XXVI
INTERCOURSE WITH FRIENDS
In port · Trip to Vienna · Literary circles · Balduin Groller · Theodor Herzl · Letter from Count Hoyos · Letter from Friedrich Bodenstedt
After our return from Paris we remained quiet and secluded at Harmannsdorf. An uneventful life, but no empty life. There is no way in which a life can be better filled than with labor and love. Of course there is not much to tell about it. The reminiscences of my youth, with all its betrothals and art-plans and varying adventures, have certainly made more amusing reading.
The period of storms was past; we were now in port. The midday sun of youth no longer blazed, and now there lay on our horizon something like the tints of evening. But not yet time to lay aside work; there was yet much to be done. And we had to bear a great grief, to fight a hard battle. It was not sorrow of our own that weighed upon us, but the sorrow of the world; we took the field not against personal enemies, but against the enemies of mankind—cruelty and falsehood!
It is a common belief that only people who are themselves unfortunate can understand the misfortunes of others, and they call that the hard school of suffering. With us it was different: whatever we experienced of deep pity, of warm wishes to help and to better, had its root in the joy which we had in life and life’s beauties. It was in the college of happiness that we had learned that here on earth life may be—in other words, ought to be—glorious and joyous and rich in love. The unfortunate are likelier to get embittered: “other folks may as well have their troubles too,” they think, and they comfort themselves by saying “there is no such thing as happiness anyhow.” We knew better: there is. It is only that not all find it, that very few indeed can find it because so much stupidity blocks the way to it,—these things will not let the happy be at peace.
For a little change from our workaday existence in the country we had brief trips to Vienna. There we attended the theater and associated with a few friends, mostly in literary circles. When Carneri was in town we joined the “deputy table” at the Hotel Meissl. We had a very pleasant intercourse with Balduin Groller, then editor of the Oesterreichische Illustrierte Zeitung. While still in the Caucasus we had formed an epistolary friendship with him, a friendship which has remained steadfast to this day. Humor and heart are the two qualities which characterize Balduin Groller as a feuilletonist and as a man. This is why in his company one is excellently amused and at the same time is in such a comfortable frame of mind; you laugh at his dry wit and bask in his warm geniality. That he was a handsome, dark-eyed, elegant man, an adept in sports, did not detract from the effect. Moreover, he liked us as well as we liked him, and those evenings when we four—Groller has the dearest little wife—chatted together over our food and wine were most delightful. Often Theodor Herzl joined us. He also sparkled with wit. And that head of his—like an Assyrian king’s! He ought to have been really king of the new Zion, whose awakener he was, and which might perhaps already exist if he had not died so prematurely.
We had in Vienna a dear and interesting friend, Count Rudolf Hoyos, a handsome old gentleman, every inch an aristocrat, but a democrat in his views. I perceive that this is the third time I have laid stress on external beauty in describing the persons of notable men. I cannot help it—in the first place they really were handsome, these three, and in the second place, I like handsome people better than homely people. One must forgive homeliness; but one ought not to neglect beauty.—Count Hoyos was a free and brilliant intellect. He had published a volume of poems in which a few pearls were to be found. His residence—a whole floor in the palace of the “Adliges Kasino” on the Ringstrasse—was a museum: paintings, art furniture, bric-a-brac, antiquities, vases, fabrics, carved cabinets, armorial trophies, bronzes, costly books,—it took hours and hours to admire all the rare objects. The host, however, preferred to spend his time in a little oriel where there was room only for one table with various mementos on it, besides his easy chair with a reading-desk, a little divan and a rocking-chair for at most three callers, and an easel with the portrait of a woman—a woman whom Rudolf Hoyos had loved; a great lady who had once been the center of a distinguished and witty circle, but who was no longer living. Count Hoyos remained unmarried. I have a large number of letters from him, and one of them I will introduce here; his character will thus most clearly be shown:
Toblach, August 13, ’90
Many years ago, at a Thé d’esprit, I was introduced to a daughter of Bettina Arnim. Her first words after the introduction, as she handed me my cup, were, “What do you think about the immortality of the soul?” “I believe in immortality, but not in the soul,” was my reply.
This story is suggested by the article “Carus,” excellently translated by you in the last magazine. It interested me very much, but did not at all satisfy me.
