Works ›The Novel of My Life

Chapter 10“Mors Imperator”»MORS IMPERATOR«

draft

📖 This chapter with the German alongside →

And soon afterwards I began my great picture, which after long debates — at first it was to be called “Rex regum”1 — I entitled “Mors Imperator.” I painted at it a long time, almost a year — then it was finished; my few friends found it excellent — and I sent it to the Great Exhibition in Berlin. Professor Becker was still president of the Academy then.

Prince Ernst of Meiningen was passing through, and Becker was showing him round the exhibition before it opened. “Where is Mors Imperator by Hermione von Preuschen?” he asked. “The picture is excellent, certainly,” the professor explained, “only we cannot do that to the aged Emperor2, so crass a memento mori. We shall inform the painter that it is the crooked execution of a crooked thought, and therefore inadmissible.” —

Prince Ernst, much astonished, telegraphed me the affair. Two hours later I was sitting in the express to Berlin, arrived there at daybreak, and soon afterwards went to Professor Becker myself. He confirmed to me the “crooked impression of a crooked thought.” “And if I now bring you the Emperor's personal declaration that he himself takes no exception to the picture?” — “You will hardly obtain that.”

But I set heaven and hell in motion, and was soon assured in black and white3 that His Majesty personally took no offence at the exhibiting of the picture. —

Triumphant, I hurried with it to Becker. A new council was convened. But the jurors held to their pronouncement: the crooked execution of a crooked thought. They were afraid of the vox populi! A good deal had already got out about the affair, and the most contradictory paragraphs were chasing one another through the press. The wildest rumours now began to outbid each other. I was supposed to have made the most incredible demands about how it was to be exhibited. Among others, only in a room hung with black and by wax candlelight. Every paper carried life stories or caricatures of me. The one in “Ulk”4 I still remember: Preuschen: “Will you reject my next picture too, Professor?”

“No, Madame, I shall not do you that favour again.” —

So I rented a place (on the corner of the Markgrafenstraße) and exhibited the picture on my own account. The crush was tremendous. Telegrams about the opening were sent out by every newspaper. On the first morning, between nine and eleven o'clock, the painting had already been viewed by over five hundred people. Here I held it in my hand, to compel my fate and seize the spirit of the age by the “forelock.” — I did not take hold of it rightly; it all slipped away from me again, and the great sensational success of Mors Imperator proves today to be the curse of my life5. It granted me an exceptional position as an “outsider.” Today the closed phalanx of the art dealers, and of the fashionable painters they favour, will have nothing to do with the “outsider” who once managed to obtain dizzying day-fame and glittering day-gold.

But in those days I was in everyone's mouth. How it went to my head! I still remember that the pavements from the Potsdamer Platz to the Markgrafenstraße lay full of the little yellow papers — the entrance tickets to my picture. Like carnival! And it was indeed the carnival of my life — which was very soon to be followed by a grisly Ash Wednesday. But at the time I noticed nothing of that. Every morning and every midday I fetched myself pocketfuls of money from my exhibition. —

Friedrich Dernburg, the brilliant journalist, my closer countryman from Darmstadt, in whose house I went about a great deal in Berlin, took up the cause of my Mors Imperator exhibition quite particularly. With him I had published a broadsheet6 about the “Ruler Death, crowned with the iron ring of necessity.” That became a proverb in those days. In the restaurants people everywhere talked of nothing but Mors Imperator and its painter. “That must be a bold piece of woman; I should like to meet her,” I once heard a gentleman next to me say. I had trouble restraining my companion from saying: “You are sitting next to her!”

Yes, that time went to my head like intoxication. But it became a curse to me. All the same, with the exhibiting of Mors Imperator alone I earned over fifty thousand marks7 in the course of five years. Later I sold the picture comparatively cheaply to the merchant Fritz in Zurich8. He then lent it to me a few times more for “Preuschen exhibitions,” and wanted, so I heard, to sell it again.

