Now don’t say What on earth does the woman want? because it seems to me so plain. What the woman wants is that present and future poets should wrap themselves sternly in an impenetrable veil of anonymity. They won’t, but she can go on praying that they will. They won’t, because of the power of the passing moment, because of the pleasantness of praise, of recognition, of personal influence, and, I suppose, but I’m not sure, of money. Do you remember that merry rhymer Prior, how he sang
’Tis long ago
Since gods came down incognito?
Well, I wish with all my heart they had gone on doing it a little longer. He wasn’t, I think, deploring what I deplore, the absence of a sense for the anonymous in gods, of a sense of the dignity of separation, of retirement, of mystery, wherever there is even one spark of the Divine; I think he thought they had all been, and that neither incognito nor in any other form would they appear again. He implied, and so joined himself across the centuries to the Walrus and the Carpenter, that there were no gods to come. Well, he has been dead over a hundred and eighty years, and they have simply flocked since then. I’d like to write the great names on this page, the names of the poets, first and greatest of the gods, to raise it to dignity and confound the ghost of Prior, but I won’t out of consideration for you.
Does not my enthusiasm, my mountain energy, make you groan with the deadly fatigue of him who has to listen and cannot share? I’ll leave off. My letter is growing unbecomingly fat. The air up here is so bracing that my very unhappinesses seem after all full of zest, very vocal, healthy griefs, really almost enjoying themselves. I’ll go back to my pots. I’m busy today, though you mightn’t think it, making apple jelly out of our very own apples. I’ll go back to my pots and forget — no, I won’t make a feeble joke I was just going to make, because of what I know your face would look like when you read it. After all, I believe I’m more than a little bit frightened of you.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLVII
Galgenberg, Sept. 30th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther, — How nice of you to be so kind, to write so consolingly, to be so patient in explaining where I am thinking wrong. I burned the book in the kitchen fire, and felt great satisfaction in clearing the house of its presence. You are right; I have no concern with the body of a poet — all my concern is with his soul, and the two shall be severely separated. I am glad you agree with me that poets should be anonymous, but you seem to have even less hope that they ever will be than I have. At least I pray that they may; you apparently take no steps whatever to bring it about. You say that experience teaches that we must not expect too much of gods; that the possible pangs of posterity often leave them cold; that they are blind to the merits of bushels, and discern neither honor nor profit in the use of those vessels of extinguishment; you fear that they will not change, and you exhort me to see to it that their weakness shall not be an occasion for my stumbling. That is very sensible advice. But before your kind letter came a few fresh autumn mornings had cleared a good deal of my first dejection away. If the gods won’t hide themselves I can after all shut my eyes. If I may not rejoice in the divine in them with undistracted attention I will try at least to get all the warmth I can from its burning. And I can imitate my own dainty and diligent bees, and take care to be absorbed only in their honey. You make me ashamed of my folly in thinking I could never read Burns again now that I know about his sins. I did secretly think so. I was sure of it. I felt quite sick to see him tumbled from his altar into the mud. Your letter shows me that once again I have been foolish. Why, it has verged on idiocy. I myself have laughed at people in Jena, strictly pious people, who will not read Goethe, who have a personally vindictive feeling against him because of his different love-affairs, and I have listened astonished to the fury with which the proposal of a few universal-minded persons to give Heine a statue was opposed, and to the tone almost of hatred with which one man whenever his name is mentioned calls out Schmutzfink. About our poets I have been from the beginning quite sane. But yours were somehow more sacred to me; sacred, I suppose, because they were more mysterious, more distant, — glorious angel-trumpets through which God sent His messages. I was so glad, I whose tendency is, I am afraid, to laugh and criticise, to possess one thing at which I could not laugh, to have a whole tract of beauty in which I could walk seriously, with downcast eyes; and I thought I was never going to be able to be serious there again. It was a passing fit, a violent revulsion. If I like carefully to