Do you know a children’s game Frau Gevatterin, leih mir d’ Scher’,[23] in which those who take part keep changing their seats, while there is always one who finds all the chairs taken, because there are more players than there are seats? Carus lets his ideas play this game, or rather the designations for the ideas. Ego, personality, soul, its activity, spirit, idea, consciousness, and so on, keep changing their places with great agility—but there is always one of them that gets nothing.
It does no good to give all ideas new names or to foist new meanings upon old words—there is always one left in the air; that is, he no more finds the ultimate cause than do the rest of us, only he does not acknowledge it as we do.
What answer does C. give to the question with which the article starts? Is that which used to be called Soul a cause or an effect (that is, a phenomenon)? Does he believe that every cause begets effects, the children of which again become causes? Does he close the circle and regard the last effect as the first cause and vice versa?
He constantly provokes me to contradiction even in details. For instance, he brings Luther forward as a “progressive spirit,” because he substituted the Bible for the Church—belief in authority for belief in authority—! Whither this progress has led, we can see by the sanctimonious frauds with the halo! these Bismarcks with the tiara—!
Pardon, if C. is a favorite with you, but frankness is the first condition of a wholesome correspondence. Even with Villers I used to have frequent controversies.
Your many-sided activity and creative enthusiasm fill me with admiration, like a great drama of nature. Now pray allow yourself the enjoyment of the latter, as I did yesterday in my world’s-end thunderstorm.
Gratefully yours
R. H.
Best regards to your worthy husband.
Here also I introduce a letter which I received from Mirza Schaffy, after I had sent him a review of my novel by Carneri in the feuilleton of the Neue Freie Presse. The Peace Congress which Bodenstedt tells of is the one that took place in Paris in the year 1849, under the presidency of Victor Hugo, when Cobden was present.
Wiesbaden, April 8, ’90
Best thanks for the article you kindly sent me regarding your admirable work; I am returning it herewith, as soon as I have read it. Carneri has wielded his pen like a master and written just after my heart. The other printed sheets which I also inclose are the last pages of the second volume, which is soon to be out, of my Recollections. On the last page of all you will find how it was I came to be sent from Berlin to Paris as a peace man and a free-trader. The thing was so suddenly arranged that I had no time left to prepare a speech. And besides, I could not have said anything that was not already included in the Berlin letter of adhesion which I was to deliver. Moreover, I had never yet spoken in public, and had no desire to make my first experiment in a foreign language. So everything would have been sure to go off without a ripple had not Richard Cobden insisted on making me make a speech, and that in the very first session. I had taken my place in one of the front rows of the hall, which held between five and six thousand people, and I had been calmly listening to a half-dozen addresses—among them a very good one by Bastiat—when Cobden perceived me and immediately came down from the platform, seized me by the hand, and made me go with him and take a place in a chair next him on the platform. As vice president he sat at Victor Hugo’s left, and, when Victor Hugo opened the congress with solemn grandiloquence, had immediately followed with an address in fearful French but immensely effective.
I obstinately refused his insistence that I also should be heard, and I believed that I had safely got out of it, when suddenly my ear caught a whispered conversation between him and Victor Hugo:
“Il faut le faire parler de quelque façon que ce soit.”
“Mais il m’a prévenu, déjà hier, qu’il n’a pas préparé un discours.”
“Donnez-lui toujours la parole; il faut donc bien qu’il dise quelque chose!”[24]
The next moment the bell tinkled and the voice of the president was heard,
“Je donne la parole à Mr. Fr. Bodenstedt de Berlin.”[25]
I got to my feet in some trepidation, and said, in as good French and in as loud a voice as I could just then command, that the president had been aware ever since my arrival that I had not come to make a speech; “mais même si j’avais préparé un discours, je ne le prononcerais pas aujourd’hui ici....”
“Pourquoi pas? Pourquoi pas?”
