Arthur O'Leary: His Wanderings And Ponderings In Many Lands

I must not forget the old Hofrath Froriep, Ordentliche-Professor von – Heaven knows what! No one ever saw his collegium (lecture-room); no one ever heard him lecture. He had been a special tutor to the Princes – as the Dukes of Cumberland and Cambridge were then called – about forty years ago, and he seemed to live upon the memory of those great days when a Royal Highness took notes beside his chair, and when he addressed his class as ‘Princes and Gentlemen!’ What pride he felt in his clasp of the Guelph, and an autograph letter of the Herzog von Clarence, who once paid him a visit at his house in Gottingen! It was a strange thing to hear the royal family of England spoken thus of among foreigners, who neither knew our land nor its language. One was suddenly recalled to the recollection of that Saxon stock from which our common ancestry proceeded – the bond of union between us, and the source from which so many of the best traits of English character take their origin. The love of truth, the manly independence, the habits of patient industry which we derived from our German blood are not inferior to the enterprising spirit and the chivalrous daring of Norman origin.

But to return to the Hofrath, or Privy Councillor Froriep, for so was he most rigidly styled. I remember him so well as he used to come slowly down the garden-walk, leaning on his sister’s arm. He was the junior by some years, but no one could have made the discovery now; the thing rested on tradition, however, and was not disputed. The Fräulein Martha von Froriep was the daguerreotype of her brother. To see them sitting opposite each other was actually ludicrous; not only were the features alike, but the expressions tallied so completely that it was as if one face reflected the other. Did the professor look grave, the Fräulein Martha’s face was serious; did he laugh, straightway her features took a merry cast; if his coffee was too hot, or did he burn his fingers with his pipe, the old lady’s sympathies were with him still. The Siamese twins were on terms of distant acquaintanceship, compared with the instinctive relation these two bore each other.

How was it possible, you will ask, that such an eternal similarity should have marked their dispositions? The answer is an easy one. The fräulein was deaf, perfectly destitute of hearing. The last recorded act of her auditory nerves was on the occasion of some public rejoicing, when twenty-four large guns were discharged in a few seconds of time, and by the reverberation broke every window in Göttingen; the old lady, who was knitting at the time, merely stopped her work and called out ‘Come in!’ thinking it was a tap at the room door. To her malady, then, was it owing that she so perfectly resembled the professor, her brother. She watched him with an anxious eye; his face was the dial that regulated every hour of her existence; and as the telegraph repeats the signal that is made to it, yet knows not the interpretation of the sign, so did she signalise the passing emotions of his mind long perhaps after her own could take interest in the cause.

Nothing had a stranger effect, however, than to listen to the professor’s conversation, to which the assent of the deaf old lady chimed in at short and regular intervals. For years long she had been in the habit of corroborating everything he said, and continued the practice now from habit; it was like a clock that struck the hour when all its machinery had run down. And so, whether the Hofrath descanted on some learned question of Greek particles, some much-disputed fact of ancient history, or, as was more often the case, narrated with German broadness some little anecdote of his student life, the old lady’s ‘Ja, ja, den sah ich selbst; da war ich auch!’ (Yes, yes, I saw it myself; I was there, too!) bore testimony to the truth of Tacitus or Herodotus, or, more remarkable still, to these little traits of her brother’s youthful existence, which, to say the least, were as well uncorroborated.

The Hofrath had passed his life as a bachelor – a circumstance which could not fail to surprise, for his stories were generally of his love adventures and perils; and all teemed with dissertations on the great susceptibility of his heart, and his devoted admiration of female beauty – weaknesses of which it was plain he felt vain, and loved to hear authenticated by his old associates. In this respect Blumenbach indulged him perfectly – now recalling to his memory some tender scene, or some afflicting separation, which invariably drew him into a story.

