Arthur O'Leary: His Wanderings And Ponderings In Many Lands

‘No weather was either too hot or too cold, too sultry or too boisterous; no hour too late or too early; no day was sacred. If the family were at prayers or at dinner or at breakfast or in bed, it mattered not; they had come many miles to see the chateau, and see it they would. “Alas!” thought I, “if, as some learned persons suppose, individuals be recognisable in the next world, what a melancholy time of it will be yours, poor Van Dyck! If they make all this hubbub about the house you lived in, what will they do about your fleshy tabernacle?”

‘As the season advanced, the crowds increased; and as autumn began, the conflicting currents to and from the Rhine all met in my bedroom. There took place all the rendezvous of Europe. Runaway daughters there first repented in papa’s arms, and profligate sons promised amendment for the future. Myself and my wife were passed by unnoticed and disregarded amid this tumult of recognition and salutation. We were emaciated like skeletons; our meals we ate when we could, like soldiers on a retreat; and we slept in our clothes, not knowing at what moment the enemy might be upon us. Locks, bolts, and bars were ineffectual; our resistance only increased curiosity, and our garrison was ever open to bribery.

‘It was to no purpose that I broke the windows to let in the north wind and acute rheumatism; to little good did I try an alarm of fire every day about two, when the house was fullest; and I failed signally in terrifying my torturers when I painted the gardener’s wife sky-blue, and had her placed in the hall, with a large label over the bed, “collapsed cholera.” Bless your heart! the tourist cares for none of these; and I often think it would have saved English powder and shot to have exported half a dozen of them to the East for the siege of Seringapatam. Had they been only told of an old picture, a teapot, a hearth-brush, or a candlestick that once belonged to Godfrey de Bouillon or Peter the Hermit, they would have stormed it under all the fire of Egypt! Well, it’s all over at last; human patience could endure no longer. We escaped by night, got away by stealth to Ghent, took post-horses in a feigned name, and fled from the Château de Van Dyck as from the plague. Determined no longer to trust to chances, I have built a cottage myself, which has no historic associations further back than six weeks ago; and fearful even of being known as the ci-devant possessor of the château, I never confess to have been in Ghent in my life; and if Van Dyck be mentioned, I ask if he is not the postmaster at Tervueren.

‘Here, then, I conclude my miseries. I cannot tell what may be the pleasure that awaits the live “lion,” but I envy no man the delights that fall to his lot who inhabits the den of the dead one.’

CHAPTER XX. BONN AND STUDENT LIFE

When I look at the heading of this chapter, and read there the name of a little town upon the Rhine – which, doubtless, the majority of my readers has visited – and reflect on how worn the track, how beaten the path I have been guiding them on so long, I really begin to feel somewhat faint-hearted. Have we not all seen Brussels and Antwerp, Waterloo and Quatre Bras? Are we not acquainted with Belgium, as well as we are with Middlesex; don’t we know the whole country, from its cathedrals down to Sergeant Cotton? – and what do we want with Mr. O’Leary here? And the Rhine – bless the dear man! – have we not steamed it up and down in every dampschiffe of the rival companies? The Drachenfels and St. Goar, the Caub and Bingen, are familiar to our eyes as Chelsea and Tilbury Fort. True, all true, mesdames and messieurs – I have been your fellow-traveller myself. I have watched you pattering along, John Murray in hand, through every narrow street and ill-paved square, conversing with your commissionaire in such French as it pleased God, and receiving his replies in equivalent English. I have seen you at table d’hôte, vainly in search of what you deemed eatable – hungry and thirsty in the midst of plenty; I have beheld you yawning at the opera, and grave at the Vaudeville; and I knew you were making your summer excursion of pleasure, ‘doing your Belgium and Germany,’ like men who would not be behind their neighbours. And still, with all this fatigue of sea and land, this rough-riding and railroading, this penance of short bed and shorter board, though you studied your handbook from the Scheldt to Schaffhausen, you came back with little more knowledge of the Continent than when you left home. It is true, your son Thomas – that lamblike scion of your stock, with light eyes and hair – has been initiated into the mysteries of rouge et noir and roulette; madame, your wife, has obtained a more extravagant sense of what is becoming in costume; your daughter has had her mind opened to the fascinations of a French escroc or a ‘refugee Pole’; and you, yourself, somewhat the worse for your change of habits, have found the salads of Germany imparting a tinge of acidity to your disposition. These are, doubtless, valuable imports to bring back – not the less so, that they are duty free. Yet, after all, ‘joy’s recollection is no longer joy’; and I doubt if the retrospect of your wanderings be a repayment for their fatigues.

