I see the venerable prophet and the device he bears; the rose-hedge
with the prominent and unnaturally-multiplied thorns; the haunting imps
of dreams, your own face and mine, and so on. It is only a year and a
few months now to the time when our contract ends, and hitherto we have
kept it well. I think it likely we shall not meet again till the day is
over. Nothing but silence now will be your burden. If you speak of or
hint at anything of our transactions, remember the bond is cancelled;
but, of course, after the expiration of the ten years you are free to
publish the whole.”
He smiled scornfully, and, with another expression of admiration as to
the work, left the tribune. It was now that Nicholas put in just over
the key-board the groups of our Saviour and the twelve apostles (Judas,
with the bag of money, bore Lemoinne’s likeness), but, instead of
being, as they are at present, immovable, the figures went in and out
by a spring hidden among the stops, so that at the Consecration they
could be brought forward, and after the Communion return to the
interior of the organ, in the same way as some of the famous figures of
the clock in Strassburg Cathedral. The day of the public opening of the
completed organ came, the tenth anniversary of the day of the contract,
and the reader may imagine all the paraphernalia of a great mediæval
_fête_, half-religious and half-secular.
Lemoinne sat among the guests at Count Stromwael’s banquet; it was the
first time Nicholas had met him in public. The strange man seemed
utterly unconscious that they had ever met before, and his eyes met the
organist’s fully as he complimented him in set phrases and handed him a
golden gift with a small roll of parchment attached. Stromwael laughed
as he remarked:
“Is that the title-deed to a mortgaged estate, or a share in one of
your ships?” Nicholas clutched it in silence and tried to smile; the
talk around him seemed to point to his strange master being a banker,
but he held to his first suspicions. As soon as he was alone he looked
hastily at the hateful bond and thrust it into the fire. It seemed odd
to him that he did not yet feel free; he had expected the release to be
instantaneous. Weeks passed, and still the same old watchfulness and
uneasiness went on. Brederode’s face came to him more constantly; all
his faculties were centred in horrible recollections and vague and
still more horrible expectations. All Flanders raved about the
wonderful organ, and requests for similar ones made under his
directions and supervision poured in from distant parts. He vowed to
himself never to touch such a thing again, or even give directions for
it; it was to his fancy an accursed thing, associated with all the
horror and despair of his life. He refused all offers; and this grew to
be even more of a mania with him than the making of the instrument had
been before. Now that his dream had been fulfilled, he only longed to
die; his servitude was still unbroken, though the letter of the bond
was now a dead letter; he felt himself miserably fettered, haunted,
paralyzed. To the rather imperious demand of Count Stromwael’s cousin,
himself a powerful personage, for an organ with the same group of the
twelve apostles, he returned a flat denial, and neither threats nor
promises could shake him. At last the power of the two nobles combined
threw him into prison; they made sure of reducing him to obedience by
violence and temporary ill-treatment. The prison was what all mediæval
dungeons were—damp, filthy, unhealthy, dark. His food was bread and
water, and a very scanty measure of both. For a month he was treated as
a criminal, but nothing made any impression on the moody,
prematurely-aged man. He had made up his mind that only death would
make him free, only death would make him able to explain and excuse
himself to his dead friend. He cared for no bodily tortures; for ten
years he had suffered a mental hell. His friends and his patrons came
alternately to coax and tempt or to threaten and abuse him; he would
not yield.
Neither wealth, marriage, nor a patent of nobility tempted him; neither
the wheel, the rack, nor the block frightened him. He grew weaker and
weaker. His eyes saw Lemoinne and Brederode all over the narrow cell;
the one seemed like a fiend, and the other always like a corpse, with
the head half-severed, yet still conscious with a kind of ghastly life.
Physicians examined him and confidently pronounced him sane, and
priests visited him and pronounced him certainly not possessed, but
both agreed that something unusually terrible must be preying on his
mind. He never told what he saw or felt, and answered all questions
evasively. At last Stromwael, furious at his vassal’s obstinacy,
threatened to put his eyes out and prevent him from ever taking
pleasure in work again. He only said:
“You cannot take away my sight, even if you put out my eyes; would to
God you could!”
Before this last measure was resorted to he received a visit from
Lemoinne, who, in the calm tone of a cynic and a man of the world,
begged him to reconsider his decision.
“Nothing could tempt me!” said Nicholas. “Not even you could compel me;
it is not in the bond, and I am free.”
“Of course,” said the other, smiling. “I only ask you to yield for your
own good. Why should you object?”
“Because the thing is accursed; it has wrecked my life, and I will have
no more to do with it,” said Nicholas violently.
