‘It’s not beautiful at all,’ said Rahel. ‘You are more than welcome here, I hope that you will learn a great deal and you are free, of course, to form whatever opinions you like, but this parlour is not beautiful.’
Fritz continued to gaze around him.
‘This is my niece by marriage, Karoline Just.’
Karoline was wearing her shawl and housekeeping apron.
‘You are beautiful, gracious Fraulein,’ said Fritz.
‘We expected you yesterday,’ said Rahel, dryly, ‘but you see, we are patient people.’ When Karoline had gone out, as she very soon did, to the kitchen, she added, ‘I am going to take the privilege of someone who met you so often when you were a student, and welcomed you, you remember, to our Shakespeare evenings, and tell you that you ought not to speak to Karoline quite like that. You did not mean it, and she is not used to it.’
‘But I did mean it,’ said Fritz. ‘When I came into your home, everything, the wine-decanter, the tea, the sugar, the chairs, the dark green tablecloth with its abundant fringe, everything was illuminated.’
‘They are as usual. I did not buy this furniture myself, but -‘
Fritz tried to explain that he had seen not their everyday, but their spiritual selves. He could not tell when these transfigurations would come to him. When the moment came it was as the whole world would be when body at last became subservient to soul.
Rahel saw that, whatever else, young Hardenberg was serious. She allowed herself to wonder whether he was obliged, on medical advice, to take much opium? For toothache, of course, everyone had to take it, she did not mean that. But she soon found out that he took at most thirty drops at bedtime as a sedative, if his mind was too active - only half the dose, in fact, that she took herself for a woman’s usual aches and pains.
14
Fritz at Tennstedt
FRITZ’S luggage arrived a day later on the diligence. It consisted largely of books. Here were the hundred and thirty-three necessary titles, the earlier ones mostly poetry, plays and folktales, later on the study of plants, minerals, medicine, anatomy, theories of heat, sound and electricity, Mathematics, the Analysis of Infinite Numbers. They are all one, said Fritz aloud, warming his hands over a candle in his cold attic bedroom at Tennstedt. All human knowledge is one. Mathematics is the linking principle, just as Ritter told me that electricity is the link between body and mind. Mathematics is human reason itself in a form everyone can recognise. Why should poetry, reason and religion not be higher forms of Mathematics? All that is needed is a grammar of their common language. And if all knowledge was to be expressed through symbols, then he must set to work to write down every possible way the operation could be performed.
‘Triumph!’ exclaimed Fritz in his icy room (but he had never in his life - nor had anyone he knew - worked or slept in a room that was not exceedingly cold).
His second load of books began with Franz Ludwig Cancrinus’ Foundations of Mining and Saltworks, Volume 1. Part 1: In What Mineralogy Consists. Part 2: In What the Art of Experiment Consists. Part 3: In What the Specification of Aboveground Earth Consists. Part 4: In What the Specification of Belowground Earth Consists. Part 5: In What the Art of Mine Construction Consists. Part 6: In What Arithmetic, Geometry and Ordinary Trigonometry Consists. Part 7, Section 1: In What Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Aerometrics and Hydraulics Consists, Section 2: In What the Construction of Mountain Machinery Consists. Part 8, Section 1: In What the Smelting and Precipitation of Metals from Ore Consists, Section 2: In What the Smelting of Half-metals Consists, Section 3: In What the Preparation of Sulphur Consists. Part 9, Section 1: In What the Examination of Salt and the Geological Description of Salt-Bearing Mountains Consists, Section 2: In What the Art of Salt-Boiling and the Construction of New Saltworks Consists. Volume 2, What is Understood by Mining and Salt Law.
The servants reported to Rahel that the young Freiherr was talking aloud to himself in his room. ‘He goes up there immediately after breakfast,’ Rahel told her husband, ‘and you have seen that he also studies after dinner.’ Just asked Karoline whether they could not have a little music one evening, as a relaxation. ‘You must take pity’, he suggested, ‘on the unfortunate young man.’
