My life and loves Vol. 2

by Frank Harris

  I must have spent an hour in fondling and caressing her; continually I discovered new beauties in her; time and again I pushed her nightie up to her neck, delighting in the plastic beauty of her figure; but Bessie showed no wish to see me or excite me. Why? Girls are a strange folk, I decided, but I soon found she was as greedy of praise as could be, so I told her what an impression she had made at the ball and how a dozen students had asked me to introduce them, saying she was the queen of the evening. At length she fell asleep in my arms and I must have slept, too, for it was four in the morning before I awoke, turned out the lights and crept to my own room. I had acted unselfishly, spared Bessie: to give her merely pain for my thrill of pleasure would not have been fair, I thought; I was rather pleased with myself.

  When I awoke in the morning, I hastened to her, but found she was getting up and did not want to be disturbed; she'd be ready before me, she said, and she wished to see the town and shops before her friends came for her at two o'clock. I followed her wishes, bolted the door between our rooms, took her for a drive, gave her lunch, said "Good-bye" afterwards. When I assured her that nothing had been done, she said that I was a darling, promised to write and kissed me warmly; but I felt a shade of reticence in her, a something of reserve too slight to be defined, and on the train back to Heidelberg I put my fears down to fancy. But though I wrote to her English address I received no answer. Had I lost her through sparing her? What a puzzle women were! Was Virgil right with his spretae injuria formae? the hatred that comes in them if their beauty is not triumphant? Do they forgive anything sooner than selfcontrol?

  I was angry with myself and resolved not to be such an unselfish fool next time.

  CHAPTER IV

  Goethe, William I, Bismarck, Wagner

  I had long been aware that there was something rotten in the core of our social system. I had seen that while immense fortunes were accumulating, the working classes, the creators of wealth, were steeped in the most abject poverty. (Disraeli) MY LIFE AT GOTTINGEN at first was all work: study from morning till night;

  I grudged even the time to bathe and dress myself, and instead of walking a couple of hours a day for exercise, I got into the habit of sprinting a hundred yards or so twice a day, and once at least daily would trot for about half a mile. I thus managed to keep physically fit.

  Besides working at German I read philosophy, the Greek thinkers and above all Plato: … The divine One If one reads the Gods aright By their motions as they shine on In an endless trail of Light.

  And then the English thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume, and the French, especially Pascal and Joubert, and of course the Germans with Kant, the master of modern scepticism, and Schopenhauer, whose ordinary essays show greatness of mind and soul. All these men, I saw, are moments in the growth of human thought, and I turned away from the speculations, feeling that I included most of them in my own development.

  One incident of this life may be worth recording: Lotze, the famous philosopher who preached a God immanent in every form of life, remarked once in seminar that the via media of Aristotle was the first and greatest discovery in morals. I disagreed with him, and when he asked me for my reasons, I said that the via media belonged to statics, whereas morals were a part of dynamics. A bottle of wine might do me good and make another man drunk: the moral path was never a straight or middle line between extremes, as Aristotle imagined, but the resultant of two forces, a curve, therefore, always making towards one side or the other. As one's years increase, after thirty or so, the curve should set towards abstinence.

  Stirb und Werde!

  Denn wenn Du das nicht hast

  Bist Du nur ein truber Gast

  Auf der dunklen Erde.

  Lotze made a great fuss about this; asked me, indeed, to lecture to the class on laws of morals, and I talked one afternoon on all the virtues of chastity. It must be remembered that I was years older than the majority of the students.

  My student life in the walled town was all in extremes: by turns sterile and fruitful. I learned German thoroughly; wasted a year indeed on Gothic, and Old High German and Middle High German, too, till I knew German as well as I knew English, and the Niebelungenlied better than I knew Chaucer.

  Twice I went on public platforms and spoke in great meetings and no one suspected that I was a foreigner-all vanity and waste of tune, as I had to learn later.