“But you are free now?”
“Am I?” said Nicholas, with savage meaning.
“You do me too much honor,” said Lemoinne sarcastically, “in believing
my power to be supernatural. Shall I tell you who I am, and what was
both my object and the secret of my influence?”
“You can tell what lies you like.”
“I dare say your superstition is greater than my falsehood,” said the
man with a smile; “and if I told you, you would be convinced against
your will and still remain of the same opinion. Well, you are free now,
and show your freedom by throwing away the very gift you sold yourself
to obtain.”
“If I could undo the past ten years,” said Nicholas, “I would give up
not my organ only, but my art. But as it is, I shall never be free
while I live, and I will do nothing that may save or lengthen my
horrible life—a mockery, indeed, of freedom!”
“If that is your last decision, I will say no more,” said Lemoinne;
“but remember, though our pact is over, I am still your friend, and,
should you wish anything between this and death which your jailers
would deny you, send me word.”
Nicholas looked at him in surprise and suspicion.
“Yes, they know me here by the same name as you do, and I can generally
find means to do what I wish. It is not the first time I have been here
or made a like offer to a condemned man.”
“I believe you,” said Nicholas shortly, and his visitor left him. Two
days elapsed before the threat was carried into execution, but the
prisoner, full of his own trouble, hardly dwelt upon the coming trial.
He prayed wildly that the red-hot iron which was to take away his
bodily sight would blot out his phantom companions from his mental
vision; the horrors of his disturbed brain appalled him more than any
earthly punishment, and his half-description or hints of it to one
person who visited him constantly was such that the latter
compassionately got leave for one of his jailers to sleep with him in
his dungeon. The day of the horribly unskilful torture came, and with
common iron rods, heated red-hot, the famous artist’s eyes were put
out. He writhed and moaned, but the bodily pain was only a faint image
of the agony of his mind. Was it madness? Was it possession? Were all
the learned men wrong, and he alone right, in thinking that he carried
hell within his brain? There was no peace from the gnawing remorse of
his betrayal of friendship; no assurance that his repentance was of
avail comforted him; no obstinate affirmations could make him feel that
the unholy fetters of his bond were in truth broken. It was not his
blindness that was killing him; it was his mania. He felt life ebbing,
and was fiercely glad, yet at times furious that, with such gifts as
his, he should go prematurely to the grave. A chaos of schemes floated
through his brain and maddened him yet more: he saw a long array of the
works he might have accomplished before he died—Masses, antiphons,
fugues; the improvements in the organ-stops and the internal machinery
of the instrument; a school he might have founded—if he had been
content to rely upon his own industry and the slow path of trust in
Providence. He had sold his birthright, and what was the farce of a ten
years’ contract, when he knew that at this present moment even the
wreck that was left of him was not his own? “If I am still his, at
least he shall help me once more,” he thought suddenly, as Lemoinne’s
offer occurred to his mind. “I will end this suspense at once.” He
asked the man who brought him his meals to tell Lemoinne that he wanted
him; and as he began the message he watched with fear and curiosity to
see how it would affect the bearer of it. Strange! nothing but a common
assent; evidently the request was not a novel one. Lemoinne came that
very evening, and Nicholas asked him for a sharp knife. He produced his
own, which Nicholas felt all over and took, saying:
“When you hear of my playing on my organ for the last time, come to the
tribune and claim your knife. I shall make the request, and feel sure
they will grant it.”
“What do you mean to do with the knife?”
“Nothing which _you_ would disapprove; but since you _say_ I am free,
let me prove it by not answering this question.”
“I do not press you,” said Lemoinne with his usual icy smile. Nicholas
felt the look he could not see, and his very heart seemed to tighten
and writhe within him. He had guessed truly; when he asked Count
Stromwael to allow him to play once more on the organ before he
died—for he felt that he should not live long, he said—the request was
quickly granted. His persecutors fancied that he would be less on his
guard now, and that somehow, while he played, they could surprise the
secret which they wanted to discover. He was taken to the chapel and
seated before his instrument. Stromwael, his cousin, and Lemoinne were
there, besides other less important persons. All watched eagerly. After
half an hour’s playing, as divine as the player’s mind was storm-driven
and despairing, Nicholas asked:
“Are the apostles out or in?”
“In,” was the answer.
He pressed a spring and the group came slowly out—our Lord’s figure
from the centre, and those of six apostles from each side. Then, with a
quick and deft touch, he cut something, and a snapping sound was heard
within; his fingers moved again, the knife gleamed, and a wailing sound
came from the notes on which his left arm now leaned; then, turning
round with a smile of triumph that looked ghastly on the blank face and
mutilated eye-sockets, he said:
“I am free now. I am ready to die.”