separate my own soul and body, why should I not do the same with those of other sinners? It has always seemed to me so quaint the way we admit, the good nature with which we reiterate, that we are all wretched sinners. We do it with such an immense complacency. We agree so heartily, with such comfortable, regretful sighs, when anybody tells us so; but with only one wretched sinner are we of a real patience. With him, indeed, our patience is boundless. I know this, I have always known it, and I will not now, at an age when it is my hope to grow every year a little better, forget it and be as insolently intolerant as the man who shudders at the name of Heine, will not read a line of him and calls him Schmutzfink. That writer’s books you tell me about, the books the virtuous in England will not read because his private life was disgraceful, beautiful books, you say, into which went his best, in which his spirit showed how bright it was, how he had kept it apart and clean, I shall get them all and read them all. No sinner, cursed with a body at variance with his soul and able in spite of it to hear the music of heaven and give it exquisite expression, shall ever again be identified by me with what at such great pains he has kept white. I know at least three German writers to whom the same thing happened, men who live badly and write nobly. My heart goes out to them. I think of them lame and handicapped, leading their Muse by the hand with anxious care so that her shining feet, set among the grass and daisies along the roadside, shall not be dimmed by the foulness through which they themselves are splashing. They are caked with impurities, but with the tenderest watchfulness they keep her clean. She is their gift to the world, the gift of their best, of their angel, of their share of divinity. And the respectable, afraid for their respectability, turn their backs in horror and go and read without blinking ugly things written by other respectables. Why, no priest at the altar, however unworthy, can hinder the worshipper from taking away with him as great a load of blessings as he will carry. And a rose is not less lovely because its roots are in corruption. And God Himself was found once in a manger. Thank you, and good-by.
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLVIII
Galgenberg, Oct. 8th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther, — We are very happy here just now because Papa’s new book, at which he has been working two years, is finished. I am copying it out, and until that is done we shall indulge in the pleasantest day-dreams. It is our time, this interval between the finishing of a book of his and its offer to a publisher, for being riotously happy. We build the most outrageous castles in the air. Nothing is certain, and everything is possible. The pains of composition are over, and the pains of rejection are not begun. Each time we suppose they never will, and that at last ears will be found respectfully ready to absorb his views. Few and far between have the ears been till now. His books have fallen as flat as books can fall. Nobody wanted to hear all, or even half, that he could tell them about Goethe. Jena shrugged its shoulders, the larger world was blank. The books have brought us no fame, no money, some tragic hours, but much interest and amusement. Always tragic hours have come when Papa clutched at his hair and raved rude things about the German public; and when the money didn’t appear there have been uncomfortable moments. But these pass; Papa leaves his hair alone; and the balance remains on the side of nice things. We don’t really want any more money, and Papa is kept busy and happy, and just to see him so eager, so full of his work, seems to warm the house with pleasant sunshine. Once, for one book, a check did come; and when we all rushed to look we found it was for two marks and thirty pfennings—’
being the amount due,’ said the accompanying stony letter, ‘on royalties for the first year of publication.’ Papa thought this much worse than no check at all, and took it round to the publisher in the molten frame of mind of one who has been insulted. The publisher put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back in his chair, gazed with refreshing coolness at Papa who was very hot, and said that as trade went it was quite a good check and that he had sent one that very morning to another author — a Jena celebrity who employs his leisure writing books about the Universe — for ninety pfennings.
Papa came home beaming with the delicious feeling that money was flowing in and that he was having a boom. The universe man was a contemptuous acquaintance who had been heard to speak lightly of Papa’s books. Papa felt all the sweetness of success, of triumph over a disagreeable rival; and since then we have looked upon that special book as his opus magnum.
