With a quiet sadness, in which I seemed to detect some shyness, the fellow at first only answered my questions; but very soon more openly, as if he had suddenly recognized himself and me, he confessed his missteps and lamented his misfortune to me. My friend, if only I could put every one of his words before you for your judgment! He admitted, indeed, he told me, with a sort of pleasure and happiness at remembering again, that his passion for his employer had grown day by day, so that finally he did not know what he was doing, unable, as he expressed it, to know where to lay his head. He could not eat or drink or sleep, something seemed stuck in his throat, he did things he should not have done, he forgot the chores that were assigned to him, it was as if he were pursued by an evil demon until, one day, when he knew that she was in an upstairs room, he followed her, or rather, something pulled him to her. When she refused to listen to his pleas, he tried to take her by force; he did not know what had come over him, and as God was his witness, his intentions toward her had always been honorable, and there was nothing he had desired more fervently than that she should marry him and spend her life with him. After he had spoken for a while, he began to stammer, like someone who still has more to say but does not trust himself to bring it out; finally he further confessed shyly the little intimacies she had allowed him and the familiarity she had granted him. He broke off two or three times and repeated, protesting forcefully, that he was not saying this to run her down, as he expressed it, that he loved her and held her in high esteem as before, that he had never told a soul such things and that he was only telling me so as to convince me that he was not depraved or out of his mind.—And here, dear friend, I begin to strike up my old refrain, which I will sing eternally: If I could only present the man to you as he stood before me, as he continues to stand before me! If I could only tell you everything properly, so that you could feel how I sympathize, cannot help but sympathize with his fate! But it is enough, since you also know my fate, also know me, you know all too well what draws me to all unfortunates, and especially to this unfortunate man.
As I reread this page, I see that I have forgotten to tell you the end of the story, but it can easily be supplied. She resisted him; enter her brother, who had hated the young man for a long time, who had long wished him turned out of the house, because he feared that if his sister remarried, his children would be deprived of the inheritance, which, since she is childless, gives them high hopes. The brother immediately threw the boy out of the house and raised such a hue and cry about the matter that the woman could not have taken him back even had she wanted to. Now she has taken on another hired hand, and it’s said that she has quarreled with her brother about him as well; it’s claimed for certain that she will marry him, but my lad is firmly determined not to live to see that.
What I am telling you is not exaggerated, in no way prettified, indeed, I may even call it weak, I have told it weakly, and coarsened it by telling it in words taken from our traditional moral vocabulary.
This love, this loyalty, this passion, then, is no poetic invention. It is alive, it exists in its purest form in that class of people that we call uncultivated, that we call crude. We cultivated people—malcultivated into nothing! Read this story with reverence, I beg you. I am calm today as I record it; you can tell from my handwriting that I do not swoop and swirl in my usual fashion. Read it, my dear friend, and as you do, think that it is also your friend’s story. Yes, this is what happened to me, this is what will happen to me, and I’m not half so good, not half so determined as this poor wretch, with whom I hardly dare to compare myself.
SEPTEMBER 5
She had written a note to her husband in the country, where he is staying on account of business. It began: My best, my dearest love, come back as soon as you can, I look forward to your return with a thousand joys.—A friend who arrived brought the news that certain circumstances would prevent Albert from coming back soon. The letter was not sent, and in the evening it fell into my hands. I read it and smiled; she asked me why?—What a divine gift imagination is! I exclaimed; for a minute I could pretend that it had been written to me.—She broke off, my words seemed to displease her, and I fell silent.
SEPTEMBER 6
It cost me effort before I could bring myself to put away the plain blue dress coat in which I danced with Lotte for the first time, but lately it had become quite shabby. And I’ve ordered another one made just like it, with collar and lapels, and the same kind of yellow waistcoat and trousers to go with it.
It doesn’t have quite the same effect, though. I don’t know—I think in time I might begin to like it better.
