Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are
murmuring
to yourself--"This
is so like him!
is so like him!
Coleridge - Biographia Literaria
all in dhe Latin language.
ANSWER. A prodigy! an absolute prodigy!
THE DANE. No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent.
ANSWER. Yes! a bishop.
THE DANE. A bishop--not a mere predicant, not a prediger.
ANSWER. My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I said that your
answering in Latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a thing
that is wonderful; that does not often happen.
THE DANE. Often! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole
historia of Denmark.
ANSWER. And since then, Sir--?
THE DANE. I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies--to our Island, and dhere I
had no more to do vid books. No! no! I put my genius anodher way--and
I haf made ten tousand pound a year. Is not dhat ghenius, my dear
friend? --But vat is money? --I dhink dhe poorest man alive my equal.
Yes, my dear friend; my little fortune is pleasant to my generous heart,
because I can do good--no man with so little a fortune ever did so much
generosity--no person--no man person, no woman person ever denies it.
But we are all Got's children.
Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the Swede, and
the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Englishman who spoke the
German fluently, and interpreted to me many of the Prussian's jokes. The
Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale
man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories, gesticulations, and
buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who,
while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll
looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter;
and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. The
Hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man, whose father had made a
large fortune in London, as an army-contractor. He seemed to emulate
the manners of young Englishmen of fortune. He was a good-natured
fellow, not without information or literature; but a most egregious
coxcomb. He had been in the habit of attending the House of Commons, and
had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating
society. For this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable
industry: for he was perfect in Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary, and
with an accent, which forcibly reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderic
Random, who professed to teach the English pronunciation, he was
constantly deferring to my superior judgment, whether or no I had
pronounced this or that word with propriety, or "the true delicacy. "
When he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always
rose: for which I could detect no other motive, than his partiality
to that elegant phrase so liberally introduced in the orations of
our British legislators, "While I am on my legs. " The Swede, whom
for reasons that will soon appear, I shall distinguish by the name
of Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-faced man, his complexion
resembling in colour, a red hot poker beginning to cool. He appeared
miserably dependent on the Dane; but was, however, incomparably the
best informed and most rational of the party. Indeed his manners
and conversation discovered him to be both a man of the world and a
gentleman. The Jew was in the hold: the French gentleman was lying on
the deck so ill, that I could observe nothing concerning him, except the
affectionate attentions of his servant to him. The poor fellow was very
sick himself, and every now and then ran to the side of the vessel,
still keeping his eye on his master, but returned in a moment and seated
himself again by him, now supporting his head, now wiping his forehead
and talking to him all the while in the most soothing tones. There
had been a matrimonial squabble of a very ludicrous kind in the cabin,
between the little German tailor and his little wife. He had secured two
beds, one for himself and one for her. This had struck the little woman
as a very cruel action; she insisted upon their having but one, and
assured the mate in the most piteous tones, that she was his lawful
wife. The mate and the cabin boy decided in her favour, abused the
little man for his want of tenderness with much humour, and hoisted
him into the same compartment with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel was
interesting to me, as it procured me a bed, which I otherwise should not
have had.
In the evening, at seven o'clock, the sea rolled higher, and the Dane,
by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had been
swallowing to make room for a great deal more. His favourite potation
was sugar and brandy, i. e. a very little warm water with a large
quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg His servant boy, a black-eyed
Mulatto, had a good-natured round face, exactly the colour of the skin
of the walnut-kernel. The Dane and I were again seated, tete-a-tete,
in the ship's boat. The conversation, which was now indeed rather an
oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever
heard. He told me that he had made a large fortune in the island of
Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He expatiated
on the style in which he meant to live, and the great undertakings which
he proposed to himself to commence, till, the brandy aiding his vanity,
and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a
madman--entreated me to accompany him to Denmark--there I should see his
influence with the government, and he would introduce me to the king,
etc. , etc. Thus he went on dreaming aloud, and then passing with a very
lyrical transition to the subject of general politics, he declaimed,
like a member of the Corresponding Society, about, (not concerning,)
the Rights of Man, and assured me that, notwithstanding his fortune, he
thought the poorest man alive his equal. "All are equal, my dear friend!
all are equal! Ve are all Got's children. The poorest man haf the same
rights with me. Jack! Jack! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat
fellow now! He is a Mulatto--but he is my equal. --That's right, Jack!
(taking the sugar and brandy. ) Here you Sir! shake hands with dhis
gentleman! Shake hands with me, you dog! Dhere, dhere! --We are all equal
my dear friend! Do I not speak like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato--they
were all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men! --and so
was Homer and Virgil--but they were poets. Yes, yes! I know all about
it! --But what can anybody say more than this? We are all equal, all
Got's children. I haf ten tousand a year, but I am no more dhan de
meanest man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! I can
say, do! and it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! Now dhere is dhat
gentleman (pointing to Nobility) he is a Swedish baron--you shall see.
Ho! (calling to the Swede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the
cabin. SWEDE. --Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine from
the cabin. DANE. No, no, no! do you go now--you go yourself you go now!
SWEDE. Pah! --DANE. Now go! Go, I pray you. " And the Swede went! !
After this the Dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking
me for un philosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked of
Deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional rants
of that rude blunderer, Mr. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, and
whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrism all Jesus Christ's business
was. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge themselves
with indulging in persiflage than myself. I should hate it, if it were
only that it is a Frenchman's vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it,
because our own language is too honest to have a word to express it by.
But in this instance the temptation had been too powerful, and I have
placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles answered one of his
dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case of life and death, to
take an equivocal oath for his preservation: Debeo amicis opitulari, sed
usque ad Deos [75]. Friendship herself must place her last and boldest
step on this side the altar. What Pericles would not do to save a
friend's life, you may be assured, I would not hazard merely to mill the
chocolate-pot of a drunken fool's vanity till it frothed over. Assuming
a serious look, I professed myself a believer, and sunk at once an
hundred fathoms in his good graces. He retired to his cabin, and I
wrapped myself up in my great coat, and looked at the water. A beautiful
white cloud of foam at momently intervals coursed by the side of the
vessel with a roar, and little stars of flame danced and sparkled and
went out in it: and every now and then light detachments of this white
cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own
small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a
Tartar troop over a wilderness.
It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and I found
reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-caped, respectable
rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part of a night-cap
very passably. In looking up at two or three bright stars, which
oscillated with the motion of the sails, I fell asleep, but was awakened
at one o'clock, Monday morning, by a shower of rain. I found myself
compelled to go down into the cabin, where I slept very soundly, and
awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my nostrils, the most
placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or indeed insensible of the
mephitis.
Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the Swede, who
spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane, whom he described as
a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the Dane respecting
the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the first
instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. From the Dane and
from himself I collected that he was indeed a Swedish nobleman, who had
squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and had made over his
property to the Dane, on whom he was now utterly dependent. He seemed
to suffer very little pain from the Dane's insolence. He was in a high
degree humane and attentive to the English lady, who suffered most
fearfully, and for whom he performed many little offices with a
tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove real goodness of heart.
Indeed his general manners and conversation were not only pleasing,
but even interesting; and I struggled to believe his insensibility
respecting the Dane philosophical fortitude. For though the Dane was
now quite sober, his character oozed out of him at every pore. And after
dinner, when he was again flushed with wine, every quarter of an hour or
perhaps oftener he would shout out to the Swede, "Ho! Nobility, go--do
such a thing! Mr. Nobility! --tell the gentlemen such a story, and
so forth;" with an insolence which must have excited disgust and
detestation, if his vulgar rants on the sacred rights of equality,
joined to his wild havoc of general grammar no less than of the English
language, had not rendered it so irresistibly laughable.
At four o'clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single
solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing
it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had associated
such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly
disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and
nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images
capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words. In the
evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run foul of the land,
which can be seen only at a small distance. And at four o'clock, on
Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of "land! land! " It was an
ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called Heiligeland, well
known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Hamburg, who have been obliged
by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in weary captivity on it,
stripped of all their money by the exorbitant demands of the wretches
who inhabit it. So at least the sailors informed me. --About nine o'clock
we saw the main land, which seemed scarcely able to hold its head above
water, low, flat, and dreary, with lighthouses and land-marks which
seemed to give a character and language to the dreariness. We entered
the mouth of the Elbe, passing Neu-werk; though as yet the right bank
only of the river was visible to us. On this I saw a church, and thanked
God for my safe voyage, not without affectionate thoughts of those I
had left in England. At eleven o'clock on the same morning we arrived
at Cuxhaven, the ship dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to
carry the Hanoverian and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to
take us, who remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the Dane
contributed so largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea
each. Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. At
Cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we could
now see the right bank only. We passed a multitude of English traders
that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. In a short time both banks
became visible, both flat and evidencing the labour of human hands by
their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church or two in
the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and windmill and
cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and windmill, and neat
single house, and steeple. These were the objects and in the succession.
