Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847

When the search, rendered almost hopeless by the extreme darkness and power of the current, was at last abandoned, I hastened to the hotel, and inquired for Madame Sendel. She came to me in a state of great agitation. Van Haubitz had not returned, but she thought less of that than of the state of her daughter, who, since recovering from a long swoon, had been almost distracted with anxiety. She knew some one had been drowned, and her mind misgave her it was her husband. The foraging-cap, which Madame Sendel immediately recognised, removed all uncertainty. The only hope remaining was, that Van Haubitz, although carried rapidly away by the power of the current, had been able to maintain himself on the surface, and had got ashore at some considerable distance down the river, or had been picked up by a passing boat. But this was a very feeble hope, and for my own part, and for more than one reason, I placed no reliance on it. I left Madame Sendel to break the painful intelligence to her daughter, and went home, promising to call again in the morning.

As I had expected, nothing was heard of Van Haubitz, nor any vestige of him found, save the foraging-cap I had picked up. Doubtless, the Rhine had borne down his lifeless corpse to the country of his birth. The next day Coblenz rang with the death of the unfortunate Dutchman. A stranger, and unacquainted with the localities, he was supposed to have walked over the quay by accident. I thought differently; and so I knew did Madame Sendel and Emilie. I saw the former early the next day. She was greatly cast down about her daughter, who had passed a sleepless night, was very weak and suffering, but who nevertheless insisted on continuing her journey the following morning.

"We must go," said her mother; "if we delay, Emilie loses her engagement, and how can we both live on my poor jointure? Weeping will not bring him back, were he worth it. To think of the misery he has caused us!"

I ventured to hint an inquiry as to their means of prosecuting their journey. The old lady understood the intention, and took it kindly. "But she needed no assistance," she said; "Van Haubitz (and this confirmed our strong suspicion of suicide) had given their little stock of money into his wife's keeping only a few hours before his death."

That afternoon I left Coblenz for England.

On a certain Wednesday of the present year, after enjoying the excellent acting of Bouffé in two of his best characters, I paused a moment to speak to a friend in the crowded lobby of the St James's Theatre. Whilst thus engaged, I became aware that I was an object of attention to two persons, whom I had an indistinct notion of having seen before, but when or where, or who they might be, I had not the remotest idea. One of them was a comfortable-looking, middle-aged man, with a bald head, a smooth, clean-shaven face, and an incipient ventral rotundity. His complexion was clear and wholesome, his countenance good-humoured, his whole appearance bespoke an existence free from care, nights of sound sleep, and days of tranquil enjoyment. His face was too sleek to be very expressive, but there was a shrewd, quick look in the eye, and I set him down in my mind as a wealthy German merchant or manufacturer (some small peculiarities of costume betrayed the foreigner) come to show London to his wife—a well-favoured Frau, fat, fair, but some years short of forty—who accompanied him, and who, as well as her better-half, seemed to honour me with very particular notice. My confabulation over, I was leaving the theatre, when a sleek soft hand was gently passed through my arm. It was my friend the fat foreigner. I strained my eyes and my memory, but in vain; I felt very puzzled, and doubtless looked so, for he smiled, and advancing his head, whispered a name in my ear. It was that of Van Haubitz.

I started, looked again, doubted, and was at last convinced. Minus mustache and whisker, which were closely shaven, and half his hair, of which the remainder was considerably grizzled; plus a degree of corpulence such as I should never have thought the slender lieutenant of artillery capable of acquiring; his heated, sun-burnt complexion, and dissipated look, exchanged for a fresh colour and benevolent placidity; the Dutchman I had left on the Rhine stood beside me in the lobby of the French theatre. I turned to the lady: she was less changed than her companion, and now that I was upon the track, I recognised Emilie Sendel. By this time we were in the street. Van Haubitz handed his wife into a carriage.

"Come and sup with us," he said, "and I will explain."

I mechanically obeyed, and in less than three minutes, still tongue-tied by astonishment, I alighted at the door of a fashionable hotel in a street adjoining Piccadilly.

