occurred to him almost at once as an accessory motive, and in a
little while definite motives were engrossed in the dramatic
interest, the pleasing gloom, the curiosity, of the thing itself.
Certainly, amid the living world in Germany, especially in old,
sleepy Rosenmold, death made great parade of itself. Youth even, in
its sentimental mood, was ready to indulge in the luxury of decay,
and amuse itself with fancies of the tomb; as in periods of decadence
or suspended progress, when the world seems to nap for a time,
artifices for the arrest or disguise of old age are adopted as a
fashion, and become the fopperies of the young. The whole body of
Carl's relations, saving the drowsy old grandfather, already lay
buried beneath their expansive heraldries: at times the whole world
almost seemed buried thus--made and re-made of the dead--its entire
fabric of politics, of art, of custom, being essentially heraldic
"achievements," dead men's mementoes such as those. You see he was a
sceptical young man, and his kinsmen dead and gone had passed
certainly, in his imaginations of them, into no other world, save,
perhaps, into some stiffer, slower, sleepier, [137] and more pompous
phase of ceremony--the last degree of court etiquette--as they lay
there in the great, low-pitched, grand-ducal vault, in their coffins,
dusted once a year for All Souls' Day, when the court officials
descended thither, and Mass for the dead was sung, amid an array of
dropping crape and cobwebs. The lad, with his full red lips and open
blue eyes, coming as with a great cup in his hands to life's feast,
revolted from the like of that, as from suffocation. And still the
suggestion of it was everywhere. In the garish afternoon, up to the
wholesome heights of the Heiligenberg suddenly from one of the
villages of the plain came the grinding death-knell. It seemed to
come out of the ugly grave itself, and enjoyment was dead. On his
way homeward sadly, an hour later, he enters by chance the open door
of a village church, half buried in the tangle of its churchyard.
The rude coffin is lying there of a labourer who had but a hovel to
live in. The enemy dogged one's footsteps! The young Carl seemed to
be flying, not from death simply, but from assassination.
And as these thoughts sent him back in the rebounding power of youth,
with renewed appetite, to life and sense, so, grown at last familiar,
they gave additional purpose to his fantastic experiment. Had it not
been said by a wise man that after all the offence of death was in
its trappings? Well! he would, as far as might be, try the thing,
while, presumably, a [138] large reversionary interest in life was
still his. He would purchase his freedom, at least of those gloomy
"trappings," and listen while he was spoken of as dead. The mere
preparations gave pleasant proof of the devotion to him of a certain
number, who entered without question into his plans. It is not
difficult to mislead the world concerning what happens to these who
live at the artificial distance from it of a court, with its high
wall of etiquette. However the matter was managed, no one doubted,
when, with a blazon of ceremonious words, the court news went forth
that, after a brief illness, according to the way of his race, the
hereditary Grand-duke was deceased. In momentary regret, bethinking
them of the lad's taste for splendour, those to whom the arrangement
of such matters belonged (the grandfather now sinking deeper into
bare quiescence) backed by the popular wish, determined to give him a
funeral with even more than grand-ducal measure of lugubrious
magnificence. The place of his repose was marked out for him as
officiously as if it had been the delimitation of a kingdom, in the
ducal burial vault, through the cobwebbed windows of which, from the
garden where he played as a child, the young Duke had often peered at
the faded glories of the immense coroneted coffins, the oldest
shedding their velvet tatters around them. Surrounded by the whole
official world of Rosenmold, arrayed for the occasion in almost [139]
forgotten dresses of ceremony as if for a masquerade, the new coffin
glided from the fragrant chapel where the Requiem was sung, down the
broad staircase lined with peach-colour and yellow marble, into the
shadows below. Carl himself, disguised as a strolling musician, had
followed it across the square through a drenching rain, on which
circumstance he overheard the old people congratulate the "blessed"
dead within, had listened to a dirge of his own composing brought out
on the great organ with much bravura by his friend, the new court
organist, who was in the secret, and that night turned the key of the
garden entrance to the vault, and peeped in upon the sleepy, painted,
and bewigged young pages whose duty it would be for a certain number
of days to come to watch beside their late master's couch.
