CHAPTER III

ERNST MORITZ ARNDT

A more fiery soul than that of Ernst Moritz Arndt can surely never have lived upon this earth. He must have been fully eighty years old at the time when I knew him, but age seemed to count for nothing with him. His eye was as bright, his voice as clear and ringing, his gait as quick and elastic as had he still been in the prime of life, and the most impassioned speech from youthful lips would have seemed tame and cold beside the lava-flood of eloquence that poured forth inexhaustibly from his kindly and expressive, although perfectly toothless mouth. The loss of his teeth was indeed the only real sign of age Arndt bore on his person, and it was apparently a matter of so little moment to him, that I have often wondered since, whether our modern practice of repairing by artificial means the ravages of time, be after all so unquestionable an advantage as some would pretend. The mouth which nature alone has moulded year by year seems to me to retain in any case much more character and expression than that which has been fitted out and shaped anew by the dentist’s skill. However that may be, it is certain that Arndt at all events felt not in the least inconvenienced by the loss, nor did it detract from our pleasure in listening to him.

It was during our stay in Bonn, whither we had migrated in order to be near a celebrated doctor, that we saw the venerable poet so constantly. Two years of my childhood were spent in the charming little University town, in the hope that my younger brother, an invalid from his birth, and my mother, whose health then gave much cause for anxiety, might both of them derive great and lasting benefit from the treatment of the great specialist. And if these hopes were doomed to disappointment,--and it seemed indeed, as an old friend of our family afterwards remarked, as if the very best efforts of medical skill must here for ever prove unavailing,--there were on the other hand certain compensations attendant on our stay, in the shape of the opportunities for intercourse it afforded with so many highly interesting people. And first and foremost among these Arndt must be reckoned, as the most constant and ever welcome guest. His visits were indeed of quite unconventional length, for he would often stay for hours at a time, now reading aloud to my mother one of her favourite Swedish books, now relating to us children some thrilling episode of the War of Liberation, in which he had played so conspicuous a part.

He was of such exuberant vivacity, that he talked till he literally foamed at the mouth, and gesticulated wildly, sometimes enforcing what he said by a little friendly tap on my mother’s shoulder, that made her shrink,--for in her weak condition, the merest touch sufficed to bring on one of her nervous attacks,--sometimes contenting himself with pressing a heavy finger on my forehead, as I sat on his knee, and gazed up in his face. I was all eyes and ears, drinking in his words with that undivided attention that only children can give, and myself all on fire with excitement. For he talked and talked, working himself up into as burning a fever as if the French had still been in the land, and Germany smarting under a foreign yoke, and poor Queen Louisa still fretting her heart out for her country’s misfortunes! It was all so real, so present for him! He lived back in those days once more, and fought the old campaigns over again, and was for ever contriving some new plan for his country’s salvation and welfare,--now inventing some marvellous new weapon that should rid her of all her foes,--now devising some infallible means of making her strong and united! For the dream of German Unity never abandoned him, and there was nothing made him so wild with indignation as for anyone to dare to assert that Germany was a mere geographical expression.

Small wonder that we children listened with beating hearts and cheeks aflame to the story of the stirring times, still so near to the elder generation, members of our family too being yet alive, great-aunts and great-uncles among us to that day, who had also lived through them, and the very walls of our castle at Neuwied still bearing the marks of the bullets, fired against it by the soldiers of General Hoche. But better still, Arndt would often recite to us some of his own poems, both from the earlier ones, written during the war, and from those of more recent date, all of them glowing with the same patriotic fervour, and kindling a like enthusiasm in the minds of his youthful hearers.

There were, however, fortunately other influences at work, to combat what might have been a somewhat one-sided teaching, and prevent us from believing that our old friend possessed a monopoly of patriotism. In the first place, there was Monsieur Monnard, the very interesting French professor at the university, whose refinement of speech and quiet manner were in their way quite as effective and convincing as Arndt’s stormy vehemence, and lent a peculiar charm to his conversation. To his daughter too, a most charming creature, I owed a debt of gratitude for one of the chief joys of my childhood, that delightful book “Augustin,” in which she had told the story, as I afterwards heard, of her own child whom she had lost. When I made her acquaintance, I had read her book a hundred times, and almost knew it by heart! And besides these two, whose love of their country was none the less intense, I felt, for being very calmly expressed, there was another frequent guest in whom that sentiment was evidently the ruling passion and guiding principle in life. The last-mentioned, Demetrius Stourdza, was a slight, spare, very dark young man, who had come from a far-off, and to me then quite unknown country, to pursue his studies at the university, whilst his two younger brothers followed the classes at the gymnasium or public school. When he spoke of his home on the distant Moldau, of his oppressed, unhappy country, it was in terms of the same ardent affection, the same irrepressible emotion, as were Arndt’s in telling the story of Germany’s wrongs; only the ills of which the young student had to tell dated much further back and were so deeply rooted as to appear well nigh incurable. Not only had his country groaned for centuries under foreign tyranny, but she was also torn by internal feuds, split into two provinces, Moldavia and Wallachia, constantly warring one with the other, so that there seemed little prospect of national independence being attained. He spoke with great enthusiasm of his mother-tongue, the beautiful Roumanian language, common heritage of the two provinces, and I remember how, at my mother’s request, he one day spoke a few words of Roumanian, to let us hear the soft melodious sounds. Years after, on my first arrival in Roumania, when the train drew up in the station at Bucarest, the first person to step forward from the crowd waiting on the platform to greet me, was Demetrius Stourdza, my old acquaintance in his student days at Bonn, afterwards to be more than once Prime Minister. I certainly, at the time I am speaking of, little foresaw this second meeting, but what did strike me then was the strength and depth of this stranger’s attachment to his country, perhaps all the stronger and deeper for being coupled with such hopelessness. All these things made a profound impression on my childish mind, and gave me much to reflect upon. For even then I was already dreaming,--wild heedless creature as I was generally supposed to be, and as I had come to consider myself. So strong a hold had this belief taken of me, that nothing could well equal my surprise, when some forty years later, meeting one of the companions of these early days, and asking

