IX.
With the first money I received for my books, I went in the middle of the Summer of 1868 for a trip to Germany. I acquired some idea of Berlin, which was then still only the capital of Prussia, and in population corresponded to the Copenhagen of our day; I spent a few weeks in Dresden, where I felt very much at home, delighted in the exquisite art collection and derived no small pleasure from the theatre, at that time an excellent one. I saw Prague for the first time, worshipped Rubens in Munich, and, with him specially in my mind, tried to realise how the greatest painters had regarded Life. Switzerland added to my store of impressions with grand natural spectacles. I saw the Alps, and a thunderstorm in the Alps, passed starlit nights on the Swiss lakes, traced the courses of foaming mountain streams such as the Tamina at Pfäffers, ascended the Rigi at a silly forced march, and from the Kulm saw a procession of clouds that gripped my fancy like the procession of the Vanir in Northern mythology. Many years afterwards I described it in the Fourth volume of Main Currents. From Interlaken I gazed on the whiteness of the Jungfrau, but scarcely with greater emotion than once upon a time when I had gazed at the white cliffs of Möen. On my homeward journey I saw Heidelberg's lovely ruins, to which Charles V.'s castle, near the Al-hambra, makes a marvellous pendant, Strassburg's grave Cathedral, and Goethe's house at Frankfurt.
My travels were not long, but were extraordinarily instructive. I made acquaintance with people from the most widely different countries, with youthful frankness engaged in conversation with Germans and Frenchmen, Englishmen and Americans, Poles and Russians, Dutchmen, Belgians and Swiss, met them as travelling companions, and listened attentively to what they narrated. They were, moreover, marvellously frank towards the young man who, with the curiosity of his age, plied them with questions.
Young Dutchmen, studying music in Dresden, gave me some idea of the ill- will felt in their country towards the Prussians, an ill-will not unmingled with contempt. On the other hand, I was astonished, during a half day's excursion on foot with a few Leipzig students, to learn how strong was the feeling of the unity of Germany and of the necessity of the supremacy of Prussia, even in the states which in the 1866 war had been on the side of Austria. The students felt no grief over having been defeated, the victors were Germans too; everything was all right so long as the German Empire became one. These and similar conversations, which finally brought me to the conclusion that the whole of the bourgeoisie was satisfied with the dominance of Prussia, had for result that in 1870 I did not for a moment share the opinion of the Danes and the French, that the defeated German states would enter into an alliance with France against Prussia.
English undergraduates told me what philosophical and historical works were being most read in the universities of Great Britain; Bohemian students explained to me that in the German philosophical world Kant had quite outshone Hegel and put him in the background.
The lady members of an American family from Boston treated me quite maternally; the wife suggested almost at once, in the railway-carriage, that I should give her when we reached the hotel whatever linen or clothes I had that wanted repairs; she would be very pleased to mend them for me. The husband, who was very pious and good-natured, had all his pockets full of little hymn-books and in his memorandum book a quantity of newspaper cuttings of devotional verse, which he now and then read aloud enthusiastically.
But I also met with Americans of quite a different cast. A young student from Harvard University, who, for that matter, was not in love with the Germans and declared that the United States could with difficulty absorb and digest those who were settled there, surprised me with his view that in the future Bismarck would come to be regarded as no less a figure than Cavour. The admiration of contemporary educated thought was then centred around Cavour, whereas Bismarck had hitherto only encountered passionate aversion outside Germany, and even in Germany was the object of much hatred. This student roused me into thinking about Bismarck for myself.
Having lain down, all bathed in perspiration, during the ascent without a guide of a mountain in Switzerland, I was accosted by a woman, who feared I had come to some harm. I walked on up with her. She turned out to be a young peasant woman from Normandy, who lived half-way up the mountain. She had accompanied her husband to Switzerland, but cursed her lot, and was always longing to be back in France. When I remarked that it must be some consolation to live in so lovely a place, she interrupted me with the most violent protests. A beautiful place! This! The steep mountain, the bristly fir-trees and pine-trees, the snow on the top and the lake deep down below--anything uglier it would be hard to conceive. No fields, no pasture-land, no apple-trees! No indeed! If she had to mention a country that really was beautiful, it was Normandy. There was plenty of food for all there, you did not need to go either up or down hill; there, thank God, it was flat. Did I think stones beautiful, perhaps? She had not been down in the valley for five months, and higher than her house she had never been and would never go; no, thank you, not she! She let her husband fetch what they required for the house; she herself sat and fretted all through the Winter; life then was almost more than she could bear.
On one of the steamers on the Lake of Lucerne, I caught, for the first time, a glimpse of Berthold Auerbach, who was very much admired by my comrades in Copenhagen and by myself.
At the hotel table at Lucerne I made the acquaintance of a Dutch captain from Batavia, an acquaintance productive of much pleasure to me. Before the soup was brought round I had pulled out a letter I had just received, opened it and begun to read it. A voice by my side said in French:
"Happy man! You are reading a letter in a woman's writing!" With that our acquaintance was made.
The captain was a man of forty, who in the course of an active life had had many and varied experiences and met with prosperity, but was suffering from a feeling of great void. His society was exceedingly attractive to me, and he related to me the main events of his life; but after one day's association only, we were obliged to part. All through my trip I had a curious feeling of every farewell on the journey being in all human probability a farewell for life, but had not realised it painfully before. But when next day the brave captain, whose home was far away in another quarter of the globe, held his hand out to say good- bye, I was much affected. "Till we meet again" said the captain.
"And where?"
"Till we meet again all and everywhere, for we live an eternal life; till we meet again in time and space, or outside time and space!"
I reflected sadly that I should never again see this man, who, the last twenty-four hours had shown me, was in extraordinary sympathy and agreement with me.
Separated from those dearest to me, the whole of the journey, for that matter, was a sort of self-torment to me, even though a profitable one. Like every other traveller, I had many a lonely hour, and plenty of time to ponder over my position and vocation in life. I summed up my impressions in the sentence: "The Powers have designated me the champion of great ideas against great talents, unfortunately greater than I."