Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther Page 11
He is a haggard man, thin of cheek, round of shoulder, short of sight, who teaches little boys Latin and Greek in Weimar. For thirty years has he taught them, eking out his income in the way we all do in these parts, by taking in foreigners wanting to learn German. In July he shakes his foreigners off and comes up here for six weeks’ vacant pottering in his orchard. He bought the house as a speculation, and lets the upper part to any one who will take it, living himself, with his wife and son, on the ground floor. He is extremely kind to me, and has given me to understand that he considers me intelligent, so of course I like him. Only those persons who love intelligence in others and have doubts about their own know the deliciousness of being told a thing like that. I adore being praised. I am athirst for it. Dreadfully vain down in my heart, I go about pretending a fine aloofness from such weakness, so that when nobody sees anything in me—and nobody ever does—I may at least make a show of not having expected them to. Thus does a girl in a ball-room with whom no one will dance pretend she does not want to. Thus did the familiar fox conduct himself towards the grapes of tradition. Very well do I know there is nothing to praise; but because I am just clever enough to know that I am not clever, to be told that I am clever—do you follow me?—sets me tingling.
Now, that’s enough about me. Let us talk about you. You must not come to Jena. What could have put such an idea into your head? It is a blazing, deserted place just now, looking from the top of the hills like a basin of hot bouillon down there in the hollow, wrapped in its steam. The University is shut up. The professors scattered. Martens is in Switzerland, and won’t be back till September. Even the Schmidts, those interesting people, have flapped up with screams of satisfaction into a nest on the side of a precipice. I urge you with all my elder-sisterly authority to stay where you are. Plainly, if you were to come, I would not see you. Oh, I will leave off pretending I cannot imagine what you want here: I know you want to see me. Well, you shall not. Why you should want to is altogether beyond my comprehension. I believe you have come to regard me as a sort of medicine, medicine of the tonic order, and wish to bring your sick soul to the very place where it is dispensed. But I, you see, will have nothing to do with sick souls, and I wholly repudiate the idea of being somebody’s physic. I will not be your physic. What medicinal properties you can extract from my letters you are welcome to; but, pray, are you mad that you should think of coming here? When you do come you are to come with your wife, and when you have a wife you are not to come at all. How simple.
Really, I feel inclined to laugh when I try to picture you, after the life you have been leading in London, after the days you are living now at Clinches, attempting to arrange yourself on this perch of ours up here. I cannot picture you. We have reduced our existence to the crudest elements, to the raw material; and you, I know, have grown a very exquisite young man. The fact is you have had time to forget what we are really like, my father and I and Johanna, and since my stepmother’s time we have advanced far in the casual scrappiness of housekeeping that we love. You would be like some strange and splendid bird in the midst of three extremely shabby sparrows. That is the physical point of view: a thing to be laughed at. From the moral it is for ever impossible.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXVIII
Galgenberg, Aug. 7.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—It is pleasant of you to take the trouble to emulate our neighbour and tell me that you too think me intelligent. You put it, it is true, more elaborately than he does, with a greater embroidery of fine words, but I will try to believe you equally sincere. I make you a profound Knix—it’s a more expressive word than curtsey—of polite gratitude. But it is less excellent of you to add on the top of these praises that I am adorable. With words like that, inappropriate, and to me eternally unconvincing, this correspondence will come to an abrupt end. I shall not write again if that is how you are going to play the game. I would not write now if I were less indifferent. As it is, I can look on with perfect calm, most serenely unmoved by anything in that direction you may say to me; but if you care to have letters, do not say them again. I shall never choose to allow you to suppose me vile.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXIX
Galgenberg, Aug. 13.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—You need not have sent me so many pages of protestations. Nothing you can say will persuade me that I am adorable, and I did exactly mean the word vile. Do not quarrel with Miss Cheriton; but if you must, do not tell me about it. Why should you always want to tell one of us about the other? Have you no sense of what is fit? I am nothing to you, and I will not hear these things.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XL