SEPTEMBER 12
She had been away for a few days to bring Albert back. Today I walked into her room, she came to meet me, and I kissed her hand with a thousand joys.
A canary flew from the mirror onto her shoulder.—A new friend, she said, and coaxed him onto her hand, he’s a present for my little ones. Isn’t he a darling! Look at him! When I give him bread, he flutters his wings and pecks at the crumb so daintily. He kisses me too, watch!
As she held out her mouth to the little creature, it snuggled up so charmingly to her sweet lips, as if it could feel the bliss it was being granted.
I want him to kiss you too, she said and handed me the bird.—The little beak made the trip from her mouth to mine, and the pecking sensation was like a breath, an intimation of love’s delights.
His kiss, I said, is not entirely without greediness, he is looking for food and turns away, dissatisfied by the empty caress.
He also eats out of my mouth, she said.—She offered him a few crumbs with her lips, from which the joys of innocent, sympathetic love smiled with perfect delight.
I turned my face away. She should not be doing this! should not tease my imagination with these images of heavenly innocence and bliss and wake my heart from the sleep into which the monotony of life sometimes lulls it!—And why not?—She trusts me! She knows how much I love her!
SEPTEMBER 15
It could drive you mad, Wilhelm, that there are people without any sense or feeling for the few things on earth that still matter. You know the walnut trees under which I sat with Lotte at the home of the good pastor at St. ——, the splendid walnut trees! that, God knows, always filled my soul with such great pleasure! How cozy a place they made of the parsonage, how cool! And how splendid the branches! And the memories, back to the good clergymen who planted them so many years ago. The schoolmaster often spoke one name, which he had heard from his grandfather; he was said to have been such a fine man, and his memory was always sacred to me beneath the trees. I tell you, the schoolmaster had tears in his eyes as we spoke yesterday about how they had been chopped down—chopped down! I could go into a rage, I could murder the dog who struck the first blow. I, who would mourn without end if such a pair of trees stood in my yard and one of them were to die of old age, I have to see this happen. Dear heart, there’s one good thing! What is called human feeling! The whole village is muttering, and I hope the deficit in butter and eggs and other signs of trust will make the pastor’s wife aware of the wound she has inflicted on her village. For she is the one, the wife of the new pastor (the old one died as well), a skinny, sickly creature who has every reason to take no interest in the world, since no one is interested in her. A fool, who pretends to be learned, meddles in the investigation of the canonical books, spends a great deal of time and effort on the moral-critical reformation of Christianity that is so fashionable and shrugs her shoulders at Lavater’s raptures, is in severely broken health, and hence takes no joy in God’s earth. Only such a creature found it possible to chop down my walnut trees. You see—I can’t get over it! Imagine, the falling leaves sully her yard, leaving it musty, the trees rob her of daylight, and when the nuts are ripe, the boys throw stones at them, and that gets on her nerves, that disturbs her in her profound reflections, when she weighs Kennikot, Semler, and Michaelis against each other. As I saw how dissatisfied the village people were, especially the older on
es, I asked: Why did you put up with it?—When our mayor wants something, they said, what can you do?—But one thing turned out right. The mayor and the pastor—who also wanted to profit from the vagaries of his wife, who in no way adds to his daily enjoyment—thought of sharing the profits; but then the Treasury learned of the business and demanded: Give it here! because it still has some old entitlements to the part of the parsonage where the trees had stood, and it sold them to the highest bidder. There they lie! Oh, if I were the Prince! I would have the pastor’s wife, the mayor, and the Treasury—Prince!—Indeed, if I were the Prince, what would I care about the trees on my lands?
OCTOBER 10
I need only see her black eyes and I feel so well! You see, what vexes me is that Albert does not seem as happy as he—hoped—as I—thought I would be—if—I do not like introducing dashes, but in this instance I cannot express myself otherwise—and I do, I think, express myself clearly enough.