The shores were very green and planted with trees not inelegantly.
Thirty-five miles from Cuxhaven the night came on us, and, as the
navigation of the Elbe is perilous, we dropped anchor.
Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest
friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the Elbe. Close above the
moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet
crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a ribbon
of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water
and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and obscurely.
We saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably from bed-rooms.
I felt the striking contrast between the silence of this majestic
stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and children, and
flocks and herds--between the silence by night of this peopled river,
and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud agitations of the desolate
solitude of the ocean. The passengers below had all retired to their
beds; and I felt the interest of this quiet scene the more deeply from
the circumstance of having just quitted them. For the Prussian had
during the whole of the evening displayed all his talents to captivate
the Dane, who had admitted him into the train of his dependents. The
young Englishman continued to interpret the Prussian's jokes to me. They
were all without exception profane and abominable, but some sufficiently
witty, and a few incidents, which he related in his own person, were
valuable as illustrating the manners of the countries in which they had
taken place.
Five o'clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon
obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our
captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared
off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very beautiful
island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the wind continuing slack. This
holm or island is about a mile and a half in length, wedge-shaped,
well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and rendered more
interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. It seemed made for
retirement without solitude--a place that would allure one's friends,
while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere visitors. The shores of
the Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich meadows and trees running
like a low wall along the river's edge; and peering over them,
neat houses and, (especially on the right bank,) a profusion of
steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive taste teaches men
to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which,
as they cannot be referred to any other object, point, as with silent
finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes, when they reflect the
brazen light of a rich though rainy sun-set, appear like a pyramid of
flame burning heavenward. I remember once, and once only, to have seen
a spire in a narrow valley of a mountainous country. The effect was
not only mean but ludicrous, and reminded me against my will of an
extinguisher; the close neighbourhood of the high mountain, at the foot
of which it stood, had so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of
all connection with the sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles from
Cuxhaven, and sixteen from Hamburg, the Danish village Veder ornaments
the left bank with its black steeple, and close by it is the wild and
pastoral hamlet of Schulau. Hitherto both the right and left bank, green
to the very brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a
park canal. The trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees
over-topping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising
above the yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once
forty or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular
facade of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued
to present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of
fishing boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the
clamorous rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to
Blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees,
over three hills in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon
the river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their
bare poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic
harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper
than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual
cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard,
and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of
paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is inhabited by fishermen
and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great request through the
whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we saw the spires of Hamburg,
and from hence, as far as Altona, the left bank of the Elbe is
uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of an industrious and
republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that
might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste
which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work
are everywhere scattered along the high and green banks; the boards
of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and
yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the
human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of
nature. Still, however, these are links of connection between town and
country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments
for which men's habits have disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays
and Sundays with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women
and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a
nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o'clock, we left the vessel, and
passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to
choke the wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the
Boom House, Hamburg.
LETTER II
To a lady.
RATZEBURG.
Meine liebe Freundinn,
See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet
been six weeks in the country! --almost as fluently as English from my
neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as
we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day,
never fails to greet me with--"---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my
dearest Englander! vhee goes it! "--which is certainly a proof of great
generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English.
I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my
proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language,
from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification
and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your
sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than
by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English affix,
ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the Latin, as
actress, directress, etc. , or from the French, as mistress, duchess, and
the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate the sex in
every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann's lady is the Frau
Amtmanninn--the secretary's wife, (by the bye, the handsomest
woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau
Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel's lady, die Frau Obristinn or
Colonellinn--and even the parson's wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am
especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of the
Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I know
it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a friend,
when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a
female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which the objection
will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than
abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their
perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a
sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be
loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--"This
is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has
blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn
where he is and what he has seen. " Well then! that I am settled at
Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither,
will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has
edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the
Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was
amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once
or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed close with all
people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes
in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies--straight
and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain,
wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver
bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of
the male Hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But
I forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible. --Therefore,
Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion, who, you recollect, speaks
the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of
confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man
of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. He seemed
about fifty or rather more. Whatever is unpleasant in French manners
from excess in the degree, had been softened down by age or affliction;
and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little
attentions, etc. , remained, and without bustle, gesticulation,
or disproportionate eagerness. His demeanour exhibited the minute
philanthropy of a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of
the English character disunited from its reserve. There is something
strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the
word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more
easy to feel than to define. It neither includes the possession of high
moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner.
I have now in my mind's eye a person whose life would scarcely stand
scrutiny even in the court of honour, much less in that of conscience;
and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea
of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed
with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter,
I believe to be this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us,
whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial
not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners
and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to
others in such a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings
an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to
himself. In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling
of Equality acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of
Rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This
description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own
remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning
the causes of the corruption of eloquence. "What perfect gentlemen these
old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I remember, with the
same feeling at the time I was reading a translation of Cicero's
philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in
Pliny's Letters I seemed to have a different feeling--he gave me the
notion of a very fine gentleman. " You uttered the words as if you had
felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree
altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero
an aristocratic republican. For this reason the character of gentleman,
in the sense to which I have confined it, is frequent in England, rare
in France, and found, where it is found, in age or the latest period
of manhood; while in Germany the character is almost unknown. But
the proper antipode of a gentleman is to be sought for among the
Anglo-American democrats.
I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman,
and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us
on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour by
the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to him
for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression
of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both
make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased therefore to
find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in
the same house. My friend went with him in search of an hotel, and I to
deliver my letters of recommendation.
I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I
actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time
in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a
liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his
first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I
began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for being
so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella hats
shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of
petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul
with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which
stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled
through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a
stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap
behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses
on the back:
"Their visnomies seem'd like a goodly banner
Spread in defiance of all enemies. "
The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth:
which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too
glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the
laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who with their
clean white stockings and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped
along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from
the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who had always
considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I
had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; to my
English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight
the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the
foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street,
some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say;
but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese
grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows,
so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt's window
tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young
toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would certainly improve the
appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not
in keeping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding
that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to
associate with a house in a noisy city. But a conflagration would, I
fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural
beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. I moved on and
crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of
water wheels close by them. The water intersects the city everywhere,
and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all
that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. It might have
been the rival of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and
stagnation. The Jungfer Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies' Walk), to which
my letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk or promenade
planted with treble rows of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and
cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a
square piece of water, with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving
among the swans, shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by
their husbands or lovers. ------
(Some paragraphs have been here omitted. )------thus embarrassed by sad
and solemn politeness still more than by broken English, it sounded like
the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant's servant inquiring
after me. He had come for the purpose of guiding me to our hotel.
Through streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child, and, I
doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes,
amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them, one
behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches;) amused by the
sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are
painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion, (a
useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations;) amused
with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells, the
bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at every
entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the windows,
as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing
cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a painter, that I
might have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. The long pipe
of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole half a yard from his
mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the other gentleman, who
was dealing the cards, and of course had both hands employed, held his
pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between his knees, smoked beside
his ancles. Hogarth himself never drew a more ludicrous distortion both
of attitude and physiognomy, than this effort occasioned nor was there
wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same
Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty
which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as
the central figure, in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figures,
(such is the power of true genius! ) neither acts, nor is meant to act
as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group,
a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the
attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this
feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and thus
prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles
or humours of our fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of
contempt or hatred.
Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the
landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that
was at every man's service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing
to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for
it)--neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest
class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the
market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of St. Nicholas:
a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of which wens
and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the top with a
round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could scarcely be desired.
