Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  Coleridge’s picture was another disillusionment, but not so great a shock, because I have loved him less. He was so rarely inspired. I don’t think you need more than the fingers of one hand for the doing of sums with Coleridge’s inspirations. Still, it saddened me to be told he was a helpless Psyche. I didn’t like to hear about his cobwebs. I hated being forced to know of his weakness, of his wasted life growing steadily dingier the farther he travelled from that East that had seen him set out so bright with morning radiance. Really, the world would be a peaceful place if we could only keep quiet about each other’s weak points. Why are we so restless till we have pulled down, belittled, be-smudged? You’ll say that without a little malice talk would grow very dull; you’ll tell me it is the salt, the froth, the sparkle, the ginger in the ginger-beer, the mustard in the sandwich. But you must admit that it becomes only terrible when it can’t leave the few truly great spirits alone, when it must somehow drag them down to our lower level, pointing out—in writing, so that posterity too shall have no illusions—the spots on the sun, the weak places in the armour, and pushing us, who want to be left alone praying in the forecourt of the temple, down the area steps into the kitchen. Two nights and two days have I spent feverishly with that book. I dare not hope that I shall forget it. I have never yet forgotten undesirable, bad things. Now, when I take my poets up with me into the forest, and sit on one of those dusky pine-grown slopes where the light is subdued to a mysterious grey green and the world is quieted into a listening silence, and far away below the roofs of Jena glisten in the sun, and the white butterflies, like white flowers come to life, flutter after each other across the blue curtain of heat that hangs beyond the trees,—now, when I open them and begin to read the noble, familiar words, will not those other words, those anecdotes, those personal descriptions, those suggestions, those buttonholings, leer at me between the lines? Shall I, straining my ears after the music, not be shown now for ever only the instrument, and how pitifully the ivory has come off the keys? Shall I, hungering after my spiritual food, not have pushed upon my notice, so that I am forced to look, the saucepan, tarnished and not quite clean, in which it was cooked? Please don’t tell me you can’t understand. Try to imagine yourself in my place. Come out of that gay world of yours where you are talking or being talked to all day long, and suppose yourself Rose-Marie Schmidt, alone, in Jena, on a hill, with books. Suppose yourself for hours and hours every day of your life with nothing particular that you must do, that you have no shooting, no hunting, no newspapers, no novels. Suppose you are passionately fond of reading, and that of all reading you most love poetry. Suppose you have inherited from a mother who loved them as much as you do a precious shelf-full of the poets, cheap editions, entirely free from the blight of commentaries, foot-notes, and introductory biographies. And suppose these books in the course of years have become your religion, your guide, the source of your best thoughts and happiest moments;—would you look on placidly while some one scrawled malicious truths between their lines? No, you would not. You would feel as I do. Think what the writers are to me, how I have built up their personalities entirely out of the materials they gave me in their work. They never told me horrid things about themselves. Their spirits, which alone they talked about, were serene and white. I knew Milton was blind, because he chose beautifully to tell me so. I knew he must have been an appreciative and regretful husband, because no husband who did not appreciate and regret would go so far as to talk of his deceased wife as his late espoused saint. I knew he was a tender friend, a friend capable of deepest love and sorrow, for, in spite of Johnson’s ‘It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion,’ I was convinced by the love and sorrow of Lycidas. I knew he was a man whose spirit was dissolved continually into the highest ecstasies, who lived with all heaven before his eyes,—briefly, I said Amen to Wordsworth’s ‘His soul was like a star, and dwelt apart.’ And now a series of sordid little pictures rises up before me and chokes my Amen. I cannot bear to think of him having two or three olives for supper and a little cold water, and then being cross to his daughters. Of course he must be cross on such a supper. I can’t conceive it kind to drill the daughters so strictly in languages they did not understand that they could read them aloud to him with extraordinary correctness. I shrink from the thought of the grumbling there was in that house of heavenly visions, grumbling and squabbling stamped out, it is true, by the heavy parental foot wherever noticed, but smouldering on from one occasion to the other. I cannot believe—I wish I could—that a child will dislike a parent without cause; the cause may be small things, a series of trifles each of little moment, snubs too often repeated, chills too often applied, stern looks, short words, sarcasms,—and these, as you and I both know, are quite ordinary dulnesses, often daily ingredients of family life; but they sit with a strange and upsetting grace on the poet of Paradise, and I would give anything never to have heard of them.