While I copy he comes in and out to ask me where I have got to and if I like it. I assure him that I think it delightful, and so honestly I do in a way, but I don’t think it will be the public’s way. It begins by telling the reader, presumably a person in search of information about Goethe, that Jena is a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, of whom nineteen thousand are apparently professors. The town certainly does give you that impression as you walk about its little streets and at every corner meet the same battered-looking persons in black you met at the corner before, but what has that to do with Goethe? And the pages that follow have nothing to do with him either that I can see, being a disquisition on the origin and evolution of the felt hats the professors wear — dingy, slouchy things — winding up with an explanation of their symbolism and inevitableness, based on a carefully drawn parallel between them and the kind of brains they have to cover. From this point, the point of the head-wear of the learned in our present year, he has to work back all the way to Goethe in Jena a century ago. It takes him several chapters to get back, for he doesn’t go straight, being constitutionally unable to resist turning aside down the green lanes of moralizing that branch so seductively off the main road and lead him at last very far afield; and when he does arrive he is rather breathless, and flutters for some time round the impassive giant waiting to be described, jerking out little anecdotes, very pleasant little anecdotes, but quite unconnected with his patient subject, before he has got his wind and can begin.
He is rosy with hope about this book. ‘All Jena will read it,’ he says, ‘because they will like to hear about themselves’ — I wonder if they will— ‘and all Germany will read it because it will like to hear about Goethe.’
‘It has heard a good deal about him already, you know Papachen,’ I say, trying gently to suggest certain possibilities.
‘England might like to have it. There has been nothing since that man Lewes, and never anything really thorough. A good translation, Rose-Marie — what do you think of that as an agreeable task for you during the approaching winter evenings? It is a matter worthy of consideration. You will like a share in the work, a finger in the literary pie, will you not?’
‘Of course I would. But let me copy now, darling. I’m not half through.’
He says that if those blind and prejudiced persons, publishers, won’t risk bringing it out he’ll bring it out at his own expense sooner than prevent the world’s rightly knowing what Goethe said and did in Jena; so there’s a serious eventuality ahead of us! We really will have to live on lettuces, and in grimmest earnest this time. I hope he won’t want to keep race-horses next. Well, one thing has happened that will go a little way toward meeting new expenses, — I go down every day now and read English with Vicki, at the desire of her mother, for two hours, her mother having come to the conclusion that it is better to legalize, as it were, my relations with Vicki who flatly refused to keep away from us. So I am a bread-winner, and can do something to help Papa. It is true I can’t help much, for what I earn is fifty pfennings each time, and as the reading of English on Sundays is not considered nice I can only altogether make three marks a week. But it is something, and it is easily earned, and last Sunday, which was the end of my first week, I bought the whole of the Sunday food with it, dinner and supper for us, and beer for Johanna’s lover, who says he cannot love her unless the beer is a particular sort and has been kept for a fortnight properly cold in the coal-hole.
Since I have read with Vicki Frau von Lindeberg is quite different. She is courteous with the careful courtesy decent people show their dependents; kindly, even gracious at times. She is present at the reading, darning socks and ancient sheets with her carefully kept fingers, and she treats me absolutely as though I were attached to her household as governess. She is no longer afraid we will want to be equals. She asks me quite often after the health of him she calls my good father. And when a cousin of hers came last week to stay a night, a female Dammerlitz on her way to a place where you drink waters and get rid of yourself, she presented me to her with pleasant condescension as the kleine Engländerin engaged as her daughter’s companion. ‘Eine recht Hebe Hausgenossin,’ she was pleased to add, gently nodding her head at each word; and the cousin went away convinced I was a resident official and that the tales she had heard about the Lindeberg’s poverty couldn’t be true.
‘It’s not scriptural,’ I complained to Vicki, stirred to honest indignation.
‘You mean, to say things not quite — not quite?’ said Vicki.
‘Such big ones,’ I fumed. ‘I’m not little. I’m not English. I’m not a Hausgenossin. Why such unnecessary ones?’
‘Now, Rose-Marie, you do know why Mamma said “little.”’
‘It’s a term of condescension?’
‘And Engländerins are rather grand things to have in the house, you know — expensive, I mean. Always dearer than natives. Mamma only wants Cousin Mienchen to suppose we are well off.’
‘Oh,’ said I.
‘You don’t mind?’ said Vicki, rather timidly taking my hand.
‘It doesn’t hurt me,’ said I, putting a little stress on the me, a stress implying infinite possible hurt to Frau von Lindeberg’s soul.
‘It is horrid,’ murmured Vicki, her head drooping over her book. ‘I wish we didn’t always pretend we’re not poor. We are. Poor as mice. And it makes us so sensitive about it, so afraid of anything’s being noticed. We spend our lives on tenterhooks — not nice things at all to spend one’s life on.’