Long shall I retain the impression made on my mind by the awful echo,
so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock within this
church, which awoke me at two in the morning from a distressful dream,
occasioned, I believe, by the feather bed, which is used here instead
of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my blanket about with me like a wild
Indian, than submit to this abominable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance
was, we found, an intimate friend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle:
and from the large fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had
rescued sufficient not only for independence, but for respectability. He
had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged
with considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and
in consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the
kingdom. I thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no
blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it
against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with rapture,
and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in England, with
all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. A man sent by force
out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and
exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had
rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet
all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish
for domestic affections interrupted--such a man, I think, I could dare
warrant guiltless of espionnage in any service, most of all in that of
the present French Directory. He spoke with ecstasy of Paris under the
Monarchy: and yet the particular facts, which made up his description,
left as deep a conviction on my mind, of French worthlessness, as his
own tale had done of emigrant ingratitude. Since my arrival in
Germany, I have not met a single person, even among those who abhor
the Revolution, that spoke with favour, or even charity of the French
emigrants. Though the belief of their influence in the organization
of this disastrous war (from the horrors of which, North Germany deems
itself only reprieved, not secured,) may have some share in the general
aversion with which they are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded
that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their
treachery and hardheartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or
corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families
of their protectors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled
to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the English patriots, who
sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil
war under the first Charles be paralleled with the French Revolution!
In the former, the character overflowed from excess of principle; in the
latter from the fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war
between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the
latter, between the vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy
shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison.
Sept. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the poet,
who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and lively
man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort to talk
with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge ear-trumpet.
From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (I hope, the
German literati in general may resemble this first specimen), I heard a
tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting anecdote. When Buonaparte was
in Italy, having been irritated by some instance of perfidy, he said in
a loud and vehement tone, in a public company--"'tis a true proverb, gli
Italiani tutti ladroni"--(that is, the Italians all plunderers. ) A lady
had the courage to reply, "Non tutti; ma BUONA PARTE," (not all, but a
good part, or Buonaparte. ) This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one
of the many good things that might have been said. The anecdote is more
valuable; for it instances the ways and means of French insinuation.
Hoche had received much information concerning the face of the country
from a map of unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he
heard, resided at Duesseldorf. At the storming of Duesseldorf by the
French army, Hoche previously ordered, that the house and property of
this man should be preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order
to an officer on whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the
man had escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, "HE had
no reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the French
nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children. " You
remember Milton's sonnet--
"The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus when temple and tower
Went to the ground"------
Now though the Duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to
the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on
the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the
tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin
of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as
the madman of Macedon.
From Professor Ebeling's Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me
to his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a
solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to my
preconceptions of his style and genius. --I saw there, likewise, a very
fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief object of
my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if anything, rather
larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his face and his
nose--O what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility! --There
appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in the forehead. --The
whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of quick and voluptuous
feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute; yet acute not in the
observation of actual life, but in the arrangements and management of
the ideal world, that is, in taste, and in metaphysics. I assure you,
that I wrote these very words in my memorandum-book with the portrait
before my eyes, and when I knew nothing of Lessing but his name, and
that he was a German writer of eminence.
We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'hote.
"Patience at a German ordinary, smiling at time. " The Germans are the
worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle
of common wine--Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of the
opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the servants
hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin's they came
in this order. Burgundy--Madeira--Port--Frontiniac--Pacchiaretti--Old
Hock--Mountain--Champagne--Hock again--Bishop, and lastly, Punch. A
tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the ordinary, viz. slices
of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are brought in, cut up, and
first handed round and then set on the table,) with stewed prunes and
other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese and butter, with plates
of apples, reminded me of Shakespeare [76], and Shakespeare put it in my
head to go to the French comedy.
Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act
informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who
had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers
plead in his behalf--in vain! His wife, the Colonel's sister, pleads
with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! She falls into hysterics and
faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act
sentence of death is passed on the Count--his wife, as frantic and
hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature! ) she could
not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic
indeed! --the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually
dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes:
and in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still
frantic, only with joy; that was all!
O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed
by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted
every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer
violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly
I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect
specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual
falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions
of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still,
however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the
offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the
parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own,
though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators to
active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is not
stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our
own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising,
undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the
imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward to
the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his
imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of
Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more
profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with
my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are
ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely
ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such
as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own
heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often
are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest
illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human
thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters,
but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and
clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite,
of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these
class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a
character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the
Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly
that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical
as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not
less essential to dramatic excellence, and, (if I may mention his name
without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle has accordingly required of
the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief
differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself,
which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form
in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the
elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were
considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make
us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of
jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of commonplace morals
in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their
characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the
applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes
of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on
their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than
the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to
affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with
the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to
transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant
the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the
worthless "thing, we are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man
happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them
to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.
Hold! --(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will
listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant. )
DEFENDANT. Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the
best Christian morality?
PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which
you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single
sacrifice that is really painful to you! --just as much as flatters you,
sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to
your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep
such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and
generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's
face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you
interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite
satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble
it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no Antony,
no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!
D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of
London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old
school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and what
curiosity can we feel----
P. What, Sir, not for the manner? --not for the delightful language
of the poet? --not for the situations, the action and reaction of the
passions?
D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story: and
how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be surprised by
it, when we know how it will turn out?
P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each
other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the
highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you
receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties of
the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings to
the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo's Sixtine Chapel, and the
Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You know
all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with the
subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the historic
or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your preference of
contemporary writers: for the great men of former times, those at least
who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so little to gratify this
kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have regarded the story in a not
much higher light, than the painter regards his canvass: as that on, not
by, which they were to display their appropriate excellence. No work,
resembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of invention
in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON
QUIXOTE of Cervantes. Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and
re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they
find any eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts
which they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom
we love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most
intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call
this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale of
his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to the
readers of "old romance. " I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who thought
it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its substance should
be previously known. That there had been at least fifty tragedies with
the same title, would be one of the motives which determined Sophocles
and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a subject. But Milton--
D. Aye Milton, indeed! --but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men tell
us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?
P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But why
then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if not
all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are
concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at least, on which they
are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or translations of
contemporary or preceding English writers. Why, I repeat, do you pretend
to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire
him? However, as once for all, you have dismissed the well-known events
and personages of history, or the epic muse, what have you taken in
their stead? Whom has your tragic muse armed with her bowl and dagger?
the sentimental muse I should have said, whom you have seated in the
throne of tragedy? What heroes has she reared on her buskins?
D. O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen,
valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews,
virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat-
catchers! --(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender-
hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all our
misanthropes very tender-hearted. )
P. But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can
such men be engaged?
D. They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young
men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat
lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as
Hector! )--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling down
precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies; and some
of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such perfection,
that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in their eye, seldom
fail to make their favourite male character as strong as Samson. And
then they take such prodigious leaps! ! And what is done on the stage is
more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a deafening
explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act
after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same
time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness of the scene was
quite astonishing!
P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions that
dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an
interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians? How
can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the power of
destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to elevate the
characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow?
D.
ANSWER. A prodigy! an absolute prodigy!
THE DANE. No, no, no! he was a bishop, a great superintendent.
ANSWER. Yes! a bishop.
THE DANE. A bishop--not a mere predicant, not a prediger.
ANSWER. My dear Sir! we have misunderstood each other. I said that your
answering in Latin at so early an age was a prodigy, that is, a thing
that is wonderful; that does not often happen.
THE DANE. Often! Dhere is not von instance recorded in dhe whole
historia of Denmark.
ANSWER. And since then, Sir--?
THE DANE. I was sent ofer to dhe Vest Indies--to our Island, and dhere I
had no more to do vid books. No! no! I put my genius anodher way--and
I haf made ten tousand pound a year. Is not dhat ghenius, my dear
friend? --But vat is money? --I dhink dhe poorest man alive my equal.
Yes, my dear friend; my little fortune is pleasant to my generous heart,
because I can do good--no man with so little a fortune ever did so much
generosity--no person--no man person, no woman person ever denies it.
But we are all Got's children.
