Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  And he disappeared with a jerk.

  ‘Ach,’ said Vicki, much impressed.

  Papa popped out his head again. ‘You may believe me, Rose-Marie,’ he said.

  ‘I do, Papachen,’ said I.

  ‘You have to thank me for much.’

  ‘And I do,’ said I heartily, smiling up at him.

  ‘But for nothing more than for leaving you free to put forth such shoots as your nature demanded in whatever direction your instincts propelled you.’ And he disappeared and shut the window.

  Vicki looked at me doubtfully. ‘You said beautiful things,’ she said, ‘and he said just the opposite. Which is true?’

  ‘Both,’ said I promptly, determined not to be outdone as a prophet by Papa.

  Poor Vicki. It is so hard to have life turned into a smudge when one is only twenty. She adored this man, was so proud of him, so proud of herself for being chosen by him. She grew, in the year during which they were engaged, into a woman, and can never now retrace her steps back to that fairy place of sunshine and carelessness in which we so happily wander if we are left alone for years and years after we are supposed to be grown up. Do you realize what a blow in the face she has received, as well as in her unfortunate little heart? All her vanities, without which a girl is but a poor thing, shrivelled up, her self-respect gone, her conceit, if there was any, and I suppose there was because there always is, gone headlong after it. A betrothal here is almost as binding and quite as solemn as a marriage. It is announced in the papers. It is abundantly celebrated. And the parents on both sides fall on each other’s necks and think highly of one another till the moment comes for making settlements. The Lindebergs spent all they had laid by and borrowed more to buy the trousseau and furnish the house. Vicki cried bitterly when she talked of her table-napkins. She says there were twelve dozen in twelve different patterns, and each twelve was tied up with a pink ribbon fastened by a buckle and a bow. They had to be sold again at a grievous loss, and the family fled from Berlin and the faces of their acquaintances, faces crooked with the effort to sympathize when what they really wanted to do, says Vicki, was to smile, and came to this cheap place where they can sit in obscurity darning up the holes in their damaged fortunes. Frau von Lindeberg, who has none of the torment of rejected love to occupy her feelings and all the bitterness of the social and financial blow, cannot help saying hard things to Vicki, things pointed and poisoned with reproaches that sometimes almost verge on taunts. The man was a good parti for Vicki; little money, but much promise for the future, a good deal older than herself and already brilliant as an officer; and during the engagement the satisfied mother overflowed, as mothers will, with love for the creditable daughter. ‘It was so nice,’ said Vicki-, dolefully sniffing. ‘She seemed to love me almost as much as she loves my brother. I was so happy. I had so much. Then everything went at once. Mamma can’t bear to think that no one will ever want to marry me now, because I have been engaged.’

  Well, love is a cruel, horrible thing. Hardly ever do both the persons love with equal enthusiasm, and if they do what is the use? It is all bound to end in smoke and nothingness, put out by the steady drizzle of marriage. And for the others, for the masses of people who do not love equally, of whom one half is at a miserable disadvantage, at the mercy absolutely of the other half, what is there but pain in the end? And yet — and yet it is a pretty thing in its beginnings, a sweet, darling thing. But, like a kitten, all charm and delicious ways at first, innocent, soft, enchanting, it turns into a cat with appalling rapidity and cruelly claws you. I’d like to know if there’s a single being on earth so happy and so indifferent that he has not got hidden away beneath a brave show of clothes and trimmings the mark of Love’s claws. And I think most of the clawings are so ferocious that they are for a long time ghastly tears that open and bleed again; and when with years they slowly dry up there is always the scar, red and terrible, that makes you wince if by any chance it is touched. That is what I think. What do you think?

  Good-by.

  No, don’t tell me what you think. I don’t want to know.

  XLVI

  Galgenberg, Sept. 24th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Yesterday I was so much absorbed by Vicki’s woes that I never got to what I really wanted to write about. It’s that book I found in the Jena bookshop. It was second-hand and cheap, and I bought it, and it has unkindly revenged itself by playing havoc with my illusions. It is a collection of descriptions of what is known of the lives of the English poets, beginning with Chaucer, who is luckily too far away to provide much tattle, and coming down the centuries growing bigger with gossip as it comes, till it ends with Rossetti, and FitzGerald, and Stevenson. Each poet has his portrait. It was for that I bought it. I cannot tell you how eagerly I looked at them. At last I was going to see what Wordsworth looked like, and Coleridge, and Keats, and Shelley. One of my dreams has been to go to that National Portrait Gallery of yours in London, described in an old Baedeker I once saw, and gaze at the faces of those whose spirits I know so well. Now I don’t want to. Can you imagine what it is like, what an extremely blessed state it is, only to have read the works of a poet, the filtered-out best of him, and to have lived so far from his country and from biographies or collections of his letters that all gossip about his private life and criticisms of his morals are unknown to you? Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Burns, have been to me great teachers, great examples, before whose shining image, built up out of the radiant materials their works provided, I have spent glorious hours in worship. Not a cloud, not a misgiving has dimmed my worship. We need altars — anyhow we women do — and they were mine — I have not been able to be religious in the ordinary sense, and they have taken the place of religion. Our own best poets, Goethe, Schiller, Heine and the rest, do not appeal to me in the same way. Goethe is wonderful, but he leaves you sitting somehow in a cold place from which you call out at intervals with conviction that he is immense the while you wish he would keep the feet of your soul a little warmer. Schiller beats his patriotic drum, his fine eyes rolling continually toward the gallery, too unintermittently for perfect delight. Heine the exquisite, the cunning worker in gems, the stringer of pearls on frailest golden threads, is too mischievous, too malicious, to be set up in a temple; and then you can’t help laughing at his extraordinary gift for maddening the respectable, at the extraordinary skill and neatness with which he deposits poison in their tenderest places, and how can he worship who is being made to laugh? If I knew little about our poets’ lives — inevitably I know more than I want to — I still would feel the same. There is, I think, in their poetry nothing heavenly. It is true I bless God for them, thank Him for having let them live and sing, for having given us such a noble heritage, but I can’t go all the way Papa goes, and melt in a bath of rapture whenever Goethe’s name is mentioned. I remember what you said about Goethe. It has not influenced me. I do think you were wrong. But I do, too, think that everything really heavenly in our nation, everything purely inspired, manifestly immortal, has gone, not into our poetry but into our music. That has absorbed our whole share of divine fire, and left our poets nothing but the cool and conscious exercise of their intellects.