  But at length I read Goethe, everything he had written, in chronological order, and so came into the modern world by the noblest entrance and stood breathless, enthralled by the Pisgah heights and the vision of what may come when men learn to develop their minds as some, even now, know how to develop their bodies. This was Goethe's supreme gift to men; he taught the duty of self-development to each of us and it is the first and chief duty; he preached culture as a creed, and even to those of us who had felt it beforehand and acted on it, his example was an inspiration. Later I saw that if Goethe had only had Whitman's pluck and had published the naughty poems and dramas that Eckermann tells us about and the true story of his life, he would have stood to the modern world as Shakespeare Und so lang du das nicht hast, Dieses: Stirb und werde Bist du nur ein truber Gast Auf der dunklen Erde. (And unless you master this- This: die and become You are but a shadowy guest On the dark earth.) stood to the feudal world, the sacred guide of men for centuries and centuries.

  But alas! He, too, was a snob and loved the dignities and flatteries, if not the empty ceremonials, of a provincial German court. Fancy a great man and one of the wisest of men content to sit on that old feudal wall in court attire and dangle buckled shoes and silken hose in the eyes of the passers by beneath him. Oh, Beethoven was right in his revolt when he crammed his hat down on his head as the Gross-Herzog drove by, while Goethe stood on the roadside, hat in hand, bowing. When Beethoven's brother put on his card Gutsbesitzer (land-owner), Beethoven put on his card Hirnbesitzer (brain-owner): the brainowner cannot be proud of being a landowner.

  Goethe had not sufficient reverence for his own genius, and though well-off, did not make the best of his astounding gifts. He should have visited England and France early in life and spent at least two years there. If Goethe had known Blake, he might have won to the heights earlier and understood that he must give his own spirit the richest nourishment; for surely Blake's first songs would have shown him that even a Goethe had worthy competitors and thereby would have rendered the tedious Wander-jahre that were not, alas! spent in travel, altogether impossible; for even at sixteen Blake had reached magic of expression. In describing eventide he writes: … Let thy west wind sleep on The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes And wash the dusk with silver…

  This "natural magic," as Matthew Arnold called it, is the one quality which Goethe's poetry never showed. Yet though consciously seeking the utmost self-development, how high Goethe grew even in the thin soil of Weimar.

  As a lyric poet he ranks with the greatest of all tune; no one has ever written a more poignant dramatic lyric than the appeal of Gretchen to the Madonna; and Mignon's confession is of the same supreme quality. Heine says that Goethe has written the best lyrics in all literature, and Heine knew. But it was Goethe the thinker who won my heart; phrases of his, couplets even, seemed to me pure divination. There is one word about him that I envy. When Emerson was confronted by his insight into botany and into biology, he found the true word for the great German: "Surely the spirit that made the world, confided itself more to this man than to any other."

  In sociology, too, Goethe deserves the high praise of Carlyle, and not mainly even for the discovery of the "open secret" that too great individual liberty leads inevitably to slavery (Coleridge saw as far as that and writes of those who Wear the name of Freedom Graven on a heavier chain, but because he (Goethe) was the first to draw the line between socialism and individualism and apportion to each its true place in the modern industrial world. I make no scruple of reproducing the passage here for the second time; it has never, so far as I know, been quoted by any
sociologist or even noticed; and I had arrived at the same conclusion years before reading the fragment of the play Prometheus, that contains the deepest piece of practical insight to be found anywhere.

  "What then is yours?" Epimetheus asks; and the answer of Prometheus comes like a flash- "The sphere that my activity can fill, no more, no less."

  In other words, every department of industry that the individual can control should be left to him; but all those where the individual has abdicated, all joint stock and limited liability companies, should be nationalized or municipalized; in other words, should be taken over by the community to be managed in the interest of all. Joint stock company's management has every fault of state or municipal management and none of then-many virtues and advantages, as Stanley Jevons proved in a memorable essay now nearly forgotten.

