"The spirit moves me to talk with you, old Dædalus; and as my physician has seriously impressed me with the duty of sparing my lungs, I may neither look you up myself nor tempt you to come out here to me. So I must force you to puzzle out these awkward copy-book letters of mine, in which you will recognize the handwriting of your pupil as little as you will his customary style.
"For, between ourselves be it said, things still look rather blue and gloomy to me. Our friends won't have told you this; before them I have played the lively, joyous Hotspur, merely in order to make them think there would be no danger in leaving me out here alone. I can no longer reconcile it to my conscience to exile my good host from the city, even though he does put such a good face on the matter; and then there is Kohle too--hard as it is for him to tear himself away from his bare walls, he can't go on with his work until he has first made the necessary designs. What do I lack here except that one thing which is lost to me forever? You need not fear that I shall become a prey to misanthropy or schnapps, like old Katie. I should be ashamed to show myself to Homo, who is looking at me now while I write, with his wise, sensible, true-hearted eyes. Perhaps he is asking me to send you his love.
"But to stay out here awhile in solitude will be of equal service to my slowly-healing breast and to my poor, somewhat discouraged soul. Don't let yourself be deceived, old Hans, by what our friends try to stuff into your head: that my anxiety about whether I shall soon be able to use my hand again in the service of the arts is gnawing at my heart. More has been injured in this case than a finger-muscle or a joint; my hopeful confidence has been shattered--that courage and audacity with which I came to you in the summer. If I had ten sound hands I would bethink myself ten times before I again sent them to school to you, for I am as good as convinced that at the very best they would only have acquired mechanical proficiency; while a true work of art requires much more, for which they would hardly have the right sort of tools.
"You prophesied this to me in the first hour of our reunion. Then I set myself up to be wiser than my master. And now can you guess how I found out that you were right? I know it is mortifying, but I must confess it. During all the pleasant weeks I passed in your workshop I never once felt so much myself, never felt myself so 'at the height of my existence'--as Rossel would call it--as in those moments when I was bringing an oarless boat safely to shore, and afterward when I was struggling, hand-to-hand, to defend my life against a furious, murderous scoundrel.
"That a man maybe a very tolerable bully and desperado, and at the same time be a great sculptor, your celebrated Florentine predecessor, Benvenuto, has shown. Though then, to be sure, the days of a nobility of force were not yet over, and many things were demanded of a complete man which are now divided among many by our present system of division of labor. Artistic creation and practical execution are now distinct, and you were quite right in saying that the clay in which I was called upon to work was to be found in public life.
"But where shall I find a material that will not melt away under my hands?
"You would be no worse off in a desert of sand than I am in this bureaucratic, well-regulated, red-tape civilization of ours, that never permits a man to dig into the lump and stamp his own individuality upon this commonplace routine; and, after all, it is that alone which could give any personal satisfaction to a man constituted as I am--this feeling, akin to the one you have in art, of having created something which every other man could not have produced just as well by merely following a certain formula.
"It may be that my experience in my own narrow little fatherland has given me a false idea of what a man inclined to action has to hope and to fear in this Old World of ours. Perhaps if I could find a position in the North German Confederation!--but even that wouldn't help me; at least I have known Prussian Landraths with whom I would not have changed places--men, the highest aim of whose ambition was to succeed to a chief magistrate's position, with a white head and a soul grown gray in the dust of official documents.
"No, my dear fellow, Schnetz unquestionably used the right expression. I have stumbled into the wrong century. I should have done very well in the middle ages, when the old savage and unruly spirit was everywhere to be found side by side with a struggling civilization, and when one could be a good citizen and yet go armed to the teeth. But since this wretched anachronism cannot now be helped, I will at least do my best to seek out a place where a bird of my plumage won't be stared at like a strange fowl in a hen-yard, and crowed over by every well-conditioned cock.
"I have seen quite enough of the New World to know that I shall be more in my proper place there than here. Don't imagine for a moment that I over-estimate that promised land; the positive, human, heart-quickening possessions and enjoyments that it has to offer are few. But of this very same unattractive nothing, from which something can be made, there is blessed superabundance there.