And a certain number of weeks afterwards it was known that "the mad
Duke" had reappeared, to the dismay of court marshals. Things might
have gone hard with the youth had the strange news, at first as
fantastic rumour, then as matter of solemn enquiry, lastly as
ascertained fact, pleasing or otherwise, been less welcome than it
was to the grandfather, too old, indeed, to sorrow deeply, but grown
so decrepit as to propose that ministers should possess themselves of
the person of the young Duke, proclaim him of age and regent. From
those dim travels, presenting themselves to the old man, who had
never been [140] fifty miles away from home, as almost lunar in their
audacity, he would come back--come back "in time," he murmured
faintly, eager to feel that youthful, animating life on the stir
about him once more.
Carl himself, now the thing was over, greatly relishing its satiric
elements, must be forgiven the trick of the burial and his still
greater enormity in coming to life again. And then, duke or no duke,
it was understood that he willed that things should in no case be
precisely as they had been. He would never again be quite so near
people's lives as in the past--a fitful, intermittent visitor--almost
as if he had been properly dead; the empty coffin remaining as a kind
of symbolical "coronation incident," setting forth his future
relations to his subjects. Of all those who believed him dead one
human creature only, save the grandfather, had sincerely sorrowed for
him; a woman, in tears as the funeral train passed by, with whom he
had sympathetically discussed his own merits. Till then he had
forgotten the incident which had exhibited him to her as the very
genius of goodness and strength; how, one day, driving with her
country produce into the market, and, embarrassed by the crowd, she
had broken one of a hundred little police rules, whereupon the
officers were about to carry her away to be fined, or worse, amid the
jeers of the bystanders, always ready to deal hardly with "the
gipsy," at which precise [141] moment the tall Duke Carl, like the
flash of a trusty sword, had leapt from the palace stair and caused
her to pass on in peace. She had half detected him through his
disguise; in due time news of his reappearance had been ceremoniously
carried to her in her little cottage, and the remembrance of her hung
about him not ungratefully, as he went with delight upon his way.
The first long stage of his journey over, in headlong flight night
and day, he found himself one summer morning under the heat of what
seemed a southern sun, at last really at large on the Bergstrasse,
with the rich plain of the Palatinate on his left hand; on the right
hand vineyards, seen now for the first time, sloping up into the
crisp beeches of the Odenwald. By Weinheim only an empty tower
remained of the Castle of Windeck. He lay for the night in the great
whitewashed guest-chamber of the Capuchin convent.
The national rivers, like the national woods, have a family likeness:
the Main, the Lahn, the Moselle, the Neckar, the Rhine. By help of
such accommodation as chance afforded, partly on the stream itself,
partly along the banks, he pursued the leisurely winding course of
one of the prettiest of these, tarrying for awhile in the towns,
grey, white, or red, which came in his way, tasting their delightful
native "little" wines, peeping into their old overloaded churches,
inspecting the church furniture, or trying the [142] organs. For
three nights he slept, warm and dry, on the hay stored in a deserted
cloister, and, attracted into the neighbouring minster for a snatch
of church music, narrowly escaped detection. By miraculous chance
the grimmest lord of Rosenmold was there within, recognised the youth
and his companions--visitors naturally conspicuous, amid the crowd of
peasants around them--and for some hours was upon their traces.
After unclean town streets the country air was a perfume by contrast,
or actually scented with pinewoods. One seemed to breathe with it
fancies of the woods, the hills, and water--of a sort of souls in the
landscape, but cheerful and genial now, happy souls! A distant group
of pines on the verge of a great upland awoke a violent desire to be
there--seemed to challenge one to proceed thither. Was their
infinite view thence? It was like an outpost of some far-off fancy
land, a pledge of the reality of such. Above Cassel, the airy hills
curved in one black outline against a glowing sky, pregnant, one
could fancy, with weird forms, which might be at their old diableries
again on those remote places ere night was quite come there. At last
in the streets, the hundred churches, of Cologne, he feels something
of a "Gothic" enthusiasm, and all a German's enthusiasm for the
Rhine.
