great tree came down among certain moss-covered ridges of old masonry
which break the surface of the Rosenmold heath, exposing, together
with its roots, the remains of two persons. Whether the bodies (male
and female, said German bone-science) had been purposely buried there
was questionable. They seemed rather to have been hidden away by the
accident, whatever it was, which had caused death--crushed, perhaps,
under what had been the low wall of a garden--being much distorted,
and lying, though neatly enough discovered by the upheaval of the
soil, in great confusion. People's attention was the more attracted
to the incident because popular fancy had long run upon a tradition
of buried treasures, golden treasures, in or about the antiquated
ruin which the garden boundary enclosed; the roofless shell of a
small but solidly-built stone house, burnt or overthrown, perhaps in
the time of the wars at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Many persons went to [120] visit the remains lying out on the dark,
wild plateau, which stretches away above the tallest roofs of the old
grand-ducal town, very distinctly outlined, on that day, in deep
fluid grey against a sky still heavy with coming rain. No treasure,
indeed, was forthcoming among the masses of fallen stone. But the
tradition was so far verified, that the bones had rich golden
ornaments about them; and for the minds of some long-remembering
people their discovery set at rest an old query. It had never been
precisely known what was become of the young Duke Carl, who
disappeared from the world just a century before, about the time when
a great army passed over those parts, at a political crisis, one
result of which was the final absorption of his small territory in a
neighbouring dominion. Restless, romantic, eccentric, had he passed
on with the victorious host, and taken the chances of an obscure
soldier's life? Certain old letters hinted at a different ending--
love-letters which provided for a secret meeting, preliminary perhaps
to the final departure of the young Duke (who, by the usage of his
realm, could only with extreme difficulty go whither, or marry whom,
he pleased) to whatever worlds he had chosen, not of his own people.
The minds of those still interested in the matter were now at last
made up, the disposition of the remains suggesting to them the lively
picture of a sullen night, the unexpected passing of the great army,
[121] and the two lovers rushing forth wildly at the sudden tumult
outside their cheerful shelter, caught in the dark and trampled out
so, surprised and unseen, among the horses and heavy guns.
Time, at the court of the Grand-duke of Rosenmold, at the beginning
of the eighteenth century might seem to have been standing still
almost since the Middle Age--since the days of the Emperor Charles
the Fifth, at which period, by the marriage of the hereditary Grand-
duke with a princess of the Imperial house, a sudden tide of wealth,
flowing through the grand-ducal exchequer, had left a kind of golden
architectural splendour on the place, always too ample for its
population. The sloping Gothic roofs for carrying off the heavy
snows still indented the sky--a world of tiles, with space
uncurtailed for the awkward gambols of that very German goblin, Hans
Klapper, on the long, slumberous, northern nights. Whole quarryfuls
of wrought stone had been piled along the streets and around the
squares, and were now grown, in truth, like nature's self again, in
their rough, time-worn massiveness, with weeds and wild flowers where
their decay accumulated, blossoming, always the same, beyond people's
memories, every summer, as the storks came back to their platforms on
the remote chimney-tops. Without, all was as it had been on the eve
of the Thirty Years' War: the venerable dark-green mouldiness,
priceless pearl of architectural effect, was unbroken [122] by a
single new gable. And within, human life--its thoughts, its habits,
above all, its etiquette--had been put out by no matter of
excitement, political or intellectual, ever at all, one might say, at
any time. The rambling grand-ducal palace was full to overflowing
with furniture, which, useful or useless, was all ornamental, and
none of it new. Suppose the various objects, especially the contents
of the haunted old lumber-rooms, duly arranged and ticketed, and
their Highnesses would have had a historic museum, after which those
famed "Green Vaults" at Dresden would hardly have counted as one of
the glories of Augustus the Strong. An immense heraldry, that truly
German vanity, had grown, expatiating, florid, eloquent, over
everything, without and within--windows, house-fronts, church walls,
and church floors. And one-half of the male inhabitants were big or
little State functionaries, mostly of a quasi decorative order--the
treble-singer to the town-council, the court organist, the court
poet, and the like--each with his deputies and assistants,
maintaining, all unbroken, a sleepy ceremonial, to make the hours
just noticeable as they slipped away. At court, with a continuous
round of ceremonies, which, though early in the day, must always take
place under a jealous exclusion of the sun, one seemed to live in
perpetual candle-light.
