Memoirs by Charles Godfrey Leland Part 9

"_Ja wohl_, certainly; at once, if you please!"

They were handed over to me, and I saw the bridge and gave the two francs, and all was well. But it gave me no renown in Venice, for the Consul and all my friends regarded it as a fabulous joke of mine, inspired by poetic genius. But I sometimes think that the official who yielded up the keys, and the man whom he sent with me, and perhaps the commissionaire, all had a put-up job of it among them on those keys, and several gla.s.ses all round out of those two francs. _Quien sabe_? _Vive la bagatelle_!

We went on an excursion to Padua. What I remember is, that what impressed me most was a placard here and there announcing that a work on Oken had just appeared! This rather startled me. Whether it was for or against the great German offshoot from Sch.e.l.ling, it proved that somebody in Italy had actually studied him! _Eppure si muove_, I thought. It cannot be true that--

"Padua! the lamp of learning In thy halls no more is burning."

I have been there several times since. All that I now recall is that the hotel was not very good the last time.

I met in Venice a young New Yorker named Clark, who had crossed with me on the ship. He was a merry companion. Sailing with him one morning in a gondola along the Grand Ca.n.a.l, we saw sitting before a hotel its porter, who was an unmistakable American man of full colour. Great was Clark's delight, and he called out, "I say, Buck! what the devil are you doing here?"

With a delighted grin, the man and brother replied in deep Southern accent--

"Dey sets me hyar fo' a bait to 'tice de Americans with."

I heard subsequently that he had come from America with his mistress, and served her faithfully till there came into the service a pretty French girl. Great was the anger of the owner of the man to find that he had unmistakably "enticed" the maid. To which he replied that it was a free country; that he had married the damsel--she was his wife; and so the pair at once packed up and departed.

We used to hear a great deal before the war from Southerns about the devotion of their slaves, but there were a great many instances in which the fidelity did not exactly hold water. There was an old Virginia gentleman who owned one of these faithful creatures. He took him several times to the North, and as the faithful one always turned a deaf ear to the Abolitionists, and resisted every temptation to depart, and refused every free-ticket offered for a journey on "the underground railway," and went back to Richmond, he was of course trusted to an unlimited extent.

When the war ended he was freed. Some one asked him one day how he could have been such a fool as to remain a slave. He replied--

"Kase it paid. Dere's nuffin pays like being a dewoted darkey. De las'

time I went Norf wid ma.s.sa I made 'nuff out of him to buy myself free twice't over."

Doubtless there were many instances of "pampered and petted" household servants who had grown up in families who had sense to know that they could never live free in the freezing North without hard work. These were the only devoted ones of whom I ever heard. The field-hands, disciplined by the lash, and liable to have their wives or children or relatives sold from them--_as happened on an average once at least in a life_--were all to a man quite ready to forsake "ole ma.s.sa" and "dear ole missus," and flee unto freedom. And what a vile mean wretch any man must be who would sacrifice his _freedom_ to any other living being, be it for love or feudal fidelity--and what a villain must the man be who would accept such a gift!

I had never thought much of this subject before I left home. I did not _like_ slavery, nor to think about it. But in Europe I did like such thought, and I returned fully impressed with the belief that slavery was, as Charles Sumner said, "the sum of all crimes." In which summation he showed himself indeed a "sumner," as it was called of yore. Which cost me many a bitter hour and much sorrow, for there was hardly a soul whom I knew, except my mother, to whom an Abolitionist was not simply the same thing as a disgraceful, discreditable malefactor. Even my father, when angry with me one day, could think of nothing bitterer than to tell me that I knew I was _an Abolitionist_. I kept it to myself, but the reader can have no idea of what I was made to suffer for years in Philadelphia, where everything Southern was exalted and worshipped with a baseness below that of the blacks themselves.

For all of which in after years I had full and complete recompense. I lived to see the young ladies who were ready to kneel before any man who owned "sla-aves," detest the name of "South," and to learn that their fathers and friends were battling to the death to set those slaves free.

