The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume Ix Part 73

But however the matter may have stood in general,--and I repeat my conviction that in this case the happy medium is hard to find,--to me the reform was a great blessing. For Wesselburen, like the other towns, acquired an elementary school and a man was chosen as teacher of it whose name I cannot write down without a feeling of the deepest grat.i.tude, because in spite of his modest position, he exercised an immeasurable influence on my development. He was called Franz Christian Detlefsen and came to us from the neighboring town of Eiderstedt, where he had already held a small official position.

IX

No house is so small as not to seem to the child who has been born in it like a world whose wonders and mysteries he discovers only little by little. Even the poorest cottage has at least a garret to which a ladder leads up, and with what feelings is this climbed for the first time!

Some old rubbish is sure to be found up there, which, useless and forgotten, points back to days long past, and reminds us of men whose last bone has already moldered to dust. Behind the chimney there is surely a worm-eaten, wooden chest which excites curiosity. The dust is lying on it hand high, the lock is still there, but there is no need to look for the key; for one can forage in it wherever one wants, and when with fear and trembling the child does so, he pulls out a torn boot, or the broken distaff of a spinning wheel which was laid aside half a century ago. Shuddering he flings away the double find, because involuntarily he asks himself where is the leg that wore the boot and where is the hand that set the wheel in motion. But the mother carefully picks up the one or the other because she happens to need a strap which can be cut out of grandfather's boot, or because she believes that she can start the fire again with great-aunt's distaff.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE DEATH OF KRIEMHILD _From the Painting by Schnorr von Carolsfeld_]

Even though the chest had found its way into the tiled stove during the last hard winter, when people were even forced to burn dried cakes of dung, there is still hidden away in the garret a rusty sickle which once went off to the fields, shining and merry, and stretched low at one swing of the arm a thousand golden-green stalks; and above it hangs the uncanny scythe which a farm-hand once ran into a long time ago, so that he cut off his nose--it having hung too far down over the garret hatch, and he having mounted the ladder too quickly. Beside them the mice are squeaking in the corners, a couple perhaps jump out of their holes and after executing a short dance creep back into them again; a little shiny white weasel is visible for a moment, lifting its clever little head and forepaws in the air, peering and sniffing; and the single sunbeam that enters through some hidden c.h.i.n.k is so perfectly like a gold thread that one would like to wind it around one's finger at once.

The cottage is not provided with a cellar but the burgher-house is, though not indeed on account of the wine but of the potatoes and turnips. The poorer cla.s.ses keep these out doors under a goodly pile of earth, which they raise above them in the autumn, and in winter, in time of hard frost, carefully cover over with straw or dung as well.

Now to reach the cellar is really much more difficult than to climb to the attic, but where is the child who does not know how to satisfy this longing too in one way or another! He can go to the neighbors and hang on coaxingly to the maid's ap.r.o.n when she goes down to get something, or can even watch for the moment when the door is left open by mistake, and venture down on his own account. That is dangerous to be sure, for the door may be suddenly closed, and the sixteen-legged spiders, that crawl around the walls in the most hideous deformed shapes, as well as the trickling greenish water that gathers in the cavities intentionally left here and there, do not invite one to tarry long. But what does it matter? One has one's throat after all, and whoever screams l.u.s.tily will be heard sooner or later. Now if the house itself suffices, under all circ.u.mstances, to make such an impression upon the child, how must the town strike him! When he is taken along by mother or father for the first time, he surely does not start to walk through the tangle of streets without a feeling of astonishment, and it is still less likely that he reaches home again without experiencing a sensation of giddiness. Nay, be perhaps brings back lasting typical conceptions of many objects, lasting in the sense that in after life they imperceptibly stretch and widen _ad infinitum_, but never allow themselves to be effaced; for the primitive impressions of things are indestructible and maintain themselves against all later ones, no matter how far these, in themselves, may surpa.s.s the old. For me too, then, it was a moment never to be forgotten, and one whose influence continues to be felt to the present day, when my mother took me with her for the first time on the evening walk which she indulged in on Sundays and holidays during the beautiful summer months. Good gracious, how large this Wesselburen was!

