EUGENIE.
I.
Dreary months followed. Aside from the great disappointment the climate contributed to his misery. The damp autumn, the cold early winter days, the northern winds were not to his taste. He was a child of sunshine, not a child of the mild sunshine of the Acropolis, as he thought he was, but of the burning rays baking the plains of Jehosophat, and the scorching heat of Jericho. Protest though he might, he was a child of Canaan. And everything around him was bleak and cold and dismal, and his heart was burning with a fire of its own, the blood in his veins seething tumultuously. He wrote much to give expression to his turbulent thoughts, walked much to dissipate his restlessness, and people called him an idler, a Gassenjunge! He did not care. He shunned people. He only wished to be a spectator of the passing show of life, and when the procession provoked laughter in him he laughed with the tears rolling down his cheeks. For there was pity in his laughter, but those around him only heard the laughter with no ear for the pitiful undertone.
Albert always hated Prussianism—he had learned to hate it in his childhood—and Prussianism was the spirit of Hamburg of that day. Brought up in a Rhenish town under French occupation it was inevitable that a boy with such keen sensibilities should perceive the difference between Prussian ponderousness and vulgarity and French sprightliness and delicacy. His present environment brought back to him his earlier perceptions.
Albert found himself pondering on Goethe and Lessing. In Goethe he saw the Spinoza of poetry. He understood what Herder meant when he said, “I wish that Goethe would for once take some other Latin book in hand besides that of Spinoza.”
The more he pondered on Goethe and Lessing and Spinoza the more he revolted against the Philistinism of his environment His unrequited love added bitterness. He saw the faults of the people around him with the eyes of an enemy.
And there was hatred all around him. Lessing’s preachments against hatred had made no impression upon his people. Indeed, they had erected monuments to his memory but went on hating more than ever. They wanted none of Lessing’s tolerance, none of the Pantheistic harmony of Goethe. They wanted strife. Not the strife that begets liberty—liberty of mind and body—but the strife that begets religious bigotry. Albert wanted to continue, and combine, the noble work of Lessing and Goethe. He wanted to teach his countrymen the truth of Lessing and the harmony of Goethe, but he was as yet too young to know that the reward for such efforts are loose stones during one’s life and stones cemented into the shape of a monument when loose stones can no longer do any harm.
He found himself like a nightingale in a crow’s nest. Every time he began to sing the crows caw-cawed; and the masses have always understood the caw-caw better than the song of the nightingale.
He was no philosopher content with metaphysical speculations. He was no Spinoza to be content to grind lenses and subsist on a penny’s worth of Dutch bread and raisins. Unlike the philosopher’s passion for abstract truth, truth was meaningless to Albert unless it colored human life. His asceticism was not that of the monk wilfully denying himself the pleasures of the body but rather that of the pleasure-seeking maiden who silently broods in her chamber because she was left out of a festivity. The world to him was a playground, and he wished to do part of the playing.
Of late he had tried to get his first poems published in book form but the publishers could see no merit in them. The verses were too simple to strike the publishers as extraordinary; and though Goethe had given them a lesson in simplicity the Germans were still too bombastic to appreciate any writing unless tumid. Albert felt that as soon as his poems were published the world would be at his feet. He had been to see a publisher who was specializing in books that provoked the censor, but as yet there was nothing in Albert’s poems to provoke any one except a lovesick maiden.