her to tell me how I had appeared to her then, she replied without hesitation,--“Most terribly serious!” For the moment I was perfectly amazed; but, looking back once more on the past, and taking into account the lively recollection I have retained, not merely of scenes and events, but also of persons whom I met, and above all of the conversations that went on around me from my eighth to my tenth year, the conviction is forced upon me, that I must have brought to bear on them very close attention, and an amount of discernment hardly compatible with the character of careless high spirits with which I was usually credited.

To return to Arndt: it was only natural that, whatever might arrest our attention elsewhere, his personality remained the dominating one and was invested for us with a sort of halo. Had he not himself taken part in the deeds he told us of, and known and immortalised the heroes by whom the best of these were accomplished,--in songs we knew by heart and sang almost before we could speak plainly? At that time, I had never heard of the tragedy which darkened his domestic life,--that he had known little happiness in his own family, and had on one occasion treated one of his sons with such harshness, that the young man went out and threw himself into the Rhine, his body being afterwards sought for in vain for three days and nights by the distracted parents. Of all this I knew nothing then,--I saw in him only the patriot, the poet, the magician who could work such marvels with words. It was a revelation to me, this of the wondrous power of language, and of all the lessons I unconsciously learned at that early age it was perhaps the one that I most readily and thoroughly assimilated, being the most congenial to my own nature, and corresponding to its potential needs. It is a pity that children are generally so reserved and reticent, for a child of enquiring mind would learn much more, could it but impart its own thoughts and enquire about the things that puzzle it. But a sensitive child broods in silence over its own imaginings, very often perplexed by some very simple matter which a word might explain. And who indeed could have guessed that these were the first stirrings of the poetic temperament within me, called into life by the personality of the aged poet, towards whom I felt myself irresistibly drawn? Poetry was certainly my native element. I could already recite Schiller’s _Diver_ and the _Fight with the Dragon_, and the other principal ballads; I learnt by heart with the greatest facility, and to hear a short poem read over once was enough, I could repeat it without a mistake. It was so much inflammable material, one might say, collected within my brain, and awaiting but the approach of the lighted match to ignite, and kindle to a blaze.

I wish I could remember some of Arndt’s own words to quote here. But of that verbal brilliancy, that inexhaustible flow of speech, it is necessarily the general impression that remains, rather than the exact form in which it was cast, and I would not dare attempt to render this. Some of his more humorous sayings, however, I have preserved textually, and need therefore not hesitate to give the following specimen:--“When I write to the King,” he one day explained,--“I do not trouble my head with all that rubbish of humbly and dutifully, and most gracious this and most gracious that, but simply say Your Majesty, and then plain you and your, and afterwards perhaps just one more Majesty to wind up with--for all the absurd rigmarole of Court lingo is more than I can stand.”

To the very last Arndt was busy and eager, as I have said, for the cause of German Unity, and we were all heart and soul with him in wishing well to that cause. The year 1848 had not long gone past, with all its unrest, and with the high hopes and dazzling day dreams it had brought, and from one of those dreams we had hardly awakened yet,--that which we dreamt as we saw folk going about wearing their black, red and yellow cockades, as if by so doing they could bring all Germany under one flag and place the Imperial crown on the head of the Prussian king. From the balcony at Heidelberg my little four-year-old brother had helped to give the word of command to the volunteers mustered in the square below, but all that excitement had died out again, and things had drifted back into the old well-worn grooves. The times were not yet ripe, and much water would have to flow down the Rhine to the sea, ere that fair dream should become reality. Clever and interesting as the Prussian king undoubtedly was, it was not in his person that the traditions of the German Empire were to be revived; that was to be the work of another, of whom at that period no one thought,--the exile who was then looking down sadly and wearily from his window upon a London street.

To conclude this brief sketch of Arndt, I can hardly do better than transcribe the verses which about this time he wrote in my mother’s album:

In God’s own image thou wast made; Of Heaven’s pure light an emanation, That down to this dark world has strayed. ’Tis this Heaven’s truest revelation.

Nor for thyself alone was lent Yon ray that lights thy path thus kindly; Each as the other’s guide was meant, Here where all grope and struggle blindly.

Still to thy dream of Heaven hold fast! For then, whatever ills assail thee, Though every earthly joy fly past, This one sure hope shall never fail thee! _Bonn, 23. of the May-month, 1853._