I lived to see the roof of the "gentlemanly planter," who could not of yore converse a minute with me without letting me know that he considered himself as an immeasurably higher being than myself, blaze over his head amid yell and groan and sabre-stroke--

"And death-shots flying thick and fast,"

while he fled for life, and the freed slaves sang hymns of joy to G.o.d. I saw the roads, five miles wide, level, barren, and crossed with ruts, where Northern and Southern armies had marched, and where villages and plantations had once been. I saw countless friends or acquaintances, who had once smiled with pitying scorn at me, or delicately turned the conversation when Abolition was mentioned in my presence, become all at once blatant "n.i.g.g.e.r-worshippers," abundant in proof that they had always had "an indescribable horror of slavery"--it was, in fact, so indescribable that (until it was evident that the North would conquer) none of them ever succeeded in giving anybody the faintest conception of it, or any idea that it existed. I can still recall how gingerly and cautiously--"paw by paw into the water"--these dough faces became hard- baked Abolitionists, far surpa.s.sing us of the Old Guard in zeal. I lived to see men who had voted against Grant and _reviled_ him become his most intimate friends. But enough of such memories. It is characteristic of the American people that, while personally very vindictive, they forgive and forget political offences far more amicably--very far--than do even the English. However, in the case of the Rebellion, this was a very easy thing for those to do who had not, like us old Abolitionists, borne the burden and heat of the day, and who, coming in at the eleventh hour, got all the contracts and offices! It never came into the head of any man to write a _Dictionnaire des Girouettes_ in America. These late converts had never known what it was to be Abolitionists while it was "unfashionable," and have, as it were, live coals laid on the quivering heart--as I had a thousand times during many years--all for believing the tremendous and plain truth that _slavery_ was a thousand times wickeder than the breach of all the commandments put together. It was so peculiar for any man, not a Unitarian or Quaker, to be an _Abolitionist_ in Philadelphia from 1848 until 1861, that such exceptions were pointed out as if they had been Chinese--"and d---d bad Chinese at that," as a friend added to whom I made the remark. So much for man's relations with poor humanity.

My old friend, B. P. Hunt, was one of these few exceptions. His was a very strange experience. After ceasing to edit a "selected" magazine, he went to and fro for many voyages to Haiti, where, singular as it may seem, his experiences of the blacks made of him a stern Abolitionist. He married a connection of mine, and lived comfortably in Philadelphia, I think, until the eighties.

I travelled with Mr. Clark from Venice to Milan, where we made a short visit. I remember an old soldier who spoke six languages, who was cicerone of the roof of the Cathedral, and whom I found still on the roof twenty years later, and still speaking the same six tongues. I admired the building as a beautiful fancy, exquisitely decorated, but did not think much of it as a specimen of Gothic architecture. It is the best test of aesthetic culture and knowledge in the world. When you hear anybody praise it as the most exquisite or perfect Gothic cathedral in existence, you may expect to hear the critic admire the designs of Chippendale furniture or the decoration of St. Peter's.

So we pa.s.sed through beautiful Lombardy and came to Domo d'Ossola, where a strange German-Italian patois was spoken. It was in the middle of April, and we were warned that it would be very dangerous to cross the Simplon, but we went on all night in a carriage on sleigh-runners, through intervals of snowstorm. Now and then we came to rushing mountain- torrents bursting over the road; far away, ever and anon, we heard the roar of a _lauwine_ or avalanche; sometimes I looked out, and could see straight down below me a thousand feet into an abyss or on a headlong stream. We entered the great tunnel directly from another, for the snow lay twenty feet deep on the road, and a pa.s.sage had been dug under it for several hundred feet, and so two tunnels were connected. Just in the worst of the road beyond, and in the bitterest cold, we met a sleigh, in which were an English gentleman and a very beautiful young lady, apparently his daughter, going to Italy. "I saw her but an instant, yet methinks I see her now"--a sweet picture in a strange scene. Poets used to "me-think" and "me-seem" more in those days, but we endured it. Then in the morning we saw Brieg, far down below us in the valley in green leaves and sunshine, and when we got there then I realised that we were in a new land.

We had a great giant of a German conductor, who seemed to regard Clark and me as under his special care. Once when we had wandered afar to look at something, and it was time for the stage or _Eilwagen_ to depart, he hunted us up, scolded us "like a Dutch uncle" in German, and drove us along before him like two bad boys to the diligence, "pawing up" first one and then the other, after which, shoving us in, he banged and locked the door with a grunt of satisfaction, even as the Giant Blunderbore locked the children in the coffer after slamming down the lid. Across the scenes and shades of forty years, that picture of the old conductor driving us like two unruly urchins back to school rises, never to be forgotten.

We went by mountains and lakes and Gothic towns, rocks, forests, old chateaux, and rivers--the road was wild in those days--till we came to Geneva. Thence Clark went his way to Paris, and I remained alone for a week. I had, it is true, a letter of introduction to a very eminent Presbyterian Swiss clergyman, so I sent it in with my card. His wife came out on the balcony, looked coolly down at me, and concluding, I suppose from my appearance, that I was one of the unG.o.dly, went in and sent out word that her husband was out, and would be gone for an indefinite period, and that she was engaged. The commissionaire who was with me--poor devil!--was dreadfully mortified; but I was not very much astonished, and, indeed, I was treated in much the same manner, or worse, by a colleague of this pious man in Paris, or rather by his wife.

