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Chapter 5Spreading WingsFLÜGELSPANNEN

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Now, then, I belonged in full standing to the Christian community, and accompanied my mother, much more self-assured now, every Sunday into the court church, where we throned on red velvet cushions on the right-hand dais, in the so-called “court-stall.” I believe that must have impressed the dear Lord too! And after the — I almost said exhibition — after the church ceremony, then, came a general shaking of hands and greeting, an inspecting and appraising of toilettes, a bowing towards the adjoining box of Their Most Exalted Highnesses — really uplifting.

Sometimes afterwards I would still go to the picture gallery or the museum, which were then still in the old palace; most gladly of all, to be sure, to the plaster casts in the hall of antiquities, which my mother did not like to see. She found it improper for young girls. Even then I found the green fig-leaves on the white plaster figures improper in the highest degree. But I could never walk through the old rooms without thinking of the famous “White Lady” of the Darmstadt palace. (Every respectable princely castle that respects itself possesses one, after all.) She was once called Countess von Orlamünde and is said to have stabbed her children to death with a needle. Or her husband — I no longer rightly know. But I had already often looked at her portrait in the hunting-lodge of Kranichstein with a faint shudder. — The White Lady! —

Even if I said earlier that I possessed no friend, I must nevertheless commemorate one playmate of my youth, or rather companion. She was, to be sure, several years older than I, and mentally ahead of her years. She was called Anna von Krane and had an old governess, Fräulein Josse, who before her had brought up “Carmen Sylva1,” the Queen of Romania, at Wied on the Rhine, and was still quite filled with her princely charge. She achieved the utmost in drill that an instructress can bring off. She was also Lutheran-pious in the extreme, and bore a strong resemblance to old Queen Victoria; inwardly too, I fear, for her blue-red complexion might have suggested secret drink, had she not been so very correct. From my tenth year I came every Saturday afternoon to Anna von Krane’s to draw. Anna was just as gifted as I, that is, in quite a different direction. There was always fresh crumb-cake, and Fräulein Josse read aloud to us, Fouqué’s “Magic Ring,” “Oberon,” and similar books of wonder. Anna was great friends with the same-aged Marie, Princess Battenberg, later Princess of Erbach. Life has torn all three of us apart.

Anna's chief doll was called “Penelope” and had a Greek peplos. As a grown girl she conducted only learned conversations at court balls. “Don't you find this heat reminds one of the leaden roofs of Venice?” The lieutenants were afraid of her erudition. Later everything relaxed, even the correctness! She moved with her father, a onetime officer of very strong artistic bent, to Düsseldorf and secretly converted to Catholicism. Fräulein Josse maintained that this was her death-blow. Anna von Krane is now a well-known author of decidedly Catholic books. — — —

Then I still associated a little with my cousins. In the child-rich house of the Chamberlain and Councillor of State and his wife, a Baroness Löw von Steinfurth, everything went topsy-turvy. Later the distinguished girls founded a kind of boarding-house for young foreigners, which throve quite well but filled my correct parents with dismay. Two of the sons became generals.

The father, my father's brother, was a highly gifted, very musical man.

But for two years, after my confirmation, I had two intimate friends: Mina Hahn, later Frau Renz, and Amalie Kühn, who afterwards married an aniline manufacturer. Mina Hahn came with her mother from Worms when I was about sixteen. We quickly became friends. She seemed to be enthusiastic about me and everything freer and more artistic. Frau Hahn owned a charming villa in Seeheim on the Bergstrasse. There, with Mina and Amalie Kühn, I spent unforgettable, romantic summer weeks in the rose season. It was like a fairy tale. Every day we wandered to another castle-ruin overgrown and fragrant with elder. Never before had the deep beauty of life so dawned on me. How harmlessly happy we were, how merrily we raved! There too we read Storm's novella “Rose Season.” “There are days that are like roses.” We quoted it hourly and roused ourselves to an enthusiastic letter of youth to the poet. By return came Theodor Storm's answer: “Dear young German girls, a greeting from youth — what dearer thing could befall me.” From this there gradually spun a correspondence between me and Storm that lasted until his death, that furthered and gladdened me infinitely, and of which I shall sometimes tell more.

