FANNY LAVATER
This angel in human form was a grand-niece of the celebrated Swiss
philosopher and physiognomist, Johann Caspar Levater. She was one of a
family of ten children, the father a member of the little
French-speaking Protestant community at Hanau, and the mother an
Englishwoman.
When Fräulein Lavater came as governess to my mother the latter was just
six years old, and she herself a mere girl of eighteen, with big brown
eyes and black hair. She was, however, already remarkably well-read in
the literature of several languages, and this she always declared she
owed in a great measure to the circumstance that the nonsense called
children’s books did not exist in her childhood, she and her brothers
and sisters being consequently obliged to have recourse for such
amusement as they sought in reading, to the little collection of the
best poets and prose-writers, of whose works their mother’s library was
composed. It was thus that she had read nearly all Shakespeare’s plays
when she was eight years old. In order to indulge their taste for
reading, without always having to be guided by the choice of their
elders, these young people had, she told us, discovered a most ingenious
method of quietly pushing open a panel of the bookcase, making an
aperture just wide enough to introduce the smallest arm among them, with
which several coveted volumes would be fetched down from the shelves,
and carried off to some safe hiding-place, to be brought out and
devoured at leisure afterwards.
It was not considered necessary in those days to pass a public
examination in order to give a proof of one’s knowledge and abilities,
and in the person of our “Fräulchen,” as she was affectionately called,
we had a striking example of the high degree of intellectual culture
that may be attained by careful and intelligent home training and a
liberal course of general reading. It was in the latter respect, above
all, that the superiority of independent study over the modern cramming
system, was in this instance so abundantly proved. A very few minutes’
conversation sufficed to show how much more solid information was
possessed by the quiet little bookworm than by many a paragon of the
latest methods of instruction, however much the latter might be
advertised by the diploma conferred on her by the State. It would almost
seem indeed as if no time were left for original thought or true mental
culture in the schemes of our newest educational oracles, which
apparently aim at reducing all mankind to one dull level of mediocrity,
forcing all into the selfsame groove, and trying to make one pattern
serve for all of us, utterly regardless both of our aptitudes and our
requirements. I fancy that before long there must come a reaction from
this unlucky craze, and that women at any rate will once more content
themselves with cultivating their mental powers to the utmost, feeling
therein a higher satisfaction than is to be derived from the noisier
successes of a public examination.
The home in which Fräulein Lavater had grown up, in happy companionship
of her brothers and sisters, under the guidance of their excellent
mother, was a comfortable old-fashioned house in Hanau, surrounded by a
pretty garden of considerable size. A genial and healthy spirit animated
the whole household; the inhabitants of the little town prided
themselves on the literary and artistic interests which they considered
had been wafted over to them from Frankfort, the Frankfort of Goethe’s
days; they read much, and were fond of meeting together for philosophic
discussion as well as for amateur acting. Those were still the good old
honest simple times in which living was so cheap that an excellent
mid-day meal, a slice of a roast joint with vegetables, bread and ale,
could be had for three kreuzers, and in which young girls made their own
simple white muslin ball-dresses, and embroidered them in coloured
wools, wearing the same dress contentedly for a dozen dances; and
assuredly they looked just as pretty and attractive in their modest
attire as do the young women of the present day in the extravagant
toilettes on which such preposterous sums are spent, often bringing ruin
on a whole family. That so-called period of stagnation at which it is so
easy to sneer, was in reality but the necessary reaction after the too
great tension, the strain and stress of the War of Liberation, a rest
after the storm, in which the nation might recuperate its energies,
exhausted by the long conflict. No one talked then of national
antipathies or hereditary enmities; and religious strife was also
unknown. It was, at all events, a peaceful happy existence which people
led in Hanau, as in many another of the smaller German towns, in which
little colonies of French Protestants, driven out of their own country
by the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, had settled down. There was
something so distinctive about these worthy people, something that
seemed to differentiate them from their compatriots of the Catholic
Faith, and that has sometimes set me wondering as to what other possible
turn affairs might have taken for France and for Europe in consequence,
had Henry IV instead of hearing his first Mass thrown the whole weight
of his influence into the other side of the scale, and brought his
countrymen over to his religion! However that may be, it is certain that
the presence of these foreigners gave Hanau something cosmopolitan, that
the tone of thought and feeling which prevailed there was exceptionally
liberal and enlightened. Anglophobia had not yet been invented in
Germany, on the contrary, one admired and imitated everything English,
looking up to the English nation as the most highly civilised of all.