OCTOBER 12
Ossian has driven Homer from my heart. What a world into which this splendid poet leads me! To roam across the heath, amid the howling of the gale that, through the steamy mists, sweeps along the ghosts of forefathers in the twilight of the moon. To hear, coming from the mountains, amid the roar of the forest stream, the groans, half blown away, of the spirits from their caverns, and the lamentations of the maiden grieving herself to death at the four gravestones, moss-covered and overgrown with grass, of one who is nobly fallen, her beloved. Then, when I find him, the wandering, gray-haired bard who seeks the footsteps of his forefathers on the broad heath and, alas, finds their gravestones and then, wailing, looks up at the lovely evening star, which hides itself in the rolling sea; and a past time lives again in the hero’s soul, a time when the friendly light still illuminated the dangers of the brave and the moonshine illuminated their garlanded ship returning victorious; when I read the grave sorrow on his brow and see the last abandoned splendid wraith, exhausted, stagger to his grave, how he forever absorbs new, painfully ardent joys in the impotent presence of the shades of his departed loved ones and looks down at the cold earth, at the tall, bending grasses, and cries out: The wanderer will come, will come, he who has seen me in my beauty, and will ask: Where is the bard, Fingal’s excellent son? His footsteps pass over my grave, and he asks in vain for me on this earth.—O my friend! I would, like a noble bearer of arms, draw my sword and release my prince from the convulsive torments of a slowly dying life at one stroke and send my soul to follow the liberated demigod.
OCTOBER 19
Alas, this void! This dreadful void that I feel in my breast!—I often think: If you could press her to your heart just once, just once, the entire void would be filled.
OCTOBER 26
Yes, I am growing certain, dear friend, certain and ever more certain, that the existence of any one creature matters little, very little. A woman friend came to see Lotte, and I went into the next room to get a book, and I could not read, and then I picked up a pen to write. I heard them talking quietly; they were discussing trivial things, local news: how this one was married, how that one was ill, very ill.—She has a dry cough, her bones are sticking out of her face, and she has fainting fits; I wouldn’t give a nickel for her life, said the one. A certain party is also in a very bad way, said Lotte.—He’s all bloated, the other said.—And my lively imagination transported me to the bedside of these poor folk; I saw them, saw with what reluctance they turned their backs on life, how they—Wilhelm! And my good little women were speaking about all this in the same way everybody speaks about it—that a stranger is dying. And when I look around me, surrounded by Lotte’s clothes and Albert’s papers everywhere, and see this room and this furniture that is now so familiar to me, even this inkwell, and I think, Look what you mean to this home! You are their be-all and end-all. Your friends venerate you! You often give them joy, and your heart feels that it could not exist without them; and yet—if you were to go now, if you were to leave this circle? Would they feel, how long would they feel, the void that your loss would gouge into their destiny? How long?—Oh, man is so transitory that even there, where he has a genuine certainty of his existence, there, where his presence makes its one truthful impression in the memory, in the soul of his dear ones, there too he must be extinguished, must vanish, and so soon!
OCTOBER 27
I could often rend my breast and bash my brains out when I realize how little we can mean to one another. Alas, the love, joy, warmth, and bliss that I fail to bring to another, he will not give me, and though my whole heart is full of bliss, I will not bring joy to the man who stands before me, cold and vacuous.
EVENING
I have so much, and my feelings for her swallow everything; I have so much, and without her everything turns to nothing for me.
OCTOBER 30
If I have not been on the point a hundred times of throwing my arms around her! Great God knows what it feels like to see so much loveliness flitting in front of you and not be allowed to reach for it; and reaching for things is surely the most natural of human instincts. Don’t children reach for whatever comes their way?—And I?