“Je vous en dirai la raison tout franchement. Je viens de promener mes regards à travers cette vaste salle, où l’on voit représentées par leurs drapeaux toutes les nations civilisées du globe, mais le drapeau de la nation la plus civilisée, le drapeau allemand y manque!”—[26]
After all eyes had looked in vain for the German flag, which was nowhere to be found, M. E. de Girardin arose to his full height and cried in a solemn nasal tone, “Monsieur, vous êtes le drapeau vivant de l’Allemagne ici!”[27]
During the storm of applause that followed these words, I remembered that at breakfast I had seen in the Charivari a cartoon of Girardin, with these words for a legend: “Mr. de Girardin commence à flotter avec le vent.”[28] So I got up, as soon as the hall was quiet again, and said, “Merci du compliment, bien que je ne puisse pas l’accepter dans toute la force du terme, attendu que je ne flotte pas avec le vent, moi!”[29]
Indescribable effect. Hundreds of Americans and Englishmen cried, “The translation! The translation!”
M. de Coquerel, curé de Ste. Madelaine, translateur officiel, gets up and begins:
“The learned gentleman has said—”
I interrupt him, politely begging permission to translate my words into English myself; in doing so I make an allusion to our Anglo-Saxon relationship, and arouse great enthusiasm.
Now arose M. de Cormenin (Timon) to protest against Germany’s being la nation la plus civilisée du globe: only France, said he, could be so designated.
“Let us put it to the test,” I cried.... “How is the greatness of a nation known? By its great men. Name me six of your great living men and I will wager that every German schoolboy knows their names; then I will mention six Germans who are their peers, and I will acknowledge myself beaten if you yourself can give me any tolerably satisfactory account of their importance.”
So the matter was thrashed back and forth without its being possible to speak of it as a speech; I myself was farthest of all from having the idea that I had made one. But Fate often plays strange tricks with us. Szarvady, Wilhelmine Claus’s husband, was my guide through Paris, and we had agreed to dine at the Hotel Rougemont at six o’clock with some of his acquaintances. He had not been at the meeting, but had taken me to Victor Hugo’s the day before and had there learned that I was not going to make a speech. Great was his astonishment at reading in all the evening papers the most contradictory reports of the speech I did not make. John Lemoine in the Journal des Débats was praising my fine English, and Galignani’s Messenger remarked as follows about my French:
“The learned gentleman delivered himself in a most exquisite French.”
That is the only sentence which my memory retains as an attestation of my oratorical triumph. In Paris I was called le drapeau vivant de l’Allemagne for a few days, and from there the phrase went over into all the German papers, where it kept its vogue for a few years. Now it is to be read only on a “triumph cup” which a fascinating young lady presented me; on it she had painted me as I then was, in my thirtieth year, with a full head of curly hair, slender, and vivacious. This young enthusiast afterwards married the famous Orientalist, Professor Matzstein, and is still living in Berlin.
But, to turn from this swift success of a witticism to a soberer tone, I must tell you briefly of a soirée which I attended at Alexis de Tocqueville’s. He was at that time Minister of Foreign Affairs and was the most intelligent Frenchman whom I ever knew. With him, Cobden, and Bastiat I had a long conversation in which the peace question was treated more exhaustively than was possible in the Congress. We agreed that the fruit of peace could be ripened only on Germanic soil, while France and Russia would remain disturbing elements as long as they should have the power to be such.
As far as I personally am concerned, I have always found myself in a difficult position as an apostle of peace. My father-in-law was a colonel. One of my sons-in-law is likewise a colonel. Two of my wife’s brothers went to fight against France as young captains in 1870. One of them did not come back at all; the other lost a leg at the storming of the heights of Spichern, and now hobbles round as a major. All my wife’s tears could not keep my only son from going as a volunteer against France, where he won the Iron Cross and the Order for Valor, with swords. He is now living in St. Paul on the Mississippi....
Yesterday I was interrupted while writing the first sheet of this, and now the second is drawing to an end. I will only call your attention to a poem entitled Die kriegerische Nazarener (“The Warlike Nazarenes”), which went through all the papers in 1854, before the breaking out of the Crimean War, and which you will find on page 120 of the ninth volume of my collected works (Berlin, Decker, 1867). It might be very appropriate for reprinting in the new edition, as is shown by the utterances of three ecclesiastical potentates, which it illustrates:
The issue is the battle of the Cross against the heathen.
The Metropolitan of Moscow
It is for the glory of God that you are fighting.
The Archbishop of Paris
Jesus Christ, our Saviour, for whose sake you fight, will bless your arms.[30]
With best greetings to the husband also,
Friedrich Bodenstedt