Galgenberg, Aug. 18.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—You must really write a book. Write a very long one, with plenty of room for all your words. What is your bill for postage now? Johanna, I am sure, thinks you are sending me instalments of manuscript, and marvels at the extravagance that shuts it up in envelopes instead of leaving its ends open and tying it up with string. Once more I must beg you not to write about Miss Cheriton. It is useless to remind me that I have posed as your sister, and that to your sister you may confide anything, because I am not your sister. Sometimes I have written of an elder-sisterly attitude towards you, but that, of course, was only talk. I am not irascible enough for the position. I do think, though, you ought to be surrounded by women who are cross. Six cross and determined elder sisters would do wonders for you. And so would a mother with an iron will. And perhaps an aunt living in the house might be a good thing; one of those aunts—I believe sufficiently abundant—who pierce your soul with their eyes and then describe it minutely at meal-times in the presence of the family, expatiating particularly on what those corners of it look like, those corners you thought so secret, in which are huddled your dearest faults.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLI
Galgenberg, Aug. 25.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—Very well; I won’t quarrel; I will be friends—friends, that is, so long as you allow me to be so in the only right and possible way. Don’t murder too many grouse. Think of my disapproving scowl when you are beginning to do it, and then perhaps your day of slaughter will resolve itself into an innocent picnic on the moors, alone with sky and heather and a bored, astonished dog. Are you not glad now that you went to Scotland instead of coming to Jena to find the Schmidts not at home? Surely long days in the heather by yourself will do much towards making you friends with life. I think those moors must be so beautiful. Really, very nearly as good as my Galgenberg. My Galgenberg, by the by, has left off being quite so admirably solitary as it was at first. The neighbour is, as I told you, extremely friendly, so is his wife, though I do not set such store by her friendliness as I do by his, for, frankly, I find men are best; and they have a son who is an Assessor in Berlin. You know what an Assessor is, don’t you?—it is a person who will presently be a Landrath. And you know what a Landrath is? It’s what you are before you turn into a Regierungsrath. And a Regierungsrath is what you are before you are a Geheimrath. And a Geheimrath, if he lives long enough and doesn’t irritate anybody in authority, becomes ultimately that impressive and glorious being a Wirklicher Geheimrath—implying that before he was only in fun—mit dem Prädikat Excellenz. And don’t say I don’t explain nicely, because I do. Well, where was I? Oh yes; at the son. Well, he appeared a fortnight ago, brown and hot and with a knapsack, having walked all the way from Berlin, and is spending his holiday with his people. For a day or two I thought him quite ordinary. He made rather silly jokes, and wore a red tie. Then one evening I heard lovely sounds, lovely, floating, mellow sounds coming up in floods through the orchard into my garden, where I was propped against a tree-trunk, watching a huge yellow moon disentangling itself slowly from the mists of Jena,—oh, but exquisite sounds, sounds that throbbed into your soul and told it all it wa
nted to hear, showed it the way to all it was looking for, talked to it wonderfully of the possibilities of life. First they drew me on to my feet, then they drew me down the garden, then through the orchard, nearer and nearer, till at last I stood beneath the open window they were coming from, listening with all my ears. Against the wall I leaned, holding my breath, spell-bound, forced to ponder great themes, themes of life and death, the music falling like drops of liquid light in dark and thirsty places. I don’t know how long it lasted or how long I stood there after it was finished, but some one came to the window and put his head out into the freshness, and what do you think he said? He said, ‘Donnerwetter, wie man im Zimmer schwitzt.’ And it was the son, brown and hot, and with a red tie.
‘Ach, Fräulein Schmidt,’ said he, suddenly perceiving me. ‘Good evening. A fine evening. I did not know I had an audience.’
‘Yes,’ said I, unable at once to adjust myself to politenesses.
‘Do you like music?’
‘Yes,’ said I, still vibrating.
‘It is a good violin. I picked it up——’ And he told me a great many things that I did not hear, for how can you hear when your spirit refuses to come back from its journeyings among the stars?