It was in a delightful rummaging of one of those lumber-rooms,
escaped from that candle-light [123] into the broad day of the
uppermost windows, that the young Duke Carl laid his hand on an old
volume of the year 1486, printed in heavy type, with frontispiece,
perhaps, by Albert Dürer--Ars Versificandi: The Art of Versification:
by Conrad Celtes. Crowned poet of the Emperor Frederick the Third,
he had the right to speak on that subject; for while he vindicated as
best he might old German literature against the charge of barbarism,
he did also a man's part towards reviving in the Fatherland the
knowledge of the poetry of Greece and Rome; and for Carl, the pearl,
the golden nugget, of the volume was the Sapphic ode with which it
closed--To Apollo, praying that he would come to us from Italy,
bringing his lyre with him: Ad Apollinem, ut ab Italis cum lyra ad
Germanos veniat. The god of light, coming to Germany from some more
favoured world beyond it, over leagues of rainy hill and mountain,
making soft day there: that had ever been the dream of the ghost-
ridden yet deep-feeling and certainly meek German soul; of the great
Dürer, for instance, who had been the friend of this Conrad Celtes,
and himself, all German as he was, like a gleam of real day amid that
hyperborean German darkness--a darkness which clave to him, too, at
that dim time, when there were violent robbers, nay, real live
devils, in every German wood. And it was precisely the aspiration of
Carl himself. Those verses, coming to the boy's hand at the [124]
right moment, brought a beam of effectual day-light to a whole
magazine of observation, fancy, desire, stored up from the first
impressions of childhood. To bring Apollo with his lyre to Germany!
It was precisely that he, Carl, desired to do--was, as he might
flatter himself, actually doing.
The daylight, the Apolline aurora, which the young Duke Carl claimed
to be bringing to his candle-lit people, came in the somewhat
questionable form of the contemporary French ideal, in matters of art
and literature--French plays, French architecture, French looking-
glasses--Apollo in the dandified costume of Lewis the Fourteenth.
Only, confronting the essentially aged and decrepit graces of his
model with his own essentially youthful temper, he invigorated what
he borrowed; and with him an aspiration towards the classical ideal,
so often hollow and insincere, lost all its affectation. His doating
grandfather, the reigning Grand-duke, afforded readily enough, from
the great store of inherited wealth which would one day be the lad's,
the funds necessary for the completion of the vast unfinished
Residence, with "pavilions" (after the manner of the famous Mansard)
uniting its scattered parts; while a wonderful flowerage of
architectural fancy, with broken attic roofs, passed over and beyond
the earlier fabric; the later and lighter forms being in part carved
adroitly out of the [125] heavy masses of the old, honest, "stump
Gothic" tracery. One fault only Carl found in his French models, and
was resolute to correct. He would have, at least within, real marble
in place of stucco, and, if he might, perhaps solid gold for gilding.
There was something in the sanguine, floridly handsome youth, with
his alertness of mind turned wholly, amid the vexing preoccupations
of an age of war, upon embellishment and the softer things of life,
which soothed the testy humours of the old Duke, like the quiet
physical warmth of a fire or the sun. He was ready to preside with
all ceremony at a presentation of Marivaux's Death of Hannibal,
played in the original, with such imperfect mastery of the French
accent as the lovers of new light in Rosenmold had at command, in a
theatre copied from that at Versailles, lined with pale yellow satin,
and with a picture, amid the stucco braveries of the ceiling, of the
Septentrional Apollo himself, in somewhat watery red and blue.
Innumerable wax lights in cut-glass lustres were a thing of course.