If these little reminiscences possessed not all the point and interest of more adventurous histories, to me at least they were more amusing by the force of truth, and by the singular look, voice, and manner of him who related them. Imagine, then, a meagre old man, about five feet two, whose head was a wedge with the thin side foremost, the nose standing abruptly out, like the cut-water of a man-o’-war gig; a large mouth, forming a bold semicircle, with the convexity downwards, the angles of which were lost in a mass of wrinkles on his withered cheeks; two fierce-looking, fiery, little grey eyes set slantwise in his head without a vestige of eyelash over them. His hair combed back with great precision, and tied behind into a queue, had from long pulling gradually drawn the eyebrows upwards to double their natural height, where they remained fixed, giving to this uncouth face an expression of everlasting surprise – in fact, he appeared as if he were perpetually beholding the ghost of somebody. His voice was a strange, unnatural, clattering sound, as though the machinery of speech had been left a long while without oiling, and could not work flippantly; but to be sure, the language was German, and that may excuse much.

Such was the Herr Hofrath Froriep – once, if you were to believe himself, a lady-killer of the first water. Indeed, still, when he stretched forth his thin and twisted shanks attired in satin shorts and black silk stockings, a gleam of conscious pride would light up his features, and he would seem to say to himself, ‘These legs might do some mischief yet.’ Caroline Pichler, the novelist, had been one of his loves, and, if you believed himself, a victim to his fascinations. However, another version of the tale had obtained currency, and was frequently alluded to by his companions at those moments when a more boastful spirit than they deemed suitable animated his discourse; and at such times I remarked that the Hofrath became unusually sensitive, and anxious to change the subject.

It was one evening, when we sat somewhat later than our wont in the garden, tempted by the delicious fragrance of the flowers and the mild light of a new moon, that at last the Hofrath’s madchen made her appearance, lantern in hand, to conduct him home. She carried on her arm a mass of cloaks, shawls, and envelopes that would have clothed a procession, with which she proceeded leisurely and artistically to dress up the professor and his sister, until the impression came over the bystanders that none but she who hid them in that mountain of wearables would ever be able to discover them again.

‘Ach Gott,’ exclaimed the Hofrath, as she crowned him with a quilted nightcap, whose jaws descended and fastened beneath the chin like an antique helmet, leaving the miserable old face, like an uncouth pattern, in the middle of the Berlin embroidery – ‘Ach Gott, but for that!’

‘But for that!’ reiterated old Hausman, in a solemn tone, as if he knew the secret grief his friend alluded to, and gave him all his sympathy.

‘Sit down again, Froriep,’ said Blumenbach; ‘it is an hour too soon for young folk like us to separate. We’ll have a glass of Rosenthaler, and you shall tell us that story.’

‘Be it so,’ said the Hofrath, as he made signs to the madchen that he would cast his skin. ‘Ich bin dabei (I ‘m ready).’

‘Wi’ tippenny we fear nae evil;Wi’ usquebaugh we ‘d face the devil,’

quoth Burns; and surely Tarn’s knowledge of human nature took a wide circuit when he uttered those words. The whole philosophy of temptation is comprised in the distich, and the adage of coming up ‘to a man’s price’ has no happier illustration; and certainly, had the poet been a Bursche in Germany, he could not have conveyed the ‘sliding scale’ of professors’ agreeability under a more suitable formula. He who would be civil with a pipe becomes communicative with coffee, and brotherly with beer; but he opens every secret of his nature under the high-pressure power of a flask of Rhenish. The very smack of the Hofrath’s lips as he drained his glass to the bottom, and then exclaimed in a transport, ‘Er ist zum küssen, der Wein!’ announced that the folding-doors of his heart stood wide open, and that he might enter who would.

‘Rosenthaler was Goethe’s favourite,’ quoth Stromeyer; ‘and he had a good taste in wine.’

‘Your great folk,’ said Hausman, ‘ever like to show some decided preference to one vintage above the rest; Napoleon adopted chambertin, Joseph the Second drank nothing but tokay, and Peter the Great found brandy the only fluid to his palate.’

‘A plague on their fancies!’ interrupted old Blumenbach. ‘Let us have the story!’

‘Ah, well, well,’ said the Hofrath, throwing up his eyes with an air of sentimentalism, ‘so you shall. Love’s young dream was sweet, after all! We were in the Hartz,’ continued he, at once springing into his story with a true Demosthenic abruptness – ‘we were in the Hartz Mountains, making a little tour, for it was semester, and all the classes were closed in the University. There was Tieck, and Feldtbourg the Dane, and Upsal, and old Langendorf of Jena, and Grotchen von Zobelschein, and Mina Upsal, and Caroline, and Martha there – she, poor thing, was getting deaf at the time, and could not take the same pleasure as the rest of us. She was always stupid, you know.’