Five-year old legs were nearly tired out before they had made the entire round! And what did one not meet on the road! The very names of the streets and squares sounded so puzzling and fantastic! "Now we are on the Lollard's Foot! That is White Meadow! This way goes over to Bell Mountain! There stands the Oak Nest!" The less apparent reason there was for these names, the more certain it seemed that they concealed some mystery! And then the objects themselves! The church whose pealing voice I had already heard so often; the graveyard with its dark trees and its crosses and tombstones; a very old house, in which a, "forty-eighter"

had lived, and in the cellar of which a treasure was said to lie buried, over which the devil kept watch; and, finally, a big fish-pond: all these details coalesced in my mind, as though like the limbs of a gigantic animal they were organically related, into one huge general picture, and the autumn moon shed a bluish light over it. Since that time I have seen St. Peter's and every German cathedral, I have been to Pere la Chaise and the Pyramid of Cestius, but whenever I think in general of churches, graveyards and the like, they still hover before me today in the shape in which I saw them on that evening.

X

About the same time that I exchanged Susanna's gloomy room for the newly-built bright and pleasant primary-school, my father also had to leave his little house and move into a hired lodging. That was a strange contrast for me. School had broadened: I gazed out of clear windows with wide frames of fir wood, instead of trying my curious eyes on green gla.s.s bottle panes with dirty leaden rims; and the daylight, which at Susanna's always commenced later and stopped earlier than it should, now came into its full rights. I sat at a comfortable table with a desk and an ink bottle; the odor of fresh wood and paint, which still has some charm for me, threw me into a sort of joyous ecstasy, and when, on account of my reading, I was told by the inspecting minister, to exchange the third bench, which I had modestly chosen, for the first, and moreover to take one of the highest places on the latter, my cup of felicity was nearly full.

Our home, on the contrary, had shrunk and grown darker; there was no more garden now in which I could romp with my comrades when the weather was fine, no hallway to receive us hospitably when it rained and blew. I was restricted to a narrow room in which I myself could hardly move around and into which I dared not bring any playmates, and to the s.p.a.ce before the door, where it was seldom that any one would stay with me very long, as the street ran directly past it.

The reason for this change, which brought about such serious consequences, was strange enough. My father at the time of his marriage had, by going security, laden himself with another's debt, and would no doubt have been driven out much earlier if his creditor had not fortunately had to serve a long term in the penitentiary in punishment for an act of incendiarism. He was one of those terrible men who do evil for evil's sake, and prefer the crooked path even when the straight one would lead them more quickly and surely to the goal. He had that lowering, wicked, diabolical look in his eyes which no one can endure, and which in a childlike age may have begotten belief in witches and sorcerers, because enjoyment of evil finds expression in it, indeed it seems of necessity to be forced to increase evil. A tavern and general store-keeper by profession and more than prosperous for his station, he might have led the most peaceful and merry existence possible, but he absolutely had to be at enmity with G.o.d and the world, and to give free rein to a truly devilish humor, such as I have never come across elsewhere, even in detective stories.

Thus he once, with the greatest friendliness, allowed his wife, at her request, to go to confession on Sat.u.r.day, but forbade her to take the communion on Sunday, in accordance with the Protestant custom, because she had not asked his permission to do so. When any one of his neighbors happened to be raising a fine young horse, he would go to him and offer an absurdly low price for the animal. If the other refused it, he would say: "I would think about it, and bear in mind the old rule, that one should hand over everything that has once been bargained for; who knows what may happen!" And surely enough the horse, in spite of careful watching, would sooner or later be found in the meadow or in the stable with the tendons of its feet cut and would have to be stabbed to death; so that in the end he could buy whatever happened to please his fancy.