‘Would he have us stay at home, Pa?’ lisps out, in pouting accents of impatience, some fair damsel, whose ringlets alone would make a furore at Paris.

Nothing of the kind, my dear. Travel by all means. There’s nothing will improve your French accent like a winter abroad; and as to your carriage and air, it is all-essential you should be pressed in the waltz by some dark-moustached Hungarian or tight-laced Austrian. Your German will fall all the more trippingly off your tongue that you have studied it in the land of beer and beetroot; while, as a safeguard against those distressing sensations of which shame and modesty are the parents, the air of the Rhine is sovereign, and its watering-places an unerring remedy. All I bargain for is, to be of the party. Let there be a corner in a portmanteau, or an imperial, a carriage-pocket, or a courier’s sack for me, and I’m content. If ‘John’ be your guide, let Arthur be your mentor. He’ll tell you of the roads; I, of the travellers.

To him belong pictures and statues, churches, châteaux, and curiosities; my province is the people – the living actors of the scene, the characters who walk the stage in prominent parts, and without some knowledge of whom your ramble would lose its interest. Occasionally, it is true, they may not be the best of company. Que voulez-vous? ‘If ever you travel, you mustn’t feel queer,’ as Mathews said or sung – I forget which. I shall only do my endeavour to deal more with faults than vices, more with foibles than failings. The eccentricities of my fellow-men are more my game than their crimes; and therefore do not fear that in my company I shall teach you bad habits, nor introduce you to low acquaintances; and above all, no disparagement – and it is with that thought I set out – no disparagement of me that I take you over a much-travelled track. If it be so, there’s the more reason you should know the company whom you are in the habit of visiting frequently; and secondly, if you accompany me here, I promise you better hereafter; and lastly, one of the pleasantest books that ever was written was the Voyage autour de ma Chambre. Come, then, is it agreed – are we fellow-travellers? You might do worse than take me. I’ll neither eat you up, like your English footmen, nor sell you to the landlord, like your German courier, nor give you over to brigands, like your Italian valet. It’s a bargain, then; and here we are at Bonn.

It is one o’clock, and you can’t do better than sit down to the table d’hôte: call it breakfast, if your prejudices run high, and take your place. I have supposed you at ‘Die Sterne’ (The Star), in the little square of the town; and, certes, you might be less comfortably housed. The cuisine is excellent, both French and German, and the wines delicious. The company at first blush might induce you to step back, under the impression that you had mistaken the salon, and accidentally fallen upon a military mess. They are nearly all officers of the cavalry regiments garrisoned at Bonn, well-looking and well-dressed fellows, stout, bronzed, and soldierlike, and wearing their moustaches like men who felt hair on the upper lip to be a birthright. If a little too noisy and uproarious at table, it proceeds not from any quarrelsome spirit: the fault, in a great measure, lies with the language. German, except spoken by a Saxon madchen, invariably suggests the idea of a row to an uninterested bystander; and if Goethe himself were to recite his ballads before an English audience, I’d venture long odds they’d accuse him of blasphemy. Welsh and Irish are soft zephyrs compared to it.

A stray Herr Baron or two, large, portly, responsible-looking men, with cordons at their button-holes, and pipe-sticks projecting from their breast-pockets, and a sprinkling of students of the higher class – it is too dear for the others – make up the party. Of course, there are English; but my present business is not with them.