Here the Hanoverian interrupted him, and the other Dane, the Swede, and
the Prussian, joined us, together with a young Englishman who spoke the
German fluently, and interpreted to me many of the Prussian's jokes. The
Prussian was a travelling merchant, turned of threescore, a hale
man, tall, strong, and stout, full of stories, gesticulations, and
buffoonery, with the soul as well as the look of a mountebank, who,
while he is making you laugh, picks your pocket. Amid all his droll
looks and droll gestures, there remained one look untouched by laughter;
and that one look was the true face, the others were but its mask. The
Hanoverian was a pale, fat, bloated young man, whose father had made a
large fortune in London, as an army-contractor. He seemed to emulate
the manners of young Englishmen of fortune. He was a good-natured
fellow, not without information or literature; but a most egregious
coxcomb. He had been in the habit of attending the House of Commons, and
had once spoken, as he informed me, with great applause in a debating
society. For this he appeared to have qualified himself with laudable
industry: for he was perfect in Walker's Pronouncing Dictionary, and
with an accent, which forcibly reminded me of the Scotchman in Roderic
Random, who professed to teach the English pronunciation, he was
constantly deferring to my superior judgment, whether or no I had
pronounced this or that word with propriety, or "the true delicacy. "
When he spoke, though it were only half a dozen sentences, he always
rose: for which I could detect no other motive, than his partiality
to that elegant phrase so liberally introduced in the orations of
our British legislators, "While I am on my legs. " The Swede, whom
for reasons that will soon appear, I shall distinguish by the name
of Nobility, was a strong-featured, scurvy-faced man, his complexion
resembling in colour, a red hot poker beginning to cool. He appeared
miserably dependent on the Dane; but was, however, incomparably the
best informed and most rational of the party. Indeed his manners
and conversation discovered him to be both a man of the world and a
gentleman. The Jew was in the hold: the French gentleman was lying on
the deck so ill, that I could observe nothing concerning him, except the
affectionate attentions of his servant to him. The poor fellow was very
sick himself, and every now and then ran to the side of the vessel,
still keeping his eye on his master, but returned in a moment and seated
himself again by him, now supporting his head, now wiping his forehead
and talking to him all the while in the most soothing tones. There
had been a matrimonial squabble of a very ludicrous kind in the cabin,
between the little German tailor and his little wife. He had secured two
beds, one for himself and one for her. This had struck the little woman
as a very cruel action; she insisted upon their having but one, and
assured the mate in the most piteous tones, that she was his lawful
wife. The mate and the cabin boy decided in her favour, abused the
little man for his want of tenderness with much humour, and hoisted
him into the same compartment with his sea-sick wife. This quarrel was
interesting to me, as it procured me a bed, which I otherwise should not
have had.
In the evening, at seven o'clock, the sea rolled higher, and the Dane,
by means of the greater agitation, eliminated enough of what he had been
swallowing to make room for a great deal more. His favourite potation
was sugar and brandy, i. e. a very little warm water with a large
quantity of brandy, sugar, and nutmeg His servant boy, a black-eyed
Mulatto, had a good-natured round face, exactly the colour of the skin
of the walnut-kernel. The Dane and I were again seated, tete-a-tete,
in the ship's boat. The conversation, which was now indeed rather an
oration than a dialogue, became extravagant beyond all that I ever
heard. He told me that he had made a large fortune in the island of
Santa Cruz, and was now returning to Denmark to enjoy it. He expatiated
on the style in which he meant to live, and the great undertakings which
he proposed to himself to commence, till, the brandy aiding his vanity,
and his vanity and garrulity aiding the brandy, he talked like a
madman--entreated me to accompany him to Denmark--there I should see his
influence with the government, and he would introduce me to the king,
etc. , etc. Thus he went on dreaming aloud, and then passing with a very
lyrical transition to the subject of general politics, he declaimed,
like a member of the Corresponding Society, about, (not concerning,)
the Rights of Man, and assured me that, notwithstanding his fortune, he
thought the poorest man alive his equal. "All are equal, my dear friend!
all are equal! Ve are all Got's children. The poorest man haf the same
rights with me. Jack! Jack! some more sugar and brandy. Dhere is dhat
fellow now! He is a Mulatto--but he is my equal. --That's right, Jack!
(taking the sugar and brandy. ) Here you Sir! shake hands with dhis
gentleman! Shake hands with me, you dog! Dhere, dhere! --We are all equal
my dear friend! Do I not speak like Socrates, and Plato, and Cato--they
were all philosophers, my dear philosophe! all very great men! --and so
was Homer and Virgil--but they were poets. Yes, yes! I know all about
it! --But what can anybody say more than this? We are all equal, all
Got's children. I haf ten tousand a year, but I am no more dhan de
meanest man alive. I haf no pride; and yet, my dear friend! I can
say, do! and it is done. Ha! ha! ha! my dear friend! Now dhere is dhat
gentleman (pointing to Nobility) he is a Swedish baron--you shall see.
Ho! (calling to the Swede) get me, will you, a bottle of wine from the
cabin. SWEDE. --Here, Jack! go and get your master a bottle of wine from
the cabin. DANE. No, no, no! do you go now--you go yourself you go now!
SWEDE. Pah! --DANE. Now go! Go, I pray you. " And the Swede went! !
After this the Dane commenced an harangue on religion, and mistaking
me for un philosophe in the continental sense of the word, he talked of
Deity in a declamatory style, very much resembling the devotional rants
of that rude blunderer, Mr. Thomas Paine, in his Age of Reason, and
whispered in my ear, what damned hypocrism all Jesus Christ's business
was. I dare aver, that few men have less reason to charge themselves
with indulging in persiflage than myself. I should hate it, if it were
only that it is a Frenchman's vice, and feel a pride in avoiding it,
because our own language is too honest to have a word to express it by.
But in this instance the temptation had been too powerful, and I have
placed it on the list of my offences. Pericles answered one of his
dearest friends, who had solicited him on a case of life and death, to
take an equivocal oath for his preservation: Debeo amicis opitulari, sed
usque ad Deos [75]. Friendship herself must place her last and boldest
step on this side the altar. What Pericles would not do to save a
friend's life, you may be assured, I would not hazard merely to mill the
chocolate-pot of a drunken fool's vanity till it frothed over. Assuming
a serious look, I professed myself a believer, and sunk at once an
hundred fathoms in his good graces. He retired to his cabin, and I
wrapped myself up in my great coat, and looked at the water. A beautiful
white cloud of foam at momently intervals coursed by the side of the
vessel with a roar, and little stars of flame danced and sparkled and
went out in it: and every now and then light detachments of this white
cloud-like foam darted off from the vessel's side, each with its own
small constellation, over the sea, and scoured out of sight like a
Tartar troop over a wilderness.
It was cold, the cabin was at open war with my olfactories, and I found
reason to rejoice in my great coat, a weighty high-caped, respectable
rug, the collar of which turned over, and played the part of a night-cap
very passably. In looking up at two or three bright stars, which
oscillated with the motion of the sails, I fell asleep, but was awakened
at one o'clock, Monday morning, by a shower of rain. I found myself
compelled to go down into the cabin, where I slept very soundly, and
awoke with a very good appetite at breakfast time, my nostrils, the most
placable of all the senses, reconciled to, or indeed insensible of the
mephitis.
Monday, September 17th, I had a long conversation with the Swede, who
spoke with the most poignant contempt of the Dane, whom he described as
a fool, purse-mad; but he confirmed the boasts of the Dane respecting
the largeness of his fortune, which he had acquired in the first
instance as an advocate, and afterwards as a planter. From the Dane and
from himself I collected that he was indeed a Swedish nobleman, who had
squandered a fortune, that was never very large, and had made over his
property to the Dane, on whom he was now utterly dependent. He seemed
to suffer very little pain from the Dane's insolence. He was in a high
degree humane and attentive to the English lady, who suffered most
fearfully, and for whom he performed many little offices with a
tenderness and delicacy which seemed to prove real goodness of heart.
Indeed his general manners and conversation were not only pleasing,
but even interesting; and I struggled to believe his insensibility
respecting the Dane philosophical fortitude. For though the Dane was
now quite sober, his character oozed out of him at every pore. And after
dinner, when he was again flushed with wine, every quarter of an hour or
perhaps oftener he would shout out to the Swede, "Ho! Nobility, go--do
such a thing! Mr. Nobility! --tell the gentlemen such a story, and
so forth;" with an insolence which must have excited disgust and
detestation, if his vulgar rants on the sacred rights of equality,
joined to his wild havoc of general grammar no less than of the English
language, had not rendered it so irresistibly laughable.
