When I look at the heading of this chapter, and read there the name of a
little town upon the Rhine--which, doubtless, the majority of my readers
has visited--and reflect on how worn the track, how beaten the path I
have been guiding them on so long, I really begin to feel somewhat
faint-hearted. Have we not all seen Brussels and Antwerp, Waterloo and
Quatre Bras? Are we not acquainted with Belgium, as well as we are with
Middlesex; don’t we know the whole country, from its cathedrals down to
Sergeant Cotton?--and what do we want with Mr. O’Leary here? And the
Rhine--bless the dear man!--have we not steamed it up and down in every
dampschiffe of the rival companies? The Drachenfels and St. Goar, the
Caub and Bingen, are familiar to our eyes as Chelsea and Tilbury Fort.
True, all true, mesdames and messieurs--I have been your fellow-
traveller myself. I have watched you pattering along, John Murray in
hand, through every narrow street and ill-paved square, conversing with
your commissionaire in such French as it pleased God, and receiving his
replies in equivalent English. I have seen you at table d’hôte, vainly
in search of what you deemed eatable--hungry and thirsty in the midst of
plenty; I have beheld you yawning at the opera, and grave at the
Vaudeville; and I knew you were making your summer excursion of
pleasure, ‘doing your Belgium and Germany,’ like men who would not be
behind their neighbours. And still, with all this fatigue of sea and
land, this rough-riding and railroading, this penance of short bed and
shorter board, though you studied your handbook from the Scheldt to
Schaffhausen, you came back with little more knowledge of the Continent
than when you left home. It is true, your son Thomas--that lamblike
scion of your stock, with light eyes and hair--has been initiated into
the mysteries of _rouge et noir_ and _roulette_; madame, your wife, has
obtained a more extravagant sense of what is becoming in costume; your
daughter has had her mind opened to the fascinations of a French
_escroc_ or a ‘refugee Pole’; and you, yourself, somewhat the worse for
your change of habits, have found the salads of Germany imparting a
tinge of acidity to your disposition. These are, doubtless, valuable
imports to bring back--not the less so, that they are duty free. Yet,
after all, ‘joy’s recollection is no longer joy’; and I doubt if the
retrospect of your wanderings be a repayment for their fatigues.
‘Would he have us stay at home, Pa?’ lisps out, in pouting accents of
impatience, some fair damsel, whose ringlets alone would make a furore
at Paris.
Nothing of the kind, my dear. Travel by all means. There’s nothing will
improve your French accent like a winter abroad; and as to your carriage
and air, it is all-essential you should be pressed in the waltz by some
dark-moustached Hungarian or tight-laced Austrian. Your German will fall
all the more trippingly off your tongue that you have studied it in the
land of beer and beetroot; while, as a safeguard against those
distressing sensations of which shame and modesty are the parents, the
air of the Rhine is sovereign, and its watering-places an unerring
remedy. All I bargain for is, to be of the party. Let there be a corner
in a portmanteau, or an imperial, a carriage-pocket, or a courier’s sack
for me, and I’m content. If ‘John’ be your guide, let Arthur be your
mentor. He’ll tell you of the roads; I, of the travellers.
To him belong pictures and statues, churches, châteaux, and curiosities;
_my_ province is the people--the living actors of the scene, the
characters who walk the stage in prominent parts, and without some
knowledge of whom your ramble would lose its interest. Occasionally, it
is true, they may not be the best of company. Que voulez-vous? ‘If ever
you travel, you mustn’t feel queer,’ as Mathews said or sung--I forget
which. I shall only do my endeavour to deal more with faults than vices,
more with foibles than failings. The eccentricities of my fellow-men are
more my game than their crimes; and therefore do not fear that in my
company I shall teach you bad habits, nor introduce you to low
acquaintances; and above all, no disparagement--and it is with that
thought I set out--no disparagement of me that I take you over a much-
travelled track. If it be so, there’s the more reason you should know
the company whom you are in the habit of visiting frequently; and
secondly, if you accompany me here, I promise you better hereafter; and
lastly, one of the pleasantest books that ever was written was the
_Voyage autour de ma Chambre_. Come, then, is it agreed--are we fellow-
travellers? You might do worse than take me. I’ll neither eat you up,
like your English footmen, nor sell you to the landlord, like your
German courier, nor give you over to brigands, like your Italian valet.
