The Eil Wagen, into whose bowels I had committed myself on leaving
Frankfort, rolled along for twenty-four hours before I could come to any
determination as to whither I should go; for so is it that perfect
liberty is sometimes rather an inconvenience, and a little despotism is
now and then no bad thing; and at this moment I could have given a ten-
gulden piece to any one who should have named my road, and settled my
destination.
‘Where are we?’ said I, at length, as we straggled, nine horses and all,
into a great vaulted _porte cochère_.
‘At the “Koenig von Preussen,” mein Herr,’ said a yellow-haired waiter,
who flourished a napkin about him in truly professional style.
‘Ah, very true; but in what town, city, or village, and in whose
kingdom?’
‘Ach, du lieber Gott!’ exclaimed he, with his eyes opened to their
fullest extent. ‘Where would you be but in the city of Hesse-Cassel, in
the Grand-Duchy of Seiner Königlichen Hoheit-----’
‘Enough, more than enough! Let me have supper.’
The Speisesaal was crowded with travellers and townspeople as I entered;
but the room was of great size, and a goodly table, amply provided,
occupied the middle of it. Taking my place at this, I went ahead through
the sliced shoe-leather, yclept beef, the Kalbs-braten and the Gurken-
salat, and all the other indigestible abominations of that light meal a
German takes before he lies down at night. The company were, with the
exception of a few military men, of that nondescript class every German
town abounds with--a large-headed, long-haired, plodding-looking
generation, with huge side-pockets in their trousers, from one of which
a cherry-wood pipe-stick is sure to project; civil, obliging, good sort
of people they are, but by no means remarkable for intelligence or
agreeability. But then, what mind could emerge from beneath twelve solid
inches of beetroot and bouilli, and what brain could bear immersion in
Bavarian beer?
One never can understand fully how atrocious the tyranny of Napoleon
must have been in Germany, until he has visited that country and seen
something of its inhabitants; then only can one compute what must the
hurricane have been that convulsed the waters of such a landlocked bay.
Never was there a people so little disposed to compete with their
rulers, never was obedience more thoroughly an instinct. The whole
philosophy of the German’s mind teaches him to look within rather than
without; his own resources are more his object in life than the
enjoyment of state privileges, and to his peaceful temper endurance is a
pleasanter remedy than resistance. Almost a Turk in his love of
tranquillity, he has no sympathy with revolutions or public disturbances
of any kind, and the provocation must indeed be great when he arouses
himself to resist it. That when he is thus called on he can act with
energy and vigour, the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 abundantly testify.
Twice the French armies had to experience the heavy retribution on
unjust invasion. Both Spain and Germany repaid the injuries they had
endured, but with a characteristic difference of spirit. In the one case
it was the desultory attacks of savage guerillas, animated by the love
of plunder as much as by patriotism; in the other, the rising of a great
people to defend their homes and altars, presented the glorious
spectacle of a nation going forth to the fight. The wild notes of the
Basque bugle rang not out with such soul-stirring effects as the
beautiful songs of Körner, heard beside the watch-fire or at the
peasant’s hearth. The conduct of their own princes might have debased
the national spirit of any other people; but the German’s attachment to
Fatherland is not a thing of courtly rule nor conventional agreement. He
loves the land and the literature of his fathers; he is proud of the
good faith and honesty which are the acknowledged traits of Saxon
character; he holds to the ‘sittliche Leben,’ the orderly domestic
habits of his country; and as he wages not a war of aggression on
others, he resists the spoliation of an enemy on the fields of his
native country.
When the French revolution fire broke out, the students were amongst its
most ardent admirers; the destruction of the Bastile was celebrated
among the secret festivals of the Burschenschaft; and although the fever
was a brief one, and never extended among the more thinking portion of
the nation, to that same enthusiasm for liberty was owing the great
burst of national energy which in 1813 convulsed the land from the
Baltic to the Tyrol, and made Leipsic the compensation for Jena.
With all his grandeur of intellect, Napoleon never understood the
national character--perhaps he may have despised it. One of his most
fatal errors, undoubtedly, was the little importance he attached to the
traits which distinguish one country from another, and the seeming
indifference with which he propounded notions of government
diametrically opposed to all the traditions and prejudices of those for
whom they were intended. The great desire for centralisation; the
ambition to make France the heart of Europe, through whose impulse the
life-blood should circulate over the entire Continent; to merge all
distinctions of race and origin, and make Frenchmen of one quarter of
the globe--was a stupendous idea, and if nations were enrolled in
armies, might not be impossible. The effort to effect it, however, cost
him the greatest throne of Christendom.
