The muse of the next century is still a child, although she no longer sleeps in a cradle. She is willful, determined, capricious; for she still does not know in which direction she wants to go. She is still playing in the great kindergarten that has been filled with treasures from the rococo and the distant past. Characters from Greek tragedy and Roman comedy are there, carved in marble to be her dolls. All the folksongs ever sung are there, waiting like dried flowers for the kiss of genius to make them bloom and smell even more sweetly than before. The chords of Beethoven, Gluck, Mozart, and all the other great composers are played for her. On her bookshelves stand many books that in their time were thought to be immortal and now are forgotten. But there is still room for those of our age, of whose immortality the telegraph wires sing, and who are dead before the telegram is delivered.
The muse is very widely read; indeed, she has read too much. But she was born in our age of which so much must be forgotten that she will learn the art of forgetting.
As yet she has not given any thought to her own song: the great work that she will inspire and that will live in the millennium to come alongside the Books of Moses and Bidpai’s golden fables of the fox. And while she amuses herself, nations struggle against each other so that the very air reverberates from the din of their battles. Cannons and pens are inscribing runes which perhaps no one will ever understand.
With a Garibaldi hat on her head, she sits reading Shakespeare; she raises her glance from the book and murmurs, “Yes, he will live and be understood when I am grown up.” Calderon rests in a sarcophagus constructed from his own works and decorated with words of homage and tribute. Holberg—oh yes, the twentieth-century muse is cosmopolitan, she has also heard of the Danish playwright—has been placed in a volume together with Molière, Plautus, and Aristophanes; but when she takes down the book it is usually to read Molière.
In her search for the meaning of life she is as single-minded as the chamois ransacking the mountains for salt, but she is free of the restless anxiety that plagues the little deer. The peace that reigns in her soul is like that of the Hebraic tale—and not even the hearts of the joyous warriors of Thessaly swelled with such strength, as that of this nomadic tribe who lived on a green plain beneath the clear and star-filled sky.
Is she religious, you ask, is she Christian? She knows the rudiments of philosophy. She broke a baby tooth on the theory of the atom, but another tooth has now grown up in its place. She ate of the apple while she was still in her cradle: she ate and she became wise. And then she thought about immortality and decided that no more beautiful thought had ever been conceived.
When will this new era begin? When shall we see and hear the muse of the next century?
One lovely morning she will arrive. She will come riding on the back of the modern dragon, a locomotive, through tunnels and over bridges. She will come sailing across the great oceans on a dolphin blowing steam out of its nostrils. Or she will come flying on the wings of Montgolfier’s bird, Rock, gliding toward the earth, toward that spot where first she will make her divinity known.
But where, in which country? Will it be on the continent that Columbus discovered? That land of liberty whose original inhabitants were hunted down like wild animals, where the Africans were turned into beasts of burden, the land from which we hear The Song of Hiawatha? Or will it be on the underside of the world: that lump of gold in the southern seas, the land of contrasts, where much is the opposite of what we know, where day is night and swans with black wings sing in forests of mimosa? Or will she stand first on the statue of Memnon, the desert sphinx who still sings at sunrise though we cannot understand her song? Or will she choose the island of coal, where Shakespeare has ruled since Elizabeth’s times? Or that country that Tycho Brahe called his own but from which he was banished? Or California, that fairy-tale land where the redwood lifts its head high above any other living thing?
We cannot answer either question: neither where nor when that light, that star in the forehead of the muse, will first be seen, and the flower unfold on whose leaves will be inscribed the twentieth century’s conception of all that is beautiful in form, color, and sound.
“What is the new muse’s program?” the clever politicians ask a little nervously. “What does she want?”
What they ought to ask is, what she does not intend to do.
She will not perform as a ghost of the past. She does not want to try to create new dramas out of leftovers. She does not intend to patch with poetry, faulty plots and badly thought-out tragedies. She will outdistance us, as the marble amphitheater surpassed the mimer’s cart. She will not dissect man’s natural speech and paste bits and pieces together so that they sound as artificial as the song of a music box, and fill it with phrases of flattery that the troubadours were forced to compose to please their masters. To her, poetry will not be the aristocrat and prose the peasant; they will be equal in power and importance, and beauty as well.
She will not attempt to chisel out of that gigantic block of Icelandic granite—the Sagas!—new versions of old gods. They are dead. The twentieth century will have no sympathy for them and will deny all kinship to them. Nor will the muse be willing to live in hired rooms of the French novel of another age, any more than she will wish to anesthetize her contemporaries with the “true” story of “ordinary” people. She will bring to art and literature the essence of life. Her songs in prose and poetry will be short, clear, and varied. A new alphabet will be developed and the heartbeat of each nation will be a letter; and the muse will love them equally, and from the letters she will form words, and from the words a song that will be the hymn of the future.