It’s a bargain, then; and here we are at Bonn.
It is one o’clock, and you can’t do better than sit down to the table
d’hôte: call it breakfast, if your prejudices run high, and take your
place. I have supposed you at ‘Die Sterne’ (The Star), in the little
square of the town; and, certes, you might be less comfortably housed.
The cuisine is excellent, both French and German, and the wines
delicious. The company at first blush might induce you to step back,
under the impression that you had mistaken the salon, and accidentally
fallen upon a military mess. They are nearly all officers of the cavalry
regiments garrisoned at Bonn, well-looking and well-dressed fellows,
stout, bronzed, and soldierlike, and wearing their moustaches like men
who felt hair on the upper lip to be a birthright. If a little too noisy
and uproarious at table, it proceeds not from any quarrelsome spirit:
the fault, in a great measure, lies with the language. German, except
spoken by a Saxon madchen, invariably suggests the idea of a row to an
uninterested bystander; and if Goethe himself were to recite his ballads
before an English audience, I’d venture long odds they’d accuse him of
blasphemy. Welsh and Irish are soft zephyrs compared to it.
A stray Herr Baron or two, large, portly, responsible-looking men, with
cordons at their button-holes, and pipe-sticks projecting from their
breast-pockets, and a sprinkling of students of the higher class--it is
too dear for the others--make up the party. Of course, there are
English; but my present business is not with them.
By the time you have arrived at the ‘Rae-braten, with capers’--which on
a fair average, taken in the months of spring and summer, may be after
about an hour and a half’s diligent performance--you’ll have more time
to survey the party, who by this time are clinking their glasses, and
drinking hospitably to one another in champagne; for there is always
some newly returned comrade to be feted, or a colonel’s birthday or a
battle, a poet or some sentimentalism about the Rhine or the Fatherland,
to be celebrated. Happy, joyous spirits, removed equally from the
contemplation of vast wealth or ignominious poverty! The equality so
much talked of in France is really felt in Germany; and however the
exclusives of Berlin and Vienna, or the still more exalted coteries of
Baden or Darmstadt, rave of the fourteen quarterings which give the
_entrée_ to their salons, the nation has no sympathy with these follies.
The unaffected, simple-minded, primitive German has no thought of
assuming an air of distance to one his inferior in rank; and I have
myself seen a sovereign prince take his place at table d’hôte beside the
landlord, and hobnob with him cordially during dinner.
I do not mean to say that the German has no respect for rank; on the
contrary, none more than he looks up to aristocracy, and reveres its
privileges; but he does so from its association with the greatness of
the Fatherland. The great names of his nobles recall those of the heroes
and sages of whom the traditions of the country bear record; they are
the watchwords of German liberty or German glory; they are the monuments
of which he feels proudest. His reverence for their descendants is not
tinged with any vulgar desire to be thought their equal or their
associate; far from it, he has no such yearnings. His own position could
never be affected by anything in theirs. The skipper of the fishing-
craft might join convoy with the great fleet, but he knows that he only
commands a shallop after all.
This, be it remarked, is a very different feeling from what we
occasionally see nearer home. I have seen a good deal of student-life in
Germany, and never witnessed anything approaching that process so
significantly termed ‘tuft-hunting’ with us. Perhaps it may be alleged
in answer that rank and riches, so generally allied in this country, are
not so there; and that consequently much of what the world deems the
prestige of condition is wanting to create that respect. Doubtless this
is, to a certain extent, true; but I have seen the descendants of the
most distinguished houses in Germany mixing with the students of a very
humble walk on terms the most agreeable and familiar, assuming nothing
themselves, and certainly receiving no marks of peculiar favour or
deference from their companions. When one knows something of German
character, this does not surprise one. As a people, highly imaginative
and poetic in temperament, dreamy and contemplative, falling back rather
on the past than facing the future, they are infinitely more assailable
by souvenirs than promises; and in this wise the ancient fame of a
Hohenstauffen has a far firmer hold on the attachment of a Prussian than
the hopes he may conceive from his successor. It was by recalling to the
German youth the former glories of the Fatherland, that the beautiful
queen of that country revived the drooping spirit of the nation. It was
over the tomb of the Great Frederick that the monarch swore to his
alliance with Alexander against the invading legions of France. The
songs of Uhland and Goethe, the lyrics of Burger and Korner, have their
source and spirit in the heartfelt patriotism of the people. The great
features of the land, and the more striking traits of national
character, are inextricably woven in their writings, as if allied to
each other; and the Rhine and the male energy of German blood, their
native mountains and their native virtues, are made to reciprocate with
one another; and thus the eternal landmarks of Germany are consecrated
as the altars of its faithfulness and its truth.