A few lines will convey to the reader the substance of the long conversation which kept the resuscitated Dutchman and myself from our beds for fully two hours after our unexpected meeting. I had been right in supposing that he had thrown himself voluntarily into the river; wrong in my belief that he meditated suicide. An excellent swimmer, he had taken the water to get rid of his wife. He might certainly have chosen a drier method, and have given her the slip in the night-time or on the road; but she had shown, whenever he referred to the possibility of their separation, such a determination to remain with him at all risks and sacrifices, that he felt certain she would be after him as soon as she discovered his absence. He had formed a wild scheme of returning to Amsterdam, and haunting his family until, through mere weariness and vexation, they supplied him with funds for all outfit to Sumatra. There he trusted to redeem his fortunes, as he had heard that others of no greater abilities or better character than himself had already done. A more extravagant project was never formed, and indeed all his acts, during the six weeks that followed his marriage, were more or less eccentric and ill-judged. This he admitted, when relating them to me, and probably would not have been sorry to place them to the score of actual mental derangement. The only redeeming touch in his conduct, at that, the blackest period of his life, was his leaving, as I have already mentioned, what money he had to his wife and her mother, reserving but a few florins for his own support.

With these in his pocket, he proposed proceeding on foot to Amsterdam. After landing on the right bank of the Rhine, he walked the greater part of the night, as the best means of drying his saturated garments. When weariness at last compelled him to pause, it was not yet daylight, no house was open, and he threw himself on some straw in a farm-yard. He awoke in a high fever, the result of his immersion, of exposure and fatigue, acting on a frame heated and weakened by anxiety and mental suffering. He obtained shelter at the neighboring farm-house, whose kind-hearted inhabitants carefully tended him for several weeks, during which his life was more than once despaired of. His convalescence was long, and not till the close of the year could he resume his journey northwards, by short stages, chiefly on foot. Unfavourable as his prospects were, his good star had not yet set. This very illness, as occasioning a delay, was a stroke of good fortune. Had he at once proceeded to Holland, his family, in hopes to get rid of him for ever, would probably have given him the small sum he needed for an outfit to the Indian Archipelago, and he would have sailed thither before the 31st of December, on which day his father, a joyous liver, and confirmed votary of Bacchus, eat and drank to such an extent to celebrate the exit of the old year and commencement of the new, that he fell down, on his way to his bed, in a thundering fit of apoplexy, and was a corpse before morning. The day of his funeral, Van Haubitz, footsore and emaciated, and reduced to his last pfenning, walked wearily into the city of Amsterdam. There a great surprise awaited him.

"Your father had not disinherited you?" I exclaimed, when the Dutchman made a momentary pause at this point of his narrative.

"He had left a will devising his entire property to my brothers, and not even naming me. But a slight formality was omitted, which rendered the document of no more value than the parchment it was drawn upon. The signature was wanting. My father had the weakness, no uncommon one, of disliking whatever reminded him of his mortality. He would have fancied himself nearer his grave had he signed his will. And thus he had delayed till it was too late. I found myself joint heir with my brothers. By far the greater part of my father's large capital was embarked in his bank, and in extensive financial operations, which it would have been necessary to liquidate at considerable disadvantage, to operate the partition prescribed by law. Seeing this, I proposed to my brothers to admit me as partner in the firm, with the stipulation that I should have no active share in its direction, until my knowledge of business and steadiness of conduct gave them the requisite confidence in me. After some deliberation they agreed to this; and three years later their opinion of me had undergone such a change, that two of them retired to estates in the country, leaving me the chief management of the concern."

"And Madame Van Haubitz; when did she rejoin you?"

"Immediately the change in my fortunes occurred. Reckless as I at that time was, and utterly devoid of feeling as you must have thought me, I could not remember without emotion the disinterested affection, delicacy, and unselfishness she had exhibited on discovery of my real circumstances. During my long illness I had had time to reflect, and when I left my sick-bed in that rude but hospitable German farm-house, it was as a penitent past offences, and with a strong resolution to atone them. Within a week after my father's funeral, I was on my way to Vienna, to fetch Emilie to the opulent home she had anticipated when she married me. Her joy at seeing me was scarcely increased when she heard I now really was the rich banker she had at first thought me."

"And Madame Sendel?"

"Returned to Amsterdam with us. There was good about the old lady, and by purloining her artificials, limiting her snuff, and soaking her in tea, she was made endurable enough. Until her death, which occurred a couple of years ago, she passed her time alternately with us and her younger daughter."