Through the length and breadth of the Rhine country the vintage was
begun. The red ruins on the heights, the white-walled villages,
white [143] Saint Nepomuc upon the bridges, were but isolated high
notes of contrast in a landscape, sleepy and indistinct under the
flood of sunshine, with a headiness in it like that of must, of the
new wine. The noise of the vineyards came through the lovely haze,
still, at times, with the sharp sound of a bell--death-bell, perhaps,
or only a crazy summons to the vintagers. And amid those broad,
willowy reaches of the Rhine at length, from Bingen to Mannheim,
where the brown hills wander into airy, blue distance, like a little
picture of paradise, he felt that France was at hand. Before him lay
the road thither, easy and straight.--That well of light so close!
But, unexpectedly, the capricious incidence of his own humour with
the opportunity did not suggest, as he would have wagered it must,
"Go, drink at once!" Was it that France had come to be of no account
at all, in comparison of Italy, of Greece? or that, as he passed over
the German land, the conviction had come, "For you, France, Italy,
Hellas, is here!"--that some recognition of the untried spiritual
possibilities of meek Germany had for Carl transferred the ideal land
out of space beyond the Alps or the Rhine, into future time, whither
he must be the leader? A little chilly of humour, in spite of his
manly strength, he was journeying partly in search of physical heat.
To-day certainly, in this great vineyard, physical heat was about him
in measure sufficient, at least for [144] a German constitution.
Might it be not otherwise with the imaginative, the intellectual,
heat and light; the real need being that of an interpreter--Apollo,
illuminant rather as the revealer than as the bringer of light? With
large belief that the Éclaircissement, the Aufklärung (he had already
found the name for the thing) would indeed come, he had been in much
bewilderment whence and how. Here, he began to see that it could be
in no other way than by action of informing thought upon the vast
accumulated material of which Germany was in possession: art, poetry,
fiction, an entire imaginative world, following reasonably upon a
deeper understanding of the past, of nature, of one's self--an
understanding of all beside through the knowledge of one's self. To
understand, would be the indispensable first step towards the
enlargement of the great past, of one's little present, by criticism,
by imagination. Then, the imprisoned souls of nature would speak as
of old. The Middle Age, in Germany, where the past has had such
generous reprisals, never far from us, would reassert its mystic
spell, for the better understanding of our Raffaelle. The spirits of
distant Hellas would reawake in the men and women of little German
towns. Distant times, the most alien thoughts, would come near
together, as elements in a great historic symphony. A kind of
ardent, new patriotism awoke in him, sensitive for the first time at
the words national [145] poesy, national art and literature, German
philosophy. To the resources of the past, of himself, of what was
possible for German mind, more and more his mind opens as he goes on
his way. A free, open space had been determined, which something now
to be created, created by him, must occupy. "Only," he thought, "if
I had coadjutors! If these thoughts would awake in but one other
mind!"
At Strasbourg, with its mountainous goblin houses, nine stories high,
grouped snugly, in the midst of that inclement plain, like a great
stork's nest around the romantic red steeple of its cathedral, Duke
Carl became fairly captive to the Middle Age. Tarrying there week
after week he worked hard, but (without a ray of light from others)
in one long mistake, at the chronology and history of the coloured
windows. Antiquity's very self seemed expressed there, on the
visionary images of king or patriarch, in the deeply incised marks of
character, the hoary hair, the massive proportions, telling of a
length of years beyond what is lived now. Surely, past ages, could
one get at the historic soul of them, were not dead but living, rich
in company, for the entertainment, the expansion, of the present: and
Duke Carl was still without suspicion of the cynic afterthought that
such historic soul was but an arbitrary substitution, a generous loan
of one's self.
The mystic soul of Nature laid hold on him [146] next, saying, "Come!
understand, interpret me!" He was awakened one morning by the jingle
of sledge-bells along the street beneath his windows. Winter had
descended betimes from the mountains: the pale Rhine below the bridge
of boats on the long way to Kehl was swollen with ice, and for the
first time he realised that Switzerland was at hand. On a sudden he
was captive to the enthusiasm of the mountains, and hastened along
the valley of the Rhine by Alt Breisach and Basle, unrepelled by a
thousand difficulties, to Swiss farmhouses and lonely villages,
solemn still, and untouched by strangers. At Grindelwald, sleeping
at last in the close neighbourhood of the greater Alps, he had the
sense of an overbrooding presence, of some strange new companions
around him. Here one might yield one's self to the unalterable
imaginative appeal of the elements in their highest force and
simplicity--light, air, water, earth. On very early spring days a
mantle was suddenly lifted; the Alps were an apex of natural glory,
towards which, in broadening spaces of light, the whole of Europe
sloped upwards. Through them, on the right hand, as he journeyed on,
were the doorways to Italy, to Como or Venice, from yonder peak
Italy's self was visible!--as, on the left hand, in the South-german
towns, in a high-toned, artistic fineness, in the dainty, flowered
ironwork for instance, the overflow of Italian genius was traceable.