The students are a means of perpetuating these notions. The young German
is essentially romantic. A poet and a patriot, his dreams are of the
greatness of his Fatherland, of its high mission among the nations of
Europe; and however he may exaggerate the claims of his country or
overrate his own efforts in her cause, his devotion is a noble one; and
when sobered down by experience and years, it gives to Germany that race
of faithful and high-souled people, the best guardians of her liberty
and the most attached defenders of her soil.
A great deal of _mauvaise plaisanterie_ has been expended by French and
English authors on the subject of the German student. The theme was
perhaps an inviting one. Certainly nothing was easier than to ridicule
absurdities in their manner and extravagances in their costume--their
long pipes and their long beards, their long skirts and long boots and
long sabres, their love of beer and their law-code of honour. Russell,
in his little work on Germany--in many respects the only English book
worth reading on that country--has been most unjustly severe upon them.
As to French authors, one never expects truth from _them_, except it
slip out unconsciously in a work of fiction. Still, they have displayed
a more than common spirit of detraction when speaking of the German
student. The truth is, they cannot forget the part these same truths
performed in repelling the French invasion of their country. The spirit
evoked by Kôrner, and responded to from the Hartz to the Black Forest,
was the death-note to the dominant tyranny of France. The patriotism
which in the Basque provinces called into existence the wild Guerillas,
and in the Tyrol created the Jager-bund, in more cultivated Germany
elicited that race of poets and warriors whose war-songs aroused the
nation from its sleep of slavery, and called them to avenge the injuries
of their nation.
Laugh, then, if you will, at the strange figures whose uncouth costumes
of cap and jack-boot bespeak them a hybrid between a civilian and a
soldier. The exterior is, after all, no bad type of what lies within;
its contradictions are indeed scarcely as great. The spectacles and
moustaches, the note-book beneath the arm and the sabre at the side, the
ink-bottle at the button-hole and the spurs jingling at the heels, are
all the outward signs of that extraordinary mixture of patient industry
and hot-headed enthusiasm, of deep thought and impetuous rashness, of
matter-of-fact shrewdness and poetic fervour, and, lastly, of the most
forgiving temper allied to an unconquerable propensity for duelling.
Laugh if you will at him, but he is a fine fellow for all that; and
despite all the contrarieties of his nature he has the seed of those
virtues which in the peaceful life of his native country grow up into
the ripe fruits of manly truth and honesty.
I wish you then to think well of the Bursche, and forgive the
eccentricities into which a college life and a most absurd doctrine of
its ordinances will now and then lead him. That wild-looking youth, for
all that he has a sabre-wound across his cheek, and wears his neck bare
like a Malay, despite his savage moustache and his lowering look, has a
soft heart, though it beats behind that mass of nonsensical braiding. He
could recite you for hours long the ballads of Schiller and the lyrics
of Uhland; ah! and sing for you, too, with no mean skill, the music of
Spohr and Weber, accompanying himself the while on the piano, with a
touch that would make your heart thrill. And I am not sure that even in
his wildest moments of enthusiastic folly he is not nearly as much an
object of hope to his country as though he were making a book on the
Derby, or studying ‘the odds’ among the ‘legs’ at Tattersall’s.
Above all things, I would beg of you not to be too hasty in judging him.
Put not much trust in half what English writers lay to his charge;
believe not one syllable of any Frenchman on the subject--no, not even
that estimable Alexandre Dumas, who represents the ‘Student’ as
demanding alms on the highroad--thus confounding him with the Lehr-
Junker (the travelling apprentice), who by the laws of Germany is
obliged to spend two years in wandering through different countries
before he is permitted to reside permanently in his own. The blunder
would have been too gross for anything but a Frenchman and a Parisian;
but the Rue St. Denis covers a multitude of mistakes, and the Boulevard
de Montmartre is a dispensation to all truth. Howitt, if you can read a
heavy book, will tell you nearly everything a _book_ can tell; but
setting a Quaker to describe Burschen life, was pretty much like sending
a Hindu to report at a county meeting.