  In this magnificent apercu Goethe was a hundred years before his time, and considering that in the first years of the nineteenth century modern industry was in the cradle, so to speak, and gave scarcely a sign of its rapid and portentous development, Goethe's insight seems to me above praise. Of course he saw, too, that the land and its inherent products, such as oil and coal, should belong to the community.

  It should teach us all the inestimable value of the seer and thinker that Goethe, though far removed from the main current of industrial life, should have found the true solution of the social problem a full century before any of the belauded European statesmen! What a criticism of democracy in the bare fact!

  I owe more to Goethe than to any other teacher: Carlyle came first and then Goethe. Carlyle, who only knew two men in the world worthy of respect, the workman and the thinker, the two iron chords out of which he struck heroic melody; and Goethe, who saw even further and was the first to recognize that the artist was the greatest of the sons of men: his destiny the most arduous, prefiguring as it does, the ceaseless mother-labour of creation, the desire which is the soul of life to produce and produce, ever reaching outward and upward to a larger and more conscious vision; and when the critics complain that Goethe was too self-centred, they forget how he organized relief for the starving weavers, or worked night after night to save the huts of Thuringen peasants from fire.

  And his creative work is of the best: his Mephistopheles is perhaps too generalized, just as Hamlet is too individual, to rank with Don Quixote or Falstaff; but look at his women, his Gretchen, Mignon and Philina; only Shakespeare's Cleopatra and perhaps his Sonnet-Love are of the same quality.

  I am annoyed whenever I hear Homer, who is not as great as our Walter Scott, placed among the first of men: to me the sacred ones are Jesus, Shakespeare and Goethe; even Cervantes and Dante, though of the same high lineage, are hardly of the same stature; for Cervantes has given us, strange to say, no new type of woman, and Dante is singer rather than creators; whereas Goethe and Shakespeare are supreme singers as well as creators; and on the Head of the Crucified One climb the crowns of the world.

  For my own part and speaking merely personally, I would find a place for Balzac and Heine even in that high company; and who would dare to exclude Rembrandt, Beethoven and Wagner?

  One small point which differentiates Goethe from Shakespeare:

  Shakespeare followed Jesus in insisting on repentance, whereas Goethe will have no sorrow for sin: what is past, is past, he says peremptorily, and tears are a waste of time: train yourself so that you will not fall twice into the same pit; and go forward boldly. The counsel is of high courage: yet sorrow, too, is the soul's purification.

  But what a counsellor is this Goethe:

  Einen Blick in's Buch hinein

  Und zwei in's Leben

  Das muss die rechte Form

  Dem Geiste geben.

  In Gottingen I learned a good many of the peculiarities of German university life and spent more time on the Pauk-boden (duelling-ground) and with the corps-students than in socialist meetings. Thanks to my excellent German, I was admitted everywhere as a German and soon discovered the cause of the extraordinary superiority of the German students in almost every department of life. I think the discovery of value because it enabled me to predict the colossal development of German industry and German wealth twenty years before it took place.

  The Emperor of Germany of that time, the grandfather of the present man, must have had a rarely good head or he would never have found a Bismarck and given him almost royal power. But his wisdom was shown, I am inclined to think, just as clearly in another field. Desirous above all things of strengthening his army, he called Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of the famous scientist, Alexander, to counsel. What should be done with the ever increasing number of students who year by year entered the army? Von Humboldt recommended that they should form a class apart as volunteers and be subjected to only one year's training instead of three. At first the old Kaiser would not hear of it: they would be inferior, he thought, to the ordinary soldier in drill and discipline. "All my soldiers must be as good as possible," was his final word. Von Humboldt assured him that the volunteers for one year would soon constitute the pick of the recruits, and he argued and pleaded for his conviction with such fervour that at length the old Emperor yielded. Von Humboldt said that a certain proportion, twenty per cent at any rate, of the volunteers would become non-commissioned officers before their year was over; and the Emperor agreed that if this happened, the experiment must be regarded as successful. Of course the first volunteers knew what was expected of them and more than fifty per cent of them gained the coveted distinction. All through the army the smartest soldiers were the one-year volunteers. It was even said later that the smartest non-commissioned officers were for the most part volunteers, but that is not generally believed, for the German is very proud of his non-commissioned officers and with good reason; for they serve 16 years with the colours, and as they are rewarded afterwards with good positions on the railways, or in the post-office or the police, and indeed may even rise to esteem as gentlemen, they form the most remarkable class in any army. I have known a good many German non-commissioned officers who had learned to speak both English and French fluently and correctly while still serving.