‘I know nothing about his trouble,’ said Karoline. She found herself very busy with the work of the forewinter - sausage-making, beating flax for the winter spinning, killing the geese (who had already been plucked alive twice) for their third and last crop of down. After this it was necessary to eat baked goose for a week. But she took her place that evening in the parlour when Fritz, appealed to by Rahel, came downstairs, carrying a book - he had been persuaded to read aloud to them - or no, it was not a book, but a folder of manuscripts.
‘You must not think that this was written to anyone in particular. I was at Jena. I was younger than I am now.
Accept my book, accept my little rhymes,
Care for them if you can and let them go
Do you want more? My heart, perhaps, my life?
Those you had long ago.’
He looked up - ‘That would be very suitable to copy out in a young lady’s album,’ said Rahel. ‘I’m afraid however we don’t have anything of the sort in the house.’
Fritz tore the sheet of paper in half. Karoline put down the pillow-case she was mending. ‘Please read more, read on.’ Her Uncle Coelestin looked quietly at the glow from the stove, whose doors were slightly ajar. He had been told that young Hardenberg was a poet, but had only just realised that he intended to read his verses aloud. He could not pretend to be a judge of them. Singing was a different matter. Like everyone else he knew, Just sang himself, belonged to two singing clubs, and listened to singing indoors in winter and in summer in the open air, the woods, the mountains and the streets. Yes, and a friend of Karoline’s, a high soprano, had possessed such a beautiful voice that at her wedding dinner, when all the notables of Tennstedt were present, Coelestin himself had been cajoled into appearing as an old bird-seller, with an armful of empty cages painted to represent gold, and into singing a comical country song, imploring the bridegroom ‘not to take away their nightingale’. Yes, that was Else Wangel, only three years ago, three years since her wedding, and she was broad enough nowadays to fill a doorway.
Karoline was speaking to him reproachfully. ‘Why are you talking of Else Wangel?’
‘My dear, I did not know I was speaking aloud. All of you must pardon an old man.’
Just was forty-six. The melancholy of approaching mortality had been one of his reasons, first, for sending for his niece, then, in good time, for his marriage.
‘Uncle, you have not been listening, you understood nothing.’
15
Justen
KAROLINE was in charge (Rahel having divided up the responsibilities with watchful tact) of the household accounts, which included collecting Fritz’s weekly payment for board and lodging, also for stabling the Gaul, who had arrived from Weissenfels. On the very first Saturday, however, there was confusion. ‘Fraulein Karoline, my father’s cashier is due at Tennstedt to bring me my allowance from now until the end of November, but he has perhaps made a mistake and gone straight to Oberwiederstadt. I shall have to ask you I am afraid to wait for what is owing.’
‘I don’t think we can wait,’ Karoline told him, ‘but I will make it up, for the time being, from the housekeeping.’ She had changed colour - which she scarcely ever did - at the idea of his embarrassment. ‘How will he manage?’ she asked Rahel. Rahel said, ‘I dare say that in spite of attending three universities he has not been taught how to manage. He is the eldest son, and has not been protected from himself.’
Although the cashier arrived the next day, Karoline felt as if she had made some kind of a stand, but in reality she had no defences against Hardenberg, because, from the evening of the poetry-reading onwards he asked so much from her. He gave her his entire confidence, he laid the weight of it upon her. She was his friend - Karoline did not contradict this - and although he
could live without love, he told her, he could not live without friendship. All was confessed, he talked perpetually. Neither the sewing nor the forewinter sausage-chopping deterred him. As she chopped, Karoline learned that the world is tending day by day not towards destruction, but towards infinity. She was told where Fichte’s philosophy fell short, and that Hardenberg had a demon of a little brother of whom he was fond, and a monstrous uncle who disputed with his father, but then, so did they all.
‘Your mother also?’
‘No, no.’
‘I am sorry you are not happy at home,’ said Karoline.
Fritz was startled. ‘I have given you the wrong idea, there is love in our home, we would give our lives for each other.’
