Thus he once, with the greatest friendliness, allowed his wife, at her request, to go to confession on Saturday, but forbade her to take the communion on Sunday, in accordance with the Protestant custom, because she had not asked his permission to do so. When any one of his neighbors happened to be raising a fine young horse, he would go to him and offer an absurdly low price for the animal. If the other refused it, he would say: "I would think about it, and bear in mind the old rule, that one should hand over everything that has once been bargained for; who knows what may happen!" And surely enough the horse, in spite of careful watching, would sooner or later be found in the meadow or in the stable with the tendons of its feet cut and would have to be stabbed to death; so that in the end he could buy whatever happened to please his fancy. He willingly assisted his son-in-law in declaring a fraudulent bankruptcy, and perhaps even beguiled him into it, but when the latter, after having perjured himself, demanded the embezzled goods back again, he laughed him to scorn and dared him to go to law. However he was surprised by his own maid-servant while committing arson and taken in the very act, in spite of his cleverness and his equally great luck, and it was to this circumstance that my father, who had been talked into going security by all sorts of cunning deceptive promises, owed the few years of quiet possession which he enjoyed during his short lifetime.
As soon as the penitentiary had given its charge back to the community we were obliged to leave the abode in which our grandparents had shared joy and sorrow for over half a century. It seemed like the end of the world to my brother and myself when the old pieces of furniture, which up till then had scarcely been moved from their places even when the rooms were whitewashed, suddenly emigrated into the street; when the respectable old Dutch striking-clock that never went correctly and always caused confusion, all at once found itself hanging on a branch of the pear tree, brightly illuminated by the beams of the May sun, while under it stood insecurely the round worm-eaten dining-table which, when there happened to be very little on it, had so often elicited from us the wish that we could have everything that had ever been eaten off it. However, the whole affair was also, quite naturally, in the nature of a spectacle for us, and as in the course of clearing out, a bright colored pipe-head that I had lost a long time before came to light again in some rat hole or other, and, moreover, various odds and ends, which the other families who were moving out with us had come across when dusting in the corners and did not consider worth taking along, fell to our share—since we could make use of the least thing—the day soon began to seem like a holiday. We parted, not indeed without emotion but still without sorrow, from the house in which we had been born.
I did not learn what it really meant until later, though to be sure it was soon enough. Without realizing it myself I had, up to that time, been a little aristocrat, and now ceased to be one. This is how it was. In the same way that the peasant proprietor and the rich burgher look down However, in the end, all this had a very good effect upon me. I had been up to that time a dreamer, who in the daytime liked to creep away behind the hedge or the well, and in the evening cowered in my mother's lap, or in that of one of our women neighbors, and begged to be told fairy and ghost stories. Now I was driven out into active life. It was a question of defending one's skin, and though I engaged in my first scuffle only "after long hesitation and many, by no means heroic efforts to escape," yet the result was such, that I no longer tried to avoid the second, and began at the third or fourth quite to relish the idea. Our declarations of war were even more laconic than those of the Romans or Spartans. The challenger looked over at his opponent during school-hours, when the teacher had turned his back for a moment, clenched his right fist and laid it over his mouth, or rather over his jaw; the opponent repeated the symbolic sign the next moment that it was safe to do so, without by even so much as a look requiring a more specific manifesto, and at midday, in the churchyard, in the vicinity of an old vault, before which there, was a grass plot, the affair was settled in the presence of the whole school, with natural weapons, by wrestling and pounding, in extreme cases also by biting and scratching. I never indeed rose to the rank of a genuine triarian, who made it a point of honor to go about the whole year with a black eye or a swollen nose, but I very soon lost the reputation for being a good child, which I owed to my mother and which up to that time had meant so much to me, and, to make up for it, rose in my father's estimation, who behaved toward his sons as Frederick the Great did toward his officers, punishing them if they fought and mocking them if they allowed themselves to be trifled with. Once my opponent, while I was lying on top of him pounding him at my ease, bit my finger through to the bone, so that for weeks I could not use my hand for writing. That was, however, the most dangerous wound that I can remember, and, as sometimes happens later in life also, it led to the forming of an intimate friendship.
EXTRACTS FROM THE JOURNAL OF FRIEDRICH
HEBBEL
Reflections on the world, life, and books, but chiefly on myself, in the form of a journal.
TRANSLATED BY FRANCES A. KING
(1836)
At the moment in which we conceive an ideal, there arises in God the thought of creating it.
Social life in all its nuances is no mere confluence of meaningless accidents; it is the product of the experience of whole millenniums, and our task is to apprehend the correctness of these experiences.