  But not only was the whole spirit and mind and discipline of the army enormously vivified by the competition of the educated volunteers; but the institution exercised in turn the most wonderful effect upon the teaching and learning in the schools; and this has never been noticed so far as I know. The middle and lower-middle classes in Germany wished their sons to become one-year volunteers, and so fathers, mothers and sisters urged their sons and brothers to study and learn so as to gain this huge step in the social hierarchy.

  In turn this inspired the masters and professors in the Gymnasien and Real- Schulen, and these teachers took immediate advantage of the new spirit in the scholars: the standard of the final examination in the Gymnasien-das Abiturienten-Examen, or "the going-away" examination-was put higher and higher year by year till it reached the limit set by human nature. The level of this examination now is about the level of second-honours in Oxford or Cambridge, far above the graduation standard of American universities.

  There are perhaps a thousand such students in Great Britain year by year, against the hundred thousand in German universities, some of whom are going on to further heights.

  I don't for a moment mean to suggest that all these hundred thousand German students are the intellectual equals of the thousand honour men of the English universities; they may be on the same level of knowledge, but the best thousand from Oxford and Cambridge are at least as intelligent as the best thousand from German universities. Genius has little or nothing to do with learning; but what I do assert is that the number of cultivated and fairly intelligent men in Germany is ten times larger than it is in England. Many Englishmen are proud of their ignorance: how often have I heard in later life,

  "I never could learn languages; French, a beastly tongue to pronounce, I know a few words of, but German is absolutely beyond me: yet I know something of horses and I'm supposed to
be pretty useful at banking," and so forth. I've heard an English millionaire, ennobled for his wealth, boast that he had only two books in his house: one "the guid book" meaning the Bible that he never opened, and the other his check book.

  One scene which will show the enormous difference between the two peoples is bitten into my memory as with vitriol. In order to get special lessons in Old German, I spent a semester in the house of a professor in a Gymnasium; he had a daughter and two sons, the younger, Wilhelm, an excellent scholar, while Heinrich, the elder, was rather dull or slow. The father was a big, powerful man with a great voice and fiercely imperious temper: a sort of Bismarck; he was writing a book on comparative grammar. Night after night, he gave me an hour's lesson; I prepared it carefully not to excite his irritability and soon we became real friends. Duty was his religion, sweetened by love of his daughter, who was preparing to be a teacher. My bedroom was on the second floor in the back; but often, after I had retired and was lying in

  bed reading, I heard outbursts of voice from the sitting room downstairs. I soon found out that after my lesson and an hour or two given to his daughter, the professor would go through his lessons with Heinrich. One summer's night I had been reading in my room when I was startled by a terrible row. Without thinking I ran downstairs and into the sitting-room. Mary was trying to comfort her father, who was marching up and down the room with the tears pouring from his eyes: "To think of that stupid lout being a son of mine; look at him!" Heinrich, with a very red face and tousled hair, sat with his books at the table, sullen and angry: "Ei with the optative is beyond him," cried the professor, "and he's fifteen!"

  "Ei with the optative was beyond me at sixteen," I laughed, hoping to allay the storm. The boy threw me a grateful look, but the father would not be appeased.