The French rule in Spain, in Italy, and in Holland, so far from
conciliating the good-will and affection of the people, has sown the
seeds of that hatred to France in each of these countries that a century
will not eradicate; while no greater evidence of Napoleon’s ignorance of
national character need be adduced than in the expectations he indulged
in the event of his landing an army in England. His calculation on
support from any part of the British people--no matter how opposed to
the ministry of the day, or how extreme in their wishes for extended
liberties--was the most chimerical thought that ever entered the brain
of man. Very little knowledge of our country might have taught him that
the differences of party spirit never survive the mere threat of foreign
invasion; that however Englishmen may oppose one another, they reserve a
very different spirit of resistance for the stranger who should attack
their common country; and that party, however it may array men in
opposite ranks, is itself but the evidence of patriotism, seeking
different paths for its development.
It was at the close of a little reverie to this purpose that I found
myself sitting with one other guest at the long table of the Speisesaal;
the rest had dropped off one by one, leaving him in the calm enjoyment
of his meerschaum and his cup of black coffee. There was something
striking in the air and appearance of this man, and I could not help
regarding him closely; he was about fifty years of age, but with a
carriage as erect and a step as firm as any man of twenty. A large white
moustache met his whiskers of the same colour, and hung in heavy curl
over his upper lip; his forehead was high and narrow, and his eyes,
deeply set, were of a greenish hue, and shaded by large eyebrows that
met when he frowned. His dress was a black frock, braided in Prussian
taste and decorated by a single cordon, which hung not over the breast,
but on an empty sleeve of his coat, for I now perceived that he had lost
his right arm near the shoulder. That he was a soldier and had seen
service, the most careless observer could have detected; his very look
and bearing bespoke the _militaire_. He never spoke to any one during
supper, and from that circumstance, as well as his dissimilarity to the
others, I judged him to be a traveller. There are times when one is more
than usually disposed to let Fancy take the bit in her mouth and run off
with them; and so I suffered myself to weave a story, or rather a dozen
stories, for my companion, and did not perceive that while I was
inventing a history for him he had most ungratefully decamped, leaving
me in a cloud of tobacco-smoke and difficult conjectures.
When I descended to the Saal the next morning I found him there before
me; he was seated at breakfast before one of the windows, which
commanded a view over the platz and the distant mountains. And here let
me ask, Have you ever been in Hesse-Cassel? The chances are, not. It is
the highroad--nowhere. You neither pass it going to Berlin or Dresden.
There is no wonder of scenery or art to attract strangers to it; and yet
if accident should bring you thither, and plant you in the ‘König von
Preussen,’ with no pressing necessity urging you onward, there are many
less pleasant things you could do than spend a week there. The hotel
stands on one side of a great platz, or square, at either side of which
the theatre and a museum form the other two wings; the fourth being left
free of building, is occupied by a massive railing of most laboured
tracery, which opens to a wide gate in a broad flight of steps,
descending about seventy feet into a spacious park. The tall elms and
beech-trees can be seen waving their tops over the grille above, and
seeming, from the platz, like young timber; beyond, and many miles away,
can be seen the bold chain of the Taunus Mountains stretching to the
clouds, forming altogether a view which for extent and splendour I know
no city that can present the equal. I could scarce restrain my
admiration; and as I stood actually riveted to the spot, I was totally
inattentive to the second summons of the waiter, informing me that my
breakfast awaited me in another part of the room.
‘What, yonder?’ said I, in some disappointment at being so far removed
from all chance of the prospect.
‘Perhaps you would join me here, sir,’ said the officer, rising, and
with a most affable air saluting me.
‘If not an intrusion----’
‘By no means,’ said he. ‘I am a passionate admirer of that view myself.
I have known it many years, and I always feel happy when a stranger
participates in my enjoyment of it.’
I confess I was no less gratified by the opportunity thus presented of
forming an acquaintance with the officer himself than with the scenery,
and I took my seat with much pleasure. As we chatted away about the town
and the surrounding country, he half expressed a curiosity at my taking
a route so little travelled by my countrymen, and seemed much amused by
my confession that the matter was purely accidental, and that frequently
I left the destination of my ramble to the halting-place of the
diligence. As English eccentricity can, in a foreigner’s estimation,
carry any amount of absurdity, he did not set me down for a madman--
which, had I been French or Italian, he most certainly would have done--
and only smiled slightly at my efforts to defend a procedure in his eyes
so ludicrous.
