XXVI
INTERCOURSE WITH FRIENDS
In port · Trip to Vienna · Literary circles · Balduin Groller · Theodor Herzl · Letter from Count Hoyos · Letter from Friedrich Bodenstedt

After our return from Paris we remained quiet and secluded at Harmannsdorf. An uneventful life, but no empty life. There is no way in which a life can be better filled than with labor and love. Of course there is not much to tell about it. The reminiscences of my youth, with all its betrothals and art-plans and varying adventures, have certainly made more amusing reading.

The period of storms was past; we were now in port. The midday sun of youth no longer blazed, and now there lay on our horizon something like the tints of evening. But not yet time to lay aside work; there was yet much to be done. And we had to bear a great grief, to fight a hard battle. It was not sorrow of our own that weighed upon us, but the sorrow of the world; we took the field not against personal enemies, but against the enemies of mankind—cruelty and falsehood!

It is a common belief that only people who are themselves unfortunate can understand the misfortunes of others, and they call that the hard school of suffering. With us it was different: whatever we experienced of deep pity, of warm wishes to help and to better, had its root in the joy which we had in life and life’s beauties. It was in the college of happiness that we had learned that here on earth life may be—in other words, ought to be—glorious and joyous and rich in love. The unfortunate are likelier to get embittered: “other folks may as well have their troubles too,” they think, and they comfort themselves by saying “there is no such thing as happiness anyhow.” We knew better: there is. It is only that not all find it, that very few indeed can find it because so much stupidity blocks the way to it,—these things will not let the happy be at peace.

For a little change from our workaday existence in the country we had brief trips to Vienna. There we attended the theater and associated with a few friends, mostly in literary circles. When Carneri was in town we joined the “deputy table” at the Hotel Meissl. We had a very pleasant intercourse with Balduin Groller, then editor of the Oesterreichische Illustrierte Zeitung. While still in the Caucasus we had formed an epistolary friendship with him, a friendship which has remained steadfast to this day. Humor and heart are the two qualities which characterize Balduin Groller as a feuilletonist and as a man. This is why in his company one is excellently amused and at the same time is in such a comfortable frame of mind; you laugh at his dry wit and bask in his warm geniality. That he was a handsome, dark-eyed, elegant man, an adept in sports, did not detract from the effect. Moreover, he liked us as well as we liked him, and those evenings when we four—Groller has the dearest little wife—chatted together over our food and wine were most delightful. Often Theodor Herzl joined us. He also sparkled with wit. And that head of his—like an Assyrian king’s! He ought to have been really king of the new Zion, whose awakener he was, and which might perhaps already exist if he had not died so prematurely.

We had in Vienna a dear and interesting friend, Count Rudolf Hoyos, a handsome old gentleman, every inch an aristocrat, but a democrat in his views. I perceive that this is the third time I have laid stress on external beauty in describing the persons of notable men. I cannot help it—in the first place they really were handsome, these three, and in the second place, I like handsome people better than homely people. One must forgive homeliness; but one ought not to neglect beauty.—Count Hoyos was a free and brilliant intellect. He had published a volume of poems in which a few pearls were to be found. His residence—a whole floor in the palace of the “Adliges Kasino” on the Ringstrasse—was a museum: paintings, art furniture, bric-a-brac, antiquities, vases, fabrics, carved cabinets, armorial trophies, bronzes, costly books,—it took hours and hours to admire all the rare objects. The host, however, preferred to spend his time in a little oriel where there was room only for one table with various mementos on it, besides his easy chair with a reading-desk, a little divan and a rocking-chair for at most three callers, and an easel with the portrait of a woman—a woman whom Rudolf Hoyos had loved; a great lady who had once been the center of a distinguished and witty circle, but who was no longer living. Count Hoyos remained unmarried. I have a large number of letters from him, and one of them I will introduce here; his character will thus most clearly be shown:

Toblach, August 13, ’90

Many years ago, at a Thé d’esprit, I was introduced to a daughter of Bettina Arnim. Her first words after the introduction, as she handed me my cup, were, “What do you think about the immortality of the soul?” “I believe in immortality, but not in the soul,” was my reply.

This story is suggested by the article “Carus,” excellently translated by you in the last magazine. It interested me very much, but did not at all satisfy me.

Do you know a children’s game Frau Gevatterin, leih mir d’ Scher’,[[23]] in which those who take part keep changing their seats, while there is always one who finds all the chairs taken, because there are more players than there are seats? Carus lets his ideas play this game, or rather the designations for the ideas. Ego, personality, soul, its activity, spirit, idea, consciousness, and so on, keep changing their places with great agility—but there is always one of them that gets nothing.