I believe that what kept me a week in Geneva was the white wine and trout. At the end of the time I set out to the north, and on the way met with some literary or professional German, who commended to me the "Pfisterer-Zunft" or Bakers' Guild as a cheap and excellent hostelry. And it was curious enough, in all conscience. During the Middle Ages, and down to a very recent period, the _Zunfte_ or trade-guilds in the Swiss cities carried it with a high hand. Even the gentlemen could only obtain rights as citizens by enrolling themselves as the trade of aristocrats. I had heard of the boy who thought he would like to be bound apprentice to the king; in Berne he might have been entered for a lower branch of the business. These guilds had their own local taverns, inns, or _Herbergs_, where travelling colleagues of the calling might lodge at moderate rates, but n.o.body else. However, as time rolled by, these _Zunfte_ or guild- lodgings were opened to strangers. One of the last which did so was that of the _Pfister_ or bakers (Latin, _pistor_), and this had only been done a few weeks ere I went there. As a literary man whom I met on the ramparts said to me, "That place is still strong in the Middle Age." It was a quaint old building, and to get to my room I had to cross the great guild-hall of the Ancient and Honourable Society of Bakers. There were the portraits of all the Grand Masters of the Order from the fourteenth or fifteenth century on the walls, and the concentrated antique tobacco- smoke of as many ages in the air, which, to a Princeton graduate, was no more than the scent of a rose to a bee.

I could speak a little German--not much--but the degree to which I felt, sympathised with, and understood everything Deutsch, pa.s.seth all words and all mortal belief. _Sit verbo venia_! But I do not believe that any human being ever crossed the frontier who had thought himself down, or rather raised himself up, into Teutonism as I had on so slight a knowledge of the language, even as a spider throweth up an invisible thread on high, and then travels on it. Which thing was perceived marvellously soon, and not without some amazement, by the Germans, who have all at least this one point in common with Savages, New Jerseymen, Red Indians, Negroes, Gypsies, and witches, that they by mystic sympathy _know those who like them_, and take to them accordingly, guided by some altogether inexplicable clue or _Hexengarn_, even as deep calleth unto deep and star answereth star without a voice. Whence it was soon observed at Heidelberg by an American student that "Leland would abuse the Dutch all day long if he saw fit, but never allowed anybody else to do so." The which thing, as I think, argues the very _ne plus ultra_ of sympathy.

I found my way to Strasburg, where I went to the tip-top outside of the cathedral, and took the railway train for Heidelberg. And here I had an adventure, which, though trifling to the last degree, was to me such a great and new experience that I will describe it, let the reader think what he will. I went naturally enough first-cla.s.s, so uncommon a thing then in Germany that people were wont to say that only princes, Englishmen, and a.s.ses did so. There entered the same carriage a very lady-like and pretty woman. The guard, seeing this, concluded that--whatever he concluded, he carefully drew down all the curtains, looking at me with a cheerful, genial air of intense mystery, as if to say, "I twig; it's all right; I'll keep your secret."

It is a positive fact that all this puzzled me amazingly. There were many things in which I, the friend and pupil of Navone, was as yet as innocent as a babe unborn. The lady seemed to be amused--as well she might. _Sancta simplicitas_! I asked her why the conductor had drawn the curtains. She laughed, and explained that he possibly thought we were a bridal pair or lovers. Common sense and ordinary politeness naturally inspired the reply that I wished we were, which declaration was so amiably received that I suggested the immediate inst.i.tution of such an arrangement. Which was so far favourably received that it was sealed with a kiss. However, the seal was not broken. I think the lady must have been very much amused. It is not without due reflection that I record this. Kissing went for very little in Germany in those days. It was about as common in Vienna as shaking hands. But this was my first experience in it. So I record it, because it seems as if some benevolent fairy had welcomed me to Germany; it took place just as we crossed the frontier. However, I found out some time after, by a strange accident, that my fairy was the wife of a banker who lived beyond Heidelberg; and at Heidelberg I left her and went to the first hotel in the town.

I had formed no plans, and had no letters to anybody. I had read Howitt's "Student Life in Germany" through and through, so I thought I would study in Heidelberg. But how to begin? That was the question. I went into a shop and bought some cigars. There I consulted with the shopkeeper as to what I should do. Could he refer me to some leading authority in the University, known to him, who would give me advice? He could, and advised me to consult with the Pedell Capelmann.

