From Memory's Shrine: The Reminscences of Carmen Sylva

by Carmen Sylva

There were, however, fortunately other influences at work, to combat what might have been a somewhat one-sided teaching, and prevent us from believing that our old friend possessed a monopoly of patriotism. In the first place, there was Monsieur Monnard, the very interesting French professor at the university, whose refinement of speech and quiet manner were in their way quite as effective and convincing as Arndt’s stormy vehemence, and lent a peculiar charm to his conversation. To his daughter too, a most charming creature, I owed a debt of gratitude for one of the chief joys of my childhood, that delightful book “Augustin,” in which she had told the story, as I afterwards heard, of her own child whom she had lost. When I made her acquaintance, I had read her book a hundred times, and almost knew it by heart! And besides these two, whose love of their country was none the less intense, I felt, for being very calmly expressed, there was another frequent guest in whom that sentiment was evidently the ruling passion and guiding principle in life. The last-mentioned, Demetrius Stourdza, was a slight, spare, very dark young man, who had come from a far-off, and to me then quite unknown country, to pursue his studies at the university, whilst his two younger brothers followed the classes at the gymnasium or public school. When he spoke of his home on the distant Moldau, of his oppressed, unhappy country, it was in terms of the same ardent affection, the same irrepressible emotion, as were Arndt’s in telling the story of Germany’s wrongs; only the ills of which the young student had to tell dated much further back and were so deeply rooted as to appear well nigh incurable. Not only had his country groaned for centuries under foreign tyranny, but she was also torn by internal feuds, split into two provinces, Moldavia and Wallachia, constantly warring one with the other, so that there seemed little prospect of national independence being attained. He spoke with great enthusiasm of his mother-tongue, the beautiful Roumanian language, common heritage of the two provinces, and I remember how, at my mother’s request, he one day spoke a few words of Roumanian, to let us hear the soft melodious sounds. Years after, on my first arrival in Roumania, when the train drew up in the station at Bucarest, the first person to step forward from the crowd waiting on the platform to greet me, was Demetrius Stourdza, my old acquaintance in his student days at Bonn, afterwards to be more than once Prime Minister. I certainly, at the time I am speaking of, little foresaw this second meeting, but what did strike me then was the strength and depth of this stranger’s attachment to his country, perhaps all the stronger and deeper for being coupled with such hopelessness. All these things made a profound impression on my childish mind, and gave me much to reflect upon. For even then I was already dreaming,—wild heedless creature as I was generally supposed to be, and as I had come to consider myself. So strong a hold had this belief taken of me, that nothing could well equal my surprise, when some forty years later, meeting one of the companions of these early days, and asking

her to tell me how I had appeared to her then, she replied without hesitation,—“Most terribly serious!” For the moment I was perfectly amazed; but, looking back once more on the past, and taking into account the lively recollection I have retained, not merely of scenes and events, but also of persons whom I met, and above all of the conversations that went on around me from my eighth to my tenth year, the conviction is forced upon me, that I must have brought to bear on them very close attention, and an amount of discernment hardly compatible with the character of careless high spirits with which I was usually credited.

To return to Arndt: it was only natural that, whatever might arrest our attention elsewhere, his personality remained the dominating one and was invested for us with a sort of halo. Had he not himself taken part in the deeds he told us of, and known and immortalised the heroes by whom the best of these were accomplished,—in songs we knew by heart and sang almost before we could speak plainly? At that time, I had never heard of the tragedy which darkened his domestic life,—that he had known little happiness in his own family, and had on one occasion treated one of his sons with such harshness, that the young man went out and threw himself into the Rhine, his body being afterwards sought for in vain for three days and nights by the distracted parents. Of all this I knew nothing then,—I saw in him only the patriot, the poet, the magician who could work such marvels with words. It was a revelation to me, this of the wondrous power of language, and of all the lessons I unconsciously learned at that early age it was perhaps the one that I most readily and thoroughly assimilated, being the most congenial to my own nature, and corresponding to its potential needs. It is a pity that children are generally so reserved and reticent, for a child of enquiring mind would learn much more, could it but impart its own thoughts and enquire about the things that puzzle it. But a sensitive child broods in silence over its own imaginings, very often perplexed by some very simple matter which a word might explain. And who indeed could have guessed that these were the first stirrings of the poetic temperament within me, called into life by the personality of the aged poet, towards whom I felt myself irresistibly drawn? Poetry was certainly my native element. I could already recite Schiller’s Diver and the Fight with the Dragon, and the other principal ballads; I learnt by heart with the greatest facility, and to hear a short poem read over once was enough, I could repeat it without a mistake. It was so much inflammable material, one might say, collected within my brain, and awaiting but the approach of the lighted match to ignite, and kindle to a blaze.

I wish I could remember some of Arndt’s own words to quote here. But of that verbal brilliancy, that inexhaustible flow of speech, it is necessarily the general impression that remains, rather than the exact form in which it was cast, and I would not dare attempt to render this. Some of his more humorous sayings, however, I have preserved textually, and need therefore not hesitate to give the following specimen:—“When I write to the King,” he one day explained,—“I do not trouble my head with all that rubbish of humbly and dutifully, and most gracious this and most gracious that, but simply say Your Majesty, and then plain you and your, and afterwards perhaps just one more Majesty to wind up with—for all the absurd rigmarole of Court lingo is more than I can stand.”

To the very last Arndt was busy and eager, as I have said, for the cause of German Unity, and we were all heart and soul with him in wishing well to that cause. The year 1848 had not long gone past, with all its unrest, and with the high hopes and dazzling day dreams it had brought, and from one of those dreams we had hardly awakened yet,—that which we dreamt as we saw folk going about wearing their black, red and yellow cockades, as if by so doing they could bring all Germany under one flag and place the Imperial crown on the head of the Prussian king. From the balcony at Heidelberg my little four-year-old brother had helped to give the word of command to the volunteers mustered in the square below, but all that excitement had died out again, and things had drifted back into the old well-worn grooves. The times were not yet ripe, and much water would have to flow down the Rhine to the sea, ere that fair dream should become reality. Clever and interesting as the Prussian king undoubtedly was, it was not in his person that the traditions of the German Empire were to be revived; that was to be the work of another, of whom at that period no one thought,—the exile who was then looking down sadly and wearily from his window upon a London street.

To conclude this brief sketch of Arndt, I can hardly do better than transcribe the verses which about this time he wrote in my mother’s album:

In God’s own image thou wast made;
Of Heaven’s pure light an emanation,
That down to this dark world has strayed.
’Tis this Heaven’s truest revelation.

Nor for thyself alone was lent
Yon ray that lights thy path thus kindly;
Each as the other’s guide was meant,
Here where all grope and struggle blindly.