Before Fanny Lavater’s first day in Biebrich was over, her little pupil
was already sitting on her knee, and telling her:--“Je vous aime déjà
beaucoup!” “Vraiment?” said the young governess, somewhat surprised. “Je
vous aime déjà beaucoup plus que ma sœur Thérèse!” “Oh!” and this
time there was something not merely incredulous, but almost of protest
in the tone. “C’est que je n’aime pas beaucoup ma sœur Thérèse!” The
elder sister had, after the mother’s death, at once assumed the reins of
government, and carried it on in so high-handed a manner, that she had
by no means increased the affection in which she was held by her younger
brothers and sisters.
The very next evening there was a big reception at the Castle, at which
Fräulein Lavater, young and timid and unknown to everyone, had to
appear. As she shyly entered the room, nobody made way for her, or took
any notice of her at all, and my grandfather, observing this, strode
through the room to the place where she stood, offered her his arm, and
conducted her in this manner through the whole assembly, everyone
falling back as they passed along. Needless to say, that her position in
society was from that hour assured, and that she never required to
assert herself in any way. And this little anecdote shows my
grandfather, then a handsome dignified man in the prime of life, in the
light in which he must have always appeared to the outside world;
towards strangers he was affable, courteous and charming, reserving his
ill-temper for his own family, his treatment of his children not
allowing them to see in him aught but a pitiless tyrant.
For my mother a happy time now began, in which she and her dear
governess lived quite by themselves in the rooms set apart for them in
one wing of the castle, where they had their own little
establishment--maid, footman and housemaids, all to themselves. Only
once or twice a day did the children have to appear before their
parents, kiss their hands and be dismissed again at once. Pupil and
governess were all in all to one another, and the former had already
made up her mind that no circumstances which she could control, should
ever separate them. Fräulein Lavater must come and live with her, the
little girl explained, when she got married. “But if your husband does
not want me?” “Alors, je dirai; mon homme, tu peux rester dans ta
chambre, et moi je resterai dans la mienne!” My mother kept her word,
insisting, to our unspeakable happiness, on Fräulein Lavater remaining
with her for weeks, sometimes months together, throughout her married
life, and afterwards, during her widowhood, altogether.
The saddest day in her whole childhood was that in which her dear
governess was dismissed. The latter had often defended her little pupil
when she saw her unjustly accused, as not infrequently occurred, her
otherwise admirable and dearly-loved stepmother having the weakness--it
was the only fault that could be laid to her charge--sometimes to try to
shield her own children from their father’s severity, at the expense of
the others. And Fräulein Lavater’s zealous efforts to exculpate the poor
child, on an occasion when she knew her to be the victim of a most cruel
injustice, simply led to her own dismissal. It was for both of them a
cruel blow, and my mother has often told me how she wandered next day
heartbroken through the empty desolate rooms, throwing herself at last
on a sofa to cry her eyes out, with no one to care what had become of
her.
My mother had hardly been able to speak a word of German at the time
when Fräulein Lavater came to her. Nassau belonged to the Confederation
of the Rhine and had decidedly French sympathies, so that everything was
new to my mother, when she came to Neuwied, marrying into a family that
had been mediatised for having drawn the sword for Germany. She was
simply shocked at the brutality of one of my great-uncles, who related
how he had ridden about on the field of Waterloo, in the hope of finding
Napoleon and making an end of him. “That fellow Bonaparte! if I could
but have got at him!” Uncle Max would say, clenching his fist; and my
mother turned away in horror at such savage sentiments.
