovers, but
confidants of their passions in other directions, and, of course,
all my conjectures have been utterly false. The secret flush of
shame at failure has not, however, prevented my falling into
similar mistakes immediately after.
When, therefore, I hereafter speak of my "constructive
imagination," the reader will know to what I am alluding. It was
already busy with Bourgonef. To it must be added that vague
repulsion, previously mentioned. This feeling abated on the second
day; but, although lessened, it remained powerful enough to prevent
my speaking to him. Whether it would have continued to abate until
it disappeared, as such antipathies often disappear, under the
familiarities of prolonged intercourse, without any immediate
appeal to my amour propre, I know not; but every reflective mind,
conscious of being accessible to antipathies, will remember that
one certain method of stifling them is for the object to make some
appeal to our interest or our vanity: in the engagement of these
more powerful feelings, the antipathy is quickly strangled. At any
rate it is so in my case, and was so now.
On the third day, the conversation at table happening to turn, as
it often turned, upon St. Sebald's Church, a young Frenchman, who
was criticising its architecture with fluent dogmatism, drew
Bourgonef into the discussion, and thereby elicited such a display
of accurate and extensive knowledge, no less than delicacy of
appreciation, that we were all listening spellbound. In the midst
of this triumphant exposition the irritated vanity of the Frenchman
could do nothing to regain his position but oppose a flat denial to
a historical statement made by Bourgonef, backing his denial by the
confident assertion that "all the competent authorities" held with
him. At this point Bourgonef appealed to me, and in that tone of
deference so exquisitely flattering from one we already know to be
superior he requested my decision; observing that, from the manner
in which he had seen me examine the details of the architecture, he
could not be mistaken in his confidence that I was a connoisseur.
All eyes were turned upon me. As a shy man, this made me blush; as
a vain man, the blush was accompanied with delight. It might
easily have happened that such an appeal, acting at once upon
shyness and ignorance, would have inflamed my wrath; but the appeal
happening to be directed on a point which I had recently
investigated and thoroughly mastered, I was flattered at the
opportunity of a victorious display.
The pleasure of my triumph diffused itself over my feelings towards
him who had been the occasion of it. The Frenchman was silenced;
the general verdict of the company was too obviously on our side.
From this time the conversation continued between Bourgonef and
myself; and he not only succeeded in entirely dissipating my absurd
antipathy--which I now saw to have been founded on purely imaginary
grounds, for neither the falseness nor the furtiveness could now be
detected--but he succeeded in captivating all my sympathy. Long
after dinner was over, and the salle empty, we sat smoking our
cigars, and discussing politics, literature, and art in that
suggestive desultory manner which often gives a charm to casual
acquaintances.
It was a stirring epoch, that of February, 1848. The Revolution,
at first so hopeful, and soon to manifest itself in failure so
disastrous, was hurrying to an outburst. France had been for many
months agitated by cries of electoral reform, and by indignation at
the corruption and scandals in high places. The Praslin murder,
and the dishonor of M. Teste, terminated by suicide, had been
interpreted as signs of the coming destruction. The political
banquets given in various important cities had been occasions for
inflaming the public mind, and to the far-seeing, these banquets
were interpreted as the sounds of the tocsin. Louis Philippe had
become odious to France, and contemptible to Europe. Guizot and
Duchatel, the ministers of that day, although backed by a
parliamentary majority on which they blindly relied, were
unpopular, and were regarded as infatuated even by their admirers
in Europe. The Spanish marriages had all but led to a war with
England. The Opposition, headed by Thiers and Odillon Barrot, was
strengthened by united action with the republican party, headed by
Ledru Rollin, Marrast, Flocon, and Louis Blanc.
Bourgonef was an ardent republican. So was I; but my color was of
a different shade from his. He belonged to the Reds. My own
dominant tendencies being artistic and literary, my dream was of a
republic in which intelligence would be the archon or ruler; and,
of course, in such a republic, art and literature, as the highest
manifestation of mind, would have the supreme direction. Do you
smile, reader? I smile now; but it was serious earnest with me
then. It is unnecessary to say more on this point. I have said so
much to render intelligible the stray link of communion which
riveted the charm of my new acquaintance's conversation; there was
both agreement enough and difference enough in our views to render
our society mutually fascinating.
On retiring to my room that afternoon I could not help laughing at
my absurd antipathy against Bourgonef. All his remarks had
disclosed a generous, ardent, and refined nature. While my
antipathy had specially fastened upon a certain falseness in his
smile--a falseness the more poignantly hideous if it were
falseness, because hidden amidst the wreaths of amiability--my
delight in his conversation had specially justified itself by the
truthfulness of his mode of looking at things. He seemed to be
sincerity itself. There was, indeed, a certain central reserve;
but that might only he an integrity of pride; or it might be
connected with painful circumstances in his history, of which the
melancholy in his face was the outward sign.
That very evening my constructive imagination was furnished with a
detail on which it was soon to be actively set to work. I had been
rambling about the old fortifications, and was returning at
nightfall through the old archway near Albert Durer's house, when a
man passed by me. We looked at each other in that automatic way in
which men look when they meet in narrow places, and I felt, so to
speak, a start of recognition in the eyes of the man who passed.
Nothing else, in features or gestures, betrayed recognition or
surprise. But although there was only that, it flashed from his
eyes to mine like an electric shock. He passed. I looked back.
He continued his way without turning. The face was certainly known
to me; but it floated in a mist of confused memories.
I walked on slowly, pestering my memory with fruitless calls upon
it, hopelessly trying to recover the place where I could have seen
the stranger before. In vain memory traveled over Europe in
concert-rooms, theaters, shops, and railway carriages. I could not
recall the occasion on which those eyes had previously met mine.
That they had met them I had no doubt. I went to bed with the
riddle undiscovered.