These things [147] presented themselves at last only to remind him
that, in a new intellectual hope, he was already on his way home.
Straight through life, straight through nature and man, with one's
own self-knowledge as a light thereon, not by way of the geographical
Italy or Greece, lay the road to the new Hellas, to be realised now
as the outcome of home-born German genius. At times, in that early
fine weather, looking now not southwards, but towards Germany, he
seemed to trace the outspread of a faint, not wholly natural, aurora
over the dark northern country. And it was in an actual sunrise that
the news came which finally put him on the directest road homewards.
One hardly dared breathe in the rapid uprise of all-embracing light
which seemed like the intellectual rising of the Fatherland, when up
the straggling path to his high beech-grown summit (was one safe
nowhere?) protesting over the roughness of the way, came the too
familiar voices (ennui itself made audible) of certain high
functionaries of Rosenmold, come to claim their new sovereign, close
upon the runaway.
Bringing news of the old Duke's decease! With a real grief at his
heart, he hastened now over the ground which lay between him and the
bed of death, still trying, at quieter intervals, to snatch profit by
the way; peeping, at the most unlikely hours, on the objects of his
curiosity, waiting for a glimpse of dawn through glowing [148] church
windows, penetrating into old church treasuries by candle-light,
taxing the old courtiers to pant up, for "the view," to this or that
conspicuous point in the world of hilly woodland. From one such at
last, in spite of everything with pleasure to Carl, old Rosenmold was
visible--the attic windows of the Residence, the storks on the
chimneys, the green copper roofs baking in the long, dry German
summer. The homeliness of true old Germany! He too felt it, and
yearned towards his home.
And the "beggar-maid" was there. Thoughts of her had haunted his
mind all the journey through, as he was aware, not unpleased,
graciously overflowing towards any creature he found dependent upon
him. The mere fact that she was awaiting him, at his disposition,
meekly, and as though through his long absence she had never quitted
the spot on which he had said farewell, touched his fancy, and on a
sudden concentrated his wavering preference into a practical
decision. "King Cophetua" would be hers. And his goodwill sunned
her wild-grown beauty into majesty, into a kind of queenly richness.
There was natural majesty in the heavy waves of golden hair folded
closely above the neck, built a little massively; and she looked
kind, beseeching also, capable of sorrow.
She was like clear sunny weather, with bluebells and the green
leaves, between rainy days, and seemed to embody Die Ruh auf dem
Gipfel--all [149] the restful hours he had spent of late in the wood-
sides and on the hilltops. One June day, on which she seemed to have
withdrawn into herself all the tokens of summer, brought decision to
our lover of artificial roses, who had cared so little hitherto for
the like of her. Grand-duke perforce, he would make her his wife,
and had already re-assured her with lively mockery of his horrified
ministers. "Go straight to life!" said his new poetic code; and here
was the opportunity;--here, also, the real "adventure," in comparison
of which his previous efforts that way seemed childish
theatricalities, fit only to cheat a little the profound ennui of
actual life. In a hundred stolen interviews she taught the hitherto
indifferent youth the art of love.
Duke Carl had effected arrangements for his marriage, secret, but
complete and soon to be made public. Long since he had cast
complacent eyes on a strange architectural relic, an old grange or
hunting-lodge on the heath, with he could hardly have defined what
charm of remoteness and old romance. Popular belief amused itself
with reports of the wizard who inhabited or haunted the place, his
fantastic treasures, his immense age. His windows might be seen
glittering afar on stormy nights, with a blaze of golden ornaments,
said the more adventurous loiterer. It was not because he was
suspicious still, but in a kind of wantonness [150] of affection,
and as if by way of giving yet greater zest to the luxury of their
mutual trust that Duke Carl added to his announcement of the purposed
place and time of the event a pretended test of the girl's devotion.
