CHAPTER VII
[BUNSEN]
It was at the time when this learned and accomplished friend of the highly gifted King Frederick William IV. was the representative of Prussia at the Court of St. James, that I first visited England in my childhood. We came over twice, on the first occasion to stay in the Isle of Wight, whilst our second visit was divided between Hastings and London. A sincere and lasting friendship then sprang up between my family and that of this remarkable man, continuing to this day among the members of a younger generation.
Bunsen loved to be the Mecænas of men of talent, and many were the interesting people whom we met at his house. The whole family was musical; two of the sons, just then students at the University of Bonn, sang most delightfully; “Kathleen Mavourneen” was first made known to me by the pleasing tenor of the one, and the other gave the famous “Figaro quà, Figaro là,” of the “Barber of Seville,” with great effect in his agreeable baritone. I had the pleasure of hearing the organ in Westminster Abbey played by the eldest daughter, whose professor, the celebrated organist, Neukomm, became from that moment a most welcome guest in our house, sometimes staying with us for weeks at a time. It was from this fine old musician that in my twelfth year I began learning the harmonium, and became moreover an enthusiast like himself for the sweet plaintive tones of the Æolian harp. It was his delight to fix one of these simple instruments in the crack of an open door, and seat himself in the full draught, to listen for and note down the weird melodies played by the wind. Often on a lovely summer’s evening,—in the moonlight of Monrepos that has been sung of among us from generation to generation,—we would have the harmonium brought out on the terrace, and letting his fingers stray over the keys, Neukomm would imitate the sighing of the breeze in the strings of the harp, catching up the echo of some murmuring sound, and repeating and improvising on it for hours.
Our stay in the Isle of Wight was delightful, and I look back on the pretty little island as a sort of earthly paradise, fit scene for a happy, idyllic life. Our little villa was smothered in the clustering roses that climbed over it everywhere, and on all sides stretched a lawn of beautiful soft green grass, perfectly kept, but upon which we children could fling ourselves and play to our hearts’ content; such a relief after the perpetual injunctions to refrain from stepping on the grass, to which we were accustomed in Germany. Then we had the good luck too, to be by the sea during a spring-tide, a novel experience, that gave us a most glorious excitement, as we happened to be taking our daily sea-bath, and there was the very greatest difficulty in getting the bathing-machine safely back to the beach again. The ropes with which the poor horse was harnessed gave way, and the man, who was pale with fright, had hard work to rescue the little house-on-wheels with its occupants, whilst my brother and I were simply delighted to see the waves dash over it, rejoicing at last to encounter something that was like a real adventure!
Our second visit to England was in the year 1851, and we were in London just at the closing of the first great International Exhibition, at which I remember seeing immense crowds of people standing bare-headed and cheering, as “God save the Queen!” was played. That spectacle made more impression on me than anything in the Exhibition itself, unless it was perhaps the splendid trees, one giant oak-tree in particular, which had been built in with the edifice, completely roofed over by the big glass dome. Other contemporary events I did not witness myself, but only heard of them from our friends,—the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, for instance,—which they described to us passing their house, the Embassy in Carlton Terrace, in an endless procession rolling on for hours, like wave on wave in swift succession, to the mournful strains of the Dead March from the Eroica Symphony. As the sounds of one military band died away in the distance, the next one had already come up in step to the melancholy cadence of the selfsame march. Just like the rising and sinking of ocean waves was the impressive yet monotonous grandeur of the nation’s tribute to its great soldier.
The Prussian Embassy was at that time frequented by almost every one of talent or high intellectual culture to be found in London, Bunsen possessing in a remarkable degree the gift of attracting clever people to himself. He was quick too to discern the promise of future eminence in others, and many might relate how in that genial atmosphere their talent was discovered and encouraged and obtained its first recognition. Mendelssohn and Max Müller were amongst those who quite young there found themselves at once prized at their true value. The conversational powers of the master of the house himself, the young people so gifted and versatile, the open hospitality, the excellent music,—all these things were so many magnets, that drew strangers within the charmed sphere. I was of course not capable then of appreciating the depth of Bunsen’s learning or his intellectual worth, but his marvellous command of language and rhetorical facility impressed me greatly. In the fluency of his speech, the ease and elegance with which on all occasions he expressed himself, he resembled his royal friend, Frederick William IV. And his handsome face recalled that of the great Goethe at an advanced age, the likeness being especially striking on his deathbed.