Here he looked over at her, when she immediately responded —

‘Yes, yes, what he says is true.’

‘Each morning we used to set off up the mountains, botanising and hammering among the limestone rocks, and seeking for cryptogamia and felspar, lichens and jungermannia and primitive rock – mingling our little diversions with pleasant talk about the poets, and reciting verses to one another from Hans Sachs and the old writers, and chatting away about Schiller: the “Lager” was just come out, and more than one among us could scarcely believe it was Frederick did it.

‘Tieck and I soon found that we were rivals; for before a week each of us was in love with Caroline. Now, Ludwig was a clever fellow, and had a thousand little ways of ingratiating himself with a pretty woman – and a poetess besides. He could come down every day to breakfast with some ode or sonnet, or maybe a dream; and then he was ready after dinner with his bit of poetry, which sometimes, when he found a piano, he ‘d set to music; or maybe in the evening he’d invent one of those strange rigmarole stories of his, about a blue-bottle fly dying for love of a white moth or some superannuated old drone bee, retiring from public life, and spending his days reviling the rest of the world. You know his nonsense well; but somehow one could not help listening, and, what’s worse, feeling interest in it. As for Caroline, she became crazed about gnats and spiders, and fleas, and would hear for whole days long the stories of their loves and sorrows.

‘For some time I bore up as well as I could. There was a limit – Heaven be thanked! – to that branch of the creation; and as he had now got down to millepedes, I trusted that before the week was over he ‘d have reached mites, beyond which it was impossible he could be expected to proceed. Alas! I little knew the resources of his genius; for one evening, when I thought him running fast aground, he sat down in the midst of us, and began a tale of the life and adventures of the Herr Baron von Beetroot, in search of his lost love the Fräulein von Cucumber. This confounded narrative had its scene in an old garden in Silesia, where there were incidents of real beauty and interest interwoven, ay, and verses that would make your heart thrill. Caroline could evidently resist no longer. The Baron von Beetroot was ever uppermost in her mind; and if she ate Gurken-salat, it brought the tears into her eyes. In this sad strait I wandered out alone one evening, and without knowing it reached the “Rase Mühle,” near Oltdorf. There I went in and ordered a supper; but they had nothing but thick-milk and kalte-schade.2

No matter, thought I – a man in such grief as mine need little care what he eats; and I ordered both, that I might afterwards decide which I’d prefer. They came, and were placed before me. Himmel und Erde! what did I do but eat the two! – beer and cream, cream and beer, pepper and sugar, brown bread and nutmeg! Such was my abstraction, that I never noticed what I was doing till I saw the two empty bowls before me. “I am a dead Hofrath before day breaks,” said I, “and I’ll make my will”; but before I could put the plan into execution I became very ill, and they were obliged to carry me to bed. From that moment my senses began to wander; exhaustion, sour beer, and despair were all working within me, and I was mad. It was a brief paroxysm, but a fearful one. A hundred and fifty thousand ridiculous fancies went at racing speed through my mind, and I spent the night alternately laughing and crying. My pipe, that lay on the chair beside the bed, figured in nearly every scene, and performed a part in many a strange adventure.

‘By noon the others learned where I was, and came over to see me. After sitting for half an hour beside me they were going away, when I called Caroline and Martha back. Caroline blushed; but, taking Martha’s arm, she seated herself upon a sofa, and asked in a timid voice what I wished for.

‘“To hear before I die,” replied I; “to listen to a wonderful vision I have seen this night.”

“A vision,” said Caroline; “oh, what was it?”

‘“A beautiful and a touching one. Let me tell it to you. I will call it ‘The-never-to-be-lost-sight-of, though not-the-less-on-that-account-to-be-concealed, Loves of the Mug and the Meerschaum.’”

‘Caroline sprang to my side as I uttered these words, and as she wiped the tears from her eyes she sobbed forth —

‘“Let me but hear it! let me but hear it!”

‘“Sit down,” said I, taking her hand and pressing it to my lips – “sit down, and you shall.” With that I began my tale. I suppose,’ continued the Hofrath, ‘you don’t wish to have the story?’