By the time you have arrived at the ‘Rae-braten, with capers’ – which on a fair average, taken in the months of spring and summer, may be after about an hour and a half’s diligent performance – you’ll have more time to survey the party, who by this time are clinking their glasses, and drinking hospitably to one another in champagne; for there is always some newly returned comrade to be feted, or a colonel’s birthday or a battle, a poet or some sentimentalism about the Rhine or the Fatherland, to be celebrated. Happy, joyous spirits, removed equally from the contemplation of vast wealth or ignominious poverty! The equality so much talked of in France is really felt in Germany; and however the exclusives of Berlin and Vienna, or the still more exalted coteries of Baden or Darmstadt, rave of the fourteen quarterings which give the entrée to their salons, the nation has no sympathy with these follies. The unaffected, simple-minded, primitive German has no thought of assuming an air of distance to one his inferior in rank; and I have myself seen a sovereign prince take his place at table d’hôte beside the landlord, and hobnob with him cordially during dinner.

I do not mean to say that the German has no respect for rank; on the contrary, none more than he looks up to aristocracy, and reveres its privileges; but he does so from its association with the greatness of the Fatherland. The great names of his nobles recall those of the heroes and sages of whom the traditions of the country bear record; they are the watchwords of German liberty or German glory; they are the monuments of which he feels proudest. His reverence for their descendants is not tinged with any vulgar desire to be thought their equal or their associate; far from it, he has no such yearnings. His own position could never be affected by anything in theirs. The skipper of the fishing-craft might join convoy with the great fleet, but he knows that he only commands a shallop after all.

This, be it remarked, is a very different feeling from what we occasionally see nearer home. I have seen a good deal of student-life in Germany, and never witnessed anything approaching that process so significantly termed ‘tuft-hunting’ with us. Perhaps it may be alleged in answer that rank and riches, so generally allied in this country, are not so there; and that consequently much of what the world deems the prestige of condition is wanting to create that respect. Doubtless this is, to a certain extent, true; but I have seen the descendants of the most distinguished houses in Germany mixing with the students of a very humble walk on terms the most agreeable and familiar, assuming nothing themselves, and certainly receiving no marks of peculiar favour or deference from their companions. When one knows something of German character, this does not surprise one. As a people, highly imaginative and poetic in temperament, dreamy and contemplative, falling back rather on the past than facing the future, they are infinitely more assailable by souvenirs than promises; and in this wise the ancient fame of a Hohenstauffen has a far firmer hold on the attachment of a Prussian than the hopes he may conceive from his successor. It was by recalling to the German youth the former glories of the Fatherland, that the beautiful queen of that country revived the drooping spirit of the nation. It was over the tomb of the Great Frederick that the monarch swore to his alliance with Alexander against the invading legions of France. The songs of Uhland and Goethe, the lyrics of Burger and Korner, have their source and spirit in the heartfelt patriotism of the people. The great features of the land, and the more striking traits of national character, are inextricably woven in their writings, as if allied to each other; and the Rhine and the male energy of German blood, their native mountains and their native virtues, are made to reciprocate with one another; and thus the eternal landmarks of Germany are consecrated as the altars of its faithfulness and its truth.

The students are a means of perpetuating these notions. The young German is essentially romantic. A poet and a patriot, his dreams are of the greatness of his Fatherland, of its high mission among the nations of Europe; and however he may exaggerate the claims of his country or overrate his own efforts in her cause, his devotion is a noble one; and when sobered down by experience and years, it gives to Germany that race of faithful and high-souled people, the best guardians of her liberty and the most attached defenders of her soil.

A great deal of mauvaise plaisanterie has been expended by French and English authors on the subject of the German student. The theme was perhaps an inviting one. Certainly nothing was easier than to ridicule absurdities in their manner and extravagances in their costume – their long pipes and their long beards, their long skirts and long boots and long sabres, their love of beer and their law-code of honour. Russell, in his little work on Germany – in many respects the only English book worth reading on that country – has been most unjustly severe upon them. As to French authors, one never expects truth from them, except it slip out unconsciously in a work of fiction. Still, they have displayed a more than common spirit of detraction when speaking of the German student. The truth is, they cannot forget the part these same truths performed in repelling the French invasion of their country. The spirit evoked by Kôrner, and responded to from the Hartz to the Black Forest, was the death-note to the dominant tyranny of France. The patriotism which in the Basque provinces called into existence the wild Guerillas, and in the Tyrol created the Jager-bund, in more cultivated Germany elicited that race of poets and warriors whose war-songs aroused the nation from its sleep of slavery, and called them to avenge the injuries of their nation.