But it was only natural that at that time Bunsen’s children and grandchildren should interest me much more than he did himself. The lame daughter, above all, like my mother at that time, being always wheeled about in her chair and unable to walk a step, and in whose features I also discovered something of a likeness to my mother, that perhaps lay in the kind gentle smile. The sympathy they felt for one another was naturally strengthened by their common misfortune, in each case the lameness appearing to be absolutely incurable. During the summer we spent in the Isle of Wight, my mother could still go about on crutches, then after the birth of my younger brother her condition grew far worse, complete atrophy of the one leg having apparently set in, and the pain hardly allowing her any sleep at night. Fräulein von Bunsen’s lameness proceeded from an attack of coxalgia as an infant, and since her sixth year all hope had been abandoned of her ever being able to walk. We children were meantime quite at home in the house of one of her brothers, playing with his children, with whom we continued on affectionate terms our whole life long. It is a satisfaction to be able to look back on fifty years of uninterrupted friendship such as this. Very specially did it exist between myself and Bunsen’s daughter-in-law, Elizabeth, so dear to me, that it was almost as if ties of blood had united us. Only quite recently did I bid a last farewell to this sweet and lovable woman, death having called her away. But she lives on in my remembrance, and I have an agreeable recollection also of her father, the Quaker, Gurney, and of his greeting, warm and courteous in spite of his keeping his hat on his head, as he met us on the threshold of his house with the words—“Be welcome to my home!”
I observed and learned a great deal more than anyone at that time suspected! It was my first stay in a great city, and the first lesson it brought home to me was that of complete acquiescence in my own limitations, or rather in those imposed on me by circumstances, my very modest supply of pocket-money making quite unattainable all the splendours I saw exhibited in the shop windows. There was one lovely doll-shop, with the most exquisite dolls, as big as real babies, and directly I had a small sum to spend, I made my way thither, quite happy to have a close view of all these treasures, even if I should be unable to purchase any of them. And in truth, it was just the tiniest wax-doll of all that the contents of my small purse could buy—but such a lovely one, in a dear little tiny bed with curtains of rose-coloured silk, through which the rosy light streamed over the delicate little wax face. How I loved that doll! It looked just like a little princess in a fairy tale, or a fairy itself, sleeping there in the beautiful rose-coloured light. None of the bigger, grander dolls could have appealed to my imagination as did this little one. After all it is on that—on the part played by their own imagination, that chiefly depends the amount of pleasure children get out of their toys, and those that are in proportion to their own diminutive scale and on a level with their simple requirements, appeal to them far more than others, chiefly remarkable for their magnitude and costliness. Lively as I was, I took the very greatest care of all my toys, treating them as if they were animate, sentient objects, so that I was in despair if any of them got broken or hurt. Demonstrations of affection never being encouraged, in fact being rather sternly repressed in our family, all my pent up tenderness poured itself out on my dolls and also on my little horse-hair pillow which I used to hug and kiss in gratitude every night before going to sleep. It was all the dearer to me, because it was not taken with us on our journeys, and as I was not allowed to sleep on a down pillow, I generally, when we were away from home, had to do without altogether, which was by no means pleasant. Notwithstanding—or perhaps in consequence of this severe training,—having always been accustomed in my youth to sleep on a rather hard thin mattress stretched on a very narrow camp bedstead, I have grown somewhat more luxurious in that respect in my later years, and can hardly now be too softly pillowed in order to rest at ease. It is as if there were a sort of reaction,—a revolt of human nature against unnecessary and useless hardships imposed,—a lassitude of the whole frame to which some slight measure of indulgence must be accorded. Not in the matter of the palate though! Naturally abstemious, the habits of my youth still prevail with me there to such an extent, that to this day I prefer a slice of good wholesome black bread to all the daintiest, most skilfully prepared dishes in the world! We children knew too by experience the relish that the imagination may impart to the simplest fare, unconsciously resembling one of the creations of the great English novelist as we “made believe” to spread a little butter on the bread which the hygienic theories of the age insisted on our eating dry! But everything has its compensation, and who knows if those pleasures of the imagination, which were our chief resource, are not denied to the younger generation, from whom we scarcely seem to exact even needful self-restraint and self-denial, much less to call upon them for any exceptional sacrifice of their own comfort. Where every whim is gratified from the outset, there remains neither the necessity nor the inclination to seek refuge from unpleasant realities in a fairer world, to spread one’s wings and take flight for the realms of Fancy. Do the children of the present day even rightly believe in the possibility of thus spreading their wings? Would not some of these little sceptics laugh at the idea? Poor little things! Can it really be that there is no fairyland for them, no enchanted isles in the distant ocean, no kingdoms to conquer, no heroic deeds to be performed, that their souls find complete satisfaction in the prosaic details of everyday life, and never soar beyond the region of dull commonplace fact of their dreary school-hours? They little know of what they are deprived! They could