‘Will you not enter?’ he said at last. ‘My mother is fetching up some beer and will be here in a moment. It makes one warm playing.’
But I would not enter. I walked back slowly through the long orchard grass between the apple-trees. The moon gleamed along the branches. The branches were weighed down with apples. The place was full of the smell of fruit, of the smell of fruit fallen into the grass, that had lain there bruised all day in the sun. I think the beauty of the world is crushing. Often it seems almost unbearable, calling out such an acuteness of sensation, such a vivid, leaping sensitiveness of feeling, that indeed it is like pain.
But what I want to talk about is the strange way good things come out of evil. It really almost makes you respect and esteem the bad things, doing it with an intelligent eye fixed on the future. Here is our young friend down the hill, a young man most ordinary in every way but one, so ordinary that I think we must put him under the heading bad, taking bad in the sense of negation, of want of good; here he is, robust of speech, fond of beer, red of tie, chosen as her temple by that delicate lady the Muse of melody. Apparently she is not very particular about her temples. It is true, while he is playing at her dictation she transforms him wholly, and I suppose she does not care what he is like in between. But I do. I care because in between he thinks it pleasant to entertain me with facetiousness, his mother hanging fondly on every word in the amazing way mothers, often otherwise quite intelligent persons, do. Since that first evening he has played every evening, and his taste in music is as perfect as it is bad in everything else. It is severe, exquisite, exclusive. It is the taste that plays Mozart and Bach and Beethoven, and wastes no moments with the Mendelssohn sugar or the lesser inspiration of Brahms. I tried to strike illumination out of him on these points, wanted to hear his reasons for a greater exclusiveness than I have yet met, went through a string of impressive names, beginning with Schumann and ending with Wagner and Tchaikowsky, but he showed no interest, and no intelligence either, unless a shrug of the shoulder is intelligent. It is true he remarked one day that he found life too short for anything but the best—‘That is why,’ he added, unable to forbear from wit, ‘I only drink Pilsner.’
‘What?’ I cried, ignoring the Pilsner, ‘and do not these great men’—again I ran through a string of them—‘do not they also belong to the very best?’
‘No,’ he said; and would say no more. So, you see, he is obstinate as well as narrow-minded.
Of course such exclusiveness in art is narrow-minded, isn’t it? Besides, it is very possible he is wrong. You, I know, used to perch Brahms on one of the highest peaks of Parnassus (I never thought there was quite room enough for him on it); and did you not go three times all the way to Munich while you were with us to hear Mottl conduct the Ring? Surely it is probable a person of your all-round good taste is a better judge than a person of his very nearly all-round bad taste? Whatever your faults may be, you never made a fault in ties, never clamoured almost ceaselessly for drink, never talked about schwitzen, nor entertained young women from next door with the tricks and facetiousness of a mountebank. I wonder if his system were carried into literature, and life were wholly concentrated on the half-dozen absolutely best writers, so that we who spread our attention out thin over areas I am certain are much too wide knew them as we never can know them, became part of them, lived with them and in them, saw through their eyes and thought with their thoughts, whether there would be gain or loss? I don’t know. Tell me what you think. If I might only have the six mightiest books to go with me through life I would certainly have to learn Greek because of Homer. But when it comes to the very mightiest, I cannot even get my six; I can only get four. Of course when I loosely say six books I mean the works of six writers. But beyond my four I cannot get; there must be a slight drop for the other two—very slight, hardly a drop, rather a slight downward quiver into a radiance the faintest degree less blazing, but still a degree less. These two would be Milton and Virgil. The other four—but you know the other four without my telling you. I am not sure that the Assessor is not right, and that one cannot, in matters of the spirit, be too exclusive. Exclusiveness means concentration, deeper study, minuter knowledge; for we only have a handful of years to do anything in, and they are quite surely not enough to go round when going round means taking in the whole world.