Laugh, then, if you will, at the strange figures whose uncouth costumes of cap and jack-boot bespeak them a hybrid between a civilian and a soldier. The exterior is, after all, no bad type of what lies within; its contradictions are indeed scarcely as great. The spectacles and moustaches, the note-book beneath the arm and the sabre at the side, the ink-bottle at the button-hole and the spurs jingling at the heels, are all the outward signs of that extraordinary mixture of patient industry and hot-headed enthusiasm, of deep thought and impetuous rashness, of matter-of-fact shrewdness and poetic fervour, and, lastly, of the most forgiving temper allied to an unconquerable propensity for duelling. Laugh if you will at him, but he is a fine fellow for all that; and despite all the contrarieties of his nature he has the seed of those virtues which in the peaceful life of his native country grow up into the ripe fruits of manly truth and honesty.

I wish you then to think well of the Bursche, and forgive the eccentricities into which a college life and a most absurd doctrine of its ordinances will now and then lead him. That wild-looking youth, for all that he has a sabre-wound across his cheek, and wears his neck bare like a Malay, despite his savage moustache and his lowering look, has a soft heart, though it beats behind that mass of nonsensical braiding. He could recite you for hours long the ballads of Schiller and the lyrics of Uhland; ah! and sing for you, too, with no mean skill, the music of Spohr and Weber, accompanying himself the while on the piano, with a touch that would make your heart thrill. And I am not sure that even in his wildest moments of enthusiastic folly he is not nearly as much an object of hope to his country as though he were making a book on the Derby, or studying ‘the odds’ among the ‘legs’ at Tattersall’s.

Above all things, I would beg of you not to be too hasty in judging him. Put not much trust in half what English writers lay to his charge; believe not one syllable of any Frenchman on the subject – no, not even that estimable Alexandre Dumas, who represents the ‘Student’ as demanding alms on the highroad – thus confounding him with the Lehr-Junker (the travelling apprentice), who by the laws of Germany is obliged to spend two years in wandering through different countries before he is permitted to reside permanently in his own. The blunder would have been too gross for anything but a Frenchman and a Parisian; but the Rue St. Denis covers a multitude of mistakes, and the Boulevard de Montmartre is a dispensation to all truth. Howitt, if you can read a heavy book, will tell you nearly everything a book can tell; but setting a Quaker to describe Burschen life, was pretty much like sending a Hindu to report at a county meeting.

Now, all this time we have been wandering from Bonn and its gardens, sloping down into the very Rhine, and its beautiful park, the former pleasure-ground of that palace which now forms the building of the University. There are few sweeter spots than this. You have escaped from the long, low swamps of Holland, you have left behind you the land of marsh and fog, and already the mountainous region of Germany breaks on the view; the Sieben Gebirge are in sight, and the bold Drachenfels, with its ruined tower on its summit, is an earnest of the glorious scenery to come. The river itself looks brighter and fresher; its eddies seem to sparkle with a lustre they know not when circling along the swampy shores of Nimmegen.

Besides, there is really something in a name, and the sound of Deutschland is pleasanter than that of the country of ‘dull fogs and dank ditches’; and although I would not have you salute it, like Voltaire —

‘Adieu, canaille – canards, canaux!’

still, be thankful for being where you are, take your coffee, and let us have a ramble through the Park.

Alas! the autumn is running into the winter; each breeze that sighs along the ground is the dirge over the dead leaves that lie strewn around us. The bare branches throw their gaunt arms to and fro as the cold grey clouds flit past; the student, too, has donned his fur-lined mantle, and strides along, with cap bent down, and hurried step. But a few weeks since, and these alleys were crowded with gay and smiling groups, lingering beneath the shadow of tall trees, and listening to the Jager band that played in yonder pavilion. The grey-haired professor moved slowly along, uncovering his venerable head as some student passed, and respectfully saluting him; and there too walked his fair daughters, the ‘frauleins with the yellow hair.’ How calmly sweet their full blue eyes! what gentleness is written in their quiet gait! Yet, see! as each bar of the distant waltz is heard beating on the ear, how their footsteps keep time and mark the measure! Alas! the summer hours have fled, and with them those calm nights when by the flickering moon the pathways echoed to the steps of lingering feet now homeward turning.