At four o'clock I observed a wild duck swimming on the waves, a single
solitary wild duck. It is not easy to conceive, how interesting a thing
it looked in that round objectless desert of waters. I had associated
such a feeling of immensity with the ocean, that I felt exceedingly
disappointed, when I was out of sight of all land, at the narrowness and
nearness, as it were, of the circle of the horizon. So little are images
capable of satisfying the obscure feelings connected with words. In the
evening the sails were lowered, lest we should run foul of the land,
which can be seen only at a small distance. And at four o'clock, on
Tuesday morning, I was awakened by the cry of "land! land! " It was an
ugly island rock at a distance on our left, called Heiligeland, well
known to many passengers from Yarmouth to Hamburg, who have been obliged
by stormy weather to pass weeks and weeks in weary captivity on it,
stripped of all their money by the exorbitant demands of the wretches
who inhabit it. So at least the sailors informed me. --About nine o'clock
we saw the main land, which seemed scarcely able to hold its head above
water, low, flat, and dreary, with lighthouses and land-marks which
seemed to give a character and language to the dreariness. We entered
the mouth of the Elbe, passing Neu-werk; though as yet the right bank
only of the river was visible to us. On this I saw a church, and thanked
God for my safe voyage, not without affectionate thoughts of those I
had left in England. At eleven o'clock on the same morning we arrived
at Cuxhaven, the ship dropped anchor, and the boat was hoisted out, to
carry the Hanoverian and a few others on shore. The captain agreed to
take us, who remained, to Hamburg for ten guineas, to which the Dane
contributed so largely, that the other passengers paid but half a guinea
each. Accordingly we hauled anchor, and passed gently up the river. At
Cuxhaven both sides of the river may be seen in clear weather; we could
now see the right bank only. We passed a multitude of English traders
that had been waiting many weeks for a wind. In a short time both banks
became visible, both flat and evidencing the labour of human hands by
their extreme neatness. On the left bank I saw a church or two in
the distance; on the right bank we passed by steeple and windmill and
cottage, and windmill and single house, windmill and windmill, and neat
single house, and steeple. These were the objects and in the succession.
The shores were very green and planted with trees not inelegantly.
Thirty-five miles from Cuxhaven the night came on us, and, as the
navigation of the Elbe is perilous, we dropped anchor.
Over what place, thought I, does the moon hang to your eye, my dearest
friend? To me it hung over the left bank of the Elbe. Close above the
moon was a huge volume of deep black cloud, while a very thin fillet
crossed the middle of the orb, as narrow and thin and black as a ribbon
of crape. The long trembling road of moonlight, which lay on the water
and reached to the stern of our vessel, glimmered dimly and obscurely.
We saw two or three lights from the right bank, probably from bed-rooms.
I felt the striking contrast between the silence of this majestic
stream, whose banks are populous with men and women and children, and
flocks and herds--between the silence by night of this peopled river,
and the ceaseless noise, and uproar, and loud agitations of the desolate
solitude of the ocean. The passengers below had all retired to their
beds; and I felt the interest of this quiet scene the more deeply from
the circumstance of having just quitted them. For the Prussian had
during the whole of the evening displayed all his talents to captivate
the Dane, who had admitted him into the train of his dependents. The
young Englishman continued to interpret the Prussian's jokes to me. They
were all without exception profane and abominable, but some sufficiently
witty, and a few incidents, which he related in his own person, were
valuable as illustrating the manners of the countries in which they had
taken place.
Five o'clock on Wednesday morning we hauled the anchor, but were soon
obliged to drop it again in consequence of a thick fog, which our
captain feared would continue the whole day; but about nine it cleared
off, and we sailed slowly along, close by the shore of a very beautiful
island, forty miles from Cuxhaven, the wind continuing slack. This
holm or island is about a mile and a half in length, wedge-shaped,
well wooded, with glades of the liveliest green, and rendered more
interesting by the remarkably neat farm-house on it. It seemed made for
retirement without solitude--a place that would allure one's friends,
while it precluded the impertinent calls of mere visitors. The shores of
the Elbe now became more beautiful, with rich meadows and trees running
like a low wall along the river's edge; and peering over them,
neat houses and, (especially on the right bank,) a profusion of
steeple-spires, white, black, or red. An instinctive taste teaches men
to build their churches in flat countries with spire-steeples, which,
as they cannot be referred to any other object, point, as with silent
finger, to the sky and stars, and sometimes, when they reflect the
brazen light of a rich though rainy sun-set, appear like a pyramid of
flame burning heavenward. I remember once, and once only, to have seen
a spire in a narrow valley of a mountainous country. The effect was
not only mean but ludicrous, and reminded me against my will of an
extinguisher; the close neighbourhood of the high mountain, at the foot
of which it stood, had so completely dwarfed it, and deprived it of
all connection with the sky or clouds. Forty-six English miles from
Cuxhaven, and sixteen from Hamburg, the Danish village Veder ornaments
the left bank with its black steeple, and close by it is the wild and
pastoral hamlet of Schulau. Hitherto both the right and left bank, green
to the very brink, and level with the river, resembled the shores of a
park canal. The trees and houses were alike low, sometimes the low trees
over-topping the yet lower houses, sometimes the low houses rising
above the yet lower trees. But at Schulau the left bank rises at once
forty or fifty feet, and stares on the river with its perpendicular
facade of sand, thinly patched with tufts of green. The Elbe continued
to present a more and more lively spectacle from the multitude of
fishing boats and the flocks of sea gulls wheeling round them, the
clamorous rivals and companions of the fishermen; till we came to
Blankaness, a most interesting village scattered amid scattered trees,
over three hills in three divisions. Each of the three hills stares upon
the river, with faces of bare sand, with which the boats with their
bare poles, standing in files along the banks, made a sort of fantastic
harmony. Between each facade lies a green and woody dell, each deeper
than the other. In short it is a large village made up of individual
cottages, each cottage in the centre of its own little wood or orchard,
and each with its own separate path: a village with a labyrinth of
paths, or rather a neighbourhood of houses! It is inhabited by fishermen
and boat-makers, the Blankanese boats being in great request through the
whole navigation of the Elbe. Here first we saw the spires of Hamburg,
and from hence, as far as Altona, the left bank of the Elbe is
uncommonly pleasing, considered as the vicinity of an industrious and
republican city--in that style of beauty, or rather prettiness, that
might tempt the citizen into the country, and yet gratify the taste
which he had acquired in the town. Summer-houses and Chinese show-work
are everywhere scattered along the high and green banks; the boards
of the farm-houses left unplastered and gaily painted with green and
yellow; and scarcely a tree not cut into shapes and made to remind the
human being of his own power and intelligence instead of the wisdom of
nature. Still, however, these are links of connection between town and
country, and far better than the affectation of tastes and enjoyments
for which men's habits have disqualified them. Pass them by on Saturdays
and Sundays with the burghers of Hamburg smoking their pipes, the women
and children feasting in the alcoves of box and yew, and it becomes a
nature of its own. On Wednesday, four o'clock, we left the vessel, and
passing with trouble through the huge masses of shipping that seemed to
choke the wide Elbe from Altona upward, we were at length landed at the
Boom House, Hamburg.
LETTER II
To a lady.
RATZEBURG.
Meine liebe Freundinn,
See how natural the German comes from me, though I have not yet
been six weeks in the country! --almost as fluently as English from my
neighbour the Amtsschreiber, (or public secretary,) who as often as
we meet, though it should be half a dozen times in the same day,
never fails to greet me with--"---ddam your ploot unt eyes, my
dearest Englander! vhee goes it! "--which is certainly a proof of great
generosity on his part, these words being his whole stock of English.
I had, however, a better reason than the desire of displaying my
proficiency: for I wished to put you in good humour with a language,
from the acquirement of which I have promised myself much edification
and the means too of communicating a new pleasure to you and your
sister, during our winter readings. And how can I do this better than
by pointing out its gallant attention to the ladies? Our English affix,
ess, is, I believe, confined either to words derived from the Latin, as
actress, directress, etc. , or from the French, as mistress, duchess, and
the like. But the German, inn, enables us to designate the sex in
every possible relation of life. Thus the Amtmann's lady is the Frau
Amtmanninn--the secretary's wife, (by the bye, the handsomest
woman I have yet seen in Germany,) is die allerliebste Frau
Amtsschreiberinn--the colonel's lady, die Frau Obristinn or
Colonellinn--and even the parson's wife, die Frau Pastorinn. But I am
especially pleased with their Freundinn, which, unlike the amica of the
Romans, is seldom used but in its best and purest sense. Now, I know
it will be said, that a friend is already something more than a friend,
when a man feels an anxiety to express to himself that this friend is a
female; but this I deny--in that sense at least in which the objection
will be made. I would hazard the impeachment of heresy, rather than
abandon my belief that there is a sex in our souls as well as in their
perishable garments; and he who does not feel it, never truly loved a
sister--nay, is not capable even of loving a wife as she deserves to be
loved, if she indeed be worthy of that holy name.