never guess the joy we knew in the possession of this wondrous secret, this magic key, which unlocked the gates of fairyland, of the world of dreams, of noble adventure, wherein we could wander at will. What battles we fought, what gallant deeds we performed, what wrongs we redressed with the aid of those invisible armies, always at hand to come to our assistance and conduct us to victory, when the odds seemed too overpowering! But we had not invariably such exalted ambitions as these, it was not even always the discovery of some lonely desert island on which we were bent, but a much simpler, more modest lot satisfied us, provided it were but sufficiently removed from that which in truth was ours! Thus it was one of my favourite ideas from the time I was four years old, to be a village schoolmistress, but I could not persuade my brother to promise that he would settle down beside me as the schoolmaster. That would have clashed with his dream of being a soldier, so it was settled that I should be the “daughter of the regiment,” the vivandiére, and accompany it everywhere so that we might not be separated. Ah! what marvellous adventures, what hairbreadth escapes, what glorious triumphs were ours! Sometimes we were sold as slaves, at others we were bold sea-farers and again quiet peasant-folk carrying our spades and milk-cans. It was by this means that we kept up our spirits, and preserved our good humour successfully, in spite of all that was irksome in our actual surroundings. Thanks to my lively imagination, I did not succumb to the persistent onslaught of the educational efforts destined to turn the current of my thoughts into a perfectly alien channel. In vain was I tied down to science and mathematics, logarithms and equations will forever be to me lifeless, meaningless abstractions, and it took me much less time than I had spent in acquiring it, to forget the velocity of a body falling through space! As for doing a simple sum in addition, I might as well never have learned the process at all for the little I know about it now. But the art of inventing a story, of calling up imaginary beings, of following them through the vicissitudes of their career, and weaving all this together to a plot—that was mine then and is still mine, notwithstanding all that was done to crush it out of me. What should I have done on the long tedious journeys, had I not been able to amuse myself by the delightful stories I thought out. Sitting cramped in my corner of the travelling-carriage or railway compartment, afraid even to stretch my limbs lest the movement should disturb one or other of the invalids, I owe it to my imagination alone, that child as I was, I did not fall into hopeless melancholy.
It was this same happy faculty of creating for myself an ideal atmosphere, and peopling this new world with my best-beloved heroes, and the no less heroic creations of my own brain,—this it was which lent so great a charm to many of our resorts,—standing us in good stead for instance, in investing with beauty the rather tame, stiff garden of a London square, so unsuited for the abode of mystery or romance. Apart from our intimacy with the Bunsen family, our stay in London possessed indeed few attractions for us. There was no relaxation of the customary strictness with which we were treated, on the contrary, there seemed to be an accumulation of wearisome restrictions and petty annoyances attendant on the stay in strange houses. Even when there was a garden, we might hardly play there, certainly not dig in it, nor run across the lawn, and as for venturing to gather a flower, I was haunted by visions of angry men pursuing us with thick sticks, ever since the day when the landlord had shaken his finger at us, just for touching his orange-trees! It was a little better in Hastings, where we had the beautiful open sea, and the beach on which we could play undisturbed. But our pleasure there was damped by our perpetual anxiety and sadness on my mother’s behalf, whose illness had already entered then on its most distressing stage. From the window I could see her carried in and out of the sea, sometimes alas! to lie in convulsions on the beach, the servants standing round holding up umbrellas to protect her from the gaze of inquisitive onlookers. I stood sad and helpless at the window, unable to understand the unfeeling curiosity of these strangers. It was not quite so bad on their part though, as the behaviour of two Germans on the steamer that brought us over from Ostend, who kept pushing against my mother’s lame foot as she sat on deck, and even complained at her, for taking up so much room. It hurt her most of all, that it should be her own countrymen who were thus rude and heartless. Let us hope that it was merely sea-sickness which made them so inhuman! And the lady resembled them who, when my mother had dragged herself on her crutches to a railway-carriage and was preparing to enter it, shut the door in her face, saying:—“there is no room here!” What a contrast to the good old bathing-man at Hastings, who used to carry her in and out of the water, and was so sorry to see how she suffered, that he would pat her cheek gently, and talk to her as if he were comforting a small child:—“There, there, poor dear! it will be better soon!”
That journey from Ostend belongs to the most painful experiences of my childhood, it was nothing but discomfort and sadness, and I shall never forget the wailing of my poor little baby brother Otto, suffering all night long in one of the frightful paroxysms of pain, for which in vain relief was sought. His devoted English nurse, our good Barnes, sat rocking him in her arms the whole time, and every now and then she cast a sympathetic glance my way, but she could do nothing to help or comfort me, she was entirely taken up with her poor little charge. Had there been anyone there who could have told me a story to distract my thoughts, to take me for a moment out of myself, and away from the unhappiness which I was helpless to console! How often may not some pretty well-told tale, some little snatch of song, help a child to forget the misery of its weary limbs and aching head, and soothe it to sleep.