Duke Carl himself, attired after the newest French fashion, played
the part of Hannibal. The old Duke, indeed, at a council-board
devoted hitherto to matters of state, would nod very early in certain
long discussions on matters of art--magnificent schemes, from this or
that eminent contractor, for spending his money tastefully,
distinguishings of the rococo [126] and the baroque. On the other
hand, having been all his life in close intercourse with select
humanity, self-conscious and arrayed for presentation, he was a
helpful judge of portraits and the various degrees of the attainment
of truth therein--a phase of fine art which the grandson could not
value too much. The sergeant-painter and the deputy sergeant-painter
were, indeed, conventional performers enough; as mechanical in their
dispensation of wigs, finger-rings, ruffles, and simpers, as the
figure of the armed knight who struck the bell in the Residence
tower. But scattered through its half-deserted rooms, state bed-
chambers and the like, hung the works of more genuine masters, still
as unadulterate as the hock, known to be two generations old, in the
grand-ducal cellar. The youth had even his scheme of inviting the
illustrious Antony Coppel to the court; to live there, if he would,
with the honours and emoluments of a prince of the blood. The
illustrious Mansard had actually promised to come, had not his sudden
death taken him away from earthly glory.
And at least, if one must forgo the masters, masterpieces might be
had for their price. For ten thousand marks--day ever to be
remembered!--a genuine work of "the Urbinate," from the cabinet of a
certain commercially-minded Italian grand-duke, was on its way to
Rosenmold, anxiously awaited as it came over rainy mountain-passes,
and along the rough German [127] roads, through doubtful weather.
The tribune, the throne itself, were made ready in the presence-
chamber, with hangings in the grand-ducal colours, laced with gold,
together with a speech and an ode. Late at night, at last, the wagon
was heard rumbling into the courtyard, with the guest arrived in
safety, but, if one must confess one's self, perhaps forbidding at
first sight. From a comfortless portico, with all the grotesqueness
of the Middle Age, supported by brown, aged bishops, whose
meditations no incident could distract, Our Lady looked out no better
than an unpretending nun, with nothing to say the like of which one
was used to hear. Certainly one was not stimulated by, enwrapped,
absorbed in the great master's doings; only, with much private
disappointment, put on one's mettle to defend him against critics
notoriously wanting in sensibility, and against one's self. In
truth, the painter wham Carl most unaffectedly enjoyed, the real
vigour of his youthful and somewhat animal taste finding here its
proper sustenance, was Rubens--Rubens reached, as he is reached at
his best, in well-preserved family portraits, fresh, gay, ingenious,
as of privileged young people who could never grow old. Had not he,
too, brought something of the splendour of a "better land" into those
northern regions; if not the glowing gold of Titian's Italian sun,
yet the carnation and yellow of roses or tulips, such as [128] might
really grow there with cultivation, even under rainy skies? And
then, about this time something was heard at the grand-ducal court of
certain mysterious experiments in the making of porcelain; veritable
alchemy, for the turning of clay into gold. The reign of Dresden
china was at hand, with one's own world of little men and women more
delightfully diminutive still, amid imitations of artificial flowers.
The young Duke braced himself for a plot to steal the gifted Herr
Böttcher from his enforced residence, as if in prison, at the
fortress of Meissen. Why not bring pots and wheels to Rosenmold, and
prosecute his discoveries there? The Grand-duke, indeed, preferred
his old service of gold plate, and would have had the lad a virtuoso
in nothing less costly than gold--gold snuff-boxes.
For, in truth, regarding what belongs to art or culture, as
elsewhere, we may have a large appetite and little to feed on. Only,
in the things of the mind, the appetite itself counts for so much, at
least in hopeful, unobstructed youth, with the world before it. "You
are the Apollo you tell us of, the northern Apollo," people were
beginning to say to him, surprised from time to time by a mental
purpose beyond their guesses--expressions, liftings, softly gleaming
or vehement lights, in the handsome countenance of the youth, and his
effective speech, as he roamed, inviting all about him to share the
[129] honey, from music to painting, from painting to the drama, all
alike florid in style, yes! and perhaps third-rate. And so far
consistently throughout he had held that the centre of one's
intellectual system must be understood to be in France. He had
thoughts of proceeding to that country, secretly, in person, there to
attain the very impress of its genius.