Lemoinne quickly took up the knife that Nicholas dropped, and smiled as
if another character-play had come to an end and he had solved another
riddle; Stromwael burst out into wild and furious threats of
purposeless revenge. Nicholas sat unmoved and said:
“This organ will be my only monument, and, if a man’s curse can follow
another, may mine follow whoever shall attempt to remove or to repair
my organ.”
To this day the instrument stands a witness to the tradition of its
maker’s fate; the group is immovable, and the few sounds the notes
produce are worse than dumbness. Nicholas died two months after, in
prison, his mind more and more delirious each day. It is said that,
when Lemoinne heard of his death, he remarked to one of his associates:
“That man was the most perfect tool I ever knew. If I had sworn
to him that I was a banker, a merchant, a usurer, a spy—an
unscrupulous eccentric, whose one mania was the possession of
secret power, and whose conscience was dead to any obstacle—he
would still have believed in his own theory. But I own I
overshot the mark and drove him too far.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE GERMAN ELEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES.
The social, moral, and political influence of the German-born and
German-descended population of the United States upon their
fellow-citizens has already been perceptible; that this influence will
vastly increase in the future is highly probable. We may state here one
of the many reasons for this belief. The intellectual and political
leaders of the Germans in America have hitherto mainly confined their
public utterances, in the press or on the platform, to the German
language. The German newspapers are very numerous; their circulation is
large; they are written for the most part with much ability; their
treatment of social and political questions is often marked by a
breadth of view and a soundness of logic too frequently wanting in many
of their English contemporaries. Their influence upon the minds of
their readers is also greater than that wielded by the majority of our
newspapers printed in the English language. We have heard this fact
attributed to the superior honesty with which the German press is
conducted; but upon this delicate ground we shall not enter. Our point
at present is that German thought and opinion, as expressed through the
German periodical press, influence for the most part only the German
population. Few of us who are not Germans read a German journal; what
the German leaders in politics, morality, and literature are saying,
day after day, is for the most part wholly unknown to the rest of us.
Occasionally an American editor translates a leading article from a
German journal and gives it to his readers; still more frequently he
avails himself of the ideas and the arguments of his German
contemporaries and reproduces them as his own.
In the next generation this state of things will be modified; more
Americans will read German literature, and more Germans, or
German-Americans, will write in English journals, speak in English at
public conventions, and sit in our legislative assemblies. The barrier
of language, which has hitherto tended to separate Germans from the
rest of us to so great an extent, will gradually yield and disappear.
The German language will be learned by increasing numbers of our
non-German citizens; the common use of the German language by the
German-Americans will be dropped, and the English tongue adopted in its
stead, not only in business affairs, but in politics, literature,
religion, and social intercourse. The English language has made many
conquests, but in America it has only to hold its own. It is the
language of the country, of the legislature, of the courts, of the
markets and exchanges, and of society. Our German citizens must acquire
it, or enter handicapped into all the relations of life.
The ability with which the German journals here are conducted does not
prevent nearly the whole of them which are not avowedly Catholic from
being inspired by an antagonism to religion. The genius of the German
mind has little sympathy with socialism or communism, and the theories
of socialism and communism find expression among our German citizens
only through the writings or speeches of a few insignificant and
uninfluential men in New York and some of our other large cities. But
the German who is not a Catholic is most often an atheist; and he
differs from the French atheist in wishing his wife and children to be
atheists also. The non-Catholic German press faithfully represents this
phase of the German mind; and it sneers at religion with the same
pertinacity and often with more skill than is shown in a like direction
by too many of our English-written newspapers.
The total immigration into the United States from the close of the War
of Independence to the end of 1876 was 9,726,455 souls. The records of
the government do not furnish an ethnological classification of all
these; it is only since 1847 that this classification has been made.