Now, all this time we have been wandering from Bonn and its gardens,
sloping down into the very Rhine, and its beautiful park, the former
pleasure-ground of that palace which now forms the building of the
University. There are few sweeter spots than this. You have escaped from
the long, low swamps of Holland, you have left behind you the land of
marsh and fog, and already the mountainous region of Germany breaks on
the view; the Sieben Gebirge are in sight, and the bold Drachenfels,
with its ruined tower on its summit, is an earnest of the glorious
scenery to come. The river itself looks brighter and fresher; its eddies
seem to sparkle with a lustre they know not when circling along the
swampy shores of Nimmegen.
Besides, there is really something in a name, and the sound of
Deutschland is pleasanter than that of the country of ‘dull fogs and
dank ditches’; and although I would not have you salute it, like
Voltaire--
‘Adieu, canaille--canards, canaux!’
still, be thankful for being where you are, take your coffee, and let us
have a ramble through the Park.
Alas! the autumn is running into the winter; each breeze that sighs
along the ground is the dirge over the dead leaves that lie strewn
around us. The bare branches throw their gaunt arms to and fro as the
cold grey clouds flit past; the student, too, has donned his fur-lined
mantle, and strides along, with cap bent down, and hurried step. But a
few weeks since, and these alleys were crowded with gay and smiling
groups, lingering beneath the shadow of tall trees, and listening to the
Jager band that played in yonder pavilion. The grey-haired professor
moved slowly along, uncovering his venerable head as some student
passed, and respectfully saluting him; and there too walked his fair
daughters, the ‘frauleins with the yellow hair.’ How calmly sweet their
full blue eyes! what gentleness is written in their quiet gait! Yet,
see! as each bar of the distant waltz is heard beating on the ear, how
their footsteps keep time and mark the measure! Alas! the summer hours
have fled, and with them those calm nights when by the flickering moon
the pathways echoed to the steps of lingering feet now homeward turning.
I never can visit a University town in Germany without a sigh after the
time when I was myself a Bursche, read myself to sleep each night with
Ludwig Tieck, and sported two broadswords crosswise above my chimney.
I was a student at Göttingen, the Georgia Augusta; and in the days I
speak of--I know not well what King Ernest has done since--it was rather
a proud thing to be ein Göttinger Bursche. There was considered
something of style to appertain to it above the other Universities; and
we looked down upon a Heidelberger or a Halle man as only something
above a ‘Philister.’ The professors had given a great celebrity to the
University too. There was Stromeyer in chemistry, and Hausman in
philology; Behr in Greek, Shrader in botany; and, greater than all, old
Blumenbach himself, lecturing four days each week on everything he could
think of--natural philosophy, physics, geography, anatomy, physiology,
optics, colours, metallurgy, magnetism, and the whale-fishery in the
South Seas--making the most abstruse and grave subjects interesting by
the charm of his manner, and elevating trivial topics into consequence
by their connection with weightier matters. He was the only lecturer I
ever heard of who concluded his hour to the regret of his hearers, and
left them longing for the continuation. Anecdote and illustration fell
from him with a profusion almost inconceivable and perfectly miraculous,
when it is borne in mind that he rarely was known to repeat himself in a
figure, and more rarely still in a story; and when he had detected
himself in this latter he would suddenly stop short, with an ‘Ach Gott,
I’m growing old,’ and immediately turn into another channel, and by some
new and unheard-of history extricate himself from his difficulty. With
all the learning of a Buffon and a Cuvier, he was simple and unaffected
as a child. His little receptions in the summer months were in his
garden. I have him before me this minute, seated under the wide-
spreading linden-tree, with his little table before him, holding his
coffee and a few books--his long hair, white as snow, escaping beneath
his round cap of dark-green velvet, falling loosely on his shoulders,
and his large grey eyes, now widely opened with astonishment at some
piece of intelligence a boy would have heard without amazement, then
twinkling with sly humour at the droll thoughts passing through his
mind; while around him sat his brother professors and their families,
chatting pleasantly over the little news of their peaceful community --
the good vraus knitting and listening, and the frauleins demurely
sitting by, wearing a look of mock attention to some learned
dissertation, and ever and anon stealing a sly glance at the handsome
youth who was honoured by an invitation to the soirée.