  And then you know I loved Fitzgerald. He had one of my best altars. You remember you read Omar Khayyam twice aloud to me—once in the spring (it was the third of April, a sudden hot day, blue and joyous, slipped in to show God had not forgotten us between weeks of hopeless skies and icy winds) and once last September, that afternoon we drifted down the river past the town, away from houses, and people, and work, and lessons, out to where the partridges scuttled across the stubble and all the world was golden. (That was the eleventh of September; I am rather good, you see, at dates.) Well, now I call him Fitz, and laugh at the description of him going about Suffolk lanes in a battered tall hat tied on in windy weather by a handkerchief, and trailing behind him, instead of clouds of glory, a shawl of green and black plaid. It isn’t, of course, in any way a bad thing to trail shawls after you on country walks; there is nothing about it or him that shocks or grieves; he is very lovable. But I don’t want to laugh. I don’t want to call him Fitz. He is one of the gods in my temple, a place from which I rigorously exclude the sense of humour. I don’t like gods who are amusing. I cannot worship and laugh simultaneously. I know that laughter is good, and I know that even derision in small quantities is as wholesome as salt; but I like to laugh and deride outside holy places, and not be forced to do it while I am on my knees.

  Now, don’t say what on earth does the woman want, because it seems to me so plain. What the woman wants is that present and future poets should wrap themselves sternly in an impenetrable veil of anonymity. They won’t, but she can go on praying that they will. They won’t, because of the power of the passing moment, because of the pleasantness of praise, of recognition, of personal influence, and, I suppose, but I’m not sure, of money. Do you remember that merry rhymer Prior, how he sang

  ’Tis long ago

  Since gods came down incognito?

  Well, I wish with all my heart they had gone on doing it a little longer. He wasn’t, I think, deploring what I deplore, the absence of a sense for the anonymous in gods, of a sense of the dignity of separation, of retirement, of mystery, wherever there is even one spark of the Divine; I think he thought they had all been, and that neither incognito nor in any other form would they appear again. He implied, and so joined himself across the centuries to the Walrus and the Carpenter, that there were no gods to come. Well, he has been dead over a hundred and eighty years, and they have simply flocked since then. I’d like to write the great names on this page, the names of the poets, first and greatest of the gods, to raise it to dignity and confound the ghost of Prior, but I won’t out of consideration for you.

  Does not my enthusiasm, my mountain energy, make you groan with the deadly fatigue of him who has to listen and cannot share? I’ll leave off. My letter is growing unbecomingly fat. The air up here is so bracing that my very unhappinesses seem after all full of zest, very vocal, healthy griefs, really almost enjoying themselves. I’ll go back to my pots. I’m busy today, though you mightn’t think it, making apple jelly out of our very own apples. I’ll go back to my pots and forget—no, I won’t make a feeble joke I wa
s just going to make, because of what I know your face would look like when you read it. After all, I believe I’m more than a little bit frightened of you.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XLVII

  Galgenberg, Sept. 30.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—How nice of you to be so kind, to write so consolingly, to be so patient in explaining where I am thinking wrong. I burned the book in the kitchen fire, and felt great satisfaction in clearing the house of its presence. You are right; I have no concern with the body of a poet—all my concern is with his soul, and the two shall be severely separated. I am glad you agree with me that poets should be anonymous, but you seem to have even less hope that they ever will be than I have. At least, I pray that they may; you apparently take no steps whatever to bring it about. You say that experience teaches that we must not expect too much of gods; that the possible pangs of posterity often leave them cold; that they are blind to the merits of bushels, and discern neither honour nor profit in the use of those vessels of extinguishment; you fear that they will not change, and you exhort me to see to it that their weakness shall not be an occasion for my stumbling. That is very sensible advice. But before your kind letter came a few fresh autumn mornings had cleared a good deal of my first dejection away. If the gods won’t hide themselves I can, after all, shut my eyes. If I may not rejoice in the divine in them with undistracted attention I will try at least to get all the warmth I can from its burning. And I can imitate my own dainty and diligent bees, and take care to be absorbed only in their honey. You make me ashamed of my folly in thinking I could never read Burns again now that I know about his sins. I did secretly think so. I was sure of it. I felt quite sick to see him tumbled from his altar into the mud. Your letter shows me that once again I have been foolish. Why, it has verged on idiocy. I myself have laughed at people in Jena, strictly pious people, who will not read Goethe, who have a personally vindictive feeling against him because of his different love-affairs, and I have listened astonished to the fury with which the proposal of a few universal-minded persons to give Heine a statue was opposed, and to the tone almost of hatred with which one man whenever his name is mentioned calls out Schmutzfink. About our poets I have been from the beginning quite sane. But yours were somehow more sacred to me; sacred, I suppose, because they were more mysterious, more distant—glorious angel-trumpets through which God sent His messages. I was so glad, I whose tendency is, I am afraid, to laugh and criticize, to possess one thing at which I could not laugh, to have a whole tract of beauty in which I could walk seriously, with downcast eyes; and I thought I was never going to be able to be serious there again. It was a passing fit, a violent revulsion. If I like carefully to separate my own soul and body, why should I not do the same with those of other sinners? It has always seemed to me so quaint the way we admit, the good nature with which we reiterate, that we are all wretched sinners. We do it with such an immense complacency. We agree so heartily, with such comfortable, regretful sighs, when anybody tells us so; but with only one wretched sinner are we of a real patience. With him, indeed, our patience is boundless. I know this, I have always known it, and I will not now, at an age when it is my hope to grow every year a little better, forget it and be as insolently intolerant as the man who shudders at the name of Heine, will not read a line of him and calls him Schmutzfink. That writer’s books you tell me about, the books the virtuous in England will not read because his private life was disgraceful, beautiful books, you say, into which went his best, in which his spirit showed how bright it was, how he had kept it apart and clean, I shall get them all and read them all. No sinner, cursed with a body at variance with his soul and able in spite of it to hear the music of heaven and give it exquisite expression, shall ever again be identified by me with what at such great pains he has kept white. I know at least three German writers to whom the same thing happened, men who live badly and write nobly. My heart goes out to them. I think of them lame and handicapped, leading their muse by the hand with anxious care so that her shining feet, set among the grass and daisies along the roadside, shall not be dimmed by the foulness through which they themselves are splashing. They are caked with impurities, but with the tenderest watchfulness they keep her clean. She is their gift to the world, the gift of their best, of their angel, of their share of divinity. And the respectable, afraid for their respectability, turn their backs in horror and go and read without blinking ugly things written by other respectables. Why, no priest at the altar, however unworthy, can hinder the worshipper from taking away with him as great a load of blessings as he will carry. And a rose is not less lovely because its roots are in corruption. And God Himself was found once in a manger. Thank you, and good-bye.