NOVEMBER 3
God knows! So often I go to bed with the wish—indeed, sometimes with the hope—not to wake; and in the morning I open my eyes, see the sun again, and am miserable. Oh, if only I could be moody, could blame the weather, blame some third person, blame a failed undertaking, then only half of the unbearable burden of my naysaying would rest on me. Woe is me! I feel all too clearly that I alone bear all the guilt—not guilt! Enough that the source of all misery lies deep within me, as formerly the source of all bliss.—Am I not still the same man who at one time floated in a fullness of feeling, who was followed at every step by a paradise, who had a heart to embrace a whole world with love? And this heart is now dead, no ecstasies flow from it, my eyes are dry, and my senses, no longer refreshed by restorative tears, furrow my brow with anxiety. I suffer greatly, for I have lost what was once the sole joy of my life, the sacred, life-giving power with which I created worlds around me; it is gone!—When I look out my window at the distant hill as the morning sun breaks through the fog that lies upon it and illuminates the peaceful meadow, and the gentle river winds its way toward me between the leafless willows—oh! when this splendid nature stands before me as rigid as a lacquered miniature, and all the glory cannot pump one drop of happiness from my heart into my brain, and this fellow here stands before the countenance of God like a well run dry, like a broken pail. I have often thrown myself on the ground and begged God for tears, like a farmer for rain when the heavens loom iron-colored above him and the earth all around him is dying of thirst.
But, alas! I feel it, God does not send rain and sunshine to our impetuous pleading, and the days whose memory torments me, why were they so blissful? if not because I awaited His spirit with patience and received the rapture that He poured over me with my entire deeply thankful heart!
NOVEMBER 8
She has reproached me for my excesses! Oh, with such charm and kindness! My excesses: that I am sometimes seduced by a glass of wine into drinking a whole bottle.—Don’t do it! she said, think of Lotte!—Think! I said, do you need to tell me that? I think!—I don’t think! You are always present to my soul. Today I sat at the spot where you got out of the coach the other day.—She changed the subject to stop me from delving too deeply into my theme. My dear friend, I’m beyond the pale. She can do with me as she likes.
NOVEMBER 15
I thank you, Wilhelm, for your sincere concern, your well-meant advice, and I beg you to be calm. Let me suffer to the end; despite all my weariness of life, I still have enough strength to see it through. I respect religion, you know that. I feel that it is a staff for many an exhausted soul—refreshment for many a languishing creature. But—can it, does it have to be so for everyone? When you look at the whole wide world, you see thousands for whom it was not so, thousands for whom it will not be so, whether they have been preached to or not; does it, then, have
to be so for me? Does not the Son of God himself say that those shall be with him whom the Father has given to him? Now, what if I have not been given? Now, what if the Father wants to keep me for Himself, as my heart tells me?—I beg of you, do not interpret this the wrong way, do not see something like mockery in these innocent words; it is my entire soul that I am baring to you; otherwise I would have preferred to keep my silence, just as I would be happy not to waste words on matters that everyone knows as little about as I do. What is it except man’s fate to suffer his measure to the end, drain his cup to the dregs?—And if the chalice was too bitter on the human lips of the God from Heaven, why should I boast and pretend that it tastes sweet to me? And why should I be ashamed in the dreaded moment when my whole being trembles between being and not-being, when the past flashes like lightning over the gloomy abyss of the future and everything around me sinks to the bottom and the world goes to ruin with me?—Is it not the voice of the creature driven entirely into itself, insufficient, and irresistibly crashing downward, who, in the inner depths of his powers, as they struggle upward in vain, gnashes its teeth and cries: My God! my God! Why hast Thou forsaken me? And should I be ashamed of this expression, should I be afraid of a moment that did not escape him who folds up the heavens like a garment?
NOVEMBER 21
She does not see, she does not sense that she is preparing a poison that will destroy both her and me; and I, with lustful pleasure, sip from the cup she hands me, to my ruination. Of what use is the kind look that she often—often?—no, not often, but indeed sometimes, gives me, the grace with which she accepts an involuntary expression of my feelings, the compassion for my suffering that is written on her brow?
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