Now I didn't know it, but Pedell--meaning beadle, commonly called Poodle by the students--was the head-constable of the University. In honest truth I supposed he must be the President or Pro-Rector. So I went to Pedell Capelmann. His appearance did not quite correspond to my idea of a learned professor. He was an immensely burly, good-natured fellow, who came in in his shirt-sleeves, and who, when he learned what I wanted, burst out into a _Her'r'r' Gottsdonerrwetter_! of surprise, as he well might. But I knew that the Germans were a very _sans facon bourgeois_ people, and still treated him with deep respect. He suggested that, as there were a great many American students there, I had better call on them. He himself would take me to see the Herr O--, with whom, as I subsequently learned, he had more than once had discussions relative to questions of University-munic.i.p.al discipline. As for the startling peculiarity which attended my introduction to University life, it is best summed up in the remark which the Herr O. (of Baltimore) subsequently made.

"Great G.o.d, fellows! _he made his first call on old Capelmann_!!"

He took me to the Herr O. and introduced me. I was overwhelmed with my cordial reception. There was at once news sent forth that a new man and a brother fellow-countryman had come to join the ranks. "And messengers through all the land sought Sir Tannhauser out." I was pumped dry as to my precedents, and as I came fresh from Princeton and had been through Italy, I was approved of. The first thing was a discussion as to where I was to live. The Frau Directorinn Louis in the University Place had two fine rooms which had just been occupied by a prince. So we went and secured the rooms, which were indeed very pleasant, and by no means dear as it seemed to me. I was to breakfast in my rooms, dine with the family at one o'clock, and sup about town.

Then there was a grand council as to what I had better study, and over my prospects in life; and it was decided that, as the law-students were the most distinguished or swell of all, I had better be a lawyer. So it was arranged that I should attend Mittermayer's and others' lectures; to all of which I cheerfully a.s.sented. The next step was to give a grand supper in honour of my arrival. After the dinner and the wine, I drank twelve _schoppens_ of beer, and then excused myself on the plea of having letters to write. I believe, however, that I forgot to write the letters. And here I may say, once for all, that having discovered that, if I had no gift for mathematics, I had a great natural talent for Rheinwein and lager, I did not bury that talent in a napkin, but, like the rest of my friends, made the most of it, firstly, during two semesters in Heidelberg:

"Then I bolted off to Munich, And within the year, Underneath my German tunic Stowed whole b.u.t.ts of beer; For I drank like fifty fishes, Drank till all was blue, For whenever I was vicious I was thirsty too."

The result of which "dire deboshing" was that, having come to Europe with a soul literally attenuated and starved for want of the ordinary gaiety and amus.e.m.e.nt which all youth requires, my life in Princeton having been one continued strain of a sobriety which continually sank into subdued melancholy, and a body just ready to yield to consumption, I grew vigorous and healthy, or, as the saying is, "hearty as a buck." I believe that if my Cousin Sam had gone on with me even-pace, that he would have lived till to-day. When we came abroad I seemed to be the weakest; he returned, and died in a few months from our hereditary disease. How many hecatombs of young men have been murdered by "seriousness" and "total abstinence," miscalled _temperance_, in our American colleges, can never be known; perhaps it is as well that it never will be; for if it were, there would be a rush to the other extreme, which would "upset society." And here be it noted that, with all our inordinate national or international Anglo-Saxon sense of superiority to everybody and everything foreign, we are in the _main_ thing--that is, the truly rational enjoyment of life and the art of living--utterly inferior to the German and Latin races. We are for the most part either too good or too bad--totally abstemious or raving drunk--always in a hurry after excitement or in a worry over our sins, or those of our neighbours. "Rest, rest, perturbed Yankee, _rest_!"

My rooms were on the ground-floor, the bedroom looking into the University Square and my study into a garden. Next door to me dwelt Paulus, the king of the Rationalists. He was then, I believe, ninety- four years of age. He remained daily till about twelve or one in a comatose condition, when he awoke and became lively till about three, when he sank into sleep again. His days were like those of a far Northern winter, lit by the sun at the same hours.

The next morning a very gentlemanly young man knocked at my door, and entered and asked in perfect English for a Mr. Bell, who lived in the same house. I informed him that Mr. Bell was out, but asked him to enter my room and take a chair, which he did, conversing with me for half an hour, when he departed, leaving a card on a side-table. In a few minutes later, O., who was of the kind who notice everything, entered, took up the card, and read on it the name and address of the young Grand Duke of Baden, who was naturally by far the greatest man in the country, he being its hereditary ruler.

"Where the devil did you get this?" asked O., and all, in amazement.

"Oh," I replied, "it's only the Duke. He has just been in here making a call. If you fellows had come five minutes sooner you'd have seen him.

