Study in Frankfort.—Lack of Money.—Different Effect of
Want on Travellers.—Bayard’s Privations.—Again sets out on
Foot.—Visit to the Hartz Mountains.—The Brocken.—Scenes
in “Faust.”—Locality in Literature.—The Battle-field at
Leipsic.—Auerbach’s Cellar.
For the purposes of this work, an outline of Bayard’s travels is all that
can be attempted; except where some remarkable incident occurred that
had an unusual influence on his subsequent life. Leaving Heidelberg in
the latter part of October (1844), Bayard walked through the Odenwald to
Frankfort, where he could pursue his study of the German language, and
observe the customs and characteristics of the people to better advantage
and at a less expense. In attempting to see Europe on such a limited
allowance of money, he necessarily met with many inconveniences and
privations. His sufferings were at times most intense. He knew what it
was to fast for whole days; he felt the pains of blistered bare feet. He
was exposed to the severest storms of summer and winter; he was familiar
with the homes of beggary and the hard, swarming beds of third-class
taverns. He must have suffered beyond his own estimate, for, as he so
well says, the pains of travel are soon forgotten and the pleasures
vividly remembered. There was a youthful _abandon_ in his almost reckless
adventures which startles the reader of his tours. But yet the pains
he felt so keenly, the dangers he encountered so frequently, did not
seem to abate his enthusiasm for the great works and beautiful scenes
which Europe exhibits. To find ourselves in a strange city, where no one
speaks our native language; where it is not possible that any person can
know us or any of our friends; without money, or food, or work, is one
of the most disheartening situations that can be imagined. Yet such an
experience came often to Bayard. It would seem as if, on some occasions,
he ran into such difficulties needlessly and for very wantonness. Yet,
as was sometimes the experience of the writer, and from one of which
dangerous situations Mr. Taylor generously rescued him, there somehow
opens a way out from such ventures, which is found on the very verge
of starvation and despair. But the trait of character, which in Bayard
commanded such respect, was something so unusual, that his daring example
cannot be safely followed by the multitude. It is far better to have a
supply of money for the necessary expenses of travel in Europe or Asia,
than to run risks for the sake of the romance which Bayard found in such
straits. To many tourists, even the parks of Homburg, the castle of
Drachenfels, or the palace of the Vatican, would become insignificant
baubles before the stronger demands of the body for food and raiment.
But seldom did any fatigue or annoyance or loss, abate his wonderful
zeal in his search for the poetical, the strange, the historical, and
the beautiful. Some of his most exquisite descriptions of art or nature,
were written from notes made when his stomach was empty and his limbs
chilled with wet and cold. Such young men are few; and for one with less
perseverance, endurance, or genius to attempt such things on such a
scale, would be to meet with disheartening failure.
Of his life in Frankfort, during the winter of 1845, he often speaks with
great satisfaction. He made excellent progress in the language, and in
that understanding of the habits of the people which Mr. Greeley had so
pointedly urged upon him as an ambitious aspirant for the favors of the
“Tribune.” He comes out of that study a matured thinker. His descriptions
assume a more thoughtful tone. His sympathies are more often awakened
for the people, and he sees as a man sees, and less juvenile are all
his undertakings and communications. He there acquired a love of German
poetry, and became acquainted with many of the noted men of Frankfort. He
visited the aged Mendelssohn, and tells with charming simplicity how he
was received by the composer of “St. Paul” and “Elijah.” Thus introduced
to German literature, art, and music, he entered again upon his travels
at the opening of spring, with new and increasing appreciativeness.
Again, on foot, he went into the untried way of Europe. His first
attraction was for the Hartz Mountains, so intimately connected with
Goethe’s “Faust,” with which Bayard was already in love, and which he
afterwards translated in a masterly manner. So he went through Friedberg
and Giessen, into Hesse-Cassel, making the acquaintance of peasants and
merchants on his way, and moralizing upon the curious circumstance that
the descendants of the Hessians, who fought so doggedly at Brandywine,
should receive so hospitably the descendant of those who filled the
“plains of Trenton with the short Hessian graves.” Thence by Münden,
Göttingen and Osterode, enduring sickening fatigues and dangerous
exposure, he reached the Brocken mountain, where, through thickets,
rocks, chasms, snow and cold, he at last rested in a cottage at its
summit, amid the associations awakened by the weird tales of witches and
the superstitious explanations of that singular illusion,—the “Spectre
of the Brocken.” If he had any “wish” on that “Walpurgis night,” which
he passed on the highest mountain of the Hartz range, it was probably to
be relieved of the tortures which his weak frame endured, and from which
the physician had failed to relieve him. It would not be surprising if he
recited from “Faust” the words of scene IV.:—
“Through some familiar tone, retrieving
My thoughts from torment, led me on,
And sweet, clear echoes came, deceiving
A faith bequeathed from childhood’s dawn,
Yet now I curse whate’er entices
And snares the soul with visions vain;
With dazzling cheats and dear devices
Confines it in this cave of pain!