How charming, too, to hear them speak of the great men of the land as
their old friends and college companions! It was not the author of
_Wallenstein_ and _Don Carlos_, but Frederick Schiller, the student of
medicine, as they knew him in his boyhood--bold, ardent, and ambitious;
toiling along a path he loved not, and feeling within him the working of
that great genius which one day was to make him the pride of his
Fatherland; and Wieland, strange and eccentric, old in his youth, with
the innocence of a child and the wisdom of a sage; and Hoffman, the
victim of his gloomy imagination, whose spectral shapes and dark
warnings were not the forced efforts of his brain, but the companions of
his wanderings, the beings of his sleep. How did they jest with him on
his half-crazed notions, and laugh at his eccentricities! It was strange
to hear them tell of going home with Hummel, then a mere boy, and how,
as the evening closed in, he sat down to the pianoforte, and played and
sang, and played again for hours long, now exciting their wonder by
passages of brilliant and glittering effect, now knocking at their
hearts by tones of plaintive beauty. There was a little melody he played
the night they spoke of--some short and touching ballad, the inspiration
of the moment--made on the approaching departure of some one amongst
them, which many years after in _Fidelio_ called down thunders of
applause; mayhap the tribute of his first audience was a sweeter homage
after all.
While thus they chatted on, the great world without and all its mighty
interests seemed forgotten by them. France might have taken another
choleric fit, and been in march upon the Rhine; England might have once
more covered the ocean with her fleets, and scattered to the waves the
wreck of another Trafalgar; Russia might be pouring down her hordes from
the Don and Dnieper--little chance had they of knowing aught of these
things! The orchards that surrounded the ramparts shut out the rest of
Europe, and they lived as remote from all the collisions of politics and
the strife of nations as though the University had been in another
planet.
I must not forget the old Hofrath Froriep, Ordentliche-Professor von--
Heaven knows what! No one ever saw his collegium (lecture-room); no one
ever heard him lecture. He had been a special tutor to the Princes--as
the Dukes of Cumberland and Cambridge were then called--about forty
years ago, and he seemed to live upon the memory of those great days
when a Royal Highness took notes beside his chair, and when he addressed
his class as ‘Princes and Gentlemen!’ What pride he felt in his clasp of
the Guelph, and an autograph letter of the Herzog von Clarence, who once
paid him a visit at his house in Gottingen! It was a strange thing to
hear the royal family of England spoken thus of among foreigners, who
neither knew our land nor its language. One was suddenly recalled to the
recollection of that Saxon stock from which our common ancestry
proceeded--the bond of union between us, and the source from which so
many of the best traits of English character take their origin. The love
of truth, the manly independence, the habits of patient industry which
we derived from our German blood are not inferior to the enterprising
spirit and the chivalrous daring of Norman origin.
But to return to the Hofrath, or Privy Councillor Froriep, for so was he
most rigidly styled. I remember him so well as he used to come slowly
down the garden-walk, leaning on his sister’s arm. He was the junior by
some years, but no one could have made the discovery now; the thing
rested on tradition, however, and was not disputed. The Fräulein Martha
von Froriep was the daguerreotype of her brother. To see them sitting
opposite each other was actually ludicrous; not only were the features
alike, but the expressions tallied so completely that it was as if one
face reflected the other. Did the professor look grave, the Fräulein
Martha’s face was serious; did he laugh, straightway her features took a
merry cast; if his coffee was too hot, or did he burn his fingers with
his pipe, the old lady’s sympathies were with him still. The Siamese
twins were on terms of distant acquaintanceship, compared with the
instinctive relation these two bore each other.
How was it possible, you will ask, that such an eternal similarity
should have marked their dispositions? The answer is an easy one. The
fräulein was deaf, perfectly destitute of hearing. The last recorded act
of her auditory nerves was on the occasion of some public rejoicing,
when twenty-four large guns were discharged in a few seconds of time,
and by the reverberation broke every window in Göttingen; the old lady,
who was knitting at the time, merely stopped her work and called out
‘Come in!’ thinking it was a tap at the room door. To her malady, then,
was it owing that she so perfectly resembled the professor, her brother.
She watched him with an anxious eye; his face was the dial that
regulated every hour of her existence; and as the telegraph repeats the
signal that is made to it, yet knows not the interpretation of the sign,
so did she signalise the passing emotions of his mind long perhaps after
her own could take interest in the cause.