From early to late we roamed in Seeheim through the wonderful beech-wood. When I think of that time, a folk-song always comes to mind that we sang then: “There once was a Jewess, a wondrously beautiful woman.” Seeheim has long since been sold to Mina's cousin, the brother of the later envoy v. S.; the friends I lost long ago — through life, through outward circumstances — not through death. — —

At that time my innermost destiny concentrated itself into isolated travel-experiences, for at home I liked it less and less. I had, one after another, painting lessons from various teachers, but that was all dilettante stuff and afforded me no inner satisfaction. At last my father allowed me a single weekly lesson from the Riviera-painter Christian Morgenstern in Frankfurt am Main. He too did not satisfy me. The much-esteemed painter, whose fine southern atmospheric moods pleased me, had me copy from his own pictures; but I felt that the painter Schlösser was right, and that only the study of nature could be of use to me. Nevertheless I gladly went to Frankfurt, because after painting until two o'clock I looked over the city in the afternoons. With what feelings I visited, again and again, the Goethe house! And revelled in the tropical charms, the camellia-splendour, of the Palm Garden. — Regularly I took my chocolate at de Giorgi's. Even now, when I pass this chocolate factory and breathe its scent, it wafts over me like a breath out of my earliest youth. With overwhelming power! —

And then I was invited to relatives, Baron and Baroness Schwartzenau in Oestrich-Winkel in the Rheingau. A glorious autumn I enjoyed there, we made wonderful walking-tours (the fat Schwartzenaus were sturdy walkers all the same) to the Hallgarter Zange and many other viewpoints. But more than in all this I lived here, at her grave, in the life and death of Karoline von Günderode2, in her morbid passion for the composer Creuzer. At the edge of the churchyard, at the grave of the suicide, deeply shaken, I read the words: “O thou Ether, my father, o thou Earth, my mother — take me up into infinity.” Or something like it. A veritable cult I made of Karoline.

And then the good Schwartzenaus took me along to Eltville, to Fräulein Lademann. The nearly eighty-year-old lady had known Goethe in her youth and never tired of telling of it. Like a seeress she seemed to me in her enthusiasm.

But most gloriously of all life opened to me when I followed an invitation of my father's friend of youth, Frau von Palézieux, to Vevey.

My first larger journey!

Beforehand I had also been with my good aunt Ottilie on a “student walking-trip” to Wilhelmshöhe and believed that there could be nothing greater in the world than the view from the Hercules on the Habichtswald.

But now, for the first time, the wide world and the wonders of the snow-mountains opened to me. To be sure, in the hospitable, child-rich house I was supposed to sit still a great deal or play tennis, which suited me less. I almost perished of inner impatience. And I shall never forget how a friend of the house once said to me reprovingly: “Vous n'êtes pas en voyage içi, vous êtes en séjour.” [You are not travelling here; you are staying.] — But soon I could bear it no longer and resolved to help myself.

On the next short summer night I got up secretly at four o'clock and rode to Chillon. There I stood in Bonivard's prison and recited Byron's “Prisoner” to myself with deepest feeling: “My hair is grey, but not with years3.” Byron was then my idol. By nine o'clock I was sitting innocently again at the coffee-table of the Palézieux family. “Afterwards we'll drive with our dear guest to Chillon,” the hostess suddenly said. And a few hours later I stood once more before the astonished castellan-woman. I pulled my hat low over my face and was ashamed to death. “Mais je connais donc cette demoiselle,” the woman said half-aloud and puzzled. [But surely I know this young lady.] I turned blood-red and pretended not to understand. —

But we made still other glorious excursions. “Do you see the white up there in the mountains?” said Mela Palézieux, the eldest daughter. “Is that snow?” I asked. “No, but the narcissus fields of Les Avants. We'll climb up there tomorrow.” It was a full day's tour. Now a rack-railway runs up there, and stately hotels rise everywhere; I was up there again later. But then it was more beautiful, in the boundless narcissus-splendour dammed in by no cultivation.