"She became reconciled to Mademoiselle, Ameline?"

"Ameline had been Countess J——all the time. She was privately married. For certain family reasons the Count had conditioned that their union should for a while be kept secret. Seeing that her equivocal position and her mother's displeasure preyed upon her health and spirits, he declared his marriage. She left the stage to become a reigning beauty in the best society of Austria, lady of half a dozen castles, and sovereign mistress of as many thousand Hungarian boors."

Van Haubitz remained some time in London, and I saw him often. He was as much changed in character as in personal appearance. The sharp lessons received, about the period of our first acquaintance, had made a strong impression on him; and the summer-tide of prosperity suddenly setting in, had enabled him to realise good intentions and honourable resolves, which the chill current of adversity might have frozen in the germ. Some of those who read these lines may have occasion, when visiting the country stigmatised by the snarling Frenchman as the land of canards, canaux, and canaille, to receive cash in the busy counting-house, and hospitality the princely mansion of one of its most respected bankers. None, I am well assured, will discern in their amiable and exemplary entertainer any vestige of the disreputable impulses and evil passions that sullied the early life of "My Friend the Dutchman."

1

The Improvisatore; or, Life in Italy, from the Danish of Hans Christian Andersen. Translated by Mary Howitt.

Only a Fiddler! and O.T. or, Life in Denmark, by the Author of The Improvisatore. Translated by Mary Howitt.

A True Story of my Life, by Hans Christian Andersen. Translated by Mary Howitt.

Tales from Denmark. Translated by Charles Bonar.

A Picture-Book without Pictures. Translated by Meta Taylor.

The Shoes of Fortune, and other Tales.

A Poet's Bazaar. Translated by Charles Beckwith, Esq.

2

See Allan Cunningham's Lives of the Painters and Sculptors, vol. ii. p. 150.

3

Not very clearly expressed by the translator. One would think that our Saviour, in his progress to the cross, had passed through the area of the Coliseum, and not that each of the pictures on these altars represented one of the resting-points, &c. Mrs Howitt is sometimes hasty and careless in her writing. And why does she employ such expressions as these:—"many white buttons," "beside of it," "beside of us?" We have read a many English books, but never met them in anyone beside of this.

4

Vol. x, Nov. 1821, p. 373.

5

Béranger has already conveyed this truth through the melody of his delicious verse:—

"Le vois-tu bien, là-bas, là-bas,

Là-bas, là-bas? dit l'Espérance;

Bourgeois, manants, rois et prelats

Lui font de loin la révérence.

C'est le Bonheur, dit l'Espérance.

Courons, courons; doublons le pas,

Pour le trouver là-bas, là-bas,

Là-bas, là-bas."

6

"I did not dare to breathe aloud the unhallowed anguish of my mind to the majesty of the unsympathising stars."—See Falkland.

7

"Motus autem siderum," such is the reverent and sententious remark of Grotius, "qui eccentrici, quique epicyclici dicuntur, manifeste ostendunt non vim materiæ, sed liberi agentis ordinationem."—See De Veritate Rel. Christ. Lib. i. § 7.

8

"Now, there was a word spoken to me in private, and my ears, by stealth as it were, received the veins of its whisper."—Job, chap. iv. verse 12.

9

"There is a roaring in the bleak-grown pines When Winter lifts his voice; there is a noise Among immortals when a god gives sign With hushing finger, how he means to load His tongue with the full weight of utterless thought, With thunder, and with music, and with pomp."

Such are the majestic syllables which preface the speech of Saturn in Hyperion. Keats was ridding himself of the puerilities of Cockaigne when he wrote that fragment of an epic—a fragment which is unsurpassed by any modern attempt at heroic composition. In reading it, the very earth seems shaking with the footsteps of fallen divinities. Even Byron, who, like ourselves, had no great predilection for the school in which the poetic genius of John Keats was germinated, has emphatically said of Hyperion that "it seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Æschylus."—See Byron's Works, vol. xv., p. 92.

10

Thus writes Suetonius—"prægrandibus oculis, qui, quod mirum esset, noctu etiam et in tenebris, viderent, sed ad breve, et quum primum a somno patuissent; deinde rursum hebescebant."—Tib. cap. lxviii.