Nothing had a stranger effect, however, than to listen to the
professor’s conversation, to which the assent of the deaf old lady
chimed in at short and regular intervals. For years long she had been in
the habit of corroborating everything he said, and continued the
practice now from habit; it was like a clock that struck the hour when
all its machinery had run down. And so, whether the Hofrath descanted on
some learned question of Greek particles, some much-disputed fact of
ancient history, or, as was more often the case, narrated with German
broadness some little anecdote of his student life, the old lady’s ‘Ja,
ja, den sah ich selbst; da war ich auch!’ (Yes, yes, I saw it myself; I
was there, too!) bore testimony to the truth of Tacitus or Herodotus,
or, more remarkable still, to these little traits of her brother’s
youthful existence, which, to say the least, were as well
uncorroborated.
The Hofrath had passed his life as a bachelor--a circumstance which
could not fail to surprise, for his stories were generally of his love
adventures and perils; and all teemed with dissertations on the great
susceptibility of his heart, and his devoted admiration of female
beauty--weaknesses of which it was plain he felt vain, and loved to hear
authenticated by his old associates. In this respect Blumenbach indulged
him perfectly--now recalling to his memory some tender scene, or some
afflicting separation, which invariably drew him into a story.
If these little reminiscences possessed not all the point and interest
of more adventurous histories, to me at least they were more amusing by
the force of truth, and by the singular look, voice, and manner of him
who related them. Imagine, then, a meagre old man, about five feet two,
whose head was a wedge with the thin side foremost, the nose standing
abruptly out, like the cut-water of a man-o’-war gig; a large mouth,
forming a bold semicircle, with the convexity downwards, the angles of
which were lost in a mass of wrinkles on his withered cheeks; two
fierce-looking, fiery, little grey eyes set slantwise in his head
without a vestige of eyelash over them. His hair combed back with great
precision, and tied behind into a queue, had from long pulling gradually
drawn the eyebrows upwards to double their natural height, where they
remained fixed, giving to this uncouth face an expression of everlasting
surprise--in fact, he appeared as if he were perpetually beholding the
ghost of somebody. His voice was a strange, unnatural, clattering sound,
as though the machinery of speech had been left a long while without
oiling, and could not work flippantly; but to be sure, the language was
German, and that may excuse much.
Such was the Herr Hofrath Froriep--once, if you were to believe himself,
a lady-killer of the first water. Indeed, still, when he stretched forth
his thin and twisted shanks attired in satin shorts and black silk
stockings, a gleam of conscious pride would light up his features, and
he would seem to say to himself, ‘These legs might do some mischief
yet.’ Caroline Pichler, the novelist, had been one of his loves, and, if
you believed himself, a victim to his fascinations. However, another
version of the tale had obtained currency, and was frequently alluded to
by his companions at those moments when a more boastful spirit than they
deemed suitable animated his discourse; and at such times I remarked
that the Hofrath became unusually sensitive, and anxious to change the
subject.
It was one evening, when we sat somewhat later than our wont in the
garden, tempted by the delicious fragrance of the flowers and the mild
light of a new moon, that at last the Hofrath’s madchen made her
appearance, lantern in hand, to conduct him home. She carried on her arm
a mass of cloaks, shawls, and envelopes that would have clothed a
procession, with which she proceeded leisurely and artistically to dress
up the professor and his sister, until the impression came over the
bystanders that none but she who hid them in that mountain of wearables
would ever be able to discover them again.
‘Ach Gott,’ exclaimed the Hofrath, as she crowned him with a quilted
nightcap, whose jaws descended and fastened beneath the chin like an
antique helmet, leaving the miserable old face, like an uncouth pattern,
in the middle of the Berlin embroidery--‘Ach Gott, but for that!’
‘But for that!’ reiterated old Hausman, in a solemn tone, as if he knew
the secret grief his friend alluded to, and gave him all his sympathy.
‘Sit down again, Froriep,’ said Blumenbach; ‘it is an hour too soon for
young folk like us to separate. We’ll have a glass of Rosenthaler, and
you shall tell us that story.’
‘Be it so,’ said the Hofrath, as he made signs to the madchen that he
would cast his skin. ‘Ich bin dabei (I ‘m ready).’
