“Were you not happy when you were young?” I asked, on a quick impulse.
“Happy! Who expects to be happy? If I had been simply not miserable, I should have counted my childhood a good one; but—”
He paused a moment, then went on:
“Your great novelist, Dickens, had a poor, sordid kind of childhood in outward circumstances. But mine was spiritually sordid—hideous, repulsive. There are some plants which spring from and flourish in mud and slime; they are but a flabby, pestiferous growth, as you may suppose. I was, to begin with, a human specimen of that kind; I was in an atmosphere of moral mud, an intellectual hot-bed. I don’t know what there was in me that set me against the life; that I never can tell. It was a sort of hell on earth that I was living in. One day something happened—I was twelve years old then—something happened, and it seemed as if all my nature—its good and its evil, its energies and indolence, its pride and humility—all ran together, welded by the furnace of passion into one furious, white-hot rage of anger, rebellion. In an instant I had decided my course; in an hour I had acted upon it. I am an odd kind of fellow, I believe. I quitted that scene and have never visited it since. I can not describe to you the anger I then felt, and to which I yielded. Twelve years old I was then. I fought hard for many years; but, mein Fräulein”—(he looked at me, and paused a moment)—“that was the first occasion upon which I ever was really angry; it has been the last. I have never felt the sensation of anger since—I mean personal anger. Artistic anger I have known; the anger at bad work, at false interpretations, at charlatanry in art; but I have never been angry with the anger that resents. I tell you this as a curiosity of character. With that brief flash all resentment seemed to evaporate from me—to exhaust itself in one brief, resolute, effective attempt at self-cleansing, self-government.”
He paused.
“Tell me more, Herr von Francius,” I besought. “Do not leave off there. Afterward?”
“You really care to hear? Afterward I lived through hardships in plenty; but I had effectually severed the whole connection with that which dragged me down. I used all my will to rise. I am not boasting, but simply stating a peculiarity of my temperament when I tell you that what I determine upon I always accomplish. I determined upon rising, and I have risen to what I am. I set it, or something like it, before me as my goal, and I have attained it.”
“Well?” I asked, with some eagerness; for I, after all my unfulfilled strivings, had asked myself Cui bono? “And what is the end of it? Are you satisfied?”
“How quickly and how easily you see!” said he, with a smile. “I value the position I have, in a certain way—that is, I see the advantage it gives me, and the influence. But that deep inner happiness, which lies outside of condition and circumstances—that feeling of the poet in ‘Faust’—don’t you remember?—
“‘I nothing had, and yet enough’—