Now I know, my gentle friend, what you are murmuring to yourself--"This
is so like him! running away after the first bubble, that chance has
blown off from the surface of his fancy; when one is anxious to learn
where he is and what he has seen. " Well then! that I am settled at
Ratzeburg, with my motives and the particulars of my journey hither,
will inform you. My first letter to him, with which doubtless he has
edified your whole fireside, left me safely landed at Hamburg on the
Elbe Stairs, at the Boom House. While standing on the stairs, I was
amused by the contents of the passage-boat which crosses the river once
or twice a day from Hamburg to Haarburg. It was stowed close with all
people of all nations, in all sorts of dresses; the men all with pipes
in their mouths, and these pipes of all shapes and fancies--straight
and wreathed, simple and complex, long and short, cane, clay, porcelain,
wood, tin, silver, and ivory; most of them with silver chains and silver
bole-covers. Pipes and boots are the first universal characteristic of
the male Hamburgers that would strike the eye of a raw traveller. But
I forget my promise of journalizing as much as possible. --Therefore,
Septr. 19th Afternoon. My companion, who, you recollect, speaks
the French language with unusual propriety, had formed a kind of
confidential acquaintance with the emigrant, who appeared to be a man
of sense, and whose manners were those of a perfect gentleman. He seemed
about fifty or rather more. Whatever is unpleasant in French manners
from excess in the degree, had been softened down by age or affliction;
and all that is delightful in the kind, alacrity and delicacy in little
attentions, etc. , remained, and without bustle, gesticulation,
or disproportionate eagerness. His demeanour exhibited the minute
philanthropy of a polished Frenchman, tempered by the sobriety of
the English character disunited from its reserve. There is something
strangely attractive in the character of a gentleman when you apply the
word emphatically, and yet in that sense of the term which it is more
easy to feel than to define. It neither includes the possession of high
moral excellence, nor of necessity even the ornamental graces of manner.
I have now in my mind's eye a person whose life would scarcely stand
scrutiny even in the court of honour, much less in that of conscience;
and his manners, if nicely observed, would of the two excite an idea
of awkwardness rather than of elegance: and yet every one who conversed
with him felt and acknowledged the gentleman. The secret of the matter,
I believe to be this--we feel the gentlemanly character present to us,
whenever, under all the circumstances of social intercourse, the trivial
not less than the important, through the whole detail of his manners
and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to
others in such a way, as at the same time implies in his own feelings
an habitual and assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to
himself. In short, the gentlemanly character arises out of the feeling
of Equality acting, as a Habit, yet flexible to the varieties of
Rank, and modified without being disturbed or superseded by them. This
description will perhaps explain to you the ground of one of your own
remarks, as I was englishing to you the interesting dialogue concerning
the causes of the corruption of eloquence. "What perfect gentlemen these
old Romans must have been! I was impressed, I remember, with the
same feeling at the time I was reading a translation of Cicero's
philosophical dialogues and of his epistolary correspondence: while in
Pliny's Letters I seemed to have a different feeling--he gave me the
notion of a very fine gentleman. " You uttered the words as if you had
felt that the adjunct had injured the substance and the increased degree
altered the kind. Pliny was the courtier of an absolute monarch--Cicero
an aristocratic republican. For this reason the character of gentleman,
in the sense to which I have confined it, is frequent in England, rare
in France, and found, where it is found, in age or the latest period
of manhood; while in Germany the character is almost unknown. But
the proper antipode of a gentleman is to be sought for among the
Anglo-American democrats.
I owe this digression, as an act of justice to this amiable Frenchman,
and of humiliation for myself. For in a little controversy between us
on the subject of French poetry, he made me feel my own ill behaviour by
the silent reproof of contrast, and when I afterwards apologized to him
for the warmth of my language, he answered me with a cheerful expression
of surprise, and an immediate compliment, which a gentleman might both
make with dignity and receive with pleasure. I was pleased therefore to
find it agreed on, that we should, if possible, take up our quarters in
the same house. My friend went with him in search of an hotel, and I to
deliver my letters of recommendation.
I walked onward at a brisk pace, enlivened not so much by anything I
actually saw, as by the confused sense that I was for the first time
in my life on the continent of our planet. I seemed to myself like a
liberated bird that had been hatched in an aviary, who now, after his
first soar of freedom, poises himself in the upper air. Very naturally I
began to wonder at all things, some for being so like and some for being
so unlike the things in England--Dutch women with large umbrella hats
shooting out half a yard before them, with a prodigal plumpness of
petticoat behind--the women of Hamburg with caps plaited on the caul
with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which
stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled
through it--the Hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a
stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap
behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or tosses
on the back:
"Their visnomies seem'd like a goodly banner
Spread in defiance of all enemies. "
The ladies all in English dresses, all rouged, and all with bad teeth:
which you notice instantly from their contrast to the almost animal, too
glossy mother-of-pearl whiteness and the regularity of the teeth of the
laughing, loud-talking country-women and servant-girls, who with their
clean white stockings and with slippers without heel quarters, tripped
along the dirty streets, as if they were secured by a charm from
the dirt: with a lightness too, which surprised me, who had always
considered it as one of the annoyances of sleeping in an Inn, that I
had to clatter up stairs in a pair of them. The streets narrow; to my
English nose sufficiently offensive, and explaining at first sight
the universal use of boots; without any appropriate path for the
foot-passengers; the gable ends of the houses all towards the street,
some in the ordinary triangular form and entire as the botanists say;
but the greater number notched and scolloped with more than Chinese
grotesqueness. Above all, I was struck with the profusion of windows,
so large and so many, that the houses look all glass. Mr. Pitt's window
tax, with its pretty little additionals sprouting out from it like young
toadlets on the back of a Surinam toad, would certainly improve the
appearance of the Hamburg houses, which have a slight summer look, not
in keeping with their size, incongruous with the climate, and precluding
that feeling of retirement and self-content, which one wishes to
associate with a house in a noisy city. But a conflagration would, I
fear, be the previous requisite to the production of any architectural
beauty in Hamburg: for verily it is a filthy town. I moved on and
crossed a multitude of ugly bridges, with huge black deformities of
water wheels close by them. The water intersects the city everywhere,
and would have furnished to the genius of Italy the capabilities of all
that is most beautiful and magnificent in architecture. It might have
been the rival of Venice, and it is huddle and ugliness, stench and
stagnation. The Jungfer Stieg, (that is, Young Ladies' Walk), to which
my letters directed me, made an exception. It was a walk or promenade
planted with treble rows of elm trees, which, being yearly pruned and
cropped, remain slim and dwarf-like. This walk occupies one side of a
square piece of water, with many swans on it perfectly tame, and, moving
among the swans, shewy pleasure-boats with ladies in them, rowed by
their husbands or lovers. ------
(Some paragraphs have been here omitted. )------thus embarrassed by sad
and solemn politeness still more than by broken English, it sounded like
the voice of an old friend when I heard the emigrant's servant inquiring
after me. He had come for the purpose of guiding me to our hotel.
Through streets and streets I pressed on as happy as a child, and, I
doubt not, with a childish expression of wonderment in my busy eyes,
amused by the wicker waggons with movable benches across them, one
behind the other, (these were the hackney coaches;) amused by the
sign-boards of the shops, on which all the articles sold within are
painted, and that too very exactly, though in a grotesque confusion, (a
useful substitute for language in this great mart of nations;) amused
with the incessant tinkling of the shop and house door bells, the
bell hanging over each door and struck with a small iron rod at every
entrance and exit;--and finally, amused by looking in at the windows,
as I passed along; the ladies and gentlemen drinking coffee or playing
cards, and the gentlemen all smoking. I wished myself a painter, that I
might have sent you a sketch of one of the card parties. The long pipe
of one gentleman rested on the table, its bole half a yard from his
mouth, fuming like a censer by the fish-pool--the other gentleman, who
was dealing the cards, and of course had both hands employed, held his
pipe in his teeth, which hanging down between his knees, smoked beside
his ancles. Hogarth himself never drew a more ludicrous distortion both
of attitude and physiognomy, than this effort occasioned nor was there
wanting beside it one of those beautiful female faces which the same
Hogarth, in whom the satirist never extinguished that love of beauty
which belonged to him as a poet, so often and so gladly introduces, as
the central figure, in a crowd of humorous deformities, which figures,
(such is the power of true genius! ) neither acts, nor is meant to act
as a contrast; but diffuses through all, and over each of the group,
a spirit of reconciliation and human kindness; and, even when the
attention is no longer consciously directed to the cause of this
feeling, still blends its tenderness with our laughter: and thus
prevents the instructive merriment at the whims of nature or the foibles
or humours of our fellow-men from degenerating into the heart-poison of
contempt or hatred.