I never can visit a University town in Germany without a sigh after the time when I was myself a Bursche, read myself to sleep each night with Ludwig Tieck, and sported two broadswords crosswise above my chimney.

I was a student at Göttingen, the Georgia Augusta; and in the days I speak of – I know not well what King Ernest has done since – it was rather a proud thing to be ein Göttinger Bursche. There was considered something of style to appertain to it above the other Universities; and we looked down upon a Heidelberger or a Halle man as only something above a ‘Philister.’ The professors had given a great celebrity to the University too. There was Stromeyer in chemistry, and Hausman in philology; Behr in Greek, Shrader in botany; and, greater than all, old Blumenbach himself, lecturing four days each week on everything he could think of – natural philosophy, physics, geography, anatomy, physiology, optics, colours, metallurgy, magnetism, and the whale-fishery in the South Seas – making the most abstruse and grave subjects interesting by the charm of his manner, and elevating trivial topics into consequence by their connection with weightier matters. He was the only lecturer I ever heard of who concluded his hour to the regret of his hearers, and left them longing for the continuation. Anecdote and illustration fell from him with a profusion almost inconceivable and perfectly miraculous, when it is borne in mind that he rarely was known to repeat himself in a figure, and more rarely still in a story; and when he had detected himself in this latter he would suddenly stop short, with an ‘Ach Gott, I’m growing old,’ and immediately turn into another channel, and by some new and unheard-of history extricate himself from his difficulty. With all the learning of a Buffon and a Cuvier, he was simple and unaffected as a child. His little receptions in the summer months were in his garden. I have him before me this minute, seated under the wide-spreading linden-tree, with his little table before him, holding his coffee and a few books – his long hair, white as snow, escaping beneath his round cap of dark-green velvet, falling loosely on his shoulders, and his large grey eyes, now widely opened with astonishment at some piece of intelligence a boy would have heard without amazement, then twinkling with sly humour at the droll thoughts passing through his mind; while around him sat his brother professors and their families, chatting pleasantly over the little news of their peaceful community – the good vraus knitting and listening, and the frauleins demurely sitting by, wearing a look of mock attention to some learned dissertation, and ever and anon stealing a sly glance at the handsome youth who was honoured by an invitation to the soirée.

How charming, too, to hear them speak of the great men of the land as their old friends and college companions! It was not the author of Wallenstein and Don Carlos, but Frederick Schiller, the student of medicine, as they knew him in his boyhood – bold, ardent, and ambitious; toiling along a path he loved not, and feeling within him the working of that great genius which one day was to make him the pride of his Fatherland; and Wieland, strange and eccentric, old in his youth, with the innocence of a child and the wisdom of a sage; and Hoffman, the victim of his gloomy imagination, whose spectral shapes and dark warnings were not the forced efforts of his brain, but the companions of his wanderings, the beings of his sleep. How did they jest with him on his half-crazed notions, and laugh at his eccentricities! It was strange to hear them tell of going home with Hummel, then a mere boy, and how, as the evening closed in, he sat down to the pianoforte, and played and sang, and played again for hours long, now exciting their wonder by passages of brilliant and glittering effect, now knocking at their hearts by tones of plaintive beauty. There was a little melody he played the night they spoke of – some short and touching ballad, the inspiration of the moment – made on the approaching departure of some one amongst them, which many years after in Fidelio called down thunders of applause; mayhap the tribute of his first audience was a sweeter homage after all.

While thus they chatted on, the great world without and all its mighty interests seemed forgotten by them. France might have taken another choleric fit, and been in march upon the Rhine; England might have once more covered the ocean with her fleets, and scattered to the waves the wreck of another Trafalgar; Russia might be pouring down her hordes from the Don and Dnieper – little chance had they of knowing aught of these things! The orchards that surrounded the ramparts shut out the rest of Europe, and they lived as remote from all the collisions of politics and the strife of nations as though the University had been in another planet.