On the other hand, wouldn’t my speech become archaic? I’m afraid I would have a tendency that would grow to address Papa in blank verse. My language, even when praying him at breakfast to give me butter, would be incorrigibly noble. I don’t think Papa would like it. And what would he say to a daughter who was forced by stress of concentration on six works to go through life without Goethe? Goethe, you observe, was not one of the two less glorious, and he certainly was not one of the four completely glorious. I begin to fear I should miss a great deal by my exclusions. It would be sad to die without ever having been thrilled by Werther, exalted by Faust, amazed by the Wahlverwandtschaften, sent to sleep by Wilhelm Meister. To die innocent of any knowledge of Schiller’s Glocke, with no memory of strenuous hours spent getting it by heart at school, might be quite pleasant. But I think it would end by being tiring to be screwed up perpetually to the pitch of the greatest men’s greatest moments. Such heights are not for insects like myself. I would hang very dismally, with drooping head and wings, on those exalted hooks. And has not the soul too its longings at times for a dressing-gown and slippers? And do you see how you could do without Boswell?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLII
Galgenberg, Aug. 31.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—Yes, of course he does. He plays every evening. And every evening I go and listen, either in the orchard beneath the open window or, more ceremoniously, inside the room with or without Papa. I find it a pleasant thing. I am living in a bath of music. And I hope you don’t expect me to agree with your criticism of music as a stirrer-up of, on the whole, second-rate emotions. What are second-rate emotions? Are they the ones that you have? And was it to have them stirred that you used to journey so often to Munich and Mottl? Stirred up I certainly am. Not in the way, I admit, in which a poem of Milton’s does it, not affected in the least as I am affected by, for instance, the piled-up majesty of the poem on Time, but if less nobly still very effectually. There; I have apparently begun to agree with you. Well, I do see, the moment I begin to consider, that what is stirred is less noble. I do see that what I feel when I listen to music is chiefly Wehmuth, and I don’t think much of Wehmuth. You have no word for it. Perhaps in England you do not have just that form of sentiment. It is a forlorn thing, made up mostly of vague ingredients—vague yearnings, vague regrets, vague dissatisfactions. When it comes over you, you remember all the people who are absent, and yo
u are sad; and the people who are dead, and you sigh; and the times you have been naughty, and you groan. I do see that a sentiment that makes you do that is not the highest. It is profitless, sterile. It doesn’t send you on joyfully to the next thing, but keeps you lingering in the dust of churchyards, barren places of the past which should never be revisited by the wholesome-minded. Now, this looks as though I were agreeing with you quite, but I still don’t. You put it so extremely. It is so horrid to think that even my emotions may be second-rate. I long ago became aware that my manners were so, but I did like to believe there was nothing second-rate about my soul. Well, what is one to do? Never be soft? Never be sad? Or sorry? Or repentant? Always stay up at the level of Milton’s Time poem, or of his At a Solemn Musick, strung high up to an unchanging pitch of frigid splendour and nobleness? It is what I try to aim at. It is what I would best like. Then comes our friend of the red tie, and in the cool of the day, when the world is dim and scented, shakes a little fugue of Bach’s out of his fiddle, a sparkling, sly little fugue, frolicsome for all its minor key, a handful of bright threads woven together, twisted in and out, playing, it would seem, at some game of hide-and-seek, of pretending to want to catch each other into a tangle, but always gaily coming out of the knots, each distinct and holding on its shining way till the meeting at the end, the final embrace when the game is over and they tie themselves contentedly together into one comfortable major chord,—our friend plays this, this manifestly happy thing, and my soul listens, and smiles, and sighs, and longs, and ends by being steeped in Wehmuth. I choose the little fugue of Bach as an instance, for of all music it is aimed most distinctly at the intellect, it is the furthest removed from Wehmuth; and if it has this effect on me I will not make you uncomfortable by a description of what the baser musics do, the musics of passion, of furious exultations and furious despairs. But my vague wish for I do not know what, gentle, and rather sweetly resigned when the accompaniment is Bach, swells suddenly while I listen to them into a terrifying longing that rends and shatters my soul.