‘Wi’ tippenny we fear nae evil; Wi’ usquebaugh we ‘d face the devil,’
quoth Burns; and surely Tarn’s knowledge of human nature took a wide
circuit when he uttered those words. The whole philosophy of temptation
is comprised in the distich, and the adage of coming up ‘to a man’s
price’ has no happier illustration; and certainly, had the poet been a
Bursche in Germany, he could not have conveyed the ‘sliding scale’ of
professors’ agreeability under a more suitable formula. He who would be
civil with a pipe becomes communicative with coffee, and brotherly with
beer; but he opens every secret of his nature under the high-pressure
power of a flask of Rhenish. The very smack of the Hofrath’s lips as he
drained his glass to the bottom, and then exclaimed in a transport, ‘Er
ist zum küssen, der Wein!’ announced that the folding-doors of his heart
stood wide open, and that he might enter who would.
‘Rosenthaler was Goethe’s favourite,’ quoth Stromeyer; ‘and he had a
good taste in wine.’
‘Your great folk,’ said Hausman, ‘ever like to show some decided
preference to one vintage above the rest; Napoleon adopted chambertin,
Joseph the Second drank nothing but tokay, and Peter the Great found
brandy the only fluid to his palate.’
‘A plague on their fancies!’ interrupted old Blumenbach. ‘Let us have
the story!’
‘Ah, well, well,’ said the Hofrath, throwing up his eyes with an air of
sentimentalism, ‘so you shall. Love’s young dream was sweet, after all!
We were in the Hartz,’ continued he, at once springing into his story
with a true Demosthenic abruptness--‘we were in the Hartz Mountains,
making a little tour, for it was semester, and all the classes were
closed in the University. There was Tieck, and Feldtbourg the Dane, and
Upsal, and old Langendorf of Jena, and Grotchen von Zobelschein, and
Mina Upsal, and Caroline, and Martha there--she, poor thing, was getting
deaf at the time, and could not take the same pleasure as the rest of
us. She was always stupid, you know.’
Here he looked over at her, when she immediately responded--
‘Yes, yes, what he says is true.’
‘Each morning we used to set off up the mountains, botanising and
hammering among the limestone rocks, and seeking for cryptogamia and
felspar, lichens and jungermannia and primitive rock--mingling our
little diversions with pleasant talk about the poets, and reciting
verses to one another from Hans Sachs and the old writers, and chatting
away about Schiller: the “Lager” was just come out, and more than one
among us could scarcely believe it was Frederick did it.
‘Tieck and I soon found that we were rivals; for before a week each of
us was in love with Caroline. Now, Ludwig was a clever fellow, and had a
thousand little ways of ingratiating himself with a pretty woman--and a
poetess besides. He could come down every day to breakfast with some ode
or sonnet, or maybe a dream; and then he was ready after dinner with his
bit of poetry, which sometimes, when he found a piano, he ‘d set to
music; or maybe in the evening he’d invent one of those strange
rigmarole stories of his, about a blue-bottle fly dying for love of a
white moth or some superannuated old drone bee, retiring from public
life, and spending his days reviling the rest of the world. You know his
nonsense well; but somehow one could not help listening, and, what’s
worse, feeling interest in it. As for Caroline, she became crazed about
gnats and spiders, and fleas, and would hear for whole days long the
stories of their loves and sorrows.
‘For some time I bore up as well as I could. There was a limit--Heaven
be thanked!--to that branch of the creation; and as he had now got down
to millepedes, I trusted that before the week was over he ‘d have
reached mites, beyond which it was impossible he could be expected to
proceed. Alas! I little knew the resources of his genius; for one
evening, when I thought him running fast aground, he sat down in the
midst of us, and began a tale of the life and adventures of the Herr
Baron von Beetroot, in search of his lost love the Fräulein von
Cucumber. This confounded narrative had its scene in an old garden in
Silesia, where there were incidents of real beauty and interest
interwoven, ay, and verses that would make your heart thrill. Caroline
could evidently resist no longer. The Baron von Beetroot was ever
uppermost in her mind; and if she ate Gurken-salat, it brought the tears
into her eyes. In this sad strait I wandered out alone one evening, and
without knowing it reached the “Rase Mühle,” near Oltdorf. There I went
in and ordered a supper; but they had nothing but thick-milk and kalte-
schade. *
* Thick-milk--a mess of sour cream thickened with sugar and crumbs of
bread _Kallte-schade_--the same species of abomination, the only
difference being beer, for cream, for the fluid.