And when will she appear? For those who have gone before us and are familiar with eternity, it will be a short while; but for us who are alive now, it will be a long time to come. Soon the Great Wall of China will crumble. The railroads of Europe will reach the closed archives of Asian culture. The two streams of culture will meet and the rapids of the double river will have deeper tones than have ever been heard before. We—the old of our own times—will tremble with fear, and hear in the new music the voice of Ragnarok and the fall of the old gods. But how can we forget that this is the fate of every civilization? On earth every nation and every epoch disappears, leaving only a single picture in a capsule made of words that floats on the surface of the eternal river like a lotus flower. These flowers bear witness that all ages are flesh of our flesh; only the clothing differs. The Hebrew flower is the Old Testament; the Greeks’ is the Iliad and the Odyssey. What will ours be? Ask the twentieth-century muse in the time of Ragnarok, when the new heavens will be formed and their message understood.
All the power of steam, all the present’s strength, was only a lever. Master Bloodless and his helpers—whom we in our times believed were rulers—were merely servants, slaves, to decorate the halls and carry the treasures and lay the table for the great feast over which the muse will preside, with the innocence of a child, the earnestness of a young girl, and the confidence and knowledge of a woman. She will lift the marvelous lamp of poesy. She—the new muse!—in whose human heart the flame of godliness will burn.
We hail you, muse of the poesy of the coming century! Our shout of welcome will be heard as the ideas and prayers of the worms are heard when the plow cuts them in two. Yet when a new spring dawns the plow must draw its furrows across the land and cut us worms in pieces, so that crops can grow to feed the coming generations.
All hail the muse of the twentieth century!
110
The Ice Maiden
CHAPTER ONE: LITTLE RUDY
Let us visit Switzerland. Let us travel a little in that marvelous land of mountains where forests spread themselves up walls of granite. Let us climb the mountains until we come to the great fields of snow; and then descend to the green meadows, where rivers and streams run so swiftly that one would think they were afraid of missing their chance to meet the ocean and disappear. Down in the valleys the sun feels burning hot, but
it also makes its strength felt on the mountaintops. There it shines on heavy masses of snow, melting them through the years into huge, shining blocks of ice, into glaciers.
Two such glaciers have been formed beneath the pinnacles of Schreckhorn and Wetterhorn, filling the wide clefts near the little mountain village of Grindelwald. They are strange and awesome, and in the summer travelers come from all over the world to see them. Either the strangers cross the snow-clad mountains or they come from the valleys far below, climbing for many hours. As they ascend, the valley below them seems to descend, and they look back at it as if they were looking down from a balloon. Often the very tops of the mountains are hidden in what looks like a curtain of smoke, while in the valley with its little brown houses the sun is still shining. Its rays make the greenness of the meadows so brilliant as to appear transparent. Water splashes, gurgles, and sputters below; water tinkles and chimes above, and looks like silver bands as it falls down the sides of the cliffs.
On both sides of the road there are log chalets, each with its own potato patch. The potato patch is necessary, for in every little chalet live large families, and even small stomachs can be very hungry.
As soon as a stranger is spied on his way up the mountain, a flock of children will be there to greet him. Little tradesmen they are, selling charmingly carved toy houses that look just like the ones they live in themselves. About twenty years ago there could sometimes be seen among these children a boy who kept a little apart from the others. He appeared so serious and held the plain box containing his wares so tightly that he looked as if he were unwilling to part with them. Although the boy himself could never have guessed it, it was his very lack of eagerness for his task that attracted buyers; and this very young boy with his very solemn expression sold more than the other children.
Farther up the mountain lived the boy’s grandfather, and it was he who carved the lovely little houses that the boy sold. In the old man’s house there was a whole chest full of the finest wood carvings: nutcrackers, knives, forks, prancing mountain antelopes, and little boxes covered with vine leaves. Everything that could please the eye of a child was there, but little Rudy—for that was the boy’s name—looked with greater interest and longing toward the rifle that hung from the rafters, for his grandfather had promised him that it would be his when he grew strong enough to use it.
Though Rudy was still very young he was set to taking care of the goats; and if a goatherd is to be judged by the way he keeps up with his animals, then Rudy was an excellent goatherd, for he could climb even higher than the goats. Up the trees he would go to fetch the birds’ nests. He was daring and brave, but he never smiled except when he stood near the great waterfall or heard in the distance the sound of an avalanche. He did not play with the other children and was to be seen among them only when his grandfather sent him down to sell wood carvings. This work was a real chore for Rudy. He preferred climbing in the mountains or sitting at home with his grandfather. The old man told the boy stories of bygone days. He told him about his ancestors, the people of Meiningen.
“They have not always been Swiss,” he explained. “In ancient times they migrated from the north, and there are people living up there to whom you are related; they are called Swedes.”
Rudy learned much from his grandfather, but he had other teachers as well, and perhaps what they taught him was even more valuable. They were the dog, Ajola, that Rudy had inherited from his father; and the tomcat, whom Rudy loved especially because he had taught him how to be a climber.
“Come up here on the roof,” the cat had said to him when he was yet so young that he could not talk himself. Rudy had understood the cat, as all small children understand the languages of hens, ducks, dogs, and cats.
Animals speak to children as plainly as their parents do; and to very young children even Grandfather’s cane can talk. It can neigh and become a horse with swift legs and a flying mane. Some children retain this gift longer than others, and then grownups shake their heads and say that they are slow in developing and start remarking about it being time for them to start growing up. Grownups are always talking, but they are not always worth listening to.