11

Those who are familiar with the classic historians, will see in this description no exaggeration whatever. Instruments for the destruction of life yet more awful and mysterious, were employed by many of the predecessors, and many of the successors of Tiberius, as well as by Tiberius himself: and modern science has shown that these devices, instead of being, as was originally conjectured, the result of black-magic, were, in reality, the effect of hydraulic, pneumatic, and mechanical contrivances. Even the most marvellous feats of the Egyptian sorcerers have been latterly explained by the revelations of natural philosophy, and a multitude of these explanations may be found by the reader in the learned work "Des Sciences Occultes," &c. written by M. Eusebe Salverte, and published in Paris as recently as 1843. In that remarkable volume, M. Salverte proves that natural phenomena are more startling than necromantic tricks, and that, in the words of Roger Bacon, "non igitur oportet nos magicis illusionibus uti, cum potestas philosophica doceat operari quod sufficit." That Tiberius was capable of atrocities yet more terrific, and that murders of the most inhuman kind were the consequence of almost every one of his diabolical whims, those acquainted with the picturesque narrative of Suetonius already know. They will remember not only how he caused his nephew Germanicus to be poisoned by the governor of Syria, but how he ordered a fisherman to be torn in pieces by the claws of a crab, simply because he met him, in one of his suspicious moods, when strolling in a sequestered garden of Capreæ.—Sue. Tib. c. lx.

12

Suetonius assures us (cap. lxviii.), that the muscular strength of Tiberius Claudius Nero was, in the prime of his manhood, almost as supernatural as his crimes; that he could with his outstretched finger bore a hole through a sound apple (integrum malum digito terebraret), and wound the head of a child or even a youth with a fillip, (caput pueri, vel etiam adolescentis, talitro vulneraret.) His excesses must, however, have enervated his frame long before his death by suffocation.

13

His garb, writes Josephus, "was so resplendent as to spread a horror over those that looked intently upon Him."—Lib. xix. c. 8.

14

"An owl," says Josephus (xix. 8); "an angel of the Lord," αγγελος Κυριου, say the scriptures, (Acts. xii. 23,)—in either case a spectral illusion.

15

It is impossible for anyone devoted to the study of "Paradise Lost," of "Comus," even of "Sampson Agonistes," and especially of "Il Pensoroso" and "L'Allegro," to doubt that their writer was carried away at times by the œstrum, or divine afflatus, although Dr Johnson discredits "these bursts of light, and involutions of darkness, these transient and involuntary excursions and retrocessions of invention."—See Lives of the Poets, vol. i. p. 188.

16

Even M. Alphonse de Lamartine acknowledges of Mirabeau, that "neither his character, his deeds, nor his thoughts, have the brand of immortality."—Hist. Giron. Liv. i. chap. 3.

17

This incident was suggested by a touching sentence in Schindler's biography of Beethoven. After observing that the outward sense no longer co-operated with the inward mind of the great composer, and that, consequently, "the outpourings of his fancy became scarcely intelligible," Schindler continues:—"Sometimes he would lay his left hand flat upon the key-board, and thus drown, in discordant noise, the music to which his right was feelingly giving utterance."—See Life of Beethoven, Edited by Ignace Moschelles, ii. 175.

18

Memoirs of Viscountess Sundon. By Mrs Thompson. 2 Vols. Colburn.

19

Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den Christlichen Völkern. Von Gottfried Kinkel.

20

Psalm xlii. 1.

21

1 Cor. ix. 9.

22

Rev. v. 5.

23

John, i. 29, and Rev. v. 6.

24

A kind of bazaar or perpetual market, where second-hand furniture, old books and pictures, earthenware, and other cheap commodities, are exposed for sale in small open booths.

25

A personage who figures, like two or three others afterwards alluded to, in the popular legends and fairy tales of Russia.

26

Twenty-five rubles.

27

A silver coin, about the size of a shilling, the quarter of a silver ruble (und e nomen) worth ninepence.

28

The officer commanding the police of the quarter.

29

The Russian house-spirit. This "lubber fiend" is frequently the popular name of the nightmare.

30

The "was-ist-das," a single pane of glass fixed in a frame, to admit of its being opened, very necessary in a climate where double casements are fixed during eight months out of the year.

31

Badham's Juvenal, Sat. 8.