The Knight Huldbrand meets her in the guise of a young girl at the cottage of a fisherman by whom she had been brought up as a daughter. Beautiful, wayward, mischievous, she falls in love with the handsome knight and testifies her fondness by mad pranks as well as by artless caresses. After they are married Huldbrand learns for the first time that his bride is a water-sprite, belonging to a race more beautiful than mankind, but devoid of an immortal soul, which can be acquired only by marriage with some human being. A great change now comes over Undine; for with her new soul there comes to her all that depth of feeling and suffering which the possession of the priceless gift implies. The scene in which she first reveals to her husband her real nature and tremblingly awaits her destiny at his hands is beautiful in the extreme. The married pair take their departure from the cottage and proceed through the enchanted forest on their way to Huldbrand’s castle at Ringstetten. The water-sprite Kühleborn, the kinsman of Undine, who besets their pathway here and elsewhere and who dissolves into a mountain torrent, is described with that vagueness which is the charm of the supernatural. On the way to Ringstetten, Undine, moved with pity for the proud and imperious Bertalda, who has been cast off by the duke of the country for her unworthiness, takes her home and receives her as a companion and friend. Gradually the love of Huldbrand for his wife wanes, and he becomes enamored of Bertalda; and while Undine’s kinsfolk, the water-sprites, seek to revenge the slights she is compelled to suffer, yet the poor wife, with loving self-sacrifice, protects not only her husband but even her rival from their power. At last, while sailing on the Danube, Huldbrand loads his wife with curses and imprecations, and she is compelled to leave him and join her kindred in the river below. And when, after his marriage with Bertalda, she is required to come back to the castle and be his executioner, she lovingly performs her terrible office with a kiss.
There are some imperfections and inconsistencies in the story, as perhaps there must be in all tales dealing with the supernatural, but the traits which come to this fair creature with the soul bestowed upon her at her wedding, the gentleness, the self-sacrifice and submissive love, are drawn by the hand of a master and painted in colors which genius alone can impart to the creations of fancy.
PETER SCHLEMIHL
ADELBERT CHAMISSO
A German critic of considerable authority speaks of “Peter Schlemihl” as “a faultless work of art, and one of deep import.” It is not necessary to concur in this estimate nor to imagine, as some do, that the shadowless man was a symbol of the author, “a wanderer without a country,” in order to give the book a reasonably high place in literature. No doubt there are autobiographical features in the story, but Chamisso’s own account of its simple genesis is evidently the true one. “I had lost,” he said, “upon a journey, my hat, portmanteau, gloves, pocket-handkerchief, and my entire travelling outfit. Fouqué asked me if I had not also lost my shadow, and we pictured this misfortune to ourselves.” Something out of La Fontaine furnished another incident, and the book was written largely to amuse the children of the author’s friend Hilzig. It is a sort of fairy story dealing largely with the supernatural.
At the garden of a rich gentleman to whom he has brought a letter of introduction, Peter Schlemihl meets a quiet man dressed in gray, who, when anything is desired by the guests, at once takes it out of his pocket. A piece of court plaster, a telescope, a Turkish carpet, a tent, and finally a horse saddled and bridled, are successively produced without anyone showing surprise at these remarkable proceedings or even seeming to know who the stranger is. When Schlemihl retires from the company the gray man follows him and offers him the inexhaustible purse of Fortunatus in exchange for his shadow. Schlemihl, poor man, thinking it a small thing to part with at such a price, sells this humble attendant to the devil, and the rest of the book sets forth the calamities that follow—the pity of the old women, the outcry of the children, the contempt of the men, especially the stout ones who have broad shadows of their own. Schlemihl tries to keep in the shade, shuts himself up in his room with his gold, proposes to have a shadow painted, sends his faithful servant Bendel to get his own back from the gray man, but all in vain. The stranger promises, however, to return “in a year and a day.”
All the splendor procured by Schlemihl’s wealth is as nothing by the side of the evil fate entailed by the loss of his shadow. He is especially unfortunate in love. At first Fanny smiles upon his suit, but falls senseless when the moon rises and casts only a single shadow as the two sit side by side. Then, when he flees to another country, where the people take him for a king and he wins sweet Mina’s heart, his secret is betrayed by Rascal, one of his own hirelings, who robs him at once both of his money and his intended bride.
At the end of the year and the day the gray man appears and offers him back his shadow if he will only subscribe a little obligation to surrender to the bearer his soul after its separation from his body. The argument is cogent. “What sort of a thing is your soul? Have you ever seen it, and what do you think you can do with it after you are dead?” But this time the voice of the tempter is unavailing, for although at first Peter is on the point of yielding when tortured by the sight of his weeping Mina about to be consigned to the arms of the hated Rascal, yet a friendly unconsciousness overcomes him and the contract is not signed.
The poor unfortunate again rides forth into the world, followed by the man in gray, until at last Schlemihl in despair flings away the purse, whereupon his evil spirit departs, leaving him free and light-hearted, although poor as well as shadowless and alone in the world.
He now avoids human society, and having become possessed of a pair of seven-league boots he is astonished to find himself striding over immense tracts of territory in an incredibly short space of time. Now he first clearly sees his appointed destiny. Shut out from the society of his fellows, nature is to be his compensation. The earth is given to him as a rich garden, and science is to be the purpose of his life. He naturally has facilities for investigation possessed by no one else. He strides through all parts of both continents, passing across Behring Straits from Asia to America, but he deplores the fact that New Holland and other islands of the Pacific are still inaccessible to him, and he gazes from the utmost point of land which his seven-league boots will permit him to reach, to the unattainable regions beyond the sea, and deems himself as badly off as if he were still behind the bars of a prison, oppressed as he is with the terrible consciousness that his great work on natural history, embracing only the flora and fauna of the two continents, must still remain a fragment.
He chooses for his hermitage a cave in the Thebais, and when we leave him he is still engaged in the preparation of his great work.