Have some beer!"

The impression that I was a queer lot, due to my making my first call on Capelmann _et cetera_, was somewhat strengthened by this card, until I explained how I came by it. But as Dr. Johnson in other words remarked, there are people to whom such queer things happen daily, and others to whom they occur once a year. And there was never yet a living soul who entered into my daily life who did not observe that I belong to the former cla.s.s. If I have a guardian angel, it must be Edgar A. Poe's Angel of the Odd. But he generally comes to those who belong to him!

It was a long time before I profited much by my lectures, because it was fearful work for me to learn German. I engaged a tutor, and worked hard, and read a great deal, and talked it _con amore_; but few persons would believe how slowly I learned it, and with what incredible labour. How often have I cursed up hill and down dale, the Tower of Babel, which first brought the curse of languages upon the world! And what did I ever have to do with that Tower? Had I lived in those days, I would never have laid hand to the work in merry, sunny, lazy Babylon, nor contributed a brick to it. By the way, it was a juvenile conjecture of mine that the Tower of Babel was destroyed for being a shot-tower, in which ammunition was prepared to be used by the heathen. Which theory might very well have been inspired by a verse from the old Puritanical rendering of the Psalms:--

"Ye race itt is not alwayes gott By him who swiftest runns, Nor ye Battell by ye Peo-pel Who shoot with longest gunnes."

Even before I had gone to Princeton I had read and learned a great deal relative to Justinus Kerner, the great German supernaturalist, mystic, and poet, firstly from a series of articles in the _Dublin University Magazine_, and later from a translation of "The Seeress of Prevorst," and several of the good man's own romances and lyrics. I suppose that, of all men on the face of the earth, I should have at that time preferred to meet him. Wherefore, as a matter of course, it occurred that one fine morning a pleasant gentlemanly German friend of mine, who spoke English perfectly, and whose name was Rucker, walked into my room, and proposed that we should take a two or three days' walk up the Neckar with our knapsacks, and visit the famous old ruined castle of the Weibertreue. My mother had read me the ballad-legend of it in my boyhood, and I had learned it by heart. Indeed, I can still recall it after sixty years:--

"Who can tell me where Weinsberg lies?

As brave a town as any; It must have sheltered in its time Brave wives and maidens many: If e'er I wooing have to do, Good faith, in Weinsberg I will woo!"

"And then, when we are there," said Rucker, "we will call on an old friend of my father's, named Justinus Kerner. Did you ever hear of him?"

Did a Jew ever hear of Moses, or an American of General Washington? In five minutes I convinced my friend that I knew more about Kerner than he himself did. Whereupon it was decided that we should set forth on the following morning.

Blessed, beautiful, happy summer mornings in Suabia--green mounts and grey rocks with old castles--peasants harvesting hay--a _Kirchweih_, or peasant's merry-making, with dancing and festivity--till we came to Weinsberg, and forthwith called on the ancient sage, whom we found with the two or three ladies and gentlemen of his family. I saw at a glance that they had the air of aristocracy. He received us very kindly, and invited us to come to dinner and sup with him.

The Weibertreue is an old castle which was in or at the end of Dr.

Kerner's garden. Once, when all the town had taken refuge in it from the Emperor Conrad, the latter gave the women leave to quit the fort, and also permission to every one to carry with her whatever was unto her most valuable, precious, or esteemed. And so the dames went forth, every one bearing on her back her husband.

In the tower of the castle, or in its wall, which was six feet thick, were eight or ten windows, gradually opening like trumpets, through which the wind blew all the time, and pleasantly enough on a hot summer day. In each of these the Doctor had placed an AEolian harp, and he who did not believe in fairies or the gentle spirit of a viewless sound should have sat in that tower and listened to the music as it rose and fell, as in endless solemn glees or part-singing; one harp stepping in, and pealing out richly and strangely as another died away, while anon, even as the new voice came, there thrilled in unison one or two more Ariels who seemed to be hurrying up to join the song. It was a marvellous strange thing of beauty, which resounded, indeed, all over Germany, for men spoke of it far and wide.

Quite as marvellous, in the evening, was the Doctor's own performance on the single and double Jew's harp. From this most unpromising instrument he drew airs of such exquisite beauty that one could not have been more astonished had he heard the sweet tones of Grisi drawn from a cat by twisting its tail. But we were in a land of marvels and wonders, or, as an English writer described it, "Weinsberg, a place on the Neckar, inhabited partly by men and women--some in and some out of the body--and partly by ghosts." There were visions in the air, and dreams sitting on the staircases; in fact, when I saw the peasants working in the fields, I should not have been astonished to see them vanish into mist or sink into the ground.