He tells her the story of the aged wizard, meagre and wan, to whom
she must find her way alone for the purpose of asking a question all-
important to himself. The fierce old man will try to escape with
terrible threats, will turn, or half turn, into repulsive animals.
She must cling the faster; at last the spell will be broken; he will
yield, he will become a youth once more, and give the desired answer.
The girl, otherwise so self-denying, and still modestly anxious for a
private union, not to shame his high position in the world, had
wished for one thing at least--to be loved amid the splendours
habitual to him. Duke Carl sends to the old lodge his choicest
personal possessions. For many days the public is aware of something
on hand; a few get delightful glimpses of the treasures on their way
to "the place on the heath." Was he preparing against contingencies,
should the great army, soon to pass through these parts, not leave
the country as innocently as might be desired?
The short grey day seemed a long one to those who, for various
reasons, were waiting anxiously for the darkness; the court people
fretful and on their mettle, the townsfolk suspicious, [151] Duke
Carl full of amorous longing. At her distant cottage beyond the
hills, Gretchen kept herself ready for the trial. It was expected
that certain great military officers would arrive that night,
commanders of a victorious host making its way across Northern
Germany, with no great respect for the rights of neutral territory,
often dealing with life and property too rudely to find the coveted
treasure. It was but one episode in a cruel war. Duke Carl did not
wait for the grandly illuminated supper prepared for their reception.
Events precipitated themselves. Those officers came as practically
victorious occupants, sheltering themselves for the night in the
luxurious rooms of the great palace. The army was in fact in motion
close behind its leaders, who (Gretchen warm and happy in the arms,
not of the aged wizard, but of the youthful lover) are discussing
terms for the final absorption of the duchy with those traitorous old
councillors. At their delicate supper Duke Carl amuses his companion
with caricature, amid cries of cheerful laughter, of the sleepy
courtiers entertaining their martial guests in all their pedantic
politeness, like people in some farcical dream. A priest, and
certain chosen friends to witness the marriage, were to come ere
nightfall to the grange. The lovers heard, as they thought, the
sound of distant thunder. The hours passed as they waited, and what
came at last was not the priest with [152] his companions. Could
they have been detained by the storm? Duke Carl gently re-assures
the girl--bids her believe in him, and wait. But through the wind,
grown to tempest, beyond the sound of the violent thunder--louder
than any possible thunder--nearer and nearer comes the storm of the
victorious army, like some disturbance of the earth itself, as they
flee into the tumult, out of the intolerable confinement and
suspense, dead-set upon them.
The Enlightening, the Aufklärung, according to the aspiration of Duke
Carl, was effected by other hands; Lessing and Herder, brilliant
precursors of the age of genius which centered in Goethe, coming well
within the natural limits of Carl's lifetime. As precursors Goethe
gratefully recognised them, and understood that there had been a
thousand others, looking forward to a new era in German literature
with the desire which is in some sort a "forecast of capacity,"
awakening each other to the permanent reality of a poetic ideal in
human life, slowly forming that public consciousness to which Goethe
actually addressed himself. It is their aspirations I have tried to
embody in the portrait of Carl.
A hard winter had covered the Main with a firm footing of ice. The
liveliest social intercourse was quickened thereon. I was unfailing
from early morning onwards; and, being lightly clad, found myself,
when my mother drove up later [153] to look on, fairly frozen. My
mother sat in the carriage, quite stately in her furred cloak of red
velvet, fastened on the breast with thick gold cord and tassels.
"Dear mother," I said, on the spur of the moment, "give me your furs,
I am frozen."
She was equally ready. In a moment I had on the cloak. Falling
below the knee, with its rich trimming of sables, and enriched with
gold, it became me excellently. So clad I made my way up and down
with a cheerful heart.
That was Goethe, perhaps fifty years later. His mother also related
the incident to Bettina Brentano;--"There, skated my son, like an
arrow among the groups. Away he went over the ice like a son of the
gods. Anything so beautiful is not to be seen now. I clapped my
hands for joy. Never shall I forget him as he darted out from one
arch of the bridge, and in again under the other, the wind carrying
the train behind him as he flew." In that amiable figure I seem to
see the fulfilment of the Resurgam on Carl's empty coffin--the
aspiring soul of Carl himself, in freedom and effective, at last.
[THE END]