There had been, quite unknown to herself, another marriage planned for
her, with the heir to the throne of Russia, whose father, the Emperor
Nicholas, was a great friend of my grandfather. But the match, on which
both fathers were so bent, fell through after my grandfather’s death,
the Emperor’s expressed desire merely having the effect of driving his
son into opposition to his wishes. But my mother was ignorant of all
this; all she knew of or cared for in Russia was the family of the
Grand-Duchess Hélène, her own first cousin and sister to her stepmother.
To her, the Grand-Duchess, and her daughters, she was deeply attached.
I cannot insist enough on the benefit resulting for us all from the
presence of Fräulein Lavater in our midst. She came among us as a true
angel of peace, bringing harmony into the strange mass of heterogeneous
elements--sometimes most conflicting and discordant--of which our
household was composed. Never were we so happy, either as children or a
little later on, as when sitting with her, close up beside her chair,
listening to all she had to tell us. Her memory was so excellent and had
been so assiduously cultivated, that her mind was a perfect
treasure-house of all that is best and noblest in the literature of the
world. She was never idle; her fingers always occupied with some pretty
piece of needlework whilst she talked, and when alone, they worked on
indefatigably, her eyes meanwhile fixed on the book that lay open before
her. It was owing to this praiseworthy habit, that in the course of
completing some beautiful piece of lace or embroidery, that looked as if
wrought by fairy fingers, she had at the same time committed whole pages
of her favourite authors to memory, and would therefore not only relate
to us the substance of her reading, but even recite long passages of
poetry or prose by the hour together, in her soft agreeable voice, and
with most admirable elocution. Her needlework was truly artistic; much
of it would have been worthy to find a place in a museum. Her
tapestry-work was as if painted, and an artist friend of ours once said
of her groups and landscapes, that whilst the paintings done by some
young ladies of his acquaintance looked as if worked in cross-stitch,
Fräulein Fanny’s needlework was so fine that it might have been painted!
“Look at that grey horse,” he went on, pointing to a little group, “so
delicately is it shaded, that Wouwerman might have acknowledged it as
the product of his brush!”
Her own harmonious and well balanced disposition enabled our dear
“Fräulchen” to play the part of peace-maker among stormier natures, and
her influence was ever used for good. Never in thirty years of the
closest intimacy did I hear a single word fall from her lips, by which I
could possibly have felt hurt; and I was as ultra-sensitive and liable
to take offence, as are most children, who are too harshly brought up.
With others I was always looking out for blame,--a scolding seemed the
natural thing to expect,--never with her! She could find fault, too,
when it was needful, but with so much tact and kindness, and
accompanying her criticism with reflections that took away all its
bitterness and made it sound almost like indirect praise; and then when
I looked up at her, half in alarm, with her soft little hand she would
stroke mine and say smiling:--“There was the horrid little serpent
concealed beneath the roses, was it not?” She was for ever pouring oil
on the troubled waters, making life better and happier for everyone, and
most of all for us poor children, who had in many respects a very hard
time, in an atmosphere so little conducive to our healthy and happy
development. We were accustomed to say among ourselves that we were a
three-leaved shamrock of ill-luck, our initials--(of all our names,
Otto, Wilhelm, and Elizabeth),--forming together the sound Oweh, or Woe!
