In Harmannsdorf again · My husband writes Sie wollen nicht · Max Nordau’s opinion of it · My labors and correspondence · Rear Admiral Réveillère · Dolmens and menhirs · From the patriot of Brittany to the patriot of humanity · Réveillère’s views about social economy, the lot of the masses, professional politicians, etc. · A fine comparison · Deaths of Prince Achille Murat, Duke von Oldenburg, and Ruggero Bonghi
After our return from Holland to our beloved Harmannsdorf we resumed our quiet, happy, laborious life. My Own began writing his two-volume novel entitled Sie wollen nicht, which was to be his ripest work. Max Nordau wrote to him regarding it:
Forgive me for delaying until to-day to thank you for your highly interesting novel Sie wollen nicht. It takes a long time for me to find opportunity, in my over-busy life, to read 730 pages of prose, no matter how very easy and agreeable may be its style, unless it happens to fit in directly with my line of work.
What I think of your character I should not be permitted to tell you. I know that men of real character find any praise of their characteristics disagreeable. At any rate I may say in brief that I admire the German writer who has the courage to-day to create the figures of a Gutfeld, Zinzler, and Kölble. Artistically your novel stands high. Perhaps there are too many threads interwoven, and the web is, perhaps, not drawn tight enough. That the main drama is not introduced until the last chapters, with the appearance of Palkowski, is no advantage from the standpoint of composition; but all that is a trifle compared to the great advantage of its wealth of motives and the vital energy of the complicated multitude of personages. Old Jörgen alone would suffice to make your novel ever fresh in the reader’s memory.
At that time I was writing Vor dem Gewitter. The editorial work on my monthly periodical likewise gave me abundant occupation, and my correspondence even more. I wrote regularly to Alfred Nobel in order to keep him informed as to the development of the peace cause. I constantly had long, stimulating letters from Carneri as well as from Rudolf Hoyos, Friedrich Bodenstedt, Spielhagen, Karl von Scherzer, M. G. Conrad, and others. I found a new, and to me personally unknown, correspondent in an old French naval officer, Rear Admiral Réveillère. I cannot now remember whether he wrote to me first or I to him. Whether or no, our correspondence was based on similarity of ideas and a mutual knowledge of each other’s writings. The first time I ever heard of Réveillère was at the banquet of the Interparliamentary Conference of 1894, at Scheveningen, when Frédéric Passy, in proposing a toast to the sea which was roaring beyond the doors of the hall, said he was quoting the words of his friend Réveillère.
Born in 1828, in Brittany, he had long followed the sea, and now was living in retirement in Brest, his native city, known to fame as a savant and a writer. He occupied his leisure time in writing books and articles. He had participated in many naval battles and many battles of ideas. The list of the titles of his books shows to how many countries he had traveled in the performance of his duties, and also how manifold were the regions which he had explored as a poet and thinker: “Gaul and the Gauls,” “The Enigma of Nature,” “Across the Unknown,” “The Voices of the Rocks,” “Journey Around the World,” “Seeds and Embryos,” “Against Storm and Flood,” “The Three Promontories,” “Letters of a Mariner,” “Tales and Stories,” “The Indian Seas,” “The Chinese Seas,” “The Conquest of the Ocean,” “The Search for the Ideal”; still later came “United Europe” (Paris, Berger Levraut, 1896), “Guardianship and Anarchy” (Ibid., 1896), “Extension, Expansion” (Ibid., 1898).
He wrote me once how it happened that he, the son of conservative Brittany, grown gray in the naval service, had joined the pacifists:
Often we are inspired by two ideas which have no apparent connection, and it sometimes takes years before the bond that connects them is discovered. It has cost me much time and thought to explain the connection between the two ruling passions which possess me and which had seemed to me to have no relationship with each other,—a deep-seated enthusiasm for the federation of Europe, and an instinctive cult for dolmens and menhirs.
From my earliest childhood I have been fascinated by the riddle that is presented in stone on all sides in my Breton homeland; and ever since my childhood I have been in love with the beautiful dream of a European federation,—a dream which is bound to come true in spite of the prejudices of statesmen and the prepossessions of crowned heads. The great work of the European alliance must begin with the rapprochement of those nations whose customs and ideas have the closest analogy. The nations living along the Atlantic coast have been the only ones to assimilate the principles of the French Revolution: I mean the following countries: Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, France, Portugal, and ancient Helvetia, the oldest of the European republics. England had, long since, already passed through her revolution.
Later my archæological studies taught me that this was the very region of the dolmens. All these nations had common ancestors,—the Megalithians; from the North Cape as far as Tangiers the same race occupied the coast; there were the same burial rites, always based on the same articles of faith; and the result was that to me the dolmens and menhirs came to stand as the symbols of a Western federation.
And another time:
The accident of birth made me first of all a Breton patriot. When I emerged from the narrow egoism of childhood, my first love was directed to Brittany. When the development of my intellect permitted me to realize the solidarity of my little homeland with the French fatherland, I became a French patriot. Later I learned from history that all the nations on this side of the Rhine once formed a glorious Federation; then I became a Gallic patriot. Still later study of the Megalithic monuments revealed to me a new connection,—that with the Megalithic race. As logic continued its work, I became a European patriot; finally, a patriot of humanity. In our day national love is an imbecile love unless it is illuminated by the love for mankind.