‘Gott bewahre (Heaven forbid)!’ broke in the whole company in a breath. ‘Leave the Mug and the Meerschaum, and go on with Caroline!’

‘Well, from that hour her heart was mine. Ludwig might call all the reptiles that ever crawled, every vegetable that ever grew, to his aid – the victory was with me. He saw it, and, irritated by defeat, returned to Berlin without bidding us even farewell; and we never heard of him till we saw his new novel of Fortunio. But to go on. The day after Tieck left us was my birthday, and they all arranged to give me a little fête; and truly nothing could be prettier. The garden of the inn was a sweet spot, and there was a large linden like this, where the table was spread; and there was a chair all decked with roses and myrtle for me – Caroline herself had done it; and they had composed a little hymn in honour of me, wherein were sundry compliments to my distinction in science and poesy, the gifts of my mind and the graces of my person. Ach, ja! I was handsome then.

‘Well, well, I must close my tale – I cannot bear to think of it even now. Caroline came forward, dressed in white, with a crown of roses and laurel leaves intertwined, and approached me gracefully, as I sat waiting to receive her – all the rest ranged on either side of me.

‘Auf seine Stirne, wo das Licht – ’

(Upon that brow where shines the light)

said Caroline, raising the chaplet.

‘“Ach, Du Heiliger!” screamed Martha, who only that instant saw I was bareheaded, “the dear man will catch his death of cold!” and with that she snatched this confounded nightcap from her pocket, and rushing forward clapped it on my head before I could know it was done. I struggled and kicked like one possessed, but it was of no use; she had tied the strings in a black knot, and they could neither be loosened nor broken. “Be still there!” said she; “thou knowest well that at fifty-three – ” You can conceive,’ said the Hofrath in a parenthesis, ‘that her passion obliterated her memory. At fifty-three one can’t play the fool like at twenty.’

‘Ach, ja! it was over with me for ever. Caroline screamed at the cap, first laughing, then crying, and then both; the rest nearly died of it, and so did I. Caroline would never look at me after, and I came back home, disappointed in my love – and all because of a woollen nightcap.’

When the Hofrath concluded, he poured the remainder of the Rosenthaler into his glass, and bowing to each in turn, wished us good-night, while taking the Fraulein Martha’s arm they both disappeared in the shade, as the little party broke up and each wended his way homeward.

CHAPTER XXI. THE STUDENT

If I were not sketching a real personage, and retailing an anecdote once heard, I should pronounce the Hofrath von Froriep a fictitious character, for which reason I bear you no ill-will if you incline to that opinion. I have no witness to call in my defence. There were but two Englishmen in Gottingen in my day; one of them is now no more. Poor fellow! he had just entered the army; his regiment was at Corfu, and he was spending the six months of his first leave in Germany. We chanced to be fellow-travellers, and ended by becoming friends. When he left me, it was for Vienna, from which after a short stay he departed for Venice, where he purchased a yacht, and with eight Greek sailors sailed for a cruise through the Ionian Islands. He was never seen alive again; his body, fearfully gashed and wounded, was discovered on the beach at Zante. His murderers, for such they were, escaped with the vessel, and never were captured. Should any Sixty-first man throw his eye over these pages he will remember that I speak of one beloved by every one who knew him. With all the heroic daring of the stoutest heart, his nature was soft and gentle as a child’s. Poor G – ! some of the happiest moments of my life were spent with you; some of the saddest, in thinking over your destiny.

You must take my word for the Hofrath, then, good reader. They who read the modern novels of Germany – the wild exaggerations of Fouqué and Hoffman, Musaeus and Tieck – will comprehend that the story of himself has no extravagance whatever. To ascribe language and human passions to the lower animals, and even to the inanimate creation, is a favourite German notion, the indulgence of which has led to a great deal of that mysticism which we find in their writings; and the secret sympathies of cauliflowers and cabbages for young ladies in love is a constant theme among this class of novelists.