Meantime, its more portable flowers came to order in abundance. That
the roses, so to put it, were but excellent artificial flowers,
redolent only of musk, neither disproved for Carl the validity of his
ideal nor for our minds the vocation of Carl himself in these
matters. In art, as in all other things of the mind, again, much
depends on the receiver; and the higher informing capacity, if it
exist within, will mould an unpromising matter to itself, will
realise itself by selection, and the preference of the better in what
is bad or indifferent, asserting its prerogative under the most
unlikely conditions. People had in Carl, could they have understood
it, the spectacle, under those superficial braveries, of a really
heroic effort of mind at a disadvantage. That rococo seventeenth-
century French imitation of the true Renaissance, called out in Carl
a boundless enthusiasm, as the Italian original had done two
centuries before. He put into his reception of the aesthetic
achievements of Lewis the Fourteenth what young France had felt when
Francis the First brought home the great [130] Da Vinci and his
works. It was but himself truly, after all, that he had found, so
fresh and real, among those artificial roses.
He was thrown the more upon such outward and sensuous products of
mind--architecture, pottery, presently on music--because for him,
with so large intellectual capacity, there was, to speak properly, no
literature in his mother-tongue. Books there were, German books, but
of a dulness, a distance from the actual interests of the warm,
various, coloured life around and within him, to us hardly
conceivable. There was more entertainment in the natural train of
his own solitary thoughts, humoured and rightly attuned by pleasant
visible objects, than in all the books he had hunted through so
carefully for that all-searching intellectual light, of which a
passing gleam of interest gave fallacious promise here or there. And
still, generously, he held to the belief, urging him to fresh
endeavour, that the literature which might set heart and mind free
must exist somewhere, though court librarians could not say where.
In search for it he spent many days in those old book-closets where
he had lighted on the Latin ode of Conrad Celtes. Was German
literature always to remain no more than a kind of penal apparatus
for the teasing of the brain? Oh! for a literature set free,
conterminous with the interests of life itself.
In music, it might be thought, Germany had [131] already vindicated
its spiritual liberty. One and another of those North-german towns
were already aware of the youthful Sebastian Bach. The first notes
had been heard of a music not borrowed from France, but flowing, as
naturally as springs from their sources, out of the ever musical soul
of Germany itself. And the Duke Carl was a sincere lover of music,
himself playing melodiously on the violin to a delighted court. That
new Germany of the spirit would be builded, perhaps, to the sound of
music. In those other artistic enthusiasms, as the prophet of the
French drama or the architectural taste of Lewis the Fourteenth, he
had contributed himself generously, helping out with his own good-
faith the inadequacy of their appeal. Music alone hitherto had
really helped him, and taken him out of himself. To music,
instinctively, more and more he was dedicate; and in his desire to
refine and organise the court music, from which, by leave of absence
to official performers enjoying their salaries at a distance, many
parts had literally fallen away, like the favourite notes of a worn-
out spinet, he was ably seconded by a devoted youth, the deputy
organist of the grand-ducal chapel. A member of the Roman Church
amid a people chiefly of the Reformed religion, Duke Carl would creep
sometimes into the curtained court pew of the Lutheran Church, to
which he had presented its massive golden crucifix, to listen to the
chorales, the execution of which he [132] had managed to time to his
liking, relishing, he could hardly explain why, those passages of a
pleasantly monotonous and, as it might seem, unending melody--which
certainly never came to what could rightly be called an ending here
on earth; and having also a sympathy with the cheerful genius of Dr.
Martin Luther, with his good tunes, and that ringing laughter which
sent dull goblins flitting.