‘Wriggly, uncomfortable things,’ I agreed.
‘I believe Cousin Mienchen isn’t in the least taken in, for all our pains.’
‘I don’t believe people ever are,’ said I; and we drifted into a consideration of the probable height of our temperatures and color of our ears if we could know how much the world we pose to really knows about us, if we could hear with what thoroughness those of our doings and even of our thoughts that we believed so secret are discussed.
Frau von Lindeberg wasn’t there, being too busy arranging comforts for her cousin’s journey to preside, and so it was that we drifted unhindered from Milton into the foggier regions of private wisdom. We are neither of us wise, but it is surprising how talking to a friend, even to a friend as unwise as yourself, clears up your brains and lets in new light. That is one of the reasons why I like writing to you and getting your letters; only you mustn’t be offended at my bracketing you, you splendid young man, with poor Vicki and poor myself in the class Unwise. Heaven knows I mean nothing to do with book-learning, in which, I am aware, you most beautifully excel.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLIX
Galgenberg, Oct. 9th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I am very sorry indeed to hear that your engagement is broken off. I feared something of the sort was going to happen because of all the things you nearly said and didn’t in your letters lately. Are you very much troubled and worried? Please let me turn into the elder sister for a little again and give you the small relief of having an attentive listener. It seems to have been rathe
r an unsatisfactory time for you all along. I don’t really quite know what to say. I am anyhow most sincerely sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to talk about Miss Cheriton. It is of course lamentable that our writing to each other should have been, as you say it was, so often the cause of quarrels. You never told me so, or I would at once have stopped. You fill several pages with surprise that a girl of twenty-two can be so different from what she appears, that so soft and tender an outside can have beneath it such unfathomable depths of hardness. I think you have probably gone to the other extreme now, and because you admired so much are all the more violently critical. It is probable that Miss Cheriton is all that you first thought her, unusually charming and sympathetic and lovable, and your characters simply didn’t suit each other. Don’t think too unkindly in your first anger. I am so very sorry; sorry for you, who must feel as if your life had been convulsed by an earthquake, and all its familiar features disarranged; sorry for your father’s disappointment; sorry for Miss Cheriton, who must have been wretched. But how infinitely wiser to draw back in time and not, for want of courage, drift on into that supreme catastrophe, marriage. You mustn’t suppose me cynical in calling it a catastrophe — perhaps I mean it only in its harmless sense of dénouement; and if I don’t I can’t see that it is cynical to recognize a spade when you see it as certainly a spade. But do not let yourself go to bitterness, and so turn into a cynic yourself. You say Miss Cheriton apparently prefers a duke, and are very angry. But why if, as you declare, you have not really loved her for months past, are you angry? Why should she not prefer a duke? Perhaps he is quite a nice one, and you may be certain she felt at once, the very instant, when you left off caring for her. About such things it is as difficult for a woman to be mistaken as it is for a barometer to be hoodwinked in matters meteorologic. It was that, and never the duke, that first influenced her. I am as sure of it as if I could see into her heart. Of course she loved you. But no girl with a spark of decency would cling on to a reluctant lover. What an exceedingly poor thing in girls she would be who did. I can’t tell you how much ashamed I am of that sort of girl, the girl who clings, who follows, who laments, — as if the world, the splendid, amazing world, were empty of everything but one single man, and there were no sun shining, no birds singing, no winds blowing, no hills to climb, no trees to sit under, no books to read, no friends to be with, no work to do, no heaven to go to. I feel now for the first time that I would like to know Miss Cheriton. But it is really almost impossibly difficult to write this letter; each thing I say seems something I had better not have said. Write to me about your troubles as often as you feel it helps you, and believe that I do most heartily sympathize with you both, but don’t mind, and forgive me, if my answers are not satisfactory. I am unpracticed and ill at ease, clumsy, limited, in this matter of frank writing about feelings, a matter in which you so far surpass me. But I am always most sincerely your friend,
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 100