His mother was young enough too, he added, to bear more children; it was his absolute duty to start earning as soon as possible. Then he returned to the subject of Fichte, fetching his lecture notes to show to Karoline - page after page of triadic patterns. ‘Yes, these are some of Fichte’s triads, but I will tell you what has suddenly struck me since I came to Tennstedt. You might look at them as representing the two of us. You are the thesis, tranquil, pale, finite, self-contained. I am the antithesis, uneasy, contradictory, passionate, reaching out beyond myself. Now we must question whether the synthesis will be harmony between us or whether it will lead to a new impossibility which we have never dreamed of.’
Karoline replied that she did not dream very much.
About Dr Brown, whom he spoke of next, she did know something, but she had not realised that Brownismus was an improvement on all previous medical systems, or that Dr Brown himself had lectured with a glass of whisky and a glass of laudanum in front of him, sipping from each in turn, to demonstrate the perfect balance. She did not even know what whisky was.
Fritz also told her that women are children of nature, so that nature, in a sense, is their art. ‘Karoline, you must read Wilhelm Meister.’
‘Of course I have read Wilhelm Meister,’ she said.
Fritz was disconcerted for a few seconds, so that she had time to add, ‘I found Mignon very irritating.’
‘She is only a child,’ cried Fritz, ‘a spirit, or a spirit-seer, more than a child. She dies because the world is not holy enough to contain her.’
‘She dies because Goethe couldn’t think what to do with her next. If he had made her marry Wilhelm Meister, that would have served both of them right.’
‘You are very severe in your judgments,’ said Fritz. He sat down to write a few verses on the subject. Karoline, with the kitchen-maid, was putting lengths of string through dried rings of apple. ‘But Hardenberg, you have written about my eyebrows!’
Karoline Just has dark eyebrows
And from the movements of her eyebrows
I can gather good advice.
‘I shall give you a pet-name,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got one?’ Most Carolines and Karolines (and it was the commonest name in North Germany) were called Line, Lili, Lollie or Karolinchen. She shook her head. ‘No, I have never had one.’
‘I shall call you Justen,’ he said.
16
The Jena Circle
TENNSTEDT had the advantage, from Just’s point of view, of being over fifty miles from Jena. Young Hardenberg still had many friendships there, but, in Just’s opinion, would be better off without them. For example, the physicist Johann Wilhelm Ritter - if that was what he was - should probably be committed, for his own good, to an asylum. But Ritter was an innocent. What struck Just in particular was the behaviour of the Jena women. Friedrich Schlegel, one of Hardenberg’s earliest friends, was a great admirer of his brother August’s wife, Caroline. This same wife had been the lover of George Forster, the librarian. Forster’s wife Therese had left him for a journalist, complaining that when their baby died of smallpox, Forster had not consoled her but had simply ‘taken strenuous steps to replace it’. Again, Friedrich Schlegel lived with a woman ten years older than himself. She was Dorothea, daughter of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, a kind and motherly woman, apparently, but she had a husband already, a banker, whose name Just couldn’t remember. Whoever he was, he was well out of it.
They were all intelligent, all revolutionaries, but since each of them had a different plan, none of it would come to anything. They talked continually of going to Prussia, to Berlin, but they stayed in Jena. As Just saw it, this was because Jena was so much cheaper.
To the Jena circle Fritz was a kind of phenomenon, a country boy, perhaps still growing, capable in his enthusiasm of breaking things, tall and awkward. Friedrich Schlegel stuck to it that he was a genius. ‘You must see him,’ they told their acquaintances. ‘Whatever you read of Hardenberg’s you won’t understand him nearly as well as if you take tea with him once.’
‘When you write to him,’ said the wild Caroline Schlegel to her sister-in-law Dorothea, ‘tell him to come at once, and we will all fichtisieren and symphilosophise and sympoetisieren until the dawn breaks.’
‘Yes,’ said Dorothea, ‘we must have the whole congregation together again in my front sitting room. I shall not be content until I see this. But in any case, why is our Hardenberg dragging round like a clerk under the orders of some tedious Kreisamtmann?’
‘Oh, but the Kreisamtmann has a niece,’ said Caroline.
‘How old is she?’ asked Dorothea.
17
What is the Meaning?
NOW that the Gaul was in the Justs’ stable, Fritz would be able to accompany the Kreisamtmann on circuit. There he was to act as his legal clerk, and to pick up business methods, as his father had specified, as he went.