‘You confess,’ said I, at last, somewhat nettled by the indifference
with which he heard my most sapient arguments--‘you confess on what mere
casualties every event of life turns, what straws decide the whole
destiny of a man, and what mere trivial circumstances influence the fate
of whole nations, and how in our wisest and most matured plans some
unexpected contingency is ever arising to disconcert and disarrange us;
why, then, not go a step farther--leave more to fate, and reserve all
our efforts to behave well and sensibly, wherever we may be placed, in
whatever situations thrown? As we shall then have fewer disappointments,
we shall also enjoy a more equable frame of mind, to combat with the
world’s chances.’
‘True, if a man were to lead a life of idleness, such a wayward course
might possibly suffice him as well as any other; but, bethink you, it is
not thus men have wrought great deeds, and won high names for
themselves. It is not by fickleness and caprice, by indolent yielding to
the accident of the hour, that reputations have been acquired----’
‘You speak,’ said I, interrupting him at this place--‘you speak as if
humble men like myself were to occupy their place in history, and not
lie down in the dust of the churchyard undistinguishable and forgotten.’
‘When they cease to act otherwise than to deserve commemoration, rely
upon it their course is a false one. Our conscience may be--indeed often
is--a bribed judge; and it is only by representing to ourselves how our
modes of acting and thinking would tell upon the minds of others,
reading of but not knowing us, that we arrive at that certain rule of
right so difficult in many worldly trials.
‘And do you think a man becomes happier by this?’
‘I did not say happier,’ said he, with a sorrowful emphasis on the last
word. ‘He may be better.’
With that he rose from his seat, and looking at his watch he apologised
for leaving me so suddenly, and departed.
‘Who is the gentleman that has just gone out?’ asked I of the waiter.
‘The Baron von Elgenheim,’ replied he; ‘but they mostly call him the
Black Colonel. Not for his moustaches,’ added he, laughing with true
German familiarity, ‘they are white enough, but he always wears
mourning.’
‘Does he belong to Hesse, then?’
‘Not he; he’s an Auslander of some sort--a Swabian, belike; but he comes
here every year, and stays three or four weeks at a time. And, droll
enough too, though he has been doing so for fifteen or sixteen years, he
has not a single acquaintance in all Cassel; indeed, I never saw him
speak to a stranger till this morning.’
These particulars, few as they were, all stimulated my curiosity to see
more of the colonel; but he did not present himself at the table d’hôte
on that day or the following one, and I only met him by chance in the
Park, when a formal salute, given with cold politeness, seemed to say
our acquaintance was at an end.
Now, there are certain inns which by a strange magnetism are felt as
homes at once; there is a certain air of quietude and repose about them
that strikes you when you enter, and which gains on you every hour of
your stay. The landlord, too, has a bearing compounded of cordiality and
respect; and the waiter, divining your tastes and partialities, falls
quickly into your ways, and seems to regard you as an _habitué_ while
you are yet a stranger; while the ringleted young lady at the bar, who
passed you the first day on the stairs with a well-practised
indifference, now accosts you with a smile and a curtsy, and already
believes you an old acquaintance.
To an indolent man like myself, these houses are impossible to leave. If
it be summer, you are sure to have a fresh bouquet in your bedroom every
morning when you awake; in winter, the _garçon_ has discovered how you
like your slippers toasted on the fender, and your _robe de chambre_
airing on the chair; the cook learns your taste in cutlets, and knows to
a nicety how to season your _omelette aux fines herbes_; the very
washerwoman of the establishment has counted the plaits in your shirt,
and wouldn’t put one more or less for any bribery. By degrees, too, you
become a kind of confidant of the whole household. The host tells you of
ma’mselle’s fortune, and the match on the tapis for her, and all the
difficulties and advantages, contra and pro; the waiter has revealed to
you a secret of passion for the chambermaid, but for which he would be
Heaven knows how many thousand miles off, in some wonderful place, where
the wages would enable him to retire in less than a twelvemonth; and
even Boots, while depositing your Wellingtons before the fire, has
unburdened his sorrows and his hopes, and asks your advice, ‘if he
shouldn’t become a soldier?’ When this hour arrives, the house is your
own. Let what will happen, _your_ fire burns brightly in your bedroom;
let who will come, _your_ dinner is cared for to a miracle. The
newspaper, coveted by a dozen and eagerly asked for, is laid by for your
reading; you are, then, in the poets words--
‘Liber, honoratus, pulcher--Rex denique Regum’;
and let me tell you, there are worse sovereignties.
Apply this to the ‘König von Preussen,’ and wonder not if I found myself
its inhabitant for three weeks afterwards.