A word now of the students, and I have done. Whatever the absurdities in their code of honour, however ludicrous the etiquette of the ‘comment’ as it is called, there is a world of manly honesty and true-heartedness among them. There is nothing mean or low, nothing dishonourable or unworthy in the spirit of the Burschen-schaft. Exaggerated ideas of their own importance, an overweening sense of their value to the Fatherland, there are in abundance, as well as a mass of crude, unsettled notions about liberty and the regeneration of Germany. But, after all, these are harmless fictions; they are not allied to any evil passions at the time, they lead to no bad results for the future. The murder of Kotzebue, and the attempt on the life of Napoleon by Staps, were much more attributable to the mad enthusiasm of the period than to the principles of the Student-league. The spirit of the nation revolted at the tyranny they had so long submitted to, and these fearful crimes were the agonised expression of endurance pushed to madness. Only they who witnessed the frantic joy of the people when the tide of fortune turned against Napoleon, and his baffled legions retreated through Germany on their return from the Russian campaign, can understand how deeply stored were the wrongs for which they were now to exact vengeance. The Völker Schlacht (the ‘people’s slaughter’), as they love to call the terrible fight of Leipsic, was the dreadful recompense of all their sufferings.

When the French Revolution first broke out, the German students, like many wiser and more thinking heads than theirs in our own country, were struck with the great movement of a mighty people in their march to liberty; but when, disgusted with the atrocities that followed, they afterwards beheld France the first to assail the liberties and trample on the freedom of every other country, they regarded her as a traitor to the cause she once professed. And while their apathy in the early wars of the republican armies marked their sympathy with the wild notions of liberty of which Frenchmen affected to be the apostles in Europe, yet when they saw the lust of conquest and the passion for dominion usurp the place of those high-sounding virtues —Liberté, Egalité– the reverse was a tremendous one, and may well excuse, if excuse were needful, the proud triumph of the German armies when they bivouacked in the streets of Paris.

The changed fortunes of the Continent have of course obliterated every political feature in the student life of Germany; or if such still exist, it takes the form merely of momentary enthusiasm in favour of some banished professor, or a Burschen festival in honour of some martyr of the Press. Still their ancient virtues survive, and the German student is yet a type – one of the few remaining – of the Europe of thirty years ago. Long may he remain so, say I; long may so interesting a land have its national good faith and brotherly affection rooted in the minds of its youth; long may the country of Schiller, of Wieland, and of Goethe possess the race of those who can appreciate their greatness, or strive to emulate their fame!

I leave to others the task of chronicling their beer orgies, their wild festivals, and their duels; and though not disposed to defend them on such charges, I might, were it not invidious, adduce instances nearer home of practices little more commendable. At those same festivals, at many of which I have been present, I have heard music that would shame most of our orchestras, and listened to singing such as I have never heard surpassed except within the walls of a grand opera. And as to their duelling, the practice is bad enough in all conscience; but still I would mention one instance, of which I myself was a witness, and perhaps even in so little fertile a field we may find one grain of goodly promise.

Among my acquaintances in Gôttingen were two students, both Prussians, and both from the same small town of Magdebourg. They had been school-fellows, and came together to the University, where they lived together on terms of brotherly affection, which even there, where friendship takes all the semblance of a sacred compact, was the subject of remark. Never were two men less alike, however, than these. Eisendecker was a bold, hotheaded fellow, fond of all the riotous excesses of Burschen life; his face, seamed with many a scar, declared him a ‘hahn,’ as in student phrase a confirmed duellist is termed. He was ever foremost in each scheme of wild adventure, and continually being brought up before the senate on some charge of insubordination. Von Mühry, his companion, was exactly the opposite. His sobriquet – for nearly every student had one – was ‘der Zahme (the gentle),’ and never was any more appropriate. His disposition was mildness itself. He was very handsome, almost girlish in his look, with large blue eyes and fine, soft silky hair, which, Germanlike, he wore upon his neck. His voice – the index of his nature – soft, low, and musical, would have predisposed you at once in his favour. Still, those disparities did not prevent the attachment of the two youths; on the contrary, they seemed rather to strengthen the bond between them – each, as it were, supplying to the other the qualities which Nature had denied him. They were never separate in lecture-room, at home, or in the allée (as the promenade was called) or in the garden, where each evening the students resorted to sup, and listen to the music of the Jâger band. Eisendecker and Mühry were names that no one ever heard separated, and when one appeared the other was never more than a few yards off.