In spite of his sober clothes, bought at second hand, Fritz did not look quite right, not quite like a clerk of any kind, and the Gaul also struck a jarring note. But the Kreisamtmann, from the moment he first saw Fritz, had taken him to his heart. The only precaution he thought necessary before they set out together on official business was to ask him whether he still felt as Just understood he once had about the sequence of events in France?
‘The Revolution in France has not produced the effects once hoped for,’ was how he put it to Fritz. ‘It has not resulted in a golden age.’
‘No, they’ve made a butcher’s shop of it, I grant you that,’ said Fritz. ‘But the spirit of the Revolution, as we first heard of it, as it first came to us, could be preserved here in Germany. It could be transferred to the world of the imagination, and administered by poets.’
‘It seems to me,’ said Just, ‘that as soon as you are settled into your profession, you would be well advised to take up politics.’
‘Politics are the last thing that we need. This at least I learned with the Brethren at Neudietendorf. The state should be one family, bound by love.’
‘That does not sound much like Prussia,’ said the Kreisamtmann.
To the Freiherr von Hardenberg he wrote that the whole relationship between himself and the son who had been entrusted to him was extremely successful. Friedrich was showing much application. Who would have guessed that he, the poet, would spare no pains to turn himself into a businessman, to do the same piece of work two or three times over, to go over the resemblances and differences in the words of newspaper articles about business matters so as to be sure he had judged them correctly, and all this as diligently as he read his poetry, science and philosophy. ‘Of course, your son learns very quickly, twice as fast as other earthly mortals.’
‘It is a curious thing that although I am supposed to be instructing him,’ Just’s letter went on, ‘and am instructing him, he is teaching me even more, matters to which I never paid attention before, and in the process I am losing the narrow-mindedness of an old man. He has advised me to read Robinson Crusoe and Wilhelm Meister. I told him that up till this time I had never felt the least temptation to read a work of fiction.’
‘What are these matters,’ the Freiherr wrote back to him, ‘to which you never paid attention before? Be good enough to give me one example.’ Just replied that F
ritz Hardenberg had spoken to him of a fable, which he had found, so far as Just could remember, in the works of the Dutch philosopher Franz Hemsterhuis - it had been about the problem of universal language, a time when plants, stars and stones talked on equal terms with animals and with man. For example, the sun communicates with the stone as it warms it. Once we knew the words of this language, and we shall do so again, since history always repeats itself. ‘- I told him, that is of course always a possibility, if God disposes.’
The Freiherr replied that his son would not need a different language from German to conduct his duties as a future salt mine inspector.
Since winter often left the roads impassable, Coelestin Just and his probationary clerk did as much of their travelling as possible before the end of the forewinter. ‘But there is something else which I have written and which I want to read to you while I still have time,’ Fritz told Karoline. ‘It will not truly exist until you have heard it.’
‘Is it then poetry?’
‘It is poetry, but not verse.’
‘Then it is a story?’ asked Karoline, who dreaded the reappearance of Fichte’s triads.
‘It is the beginning of a story.’
‘Well, we will wait until my Aunt Rahel comes back from the evening service.’
‘No, it is for you only,’ said Fritz.
‘His father and mother were already in bed and asleep, the clock on the wall ticked with a monotonous beat, the wind whistled outside the rattling window-pane. From time to time the room grew brighter when the moonlight shone in. The young man lay restlessly on his bed and remembered the stranger and his stories. “It was not the thought of the treasure which stirred up such unspeakable longings in me,” he said to himself. “I have no craving to be rich, but I long to see the blue flower. It lies incessantly at my heart, and I can imagine and think about nothing else. Never did I feel like this before. It is as if until now I had been dreaming, or as if sleep had carried me into another world. For in the world I used to live in, who would have troubled himself about flowers? Such a wild passion for a flower was never heard of there. But where could this stranger have come from? None of us had ever seen such a man before. And yet I don’t know how it was that I alone was truly caught and held by what he told us. Everyone else heard what I did, and yet none of them paid him serious attention.”’
The Blue Flower Page 5