“Come up here, up on the roof,” were the first words that the cat said to Rudy and he had understood them at once. “Don’t be afraid. All that about falling is all the way you look at it; and if you don’t imagine what it’s like to fall, you won’t fall. You only fall if you’re afraid of falling. Come follow me, first one paw and then the other, eyes straight ahead. And when you come to a gap, you leap; and hold on with your claws when you get to the other side. That’s the way I do it!”
And that’s what Rudy did; and he spent many hours with the tomcat on top of the roof or in the uppermost branches of a tree. Later Rudy learned to climb higher than his friend, to the very edges of the cliffs where the cat never came.
“Higher! Higher!” exclaimed the trees and bushes. “Look how we climb, how near the sky we reach! See how we hang on with our roots to the ledges of the cliffs.”
Often Rudy would be on the mountaintop before the sun was up there; then he would be given his breakfast drink, that draft that only God can brew, though man knows the recipe. It is made up of the fragrance of mountain herbs mixed with the smell of mint and thyme from the valleys. All that is heavy, the clouds absorb; then the wind drives the clouds across the tops of the pine trees, to comb and card them. The very essence of all these aromas becomes air, fresh and light; and this was Rudy’s first drink in the morning.
The daughters of the sun, its rays, kissed his cheeks, and Dizziness, though she stood nearby, waiting, did not dare to touch him. The swallows from his grandfather’s houses, where there were never less than seven nests, joined Rudy and his herd of goats. “You and we … You and we!” they sang, bringing messages from all the animals back at the house, even from the hens, the only birds to whom little Rudy paid no attention.
Rudy had traveled much for a child of his tender years. Born in the canton of Valais, he had been carried across the mountain range to his grandfather’s house, and recently he had gone by foot to visit Staubbach, that mountain which stands in front of its greater sister, who is called “The Maiden,” and covers part of its bright white face with a silver veil as the face of an Arabian woman is concealed. During his first trip Rudy had crossed the great glacier near Grindelwald, but that had been a journey of sorrow, for his mother had died, and as his grandfather once explained: “It was on the glacier that Rudy had his child’s merriment stolen from him.”
When Rudy was a baby his mother had described him in a letter to her father as a baby who laughed more than he cried. “I think his soul has been changed. While he was imprisoned in the cleft all his laughter froze,” his grandfather had been heard to say, though as a rule he seldom spoke about this event.
Yet everyone knew the story of Rudy’s life. His father had been a postman and, with a dog as his only companion, had carried the mail across the Simplon Pass. That was in the canton of Valais, and there in the valley of the Rhone, Rudy’s father’s brother still lived and was a well-known hunter and guide.
When Rudy’s father died, Rudy’s mother decided that she would return with her year-old son to her father’s home in the Bernese Oberland, a few hours’ walk beyond Grindelwald. One June day she set out for her father’s house, carrying her little boy in her arms. She did not travel alone but went with two hunters who were returning to Grindelwald.
They had traveled the greatest part of their journey and had reached the great snow fields on the mountain ridge, from where Rudy’s mother could see her father’s house and the green mountainside where she had played as a child. The only difficulty left was the crossing of the upper part of the glacier. Newly fallen snow hid a crevasse—not a deep cleft with a raging river at the bottom but a narrow split in the ice that was deeper than a man’s height. The young woman, with her babe in her arms, slid, fell, and was gone. She had not screamed or even uttered a sound, but from below t
hem in the glacier her companions heard a baby cry.
More than an hour passed before the hunters were able to return with ropes and a ladder, so that they could climb down into the crevasse. With great difficulty they brought up the two bodies. The baby was still alive, but though they tried, they could not bring the mother back to life.
So it was that the woodcarver who had lost a daughter received a son. But the little boy had changed. No more could it be said of him, as his mother had, that he laughed more than he cried. His visit to the cold, ice world—where the Swiss mountain people believe the souls of the condemned are frozen till Doomsday—had altered him.
Not unlike raging water frozen and crushed into green blocks of glass is the glacier, one gigantic block tipped on top of another. Far below—deep, deep down—flows a raging river of melted snow and ice; its waters twist themselves through the glacier, making deep caves and great caverns, a wonderful palace of ice. This is the home of the Ice Maiden. She, who kills and crushes all living things that come near her, is both a child of the air and a ruler of the mighty rivers. That is why she can reach, swifter than the mountain goat, the highest peaks, where mountain climbers must wearily cut steps in the ice to gain a foothold; and why she can sail on a twig down a great river, or leap from cliff to cliff with her snow-white hair and her blue-green dress, which glistens like water, streaming behind her.
“Mine is the power!” she exclaims. “I crush anything that comes within my grasp and never let it go! A lovely boy was stolen from me. I had kissed him but not so hard that he died from it. Now he is again among human beings. He herds goats in the mountains. Upward, ever upward, he climbs, away from everyone else, but not from me. He is mine and I claim him.”
The Complete Fairy Tales Page 83