“Tell the world,” he ended, “how our lives (yours and mine) took shape on the Sparrow Hills.”
Five more years passed, and I was far from those Hills, but their Prometheus, Alexander Vitberg, was near me, a sorrowful and gloomy figure. After my return to Moscow, I visited the place again in 1842; again I stood by the foundation-stone and surveyed the same scene; and a companion was with me—but it was not my friend.
§3
After 1827 we two were inseparable. In every recollection of that time, whether detailed or general, he is always prominent, with the face of opening manhood, with his love for me. He was early marked with that sign of consecration which is given to few, and which, for weal or for woe, separates a man from the crowd. A large oil-painting of Ogaryóv was made about that time and long remained in his father’s house. I often stopped in front of it and looked long at it. He was painted with a loose open collar: the artist has caught successfully the luxuriant chestnut hair, the fleeting beauty of youth on the irregular features, and the somewhat swarthy complexion. The canvas preserves the serious aspect which precedes hard intellectual work. The vague sorrow and extreme gentleness which shine from the large grey eyes, give promise of great power of sympathy; and that promise was fulfilled. The portrait was given to me. A lady, not related to Ogaryóv, afterwards got hold of it; perhaps she will see these lines and restore it to me.
I do not know why people dwell exclusively on recollections of first love and say nothing about memories of youthful friendship. First love is so fragrant, just because it forgets difference of sex, because it is passionate friendship. Friendship between young men has all the fervour of love and all its characteristics—the same shy reluctance to profane its feeling by speech, the same diffidence and absolute devotion, the same pangs at parting, and the same exclusive desire to stand alone without a rival.
I had loved Niko long and passionately before I dared to call him “friend”; and, when we were apart in summer, I wrote in a postscript, “whether I am your friend or not, I don’t know yet.” He was the first to use “thou” in writing to me; and he called me Damon before I called him Pythias.
Smile, if you please, but let it be a kindly smile, such as men smile when recalling their own fifteenth year. Perhaps it would be better to ask, “Was I like that in my prime?” and to thank your stars, if you ever had a prime, and to thank them doubly, if you had a friend to share it.
The language of that time seems to us affected and bookish. We have travelled far from its passing enthusiasms and one-sided partisanships, which suddenly give place to feeble sentimentality or childish laughter. In a man of thirty it would be absurd, like the famous Bettina will schlafen;[[36]] but, in its own season, this language of adolescence, this jargon de la puberté, this breaking of the soul’s voice—all this is quite sincere, and even its bookish flavour is natural to the age which knows theory and is ignorant of practice.
[36]. This must refer to Bettina von Arnim’s first interview with Goethe at Weimar in April, 1807. She writes that she sprang into Goethe’s arms and slept there. The poet was then 58, and Bettina had ceased to be a child.
Schiller remained our favourite; the characters in his plays were real for us; we discussed them and loved or hated them as living beings and not as people in a book. And more than that—we identified ourselves with them. I was rather distressed that Niko was too fond of Fiesco, and wrote to say that behind every Fiesco stands a Verina. My own ideal was Karl Moor, but I soon deserted him and adopted the Marquis Posa instead.