Poor little woful shamrock in truth it was! We often stood in need of
someone to protect us, our parents’ ill-health placing us so entirely
in the hands of our first governesses and nursery-governesses, who
unfortunately happened to be anything but fitted for a position of such
trust. We should have suffered still more from their harsh treatment and
rough ways, had not Fräulein Lavater constantly stepped in, to interpose
calmly and gently on our behalf. My gratitude towards her knew no
bounds, and can find but scant expression in the words I write, which
seem cold and colourless beside the feelings that dictate them. She
alone understood the restless workings of my imagination, its insatiable
thirst of beauty, not to be stilled by the daily portion of dull dry
fact, which was alone provided by our earliest instruction, she alone
cared to satisfy the intense longing for poetry, for literature, for
some other knowledge than was contained in the little scholastic manuals
of science and history on which our young minds were almost exclusively
fed. Thanks to her, when I was eight years old, I was liberated from the
very disagreeable young governess who had tyrannised over me since my
fourth year, and a friend of her own substituted, an amiable and
highly-instructed woman, with whom I at once made great progress, my
studies becoming from that moment a real delight to me. Grammar, and
French grammar above all, was a real passion with me, and unconsciously
I was already then, in my love of languages and of language itself,
cultivating and preparing the instrument that was one day to be my own,
to be played on as others play on the strings of a harp or violin. But
clever and accomplished as Fräulein Josse was, and much as I enjoyed my
lessons with her, the hours spent with Fräulein Lavater were worth even
more, for her knowledge had a still wider range, her judgment was more
calm and clear, being utterly unbiased by any personal considerations.
She possessed a special gift for calming the tumult--a tumult of thought
unsuspected by everyone else--which my lively imagination sometimes set
up in my brain. As she was the only person who could sympathise with my
flights of fancy, perhaps the only one who did not consider absolutely
culpable and reprehensible the tendency to indulge in them, it was only
natural that she should be the sole confidante of my dreams and
aspirations. With her too I could give vent to my natural liveliness, to
the perpetual flow of high spirits, so sadly out of place in the
atmosphere of the sick-room. My youthful health and strength drew down
on me all sorts of uncomplimentary epithets from some of the elder
members of the family, to whom, more even than to the invalids, my
liveliness must have been a trial; Whirlwind, Flibbertigibbet,
Will-o’-the-wisp, these were a few of the names showered on me by Uncle
Max, and more or less acquiesced in by the rest. It must have been the
sensation of exuberant, irrepressible vitality within me which made me
one day exclaim--“Mamma, I feel as if I could carry away a mountain!”
Alas! I have sometimes thought since that my heedless words must have
been overheard by Fate!
When I came back from St. Petersburg everything was changed, my dear
father dead, and quite a different way of living to be entered on by my
mother and myself, she being restricted henceforth to her dower for her
own use, the estates of course passing into my brother’s hands, and
simply being administered by her until his coming of age. We could now
no longer keep open house as in the old days, in which the carriage had
scarcely departed that took away one party of guests, when already and
perhaps quite unexpectedly another would appear round the corner
bringing a fresh relay. It was a quiet and rather lonely life that began
thus suddenly for us three women, but no less full of interest, thanks
to the one of us, to our dear Fräulein Lavater! We were hardly an hour
of the day apart from one another, she and I; when the weather made it
impossible for us to go out, if the wind was raging or the snow falling
fast, then we contented ourselves with walking up and down indoors,
pacing the rooms sometimes for hours, subjects of conversation never
failing, her well-stored mind always ready to provide some fresh topic,
and her marvellous swiftness of intuition enabling her to place herself
at another’s point of view, and participate in phases of thought and
feeling quite new to her. I had but just returned home after a lengthy
absence, in which I had travelled much, seen many new countries, and met
numbers of celebrated and interesting people. She meanwhile had remained
quietly at home, surrounded daily by the same scenes, the same faces.
And yet, how infinitely richer and fuller she had contrived to make her
life, that inner life, which is in truth independent of and superior to
all influences from without!
I could wish that many another young girl might go through the
experience that then was mine, that she might enjoy and profit by days
like our winter-days in Monrepos, provided, of course, that she had such
a companion as Fräulein Lavater to share in them. And better still were
the long winter evenings, when we sat round the lamp, the immense deep
stillness of the mighty woods reigning outside and a like feeling of
calm, of aloofness from the world dwelling within our souls. Of
inestimable value was that time for me, after all the bustle and fatigue
of the long journeys, of the rapid succession of events, of all the
changing, shifting phantasmagoria of the busy, restless world, stamped
in almost bewildering variety on my brain. The impressions had been so
vivid, so multitudinous, they bade fair to grow confused or distorted,
crowding on and threatening to efface each other. But now, in this quiet
uneventful existence, I could look through the rich collection I had
brought home with me, could examine each treasure undisturbed, and range
them all in order, could bring myself into harmony with all I had so
recently acquired. How quickly those evenings passed! Our fingers were
busy all the time; my mother spinning, and I already making all sorts of
new inventions in tatting,--that pretty work of which I have always been
so fond, and which I have gone on elaborating of late years into
something resembling old-fashioned ecclesiastical embroideries. We
talked at intervals, or else read aloud by turns,--from some author
whose high and noble thoughts we might meditate on for long after.