  Well, I am preaching. I would make a very arrogant parson, wouldn’t I, laying down the law more often than the prophets from that safe citadel, a pulpit; but please have patience, for I want you to comfort me. The book really has made me unhappy. It is the kind of book you must go on reading, — angry, rebelling at every page, but never leaving it till you’ve reached the last word. Then you throw it as hard as you can into the furthest corner of the room, and shake yourself as a dog does, come up out of muddy water, and think to shake it off as easily as he does his mud; but you can’t, because it has burned itself into your soul. I don’t suppose you will understand what I feel. When a person possesses very few things those few things are terribly precious. See the mother of the only child, and compare her conduct when it coughs with the conduct of the mother of six, all cough
ing. See how one agonizes; and see with what serenity the other brings out her bottle of mixture and pours it calmly down her children’s throats. Well, I’m like the first mother, and you are like the second. I expect you knew long ago, and have never minded knowing, the littlenesses of my gods; but I, I felt as unsettled while I read about them, as uneasy, as fidgety, as frightened, as a horse being driven by somebody cruel, which knows that every minute the lash will come down in some fresh place. Think: I knew nothing about Harriet Westbrook and her tragic life and death; I had never heard of Emilia Viviani; of Mary; of her whose name was Eliza, but who soared aloft in the sunshine of Shelley’s admiration re-christened Portia, only presently to descend once more into the font and come out luridly as the Brown Demon. I never knew that Keats loved somebody called Brawne, and that she was unwilling, that she saw little in him, in Endymion the godlike, the divinely gifted, and that he was so persistent, so unworthily persistent, that the only word I can find that at all describes it is the German zappelnd. I had never heard of Jean Armour, of the headlong descent from being ‘him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough along the mountain-side’ to hopeless black years spent in public-houses at the beck and call — think of it, think of the divine spirit forced to it by its body — of any one who would pay for a drink. I never knew about Coleridge’s opium, or that to Carlyle he appeared as a helpless Psyche overspun with Church of England cobwebs, as a weak, diffusive, weltering, ineffectual man. I never knew that Wordsworth’s greeting was a languid handful of numb, unresponsive fingers, that his speech was prolix, thin, endlessly diluted. I never knew that Milton had three wives, that the first one ran away from him a month after their marriage, that he was hard to his daughters, so hard that they wished him dead. All these things I never knew; and for years I have been walking with glorious spirits, and have been fed on honey-dew, and drunk the milk of Paradise. When first I saw Wordsworth’s portrait I turned cold. Don’t laugh; I did actually turn cold. He had been so much in my life. I had pictured him so wonderful. Calm; beautiful, with the loftiest kind of beauty; faintly frosty at times, and detached, yet gently cheery and always dignified. It is the picture from a portrait by some one called Hancock. Very bitterly do I dislike Hancock. It is a profile. It would, if I had seen it in the flesh, completely have hidden from my silly short sight the inner splendors. I’m afraid — oh, I’m afraid, and I shiver with shame to think it — that I would have regarded him only as an elderly gentleman of irreproachable character out of whose way it was as well to get because he showed every sign of being a bore. Will you think me irretrievably silly when I tell you that I cried over that picture? For one dreadful moment I stared at it in startled horror; then I banged the book to and fled up into the forest to cry. There was a smugness — but no, I won’t think of it. I’ll upset all my theories about the face being the mirror of the soul. It can’t be. If it is, Peter Bell and The Thorn are accounted for; but who shall account for the bleak nobility, the communings with nature on lofty heights in the light of setting suns? Or, when he comes down nearer, for that bright world he unlocks of things dear to memory, of home, of childhood, of quiet places, of calm affections? And for the tenderness with which it is done? And for its beautiful, simple goodness?

  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, besmudged? 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 armor, and pushing us, who want to be left alone praying in the fore-court 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 gray-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 button-holings, 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? Oh, 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 kno
w, 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 humor. 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.