Blossom crowded on blossom, the slender stalks pressed together, and the scent surged over them like a stupefying cloud. An experience, one never to be forgotten, were these fragrant narcissus fields to me! And another, just as great: the blooming rose-hedges in Glion and Montreux, everywhere. After the accustomed Nordic meagreness I simply could not grasp it, and could not comprehend that my hostess's family behaved so coolly toward all these splendours. And then the Dent du Midi in the alpenglow! And the Savoy mountains! — Geneva in its grandeur almost frightened me. — On the way back I spent eight more wonder-rich days with my favourite uncle Eduard, General von Fransecky, the hero of Sadowa4, who had become governor of Strasbourg. He lived in the palace-like government building on the Broglie. I had a whole suite of genuine rococo rooms, received daily military serenades and fresh bunches of roses. But what was all that against the Minster! Every free moment I slipped over into its glowing dark. In Erwin von Steinbach5's fairy-tale turned to stone I understood for the first time the much-mocked saying: “Architecture is frozen music.” All the most glorious cathedrals in the world I later saw, and all the greatest places of worship on earth; nothing has shaken and carried me away more than the Strasbourg Minster. The young Goethe I saw in spirit standing beside me, up on the tower, where with reverent awe I looked at his and Byron's signatures scratched in stone. — But nothing penetrated deeper into my soul than the mystical glow of colour of the old stained-glass windows when the sun shone through them. It stirred in me dark blisses like those the little child once felt crouching under the piano when my father made music. I felt it, even if quite unconsciously, already then: such moments of being loosed from all earthly things, from the “everyday,” are for the artist's soul the only ones worth living. — What all I wanted, I did not know, but it surged chaotically within me, like balls of mist behind which the sun wrestles. Would it break through? Radiant and great? Or would only a brief flash of sun clear the chaotic struggle for moments? Is not every human life, more or less, a battle between mist and sun? —

When, after all these experiences, I returned to Darmstadt to my parents' house, I felt ever stranger and lonelier. Ever more I strove out into the wide world! My longing was for an art school, for thorough study. But first I was to be introduced into the world of society. To be led to “court”! My otherwise so anxiously thrifty mother made the most wonderful toilette-purchases for me in Frankfurt. — The old fat Grand Duke Ludwig had died a year before. To be presented to him is said to have been very amusing; he always murmured something unintelligible that the initiated interpreted as “white beans, black beans, black beans, white beans.”

The new Grand Duke Ludwig, however, had an English princess for a wife, the brilliant Grand Duchess Alice6. She had heard of my talent for painting and took a quite special interest in me, personally took me under her wing.

The first court ball! I wept bitterly beforehand and implored my mother not to lead me into the “world,” this society-world — (the word seemed a mockery to me), for I was surely far too ugly. Ah — after a few months I had already become excessively vain about outward personal advantages. My first ball-gown I always remember. Blue-grey tarlatan, the airy flounces held everywhere with pale-pink and black silk bows. The colours harmonized gloriously. “Why, in this dress you look like rosy-fingered Eos,” said Anna von Krane in her very own style. —

This winter then pleased me very much. Amid sheer dancing and pleasure and vain worldly splendour, all my dark cravings paled for a few months. Besides, I had conceived a platonic passion for an English legation attaché, Mr. Jerningham. He had not the slightest designs on me, but he had said to someone of me, “She is very pretty,” and had given me a camellia at the cotillion. That sufficed my fantastical heart. I made English poems then. One of them I still remember: “My love was mad, my love was wild, why hast thou captured me, o Hugh, thy false, false words beguiled me to Eternity.” — —

He then soon became engaged to an American widow, a quadruple millionairess, and suddenly vanished from the scene. And my longings awoke again. — — —