It was the sensation of being enfolded and shut off from the rest of the
world by the woods around us, that lent those evenings their peculiar
charm. Often during the day I had wandered for hours through my beloved
woods, with the sole companionship of the faithful St. Bernard dogs, my
trusty guardians. We did not keep to the beaten path, but plunged into
the deepest thickets, threading our way through the most tangled growth
of brushwood. And on my return, my first care was to note down the songs
which the trees had whispered in my ear as I passed beneath them. I was
the wild rose, the wood rose, for all my friends. They had christened me
thus, because of the roses on my cheeks, which I never lost, although so
much of my youth had been spent in the atmosphere of the sick-room. I
might indeed pass as a living contradiction to every sort of theory of
infection, my magnificent health would have given the lie to all stories
of germs and microbes,--I was really never ill in my life, and never had
occasion to see a doctor, until the attack of typhoid fever I had while
in St. Petersburg. That was perhaps in a great measure the result of the
long anxiety, the sadness of years, but it did not come on till
afterwards, not in the least as an immediate consequence of the
unhealthy atmosphere in which I had grown up.
The drawback to the life we were now leading, lay of course in its
natural tendency to encourage mere dreaming, almost at the expense
perhaps of one’s active duties, of all practical work. For me this
might have been a special danger, had I not been preserved from it by
the good sense, the clearsightedness, the spirit of self-sacrifice of my
Mentor. Of herself she never thought at all. Therein lay the secret of
her great power, of her unbounded influence. On her deathbed she could
say:--“How good it is, when one’s whole life has been filled by one
great affection!”
For those who knew her best, her whole existence was summed up in those
words. But did they also contain a hidden meaning, the key to a secret
none had ever guessed, some page of quite unsuspected romance, an
attachment which death or circumstances had cut short? I had sometimes
wondered that she alone of all her sisters had remained unmarried, had
therefore never known the happiness of having a home, a family of her
own; but, like everyone else, I had grown accustomed to the idea that
her devotion to my mother was so all-absorbing as to leave no room for
any other affection in her heart. Most probably was it so, and that her
last words did but refer to the friendship, the affection, to which she
had devoted her whole life, identifying herself so entirely with the
feelings, the hopes, the interests and aims of the family of which in
the truest sense she had become a member, that she found within that
circle ample scope for the exercise of all her energy, the satisfaction
of all her wishes, nor ever for one moment regretted having formed no
other ties. She died in the year 1877, after the Balkan war, that war on
which hung the destinies of Roumania, and out of which the country came
forth victorious and independent, and before her death she had come to
pay me a visit there, appearing in her old character of an angel of
peace and consolation. For it was in the saddest, darkest hour of my
whole existence, that in which its whole joy and happiness, granted to
me for so short a time, had been torn from me forever, and when my only
wish was to be allowed myself to die also. In that moment of utter
hopelessness, none knew as did this old friend of mine, in what manner
alone to strive to reconcile me with life. Hers were the gentle words,
the gentle touch, that can never hurt, that one can bear, even when
one’s whole heart seems to be an open wound. “Bun de pus pe
rana,”--“good enough to be put on a wound,” is a Roumanian proverb, that
always recurs to me, in thinking of Fräulein Lavater, for it exactly
describes the feeling one had when with her. Her hands were soft as
satin, and in the moral or spiritual sphere, she had just the same
exquisite softness of touch. Whilst others, even with the very best
intentions, seemed only too often to bear heavily on a spot too
sensitive to be breathed upon, every word and action of hers was like
balm to the soul. Instead of making the vain attempt to offer
consolation for a sorrow beyond redress, she understood at once that in
such utter bereavement one can only be reconciled to the world by the
effort to live for others. And that lesson she was best fitted to teach,
who had for so many years practised it in her own person, putting
herself so entirely on one side, and only thinking how she could help
and comfort those around her. One felt sure of never being misunderstood
or misjudged by her, since her readiness of sympathy enabled her at all
times to put herself in another’s place, and look at the situation from
another point of view. Witty and amusing in conversation, her modesty
made her draw back more and more from general society as she grew older,
