Umilmo, devotmo servitore
Alessandro Manzoni
Under the date “Gads Hill Place Higham by Rochester Kent, Monday twenty-seventh January 1862,” and on mourning paper, Charles Dickens sent the transcript of some lines from “David Copperfield.”
The book further contains all sorts of dried plants picked at famous places, pictures, bits of flags, even a scrap “from the shirt worn with his wedding suit by Louis I of Anjou,” a little stone from “the ruins of the palace of Catherine Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus,” another from “Torquato Tasso’s prison door”—a whole panorama of historical shadow-pictures. All, all, who are gathered on these pages, are dead—all but the one who inserted the word “Past.” And this word is the real leitmotif of the whole book: Past, past—and so I close it with a sigh.
IV
MORE EPISODES OF YOUTH
The War of 1859 · A prank · Elvira’s marriage
So the year 1859 saw us in Wiesbaden again, and there we experienced the episode, so mortifying after our sacrifices made and accepted and after all my puff romances of the past year, of the incomparable Friedrich von Hadeln not wasting on us a word, not a look, beyond the most ceremonial politeness. So far as I now remember, we did not greatly take this mortification to heart: Elvira was perhaps glad that she did not have to witness a rival’s triumph, and I was perhaps relieved at not inflicting such deep suffering on my luckless friend and at the same time making such a bad match into the bargain. Nor did the real Hadeln continue to inspire in me those sensations which his image in memory had inspired. In short, we spent a very enjoyable summer in Wiesbaden.
And yet it was the summer of 1859, i.e. the battles of Magenta and Solferino were being fought. Austria, our country, was suffering defeats. Great bloody fights were heard of. But I know perfectly that at that time the event was as indifferent to me, as little existent, as it would to-day be indifferent to me to learn that a volcano had broken out in a West Indian island whose name I had never heard. An elemental event at a great distance, that is what the war in Italy was to me. I did not read the newspapers much either; to be sure we often went into the reading-room where the papers lay open, but there it was not the political but the literary papers that attracted us; all the more as Elvira had written some novelettes which were accepted by family magazines, and I had in mind the idea of also writing one.—For in the preceding summer, in the white heat of emotion, I had put into rhyme three stanzas to the object of my affections. But in my case the next to the last line did not rhyme with Hadeln (one really must not be so utter an ape), but with Friedrich.
In the illustrated papers pictures of “the theater of the war” did strike my eye from time to time, but I did not pause over them: soldiers and horses lying about, broken cannon, or confused scrimmages, such as I have seen a great many of in history textbooks, do not make pretty pictures. I turned over the leaf quickly.
We did not have in the war anybody nearly connected with us, for whom we might have trembled. My brother, who in the year 1854 had been commissioned as lieutenant, had left the service a year before the war, because he had spit blood and because the service in general was in the highest degree repugnant to him. He was living with us. Mother was jubilant over her only son’s not being still in the army when the war broke out.
So I did not concern myself in the least about events in Italy. There did not arise in me any feeling of horror at the atrocities and misery that were connected with them (why should one be horrified at inevitable deaths that do not concern one?), and of all things there did not arise any feeling of revolt at the waging of war—I was too thoroughly penetrated with the respect and admiration which are generally accorded to this form of historical eventuation. I was not disturbed by any inkling of the shadow of a possibility that one could think of war’s not being in the world at all. As well might one think of leaves not being on the trees, or waves on the sea. Why, war is the form in which human history accomplishes itself: the founding of empires, the settlement of controversies, are seen to by war. Perhaps I did not even reflect on the matter so much as that; I only accepted it as something existent and irreversible, as one accepts the existence of the sun. Many may share this standpoint even to-day; at that time almost all did still share it. Not even Dunant had yet written his little book “Solferino” and thereby given the impulse for the founding of the Red Cross. No one was yet thinking of the possibility of internationalizing the care of the wounded in war; who (except a few men like the Abbé de St. Pierre and Immanuel Kant) would have dared think of endeavoring to obtain an international agreement not to make any such wounded at all?—In the year 1849, to be sure, a Peace Congress had already been held with Victor Hugo in the chair; but who, beside the participants, knew anything about it? Every time, like every man, has for its own a certain field of thought, beyond which nothing is perceived.