The Dodd Family Abroad, Vol. II. Lynde Francis

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СКАЧАТЬ of. Some are in Belgium, some in Germany, and some in Italy. Think, for instance, of a small house on the "Meuse," in the midst of the most beauteous scenery, and with a country teeming in every abundance around you, for twelve pounds a year, and all the material of life equally cheap in proportion. Imagine the habits of a Grand-Ducal capital, where the Prime Minister receives three hundred per annum, and spends two; where the admission to the theatre is fourpence, and you go to a Court dinner on foot at four o'clock in the day, and sit out of an evening with your work in a public garden afterwards.

      Now, I know that in Ireland or Scotland, and perhaps in Wales too, places might be discovered where all the ordinary wants of life would not be dearer than here, but then remember that to live with this economy at home, you subject yourself to all that pertains to a small estate; you endure the barbarizing influences of a solitary life, or, what is worse, the vulgarity of village society. The well-to-do classes, the educated and refined, will not associate with you. Not so here. Your small means are no barrier against your admission into the best circles; you will be received anywhere. Your black silk gown will be "toilet" for the "Minister's reception," your white muslin will be good enough for a ball at Court! When the army numbers in its cavalry fifty hussars, and one battalion for its infantry, the simple resident need never blush for his humble retinue, nor feel ashamed that a maid-servant escorts him to a Court entertainment with a lantern, or that a latch-key and a lucifer-match do duty for a hall-porter and a chandelier!

      One night – I was talking of these things – Captain Morris quoted a Latin author to the effect "that poverty had no such heavy infliction as in its power to make people ridiculous." The remark sounds at first an unfeeling one, but there is yet a true and deep philosophy in it, for it is in our own abortive and silly attempts to gloss over narrow fortune that the chief sting of poverty resides, and the ridicule alluded to is all of our making! The poverty of two thousand a year can be thus as glaringly absurd, as ridiculous, as that of two hundred, and even more so, since its failures are more conspicuous.

      Now, had we been satisfied to live in this way, it is not alone that we should have avoided debt and embarrassment, but we should really have profited largely besides. I do not speak of the negative advantages of not mingling with those it had been better to have escaped; but that in the society of these smaller capitals there is, especially in Germany, a highly cultivated and most instructive class, slightly pedantic, it may be, but always agreeable and affable. The domesticity of Germany is little known to us, since even their writers afford few glimpses of it. There are no Bulwers nor Bozes nor Thackerays to show the play of passion, nor the working of deep feeling around the family board and hearth. The cares of fathers, the hopes of sons, the budding anxieties of the girlish heart, have few chroniclers. How these people think and act and talk at home, and in the secret circle of their families, we know as little as we do of the Chinese. It may be that the inquiry would require long and deep and almost microscopic study. Life with them is not as with us, a stormy wave-tossed ocean; it is rather a calm and landlocked bay. They have no colonial empires, no vast territories for military ambition to revel in, nor great enterprise to speculate on. There are neither gigantic schemes of wealth, nor gold-fields to tempt them. Existence presents few prizes, and as few vicissitudes. The march of events is slow, even, and monotonous, and men conform themselves to the same measure! How, then, do they live, – what are their loves, their hates, their ambitions, their crosses, their troubles, and their joys? How are they moved to pity, – how stirred to revenge? I own to you I cannot even fancy this. The German heart seems to me a clasped volume; and even Goethe has but shown us a chance page or two, gloriously illustrated, I acknowledge, but closed as quickly as displayed.

      Is Marguerite herself a type? I wish some one would tell me. Is that childlike gentleness, that trustful nature, that resistless, passionate devotion, warring with her piety, and yet heightened by it, – are these German traits? They seem so; and yet do these Fräuleins that I see, with yellow hair, appear capable of this headlong and impetuous love. Faust, I 'm convinced, is true to his nationality. He loves like a German, – and is mad, and mystical, fond, dreamy, and devoted by turns.

      But all these are not what I look for. I want a family picture – a Teerburgh or a Mieris – painted by a German Dickens, or touched by a native Titmarsh. So far as I have read of it, too, the German Drama does not fill up this void; the comedies of the stage present nothing identical of the people, and yet it appears to me they are singularly good materials for portraiture. The stormy incidents of university life, its curious vicissitudes, and its strange, half-crazed modes of thought blend into the quiet realities of after-life, and make up men such as one sees nowhere else. The tinge of romance they have contracted in boyhood is never thoroughly washed out of their natures, and although statecraft may elevate them to be grave privy councillors, or good fortune select them for its revenue officers, they cherish the old memories of Halle and Heidelberg, and can grow valorous over the shape of a rapier, or pathetic about the color of Fräulein Lydchen's hair.

      It is doubtless very presumptuous in me to speak thus of a people of whom I have seen so little; but bear in mind, my dear Miss Cox, that I'm rather giving Mrs. Morris's experiences than my own, and, in some cases, in her own very words. She has a very extensive acquaintance in Germany, and corresponds, besides, with many very distinguished persons of that country. Perhaps private letters give a better insight into the habits of a people than most other things, and if so, one should pronounce very favorably of German character from the specimens I have seen. There are everywhere, great truthfulness, great fairness; a willingness to concede to others a standard different from their own; a hopeful tone in all things, and extreme gentleness towards women and children. Of rural life, and of scenery, too, they speak with true feeling-; and, as Sir Walter said of Goethe, "they understand trees."

      You will wish to hear something of Bregenz, where we are staying at present, and I have little to say beyond its situation in a little bay on the Lake of Constance, begirt with high mountains, amidst which stretches a level flat, traversed by the Rhine. The town itself is scarcely old enough to be picturesque, though from a distance on the lake the effect is very pleasing. A part is built upon a considerable eminence, the ascent to which is by a very steep street, impassable save on foot; at the top of this is an old gateway, the centre of which is ornamented by a grotesque attempt at sculpture, representing a female figure seated on a horse, and, to all seeming, traversing the clouds. The phenomenon is explained by a legend, that tells how a Bregenzer maiden, some three and a half centuries ago, had gone to seek her fortune in Switzerland, and becoming domesticated there in a family, lived for years among the natural enemies of her people. Having learned by an accident one night, that an attack was meditated on her native town, she stole away unperceived, and, taking a horse, swam the current of the Rhine, and reached Bregenz in time to give warning of the threatened assault, and thus rescued her kinsmen and her birthplace from sack and slaughter. This is the act commemorated by the sculpture, and the stormy waves of the river are doubtless typified in what seem to be clouds.

      There is, however, a far more touching memory of the heroism preserved than this; for each night, as the watchman goes his round of the village, when he comes to announce midnight, he calls aloud the name of her who at the same dead hour, three centuries back, came to wake the sleeping town and tell them of their peril. I do not know of a monument so touching as this! No bust nor statue, no group of marble or bronze, can equal in association the simple memory transmitted from age to age, and preserved ever fresh and green in the hearts of a remote generation. As one thinks of this, the mind at once reverts to the traditions of the early Church, and insensibly one is led to feel the beauty of those transmitted words and acts, which, associated with place, and bound up with customs not yet obsolete, gave such impressive truthfulness to all the story of our faith. At the same time, it is apparent that the current of tradition cannot long run pure. Even now there are those who scoff at the grateful record of the Bregenzer maiden! Where will her memory be five years after the first railroad traverses the valley of the Vorarlberg? The shrill whistle of the "express" is the death-note to all the romance of life!

      Some deplore this, and assert that, with this immense advancement of scientific discovery, we are losing the homely virtues of our fathers. Others pretend that we grow better as we grow wiser, СКАЧАТЬ