Cursed be, at once, the high ambition.
Wherewith the mind itself deludes!
Cursed be the glare of apparition,
That on the finer sense intrudes.”
We cannot forbear to add another quotation from the same Act, so
illustrative is it of Bayard’s note-taking life:—
“No need to tell me twice to do it!
I think, how useful ’tis to write;
For what one has in black and white,
One carries home and then goes through it.”
His visit to the Brocken was one of the most fascinating trips of his
whole pedestrian tour, notwithstanding his narrow escape from death in
the snow, and from destruction by falling into the partially concealed
caves that beset his way to the summit. He mentioned long afterward the
view he had from the summit-house, through the rifts in the clouds, of
the plains and cities of Germany. Thirty cities and several hundred
villages lay within sight, and all of them more or less closely
interwoven with the literature of Germany. The plains of Brunswick and
Magdeburg stretch away for seventy miles, with all the various shadings
of green intermingled with the sparkling silver of stream and lake. It is
a scene so grand that no pen could portray its sublimity and no tongue
accurately convey an idea of its varied beauty. With that romantic
persistency which no amount of fatigue overcame, Bayard descended the
mountain by that rugged and nerve-shaking path up which Faust was said to
have ascended with Mephistopheles (scene XXI. of Taylor’s translation)
who says:—
“How sadly rises, incomplete and ruddy,
The moon’s lone disk, with its belated glow,
And lights so dimly, that, as one advances,
At every step one strikes a rock or tree!
Let us, then, use a Jack-o’-Lantern’s glances:
I see one yonder, burning merrily.
Ho, there! my friend! I’ll levy thine attendance:
Why waste so vainly thy resplendence?
Be kind enough to light us up the steep.”
After which Faust, in a musing mood, looks down from the Brocken heights
and replies:—
“How strangely glimmers through the hollows
A dreary light, like that of dawn!
Its exhalation tracks and follows
The deepest gorges, faint and wan.
Here steam, there rolling vapor sweepeth;
Here burns the glow through film and haze:
Now like a tender thread it creepeth,
Now like a fountain leaps and plays.
Here winds away, and in a hundred
Divided veins the valley braids:
There in a corner pressed and sundered,
Itself detaches, spreads and fades.
Here gush the sparkles incandescent
Like scattered showers of golden sand;—
But, see! in all their height at present,
The rocky ramparts blazing stand.”
As Bayard leaped and stumbled down the rocky declivity into the narrow
gorge that there divides the mountains to give an outlet for the river
Bode, the very difficulties bound him closer to Goethe’s writings. He
felt again how important a thing it is in literature to connect it by
patriotic links with some actual landscape, and how much more vivid and
permanent are the lessons an author would teach when the reader visits
the mountains, plains, cities, buildings, and people mentioned in books
of classic worth. Thus learning and growing the young traveller plodded
on from inn to inn and village to village.
Leipsic, which he reached a day or two after leaving the Brocken, was a
place of great interest to Bayard, as it is in fact to all travellers.
But the interest in any city or country visited by a tourist depends
so much upon his previous reading, and the taste and opportunities for
reading are so diverse, that it seldom happens that any two persons in
the same party enjoy the same scene with equal satisfaction. Bayard had
read of Leipsic and Dresden in his boyhood when other boys were catching
rabbits or playing ball, and as when he sees the great citadel at
Magdeburg which once held Baron Trenck a prisoner, so when at Leipsic he
looks over the field where Blucher and Schwartzenberg met Napoleon, he is
startled with the vividness of the pictures in his imagination. Hundreds
of thousands rushing to combat and scattering in retreat while smoke
rolls upward from hundreds of cannon and the streams are choked with
piles of bloody dead!
There too was Auerbach’s Cellar, in which Goethe’s Faust and
Mephistopheles are so humorously placed. There was the same
drinking-saloon, there the descendant of the old bar-keeper, and
there the same characteristic crowd of loafers, as when Faust and
Mephistopheles drank there, and when amid songs and jokes, the latter
drew all kinds of wine from the gimlet holes in the leaf of the old
wooden table. Bayard’s estimate of the people appears to have confirmed
that of Mephistopheles who says (scene V.):—
“Before all else I bring thee hither
Where boon companions meet together,
To let thee see how smooth life runs away.
Here, for the folk, each day’s a holiday:
With little wit, and ease to suit them,
They whirl in narrow, circling trails,
Like kittens playing with their tails:
And if no headache persecute them,
So long the host may credit give,
They merrily and careless live.”
The peasantry still crowd the cellar, still sing the old lays, and each
day tell over again the old legend of Mephistopheles’ miraculous exit.
“I saw him, with these eyes, upon a wine cask riding
Out of the cellar door, just now.”