under the plea that old people are always dull, but this did not prevent
a proper sense of her own dignity, of that which was due to herself. She
once said to me with a smile, in relating an incident from which it
appeared that she had scarce been treated with due consideration--“Well,
if the place allotted me at table did me no honour, I must suppose that
I did honour to the place by accepting it!” Impartial and dispassionate
in her judgment of men and events, she was equally unbiased in her
literary criticisms, paying absolutely no heed to the voice of public
opinion in such matters, but thinking and judging for herself. No one I
have known ever possessed in the same degree the gift of rapid and
unerring discernment: she would glance through a volume, and in a moment
her mind was made up as to its contents; she seemed able to take in, and
digest and assimilate them, in less time than it would take most people
to read the headings of the chapters. It was a real pleasure to see her,
when a big parcel of books arrived from a library; sometimes a peep into
the uncut pages of a volume sufficed for it to be put on one side to be
returned as not worthy of further attention, whilst over others she
hovered, paper-knife in hand, glancing now here, now there, and
choosing the best for more serious perusal, like a bee, we used to tell
her, that darts from one plant to the other, sipping honey from the
choicest blossoms!
Like the bees too, who are not content each to gather honey for itself
alone, but bring it all to the common store, the treasures culled by
Fräulein Lavater from her reading were not intended solely for her own
pleasure and profit, but were ever destined to more unselfish purposes.
She could enliven the dullest society, revive the most languishing
conversation with some apposite remark, some reference to a topic so
well chosen that even the most listless felt their interest aroused. And
best of all, her soft low voice was like a charm for mental fatigue or
overstrung nerves. It was as if she could wile away headache or worry
with her gentle tones, she brought comfort to every sick-bed, and in the
long weary day of convalescence, when the work of taking up again the
burden of existence is perchance almost too great an effort for the
weakened frame, who was there could ever, like Fräulchen, cheer and
rouse one from one’s apathy, who else possessed such an inexhaustible
fund of delightful stories, or could relate them as she did? How often,
in later days, in the long slow recovery from illness, have I not sighed
for her presence, feeling that she could beguile my pain and weariness
with one of the stories or legends she told so well. She it was who
first encouraged in me the taste for literature, the love of poetry, in
which others saw only a weakness and a danger. It was her guiding hand
that directed my youthful talent into the right path, treating it as a
plant worthy of cultivation, and not as a dangerous or perhaps even
poisonous weed, to be rooted up or trodden under foot! For it was to
many quite a shocking idea, that a princess should not merely have the
misfortune to be born a poet, but that she should actually take no pains
to conceal so terrible a fact! That sort of talent really could not be
considered suitable to one’s station, and where there was no possibility
of extirpating, it must at least be hidden away out of sight! But
Fräulein Lavater, in her quiet unobtrusive way, saying no word to hurt
prevailing prejudices and thereby expose me to still greater
disapprobation, found the means of lending just the aid and sheltering
care so requisite to my first timid attempts at giving poetic form to
the emotional and intellectual chaos over which I brooded. The sure and
refined taste of the elder woman rendered invaluable service to the
somewhat headlong and indiscriminating enthusiasm of youth, in pointing
out to me, at the same time with the best models for admiration and
imitation, errors to be avoided, excesses and weaknesses to be
condemned. Then, as later, it was the certainty that one’s efforts and
aspirations, one’s failures and mistakes would meet in her, not merely
with justice, but with that indulgence which is perhaps the highest form
of human justice, this it was which inspired one with confidence in
seeking her verdict, and spared one the excessive discouragement some
criticisms invariably leave behind. A sense of justice is very strong
in most children, and they suffer more acutely than is generally
supposed, in the consciousness of being unjustly treated. Misjudged as
in my childhood I felt myself to be by the iron disciplinarians whose
aim it was to crush out all originality, it was a comfort to know that
to one person I never appeared wilful or headstrong, and it was perhaps
scarce possible to experience a greater satisfaction than was mine in
later years, in hearing Fräulchen’s affectionate tribute to “our
sunbeam,” as she was fond of calling me:--“She was always a dear good
child, only wishing to make everyone happy!”