At this time, then, his mind ran eagerly for awhile on the project of
some musical and dramatic development of a fancy suggested by that
old Latin poem of Conrad Celtes--the hyperborean Apollo, sojourning,
in the revolutions of time, in the sluggish north for a season, yet
Apollo still, prompting art, music, poetry, and the philosophy which
interprets man's life, making a sort of intercalary day amid the
natural darkness; not meridian day, of course, but a soft derivative
daylight, good enough for us. It would be necessarily a mystic
piece, abounding in fine touches, suggestions, innuendoes. His vague
proposal was met half-way by the very practical executant power of
his friend or servant, the deputy organist, already pondering, with
just a satiric flavour (suppressible in actual performance, if the
time for that should ever come) a musical work on Duke Carl himself;
Balder, an Interlude. He was contented to re-cast and enlarge the
part of the northern god of light, with a now wholly serious
intention. But still, [133] the near, the real and familiar, gave
precision to, or actually superseded, the distant and the ideal. The
soul of the music was but a transfusion from the fantastic but so
interesting creature close at hand. And Carl was certainly true to
his proposed part in that he gladdened others by an intellectual
radiance which had ceased to mean warmth or animation for himself.
For him the light was still to seek in France, in Italy, above all in
old Greece, amid the precious things which might yet be lurking there
unknown, in art, in poetry, perhaps in very life, till Prince
Fortunate should come.
Yes! it was thither, to Greece, that his thoughts were turned during
those romantic classical musings while the opera was made ready.
That, in due time, was presented, with sufficient success. Meantime,
his purpose was grown definite to visit that original country of the
Muses, from which the pleasant things of Italy had been but
derivative; to brave the difficulties in the way of leaving home at
all, the difficulties also of access to Greece, in the present
condition of the country.
At times the fancy came that he must really belong by descent to a
southern race, that a physical cause might lie beneath this strange
restlessness, like the imperfect reminiscence of something that had
passed in earlier life. The aged ministers of heraldry were set to
work (actually prolonging their days by an unexpected [134] revival
of interest in their too well-worn function) at the search for some
obscure rivulet of Greek descent--later Byzantine Greek, perhaps,--in
the Rosenmold genealogy. No! with a hundred quarterings, they were
as indigenous, incorruptible heraldry reasserted, as the old yew-
trees asquat on the heath.
And meantime those dreams of remote and probably adventurous travel
lent the youth, still so healthy of body, a wing for more distant
expeditions than he had ever yet inclined to, among his own wholesome
German woodlands. In long rambles, afoot or on horseback, by day and
night, he flung himself, for the resettling of his sanity, on the
cheerful influences of their simple imagery; the hawks, as if asleep
on the air below him; the bleached crags, evoked by late sunset among
the dark oaks; the water-wheels, with their pleasant murmur, in the
foldings of the hillside.
Clouds came across his heaven, little sudden clouds, like those which
in this northern latitude, where summer is at best but a flighty
visitor, chill out the heart, though but for a few minutes at a time,
of the warmest afternoon. He had fits of the gloom of other people--
their dull passage through and exit from the world, the threadbare
incidents of their lives, their dismal funerals--which, unless he
drove them away immediately by strenuous exercise, settled into a
gloom more properly his own. Yet at such times [135] outward things
also would seem to concur unkindly in deepening the mental shadow
about him, almost as if there were indeed animation in the natural
world, elfin spirits in those inaccessible hillsides and dark
ravines, as old German poetry pretended, cheerfully assistant
sometimes, but for the most part troublesome, to their human kindred.
Of late these fits had come somewhat more frequently, and had
continued. Often it was a weary, deflowered face that his favourite
mirrors reflected. Yes! people were prosaic, and their lives
threadbare:--all but himself and organist Max, perhaps, and Fritz the
treble-singer. In return, the people in actual contact with him
thought him a little mad, though still ready to flatter his madness,
as he could detect. Alone with the doating old grandfather in their
stiff, distant, alien world of etiquette, he felt surrounded by
flatterers, and would fain have tested the sincerity even of Max, and
Fritz who said, echoing the words of the other, "Yourself, Sire, are
the Apollo of Germany!"
It was his desire to test the sincerity of the people about him, and
unveil flatterers, which in the first instance suggested a trick he
played upon the court, upon all Europe. In that complex but wholly
Teutonic genealogy lately under research, lay a much-prized thread of
descent from the fifth Emperor Charles, and Carl, under direction,
read with much readiness to be impressed [136] all that was
attainable concerning the great ancestor, finding there in truth
little enough to reward his pains. One hint he took, however. He
determined to assist at his own obsequies.