Our hotel DIE WILDE MAN, (the sign of which was no bad likeness of the
landlord, who had ingrafted on a very grim face a restless grin, that
was at every man's service, and which indeed, like an actor rehearsing
to himself, he kept playing in expectation of an occasion for
it)--neither our hotel, I say, nor its landlord were of the genteelest
class. But it has one great advantage for a stranger, by being in the
market place, and the next neighbour of the huge church of St. Nicholas:
a church with shops and houses built up against it, out of which wens
and warts its high massy steeple rises, necklaced near the top with a
round of large gilt balls. A better pole-star could scarcely be desired.
Long shall I retain the impression made on my mind by the awful echo,
so loud and long and tremulous, of the deep-toned clock within this
church, which awoke me at two in the morning from a distressful dream,
occasioned, I believe, by the feather bed, which is used here instead
of bed-clothes. I will rather carry my blanket about with me like a wild
Indian, than submit to this abominable custom. Our emigrant acquaintance
was, we found, an intimate friend of the celebrated Abbe de Lisle:
and from the large fortune which he possessed under the monarchy, had
rescued sufficient not only for independence, but for respectability. He
had offended some of his fellow-emigrants in London, whom he had obliged
with considerable sums, by a refusal to make further advances, and
in consequence of their intrigues had received an order to quit the
kingdom. I thought it one proof of his innocence, that he attached no
blame either to the alien act, or to the minister who had exerted it
against him; and a still greater, that he spoke of London with rapture,
and of his favourite niece, who had married and settled in England, with
all the fervour and all the pride of a fond parent. A man sent by force
out of a country, obliged to sell out of the stocks at a great loss, and
exiled from those pleasures and that style of society which habit had
rendered essential to his happiness, whose predominant feelings were yet
all of a private nature, resentment for friendship outraged, and anguish
for domestic affections interrupted--such a man, I think, I could dare
warrant guiltless of espionnage in any service, most of all in that of
the present French Directory. He spoke with ecstasy of Paris under the
Monarchy: and yet the particular facts, which made up his description,
left as deep a conviction on my mind, of French worthlessness, as his
own tale had done of emigrant ingratitude. Since my arrival in
Germany, I have not met a single person, even among those who abhor
the Revolution, that spoke with favour, or even charity of the French
emigrants. Though the belief of their influence in the organization
of this disastrous war (from the horrors of which, North Germany deems
itself only reprieved, not secured,) may have some share in the general
aversion with which they are regarded: yet I am deeply persuaded
that the far greater part is owing to their own profligacy, to their
treachery and hardheartedness to each other, and the domestic misery or
corrupt principles which so many of them have carried into the families
of their protectors. My heart dilated with honest pride, as I recalled
to mind the stern yet amiable characters of the English patriots, who
sought refuge on the Continent at the Restoration! O let not our civil
war under the first Charles be paralleled with the French Revolution!
In the former, the character overflowed from excess of principle; in the
latter from the fermentation of the dregs! The former, was a civil war
between the virtues and virtuous prejudices of the two parties; the
latter, between the vices. The Venetian glass of the French monarchy
shivered and flew asunder with the working of a double poison.
Sept. 20th. I was introduced to Mr. Klopstock, the brother of the poet,
who again introduced me to Professor Ebeling, an intelligent and lively
man, though deaf: so deaf, indeed, that it was a painful effort to talk
with him, as we were obliged to drop our pearls into a huge ear-trumpet.
From this courteous and kind-hearted man of letters, (I hope, the
German literati in general may resemble this first specimen), I heard a
tolerable Italian pun, and an interesting anecdote. When Buonaparte was
in Italy, having been irritated by some instance of perfidy, he said in
a loud and vehement tone, in a public company--"'tis a true proverb, gli
Italiani tutti ladroni"--(that is, the Italians all plunderers. ) A lady
had the courage to reply, "Non tutti; ma BUONA PARTE," (not all, but a
good part, or Buonaparte. ) This, I confess, sounded to my ears, as one
of the many good things that might have been said. The anecdote is more
valuable; for it instances the ways and means of French insinuation.
Hoche had received much information concerning the face of the country
from a map of unusual fulness and accuracy, the maker of which, he
heard, resided at Duesseldorf. At the storming of Duesseldorf by the
French army, Hoche previously ordered, that the house and property of
this man should be preserved, and intrusted the performance of the order
to an officer on whose troop he could rely. Finding afterwards, that the
man had escaped before the storming commenced, Hoche exclaimed, "HE had
no reason to flee! It is for such men, not against them, that the French
nation makes war, and consents to shed the blood of its children. " You
remember Milton's sonnet--
"The great Emathian conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus when temple and tower
Went to the ground"------
Now though the Duesseldorf map-maker may stand in the same relation to
the Theban bard, as the snail, that marks its path by lines of film on
the wall it creeps over, to the eagle that soars sunward and beats the
tempest with its wings; it does not therefore follow, that the Jacobin
of France may not be as valiant a general and as good a politician, as
the madman of Macedon.
From Professor Ebeling's Mr. Klopstock accompanied my friend and me
to his own house, where I saw a fine bust of his brother. There was a
solemn and heavy greatness in his countenance, which corresponded to my
preconceptions of his style and genius. --I saw there, likewise, a very
fine portrait of Lessing, whose works are at present the chief object of
my admiration. His eyes were uncommonly like mine, if anything, rather
larger and more prominent. But the lower part of his face and his
nose--O what an exquisite expression of elegance and sensibility! --There
appeared no depth, weight, or comprehensiveness in the forehead. --The
whole face seemed to say, that Lessing was a man of quick and voluptuous
feelings; of an active but light fancy; acute; yet acute not in the
observation of actual life, but in the arrangements and management of
the ideal world, that is, in taste, and in metaphysics. I assure you,
that I wrote these very words in my memorandum-book with the portrait
before my eyes, and when I knew nothing of Lessing but his name, and
that he was a German writer of eminence.
We consumed two hours and more over a bad dinner, at the table d'hote.
"Patience at a German ordinary, smiling at time. " The Germans are the
worst cooks in Europe. There is placed for every two persons a bottle
of common wine--Rhenish and Claret alternately; but in the houses of the
opulent, during the many and long intervals of the dinner, the servants
hand round glasses of richer wines. At the Lord of Culpin's they came
in this order. Burgundy--Madeira--Port--Frontiniac--Pacchiaretti--Old
Hock--Mountain--Champagne--Hock again--Bishop, and lastly, Punch. A
tolerable quantum, methinks! The last dish at the ordinary, viz. slices
of roast pork, (for all the larger dishes are brought in, cut up, and
first handed round and then set on the table,) with stewed prunes and
other sweet fruits, and this followed by cheese and butter, with plates
of apples, reminded me of Shakespeare [76], and Shakespeare put it in my
head to go to the French comedy.
Bless me! why it is worse than our modern English plays! The first act
informed me, that a court martial is to be held on a Count Vatron, who
had drawn his sword on the Colonel, his brother-in-law. The officers
plead in his behalf--in vain! His wife, the Colonel's sister, pleads
with most tempestuous agonies--in vain! She falls into hysterics and
faints away, to the dropping of the inner curtain! In the second act
sentence of death is passed on the Count--his wife, as frantic and
hysterical as before: more so (good industrious creature! ) she could
not be. The third and last act, the wife still frantic, very frantic
indeed! --the soldiers just about to fire, the handkerchief actually
dropped; when reprieve! reprieve! is heard from behind the scenes:
and in comes Prince Somebody, pardons the Count, and the wife is still
frantic, only with joy; that was all!