To this very day, in those moments of disappointment and lassitude by
which all of us are at times beset, I have but to think of Fräulein
Lavater, for the old feeling of peace and calm to come over me, and the
physical pain is at once stilled, and the cares and troubles that seemed
overpowering shrink into insignificance. More than once, in times gone
by, when the burden laid upon my shoulders seemed greater than I could
bear, her adroit touch adjusted it and turned it into a feather-weight,
and recalling this, I rouse myself again to the struggle, to find as
before my strength and courage increase, in proportion to the
difficulties of the situation. I was in good truth Fräulchen’s pupil,
her spiritual child, and it was as much for her as for myself that I was
indignant, when of recent years an absurd report came to my knowledge,
of a nervous complaint from which I was said to be suffering! As soon
might one have credited _her_, the best-balanced person in the world,
with an hysterical or nervous attack, since, like herself, I have always
had my nerves under perfect control, and sharing in her somewhat
contemptuous feeling for neurasthenia, neurosis, or any other such
new-fangled disorder, I should consider it something degrading, of which
to be ashamed, to be justly ranged among its victims. I have given, I
think, sufficient proof to the contrary, and have shown of what
well-tempered steel my nerves are made, by continuing my work
uninterruptedly during long years of ill-health, and in spite of severe
and almost unremitting pain, of which the doctors only much later
discovered the cause. Well may I claim to disdain nerves and all who
suffer from them, considering that they only too often serve as a mask,
behind which selfishness and hypocrisy are hidden. Fräulein Lavater, at
any rate, did not plead nerves if ever her equanimity were disturbed;
she would own quite candidly:--“I am so irritable to-day!”
In one of the little albums--“Books of Confessions,” as they were
called,--that at one time had so much vogue, among a host of silly
questions, this one was asked: “Of all human qualities which do you
prize most highly?” Without a moment’s hesitation, my father wrote down:
“Enlightened goodness of heart!” No better description could be given of
our Fräulein. Hers was the kindness, the goodness of heart, that may be
truly said to be “illuminated” by the understanding; not that mere
unthinking, easy good nature, blind in perception and indiscriminate in
action, but the sympathy that springs from deepest insight, the
indulgence that is born of comprehension--in a word, the charity that
“beareth and endureth all things.” In each family circle, ever a little
world in itself, with its sometimes incongruous elements and oft
divergent and conflicting interests, and wherein the little rift may so
soon be widened to an irreparable breach, the trifling dissension
develop into implacable enmity, the presence of one person endowed with
this rarest of human attributes will ever be the harmonising medium, the
spirit of conciliation, the factor indispensable to the cohesion of the
group.
Would that there were more like Fräulchen in this weary world! Fate is
hard enough towards most of us. No need that we should ever strive to
place a stumbling-block in another’s path, or make it darker by one
shadow the more. Let us at least cherish the memory of all, whose
“irradiating kindliness” for a moment brightened the gloom.
Wherever great intelligence and true culture combine, as in the person
of Fanny Lavater, with moral strength and sweetness to the formation of
a character, the result is like the harmonious blending of rich hues in
some beautiful old cathedral window, through which the daylight
streaming, transforms into new and unwonted loveliness even the
commonest objects on which it falls!