No matter, thought I--a man in such grief as mine need little care what
he eats; and I ordered both, that I might afterwards decide which I’d
prefer. They came, and were placed before me. Himmel und Erde! what did
I do but eat the two!--beer and cream, cream and beer, pepper and sugar,
brown bread and nutmeg! Such was my abstraction, that I never noticed
what I was doing till I saw the two empty bowls before me. “I am a dead
Hofrath before day breaks,” said I, “and I’ll make my will”; but before
I could put the plan into execution I became very ill, and they were
obliged to carry me to bed. From that moment my senses began to wander;
exhaustion, sour beer, and despair were all working within me, and I was
mad. It was a brief paroxysm, but a fearful one. A hundred and fifty
thousand ridiculous fancies went at racing speed through my mind, and I
spent the night alternately laughing and crying. My pipe, that lay on
the chair beside the bed, figured in nearly every scene, and performed a
part in many a strange adventure.
‘By noon the others learned where I was, and came over to see me. After
sitting for half an hour beside me they were going away, when I called
Caroline and Martha back. Caroline blushed; but, taking Martha’s arm,
she seated herself upon a sofa, and asked in a timid voice what I wished
for.
‘“To hear before I die,” replied I; “to listen to a wonderful vision I
have seen this night.”
“A vision,” said Caroline; “oh, what was it?”
‘“A beautiful and a touching one. Let me tell it to you. I will call it
‘The-never-to-be-lost-sight-of, though not-the-less-on-that-account-to-
be-concealed, Loves of the Mug and the Meerschaum.’”
‘Caroline sprang to my side as I uttered these words, and as she wiped
the tears from her eyes she sobbed forth--
‘“Let me but hear it! let me but hear it!”
‘“Sit down,” said I, taking her hand and pressing it to my lips--“sit
down, and you shall.” With that I began my tale. I suppose,’ continued
the Hofrath, ‘you don’t wish to have the story?’
‘Gott bewahre (Heaven forbid)!’ broke in the whole company in a breath.
‘Leave the Mug and the Meerschaum, and go on with Caroline!’
‘Well, from that hour her heart was mine. Ludwig might call all the
reptiles that ever crawled, every vegetable that ever grew, to his aid--
the victory was with me. He saw it, and, irritated by defeat, returned
to Berlin without bidding us even farewell; and we never heard of him
till we saw his new novel of _Fortunio_. But to go on. The day after
Tieck left us was my birthday, and they all arranged to give me a little
fête; and truly nothing could be prettier. The garden of the inn was a
sweet spot, and there was a large linden like this, where the table was
spread; and there was a chair all decked with roses and myrtle for me--
Caroline herself had done it; and they had composed a little hymn in
honour of me, wherein were sundry compliments to my distinction in
science and poesy, the gifts of my mind and the graces of my person.
Ach, ja! I was handsome then.
‘Well, well, I must close my tale--I cannot bear to think of it even
now. Caroline came forward, dressed in white, with a crown of roses and
laurel leaves intertwined, and approached me gracefully, as I sat
waiting to receive her--all the rest ranged on either side of me.
‘Auf seine Stirne, wo das Licht-----’
(Upon that brow where shines the light)
said Caroline, raising the chaplet.
‘“Ach, Du Heiliger!” screamed Martha, who only that instant saw I was
bareheaded, “the dear man will catch his death of cold!” and with that
she snatched this confounded nightcap from her pocket, and rushing
forward clapped it on my head before I could know it was done. I
struggled and kicked like one possessed, but it was of no use; she had
tied the strings in a black knot, and they could neither be loosened nor
broken. “Be still there!” said she; “thou knowest well that at fifty-
three----” You can conceive,’ said the Hofrath in a parenthesis, ‘that
her passion obliterated her memory. At fifty-three one can’t play the
fool like at twenty.’
‘Ach, ja! it was over with me for ever. Caroline screamed at the cap,
first laughing, then crying, and then both; the rest nearly died of it,
and so did I. Caroline would never look at me after, and I came back
home, disappointed in my love--and all because of a woollen nightcap.’
When the Hofrath concluded, he poured the remainder of the Rosenthaler
into his glass, and bowing to each in turn, wished us good-night, while
taking the Fraulein Martha’s arm they both disappeared in the shade, as
the little party broke up and each wended his way homeward.