He willingly a.s.sisted his son-in-law in declaring a fraudulent bankruptcy, and perhaps even beguiled him into it, but when the latter, after having perjured himself, demanded the embezzled goods back again, he laughed him to scorn and dared him to go to law. However he was surprised by his own maid-servant while committing arson and taken in the very act, in spite of his cleverness and his equally great luck, and it was to this circ.u.mstance that my father, who had been talked into going security by all sorts of cunning deceptive promises, owed the few years of quiet possession which he enjoyed during his short lifetime.

As soon as the penitentiary had given its charge back to the community we were obliged to leave the abode in which our grandparents had shared joy and sorrow for over half a century. It seemed like the end of the world to my brother and myself when the old pieces of furniture, which up till then had scarcely been moved from their places even when the rooms were whitewashed, suddenly emigrated into the street; when the respectable old Dutch striking-clock that never went correctly and always caused confusion, all at once found itself hanging on a branch of the pear tree, brightly illuminated by the beams of the May sun, while under it stood insecurely the round worm-eaten dining-table which, when there happened to be very little on it, had so often elicited from us the wish that we could have everything that had ever been eaten off it.

However, the whole affair was also, quite naturally, in the nature of a spectacle for us, and as in the course of clearing out, a bright colored pipe-head that I had lost a long time before came to light again in some rat hole or other, and, moreover, various odds and ends, which the other families who were moving out with us had come across when dusting in the corners and did not consider worth taking along, fell to our share--since we could make use of the least thing--the day soon began to seem like a holiday. We parted, not indeed without emotion but still without sorrow, from the house in which we had been born.

I did not learn what it really meant until later, though to be sure it was soon enough. Without realizing it myself I had, up to that time, been a little aristocrat, and now ceased to be one. This is how it was.

In the same way that the peasant proprietor and the rich burgher look down However, in the end, all this had a very good effect upon me. I had been up to that time a dreamer, who in the daytime liked to creep away behind the hedge or the well, and in the evening cowered in my mother's lap, or in that of one of our women neighbors, and begged to be told fairy and ghost stories. Now I was driven out into active life. It was a question of defending one's skin, and though I engaged in my first scuffle only "after long hesitation and many, by no means heroic efforts to escape," yet the result was such, that I no longer tried to avoid the second, and began at the third or fourth quite to relish the idea. Our declarations of war were even more laconic than those of the Romans or Spartans. The challenger looked over at his opponent during school-hours, when the teacher had turned his back for a moment, clenched his right fist and laid it over his mouth, or rather over his jaw; the opponent repeated the symbolic sign the next moment that it was safe to do so, without by even so much as a look requiring a more specific manifesto, and at midday, in the churchyard, in the vicinity of an old vault, before which there, was a gra.s.s plot, the affair was settled in the presence of the whole school, with natural weapons, by wrestling and pounding, in extreme cases also by biting and scratching.

I never indeed rose to the rank of a genuine triarian, who made it a point of honor to go about the whole year with a black eye or a swollen nose, but I very soon lost the reputation for being a good child, which I owed to my mother and which up to that time had meant so much to me, and, to make up for it, rose in my father's estimation, who behaved toward his sons as Frederick the Great did toward his officers, punishing them if they fought and mocking them if they allowed themselves to be trifled with. Once my opponent, while I was lying on top of him pounding him at my ease, bit my finger through to the bone, so that for weeks I could not use my hand for writing. That was, however, the most dangerous wound that I can remember, and, as sometimes happens later in life also, it led to the forming of an intimate friendship.

EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF FRIEDRICH

HEBBEL

Reflections on the world, life, and books, but chiefly on myself, in the form of a journal.

TRANSLATED BY FRANCES A. KING

(1836)

At the moment in which we conceive an ideal, there arises in G.o.d the thought of creating it.