But every one knows that the bulk of our immigrants have come from
Ireland and Germany. At the port of New York alone the total number of
Irish immigrants from 1847 up to September 1 of the present year was
2,009,447; of German immigrants 2,345,486; of all others 1,265,240. An
estimated classification of those arriving before 1847, added to the
above figures, gives 2,463,598 Irish, 2,622,556 German, and 1,542,311
of other nationalities. The present Secretary of the Interior is the
only American citizen of German birth who has ever held a cabinet
appointment; we believe that he is the only citizen of German birth who
has ever sat in the Senate. But among the senators at the last session
of the Forty-fourth Congress there were seven who were either of
foreign birth or the sons of foreigners; and in the lower House of the
same assembly there appears to have been but one German to twelve
naturalized citizens of other nationalities. The Secretary of the
Interior owes the prominent political position which he fills less to
his statesmanlike and philosophical acquirements than to his command of
the English language and to his grace and power as a public speaker. No
doubt there are among our German citizens many who are his equals in
learning and political wisdom, but who are almost wholly unknown
outside the German-speaking community, for the reason that they confine
themselves, on the platform or in the press, to the use of the German
language. The coming generation of Americans of German descent will not
subject themselves to this disadvantage; and thus the influence of
German thought will be widened and deepened.
Upon this portion of our subject we may as well reproduce in substance,
although not with literal exactness, the observations made to us by a
German ecclesiastic, a member of one of the German religious orders
which are working here with so much zeal and success. In his opinion
the German element now in the United States will ere long be greatly
increased by a revival of immigration. Immigration from Germany may not
again attain the vast proportions which it reached in 1852–53–54, nor
during the seven memorable years 1866–1872, but it will still be very
large. All other things being equal, the proportion of Catholics
immigrating from Germany will be greater in the future than in the
past. In looking at the future of the country we should reckon that the
German element here will for many years to come steadily and rapidly
increase. But it is not probable that, after the passing away of the
present generation, our German population will so tenaciously retain
its distinctive national or ethnological features. It will become
absorbed in, amalgamated with, the rest of the community, but through
this very absorption and amalgamation it will leaven the whole mass for
good or for evil; and most probably the good will preponderate.
In our present German population, especially the younger portion of it,
there is a very perceptible disposition to be a little ashamed of their
German origin. This feeling, which has long existed, received a check
during and immediately after the triumph of Germany over France in 1870
and the erection of the German Empire. But it has now revived and
prevails with more force than before. Our German citizens feel that the
golden apples of victory have turned to ashes in the grasp of the
conquerors. The milliards wrung from France have sunk into the ground
or vanished in the air, and Germany is poorer than before the war—much
poorer than France, which Prince Bismarck imagined had been crushed
into nothingness. All the glory that Germany won by her conquest of
France in the field has been eclipsed by the peaceful victory of
France—a victory the effects of which were made manifest at our
International Exhibition last year. More serious still than this, in
the opinion of the learned and acute ecclesiastic whom we are quoting,
is the dislike and contempt with which the iniquitous, unnecessary, and
tyrannical policy of the German government toward the church is
regarded not only by Catholic Germans in America, but by those of their
non-Catholic compatriots here who are not swayed by sectarian hatred of
the church. This policy is justly regarded as at once an evidence of
weakness and a prolific source of future trouble, and among the
non-Catholic German-Americans the remark is common that “between the
Red-coats and the Black-coats—the Communists and the Catholics—the
empire is in great danger of destruction.” For these reasons, and other
slighter ones, our German fellow-citizens are becoming less and less
disposed to boast of their nationality, and more and more inclined to
Americanize themselves and their children. The “Watch on the Rhine”
gives place to “Yankee Doodle”; the suggestive inquiry as to the
precise locality and boundaries of the Faderland is not so popular as
“Hail Columbia.” Certain considerations of a utilitarian nature aid
powerfully in leading our German citizens in the same direction. Their
common sense enables them to see that their own advancement in life,
and the prosperity and happiness of their children, materially depend
upon their thorough Americanization—their complete identification with
the rest of the community in which they live. The first step towards
this end is the acquirement and use of the English language, and in
this the children often outstrip the wishes of their parents. In the
German-American schools, secular as well as religious, the study of the
English language is compulsory, and necessarily so. The children appear
to have a natural affinity for the English tongue; they acquire its use
rapidly and soon begin to speak it in preference to their native
language. It is not uncommon to meet with families where the parents
address the children in German and the children reply in English. The
truth is that the English language as now spoken, largely Teutonic in
its composition and structure, but enriched and softened by Celtic,
Latin, and Greek accretions, more easily adapts itself to the
expression of the necessities, the emotions, and the ideas of the age.
An amusing illustration of this self-asserting power of the English
language was afforded by the experience of a village in Indiana, on the
Ohio River, which was settled a few years ago by an exclusively German
colony consisting of about three hundred families. Nothing but German
was at first spoken in the houses, but in a very brief space of time
the language in the streets was found to be English, and ere long that
became the prevailing dialect of the place, appearing, as one of the
residents said, to have sprung up and taken root there just as the
weeds in the fields.