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XLVIII

  Galgenberg, Oct. 8.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—We are very happy here just now because Papa’s new book, at which he has been working two years, is finished. I am copying it out, and until that is done we shall indulge in the pleasantest day-dreams. It is our time, this interval between the finishing of a book of his and its offer to a publisher, for being riotously happy. We build the most outrageous castles in the air. Nothing is certain, and everything is possible. The pains of composition are over, and the pains of rejection are not begun. Each time we suppose they never will, and that at last ears will be found respectfully ready to absorb his views. Few and far between have the ears been till now. His books have fallen as flat as books can fall. Nobody wanted to hear all, or even half, that he could tell them about Goethe. Jena shrugged its shoulders, the larger world was blank. The books have brought us no fame, no money, some tragic hours, but much interest and amusement. Always tragic hours have come when Papa clutched at his hair and raved rude things about the German public; and when the money didn’t appear there have been uncomfortable moments. But these pass; Papa leaves his hair alone; and the balance remains on the side of nice things. We don’t really want any more money, and Papa is kept busy and happy, and just to see him so eager, so full of his work, seems to warm the house with pleasant sunshine. Once, for one book, a cheque did come; and when we all rushed to look we found it was for two marks and thirty pfennings—‘being the amount due,’ said the accompanying stony letter, ‘on royalties for the first year of publication.’ Papa thought this much worse than no cheque at all, and took it round to the publisher in the molten frame of mind of one who has been insulted. The publisher put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back in his chair, gazed with refreshing coolness at Papa, who was very hot, and said that as trade went it was quite a good cheque, and that he had sent one that very morning to another author—a Jena celebrity who employs his leisure writing little books of riddles—for ninety pfennings.

  Papa came home beaming with the delicious feeling that money was flowing in and that he was having a boom. The riddle man was a contemptuous acquaintance who had been heard to speak lightly of Papa’s books. Papa felt all the sweetness of success, of triumph over a disagreeable rival; and since then we have looked upon that special book as his opus magnum.

  While I copy he comes in and out to ask me where I have got to and if I like it. I assure him that I think it delightful, and so honestly I do in a way, but I don’t think it will be the public’s way. It begins by telling the reader, presumably a person in search of information about Goethe, that Jena is a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, of whom nineteen thousand are apparently professors. The town certainly does give you that impression as you walk about its little streets, and at every corner meet the same battered-looking persons in black you met at the corner before; but what has that to do with Goethe? And the pages that follow have nothing to do with him either that I can see, being a disquisition on the origin and evolution of the felt hats the professors wear—dingy, slouchy things—winding up with an explanation of their symbolism and inevitableness, based on a carefully drawn parallel between them and the kind of brains they have to cover. From this poin
t, the point of the head-wear of the learned in our present year, he has to work back all the way to Goethe in Jena a century ago. It takes him several chapters to get back, for he doesn’t go straight, being constitutionally unable to resist turning aside down the green lanes of moralizing that branch so seductively off the main road and lead him at last very far afield; and when he does arrive he is rather breathless, and flutters for some time round the impassive giant waiting to be described, jerking out little anecdotes, very pleasant little anecdotes, but quite unconnected with his patient subject, before he has got his wind and can begin.