I have read only the three last-named works of the admiral; but he regularly sent me the articles that he published in the journal La Dépêche, in which he always took a consistent attitude—that of “illuminating” love for mankind—toward all the questions of the day; not, however, in the least in a visionary way, nor with any smack of mysticism, which so constantly stirs the spiritual lives of poetically inclined seafarers. He based his political ideals on actual and positive considerations, drawn particularly from the domain of national economy. Thus he wrote:
In order to meet the industrial rivalry of the United States of America and the yellow races, it would be desirable—in the interest of France and Germany—to see a customs union formed, embracing Germany, Belgium, Holland, and France, and including, at the same time, the colonies of these countries. It really seems almost impossible at the present time to swim against the stream of protective tariffs, and yet every nation is conscious of the necessity of extending its market. If there is opposition to this extension on European soil, why is not an effort made to gain it through a colonial union,—a union by means of which the federated countries might insure to their citizens, their vessels, and their products the same rights and privileges in all the colonies?
With regard to the lot of the masses, which so greatly needs to be improved, Réveillère says that this amelioration depends on the general production of useful articles. As long as the masses are wasting their energies in unproductive labors there is no alleviation possible for them, ... and at the present time the nations are wearing themselves out in unproductive and destructive labor. There is no halfway measure; either international anarchy (that is to say, the lack of a code of laws regulating the intercourse of nations), with poverty, or federation, with wealth.
My Breton friend was inclined not to mince words in speaking of the politicians: “Steam has changed everything in this world except the routine of our statesmen!” And in the following letter:
Engineers and scholars are all the time at work filling up the graves which the professionals in statecraft are digging; the engineers are expending all their energies in increasing the productivity of labor, the politicians are doing everything they possibly can to make it sterile.
Many persons are of the opinion that the end sought is too broad and distant, and the initiation of it is beset with too great difficulties, to be willing to attempt the regulation of a pacific mutual relationship among the European states; especially at the present time, when almost every state has to endure so much trouble and disturbance arising from the violent national and social battles which are raging within its own borders. An answer to this objection is afforded by the following passage from one of Réveillère’s books (“Extension, Expansion,” p. 23):
When a physician has to treat a case of consumption, his first care is to prevent his patient from breathing poisoned air. If he has to perform an operation, he sees to it that the room in which the operation is to take place is purified of every contagious germ. Exactly the same principle holds with regard to national diseases. No state can think of curing its internal ills before the European room is disinfected. Certainly it is the duty of every nation to do everything possible to modify the ills of its own people; but to claim that serious internal reforms can be carried out without having first secured European federation is just like caring for wounded men in a hall filled with microbes.
I kept up a correspondence with Admiral Réveillère for a long time. Of late years our letters fell off in frequency. A short time ago—in March, 1908—he died. Ah, when we have grown old, how often we have to report of our friends that they are no more! In childhood life is like a nursery; in youth, like a garden; in old age, like a cemetery.
Tidings of a death which affected us painfully—I am now telling of what happened in the year 1895—came to us suddenly from the Caucasus,—Prince Achille Murat had shot himself. Was it suicide or an accident? I never learned the exact truth. It happened in Zugdidi, in the villa which My Own had built for the Murats. Princess Salomé, who was sitting in the next room, heard the report of a shot in her husband’s room. She hastened in and found the unfortunate man fallen back in an easy-chair, with a pistol between his legs, the barrel pointing up in the air. Had he been cleaning the weapon carelessly, or was it weariness of life? As I said, I do not know.
And still another loss: On the 17th of October, 1895, Duke Elimar von Oldenburg departed this life, in his fifty-second year, at his castle of Erlaa. A short time before, he had given me a second article by his uncle, Prince Peter, entitled “Thoughts of a Russian Patriot,” which ends with these ringing words:
Let me be permitted to express the dearest wish of my heart, as I face God and Eternity,—an agreement of all governments in the interest of peace and humanity! May that happy day dawn when men can say, War between civilized nations is at an end.
Duke Elimar’s widow was completely overwhelmed by this sudden and premature bereavement. To my letter of condolence she wrote me the following answer, which throws a brilliant light on the noble characteristics of the departed and his consort:
Brogan, October 29, 1895
Dear Baroness:
Most hearty thanks for your warm, sympathetic words, and also for the splendid wreath sent by the Society of the Friends of Peace, which, with so many other gifts of love and tokens of respect, adorns the last resting-place of the deceased. There is no consolation for such hours. What I have lost no one can truly realize who does not know how the inner bond that united us, joining every fiber of our two lives together, had been interwoven in the nineteen years of undivided, untroubled wedlock, so that with the uprooting of one life the thousands and thousands of roots of the other were torn from the ground. The profound loneliness which has come upon me through this loss is often scarcely to be endured, and at the present time I can hardly imagine how in this life, on this earth, I can ever again take root. One who has lived for nineteen years in such intimate relationship with a man like my husband cannot easily become accustomed to other persons.
The pure, lofty idealism which—I may say—formed the very quintessence of his being and made him so extremely lovable, so winning, and so attractive to all who came into contact with him, I shall never again find anywhere so embodied as in him, and since he has gone from me I miss him always everywhere to such a degree that it is often simply unendurable for me to be with others. And yet the proofs of unofficial, genuine, heartfelt sympathy from so many good and noble people in these days has done me unspeakable good. To you also, my dear Baroness, my best and heartiest thanks once again for all your sympathy.
Your sincerely devoted
Natalie von Oldenburg
A few years later she sent me a volume of poems dedicated to the memory of the departed and breathing a pathetic grief.
And yet a third loss: On the 31st of October, 1895, Ruggero Bonghi, so beloved in our circle, died in Torre del Greco at the age of sixty-eight. Italy mourned in him the reformer of public education, the professor of philosophy, the editor of the Nuova Antologia, the founder and director of the orphan asylum at Anagni; we mourned the active apostle of our common cause, the man who from a lofty tribune had spoken these beautiful words: “We promoters of peace, who work for it with glowing zeal, have in the last analysis no other object than this,—that man shall become wholly human.” Our Austrian Union telegraphed the following words to Rome for the funeral: Sincero dolore e riconoscenza eterna. “Sincere grief and eternal gratitude.”