O dear lady! this is one of the cases, in which laughter is followed
by melancholy: for such is the kind of drama, which is now substituted
every where for Shakespeare and Racine. You well know, that I offer
violence to my own feelings in joining these names. But however meanly
I may think of the French serious drama, even in its most perfect
specimens; and with whatever right I may complain of its perpetual
falsification of the language, and of the connections and transitions
of thought, which Nature has appropriated to states of passion; still,
however, the French tragedies are consistent works of art, and the
offspring of great intellectual power. Preserving a fitness in the
parts, and a harmony in the whole, they form a nature of their own,
though a false nature. Still they excite the minds of the spectators to
active thought, to a striving after ideal excellence. The soul is not
stupefied into mere sensations by a worthless sympathy with our
own ordinary sufferings, or an empty curiosity for the surprising,
undignified by the language or the situations which awe and delight the
imagination. What, (I would ask of the crowd, that press forward to
the pantomimic tragedies and weeping comedies of Kotzebue and his
imitators), what are you seeking? Is it comedy? But in the comedy of
Shakespeare and Moliere the more accurate my knowledge, and the more
profoundly I think, the greater is the satisfaction that mingles with
my laughter. For though the qualities which these writers pourtray are
ludicrous indeed, either from the kind or the excess, and exquisitely
ludicrous, yet are they the natural growth of the human mind and such
as, with more or less change in the drapery, I can apply to my own
heart, or at least to whole classes of my fellow-creatures. How often
are not the moralist and the metaphysician obliged for the happiest
illustrations of general truths and the subordinate laws of human
thought and action to quotations, not only from the tragic characters,
but equally from the Jaques, Falstaff, and even from the fools and
clowns of Shakespeare, or from the Miser, Hypochondriast, and Hypocrite,
of Moliere! Say not, that I am recommending abstractions: for these
class-characteristics, which constitute the instructiveness of a
character, are so modified and particularized in each person of the
Shakesperian Drama, that life itself does not excite more distinctly
that sense of individuality which belongs to real existence. Paradoxical
as it may sound, one of the essential properties of geometry is not
less essential to dramatic excellence, and, (if I may mention his name
without pedantry to a lady,) Aristotle has accordingly required of
the poet an involution of the universal in the individual. The chief
differences are, that in geometry it is the universal truth itself,
which is uppermost in the consciousness, in poetry the individual form
in which the truth is clothed. With the ancients, and not less with the
elder dramatists of England and France, both comedy and tragedy were
considered as kinds of poetry. They neither sought in comedy to make
us laugh merely, much less to make us laugh by wry faces, accidents of
jargon, slang phrases for the day, or the clothing of commonplace morals
in metaphors drawn from the shops or mechanic occupations of their
characters; nor did they condescend in tragedy to wheedle away the
applause of the spectators, by representing before them fac-similes
of their own mean selves in all their existing meanness, or to work on
their sluggish sympathies by a pathos not a whit more respectable than
the maudlin tears of drunkenness. Their tragic scenes were meant to
affect us indeed, but within the bounds of pleasure, and in union with
the activity both of our understanding and imagination. They wished to
transport the mind to a sense of its possible greatness, and to implant
the germs of that greatness during the temporary oblivion of the
worthless "thing, we are" and of the peculiar state, in which each man
happens to be; suspending our individual recollections and lulling them
to sleep amid the music of nobler thoughts.
Hold! --(methinks I hear the spokesman of the crowd reply, and we will
listen to him. I am the plaintiff, and he the defendant. )
DEFENDANT. Hold! are not our modern sentimental plays filled with the
best Christian morality?
PLAINTIFF. Yes! just as much of it, and just that part of it, which
you can exercise without a single Christian virtue--without a single
sacrifice that is really painful to you! --just as much as flatters you,
sends you away pleased with your own hearts, and quite reconciled to
your vices, which can never be thought very ill of, when they keep
such good company, and walk hand in hand with so much compassion and
generosity; adulation so loathsome, that you would spit in the man's
face who dared offer it to you in a private company, unless you
interpreted it as insulting irony, you appropriate with infinite
satisfaction, when you share the garbage with the whole stye, and gobble
it out of a common trough. No Caesar must pace your boards--no Antony,
no royal Dane, no Orestes, no Andromache!
D. No: or as few of them as possible. What has a plain citizen of
London, or Hamburg, to do with your kings and queens, and your old
school-boy Pagan heroes? Besides, every body knows the stories; and what
curiosity can we feel----
P. What, Sir, not for the manner? --not for the delightful language
of the poet? --not for the situations, the action and reaction of the
passions?
D. You are hasty, Sir! the only curiosity, we feel, is in the story: and
how can we be anxious concerning the end of a play, or be surprised by
it, when we know how it will turn out?
P. Your pardon, for having interrupted you! we now understand each
other. You seek then, in a tragedy, which wise men of old held for the
highest effort of human genius, the same gratification, as that you
receive from a new novel, the last German romance, and other dainties of
the day, which can be enjoyed but once. If you carry these feelings to
the sister art of Painting, Michael Angelo's Sixtine Chapel, and the
Scripture Gallery of Raphael can expect no favour from you. You know
all about them beforehand; and are, doubtless, more familiar with the
subjects of those paintings, than with the tragic tales of the historic
or heroic ages. There is a consistency, therefore, in your preference of
contemporary writers: for the great men of former times, those at least
who were deemed great by our ancestors, sought so little to gratify this
kind of curiosity, that they seemed to have regarded the story in a not
much higher light, than the painter regards his canvass: as that on, not
by, which they were to display their appropriate excellence. No work,
resembling a tale or romance, can well show less variety of invention
in the incidents, or less anxiety in weaving them together, than the DON
QUIXOTE of Cervantes. Its admirers feel the disposition to go back and
re-peruse some preceding chapter, at least ten times for once that they
find any eagerness to hurry forwards: or open the book on those parts
which they best recollect, even as we visit those friends oftenest whom
we love most, and with whose characters and actions we are the most
intimately acquainted. In the divine Ariosto, (as his countrymen call
this, their darling poet,) I question whether there be a single tale of
his own invention, or the elements of which, were not familiar to the
readers of "old romance. " I will pass by the ancient Greeks, who thought
it even necessary to the fable of a tragedy, that its substance should
be previously known. That there had been at least fifty tragedies with
the same title, would be one of the motives which determined Sophocles
and Euripides, in the choice of Electra as a subject. But Milton--
D. Aye Milton, indeed! --but do not Dr. Johnson and other great men tell
us, that nobody now reads Milton but as a task?
P. So much the worse for them, of whom this can be truly said! But why
then do you pretend to admire Shakespeare? The greater part, if not
all, of his dramas were, as far as the names and the main incidents are
concerned, already stock plays. All the stories, at least, on which they
are built, pre-existed in the chronicles, ballads, or translations of
contemporary or preceding English writers. Why, I repeat, do you pretend
to admire Shakespeare? Is it, perhaps, that you only pretend to admire
him? However, as once for all, you have dismissed the well-known events
and personages of history, or the epic muse, what have you taken in
their stead? Whom has your tragic muse armed with her bowl and dagger?
the sentimental muse I should have said, whom you have seated in the
throne of tragedy? What heroes has she reared on her buskins?
D. O! our good friends and next-door neighbours--honest tradesmen,
valiant tars, high-spirited half-pay officers, philanthropic Jews,
virtuous courtezans, tender-hearted braziers, and sentimental rat-
catchers! --(a little bluff or so, but all our very generous, tender-
hearted characters are a little rude or misanthropic, and all our
misanthropes very tender-hearted. )
P. But I pray you, friend, in what actions great or interesting, can
such men be engaged?
D. They give away a great deal of money; find rich dowries for young
men and maidens who have all other good qualities; they brow-beat
lords, baronets, and justices of the peace, (for they are as bold as
Hector! )--they rescue stage coaches at the instant they are falling down
precipices; carry away infants in the sight of opposing armies; and some
of our performers act a muscular able-bodied man to such perfection,
that our dramatic poets, who always have the actors in their eye, seldom
fail to make their favourite male character as strong as Samson. And
then they take such prodigious leaps! ! And what is done on the stage is
more striking even than what is acted. I once remember such a deafening
explosion, that I could not hear a word of the play for half an act
after it: and a little real gunpowder being set fire to at the same
time, and smelt by all the spectators, the naturalness of the scene was
quite astonishing!
P. But how can you connect with such men and such actions that
dependence of thousands on the fate of one, which gives so lofty an
interest to the personages of Shakespeare, and the Greek Tragedians? How
can you connect with them that sublimest of all feelings, the power of
destiny and the controlling might of heaven, which seems to elevate the
characters which sink beneath its irresistible blow?
D.