Social life in all its _nuances_ is no mere confluence of meaningless accidents; it is the product of the experience of whole millenniums, and our task is to apprehend the correctness of these experiences.

A poetic idea cannot be expressed allegorically; allegory is the ebb-tide at once of the intellect and of the productive power.

Nature eternally repeats the same thought in ever widening expansion; therefore the drop is an image of the sea.

Poetic and plastic art are alike in being both formative; that is to say, they are intended to bring to view a limited amount of matter in definite relations which are fixed by nature; and when the poet gives expression to an idea, the process is exactly the same as when a painter or sculptor represents the n.o.ble or beautiful outlines of a body.

"Throw away so that thou shalt not lose!" is the best rule of life.

There are said to have been people who, when a limb had been amputated, still felt pain in the severed member. Twofold mode of all being: what has _been_ from the beginning and what has only _become_. _Cogito ergo sum_; am I not much more under the dominion of the thinking faculty within me than the latter is under my dominion? Individuality is not so much the goal as the way, and not so much the best way as the only one.

Two human beings are always two extremes.

Words are monuments not of what mankind has thought for centuries about certain subjects but only of the fact that it has thought about them.

The difference is considerable.

A really great genius can never chance upon an age which would make it impossible for him to allow free play to his superior powers. If he chances upon a dull, exhausted, empty century,--well then, this century is his problem.

Most of my knowledge about myself I have gained in moments when I perceived the peculiarities of other people.

It is a sign of mediocre intelligence to be able to fix one's attention upon details when contemplating a great work of art; on the other hand, it is a sign of the mediocrity of a work of art (poetic or plastic) if one cannot get beyond the details, if they, so to speak, impede the way to the whole.

Goethe says in regard to _Michael Kohlhaas_ that one should not single out such cases in the general course of human events. That is true in so far as one should not draw any conclusions therefrom to the detriment of mankind. But it seems to me that it is precisely to exceptions of this sort that the poet must turn his attention, in order to show that they, as well as common-place events, have their origin in what is most genuinely human.

Man cannot abstract his ego from the universe. As firmly as he is interwoven with the universe and life, just so firmly does he believe that life and the universe are interwoven with him.

(1837)

It takes a great deal of time merely to perceive where the enigmatical in many things is actually located. Many simply introduce logic into their poetry and believe this is equivalent to motivation.

All reasoning (and here belongs what Schiller, under the trade mark of the sentimental, would smuggle in as poetry) is onesided and allows the heart and mind no further activity than simply to deny or affirm. On the contrary, all that is actual and objective (and here belong the so-called natural sounds, which reveal the innermost essence of a state or a human personality) is infinite, and offers to those who are in sympathy and to those who are not the widest scope for the employment of all their powers.

Philosophy strives ever and always for the absolute, and yet that is properly speaking the task of poetry.

With every human being (let him be who he will) disappears from the world a mystery, that, owing to his peculiar construction, he alone could reveal, and that no one will reveal after him.

It is dangerous to think in images, but it cannot always be avoided; for often, especially in regard to the highest things, image and thought are identical.

A miracle is easier to repeat than to explain. Thus the artist continues the act of creation in the highest sense, without being able to comprehend it.

(1838)

G.o.d Himself when, in order to attain great ends, He exerts a direct influence upon an individual, and thus allows Himself an arbitrary interference (if we put the case we must use expressions that fit it) in the world's machinery, cannot protect His tool from being crushed by the same wheel which this individual has arrested for a moment or has turned in another direction. This is surely the princ.i.p.al tragic motif which underlies the history of the Maid of Orleans. A tragedy which should reflect this idea would produce a great impression through the glimpse it would afford into the eternal order of nature, which G.o.d Himself may not disturb with impunity.

When the poet attempts to delineate characters by making them speak, he must be careful not to allow them to speak about their own inner life.

All their utterances must relate to something external; only then does their inner nature come out vividly and expressively, for it fashions itself only in reflections of the world and of life.