On the thrones the great dying now began, “called up,” as people said, by my picture9. First the old Emperor died! Then came the tragedy of the Crown Prince Rudolf, and then the most shattering of all: the Emperor and Empress Frederick. —

I had always been in lively correspondence with the Crown Princess. She had often answered me at length, though usually without a signature. And so I sent her, trustingly and with no suspicion, a large photograph of Mors Imperator, several weeks before it appeared in public. The Crown Prince was suffering from his throat at the time, and had travelled to England with his wife to consult Dr. Mackenzie. Mackenzie had just explained to the Crown Princess the cancerous nature of the illness. Shaken to the depths, she travelled home, found my letter there, and opened it joyfully, recognising my handwriting. And into her hand falls the picture “Mors Imperator”!10 From that hour I have never seen her again; she never wrote to me again; she conceived a superstitious aversion to me. Her lady-in-waiting, Countess Kalckreuth, told me so much later. —

No, Mors Imperator brought me no good fortune in any way, for all the outward, roaring, ringing success. The picture became the curse of my life. I have to keep repeating it.

When I came back from Berlin the whole world seemed at first transformed to me. I travelled for several weeks to Venice and the Riviera, to recover from all the work, the excitement and — from Oswald. When I returned, everything seemed to be getting a little better. My old Karlsruhe friend Emma L.11 had moved to Munich as D.'s pupil. She soon called for me every afternoon to go walking. But she grew more uncanny to me every day. For several years she had spent long months with D. among the fishermen at Chioggia, and it seemed to me that she nursed a great, secret passion for the thoroughly happily married artist. After that she became acquainted with the Ibsens by chance, went a great deal to the house, and dropped hints to me of a forbidden love of Ibsen's for her12. I did not really believe her — I knew Ibsen and his dry manner far too well; we too had been treated most faithfully by them in Munich — after Gossensaß — and were often at the house.

Every New Year's Eve we drank punch there and ate Frau Ibsen's “self-piped” piped cakes. That was the one time in the year that I was warm in the otherwise so chilly suite of rooms in the Maximilianstraße, with their old Italian pictures of saints. “My wife suffers from hot flushes,” the poet would explain as he whirred up and down the long row of rooms, rubbing his hands, plagued by cold, restless as a bat. But at New Year it was warm, and he drank a very thorough New Year punch and then became wonderfully animated, spoke of his dramas, his problems, and of how his figures pressed on him with tangible solidity. “Rebekka West has a cornflower-blue dress and a white bib apron.”13 The sentence is unforgettable to me. Just then the “Gjengangere,” the Ghosts, were making their triumphal progress through the world.

Of Emma L. he never spoke to me, although he knew she was my friend. And when I once asked him, he only said, smiling: “Poor thing.” —

But I now saw her daily. She had a studio with an apartment in the Landwehrstraße, and her pictures were a poor copy of Gude and D., good, but without a personal note. The fame of Mors Imperator had got badly on her nerves. She was also hungry for fame and sick with love. How much so, I only understood fully some years later. But as I said, at that time she was uncanny to me. She told me, with flickering eyes, about the love-nights of her studio neighbour, that she understood every word — that she did not have to put up with it. And then, quite abruptly: “I dance every night now!” — “You dance?” — “Yes, in front of the mirror, naked; it is very beautiful and my only joy!” I looked at her, appalled. Her eyes glowed madly. — —

A few years later she took her own life. Beforehand she had brought all her pictures to an exhibition at the Kunstverein. On the morning of the opening she shot herself.14 — That caused a sensation, and brought the pictures a great crowd. Since the exhibition was postponed by a fortnight, she had to bear the lonely torment of awaiting death a fortnight longer. Poor creature! Not much love came to her longing for love in death! She had written me a farewell letter, to Italy, where I was staying at the time. When I came back to Munich I went to the portress of her studio apartment and had her tell me these dreadful outward last details.

To her too the “thousand voices in the depths” had lied, and she succumbed to her unsatisfied craving for love. At that time, though, she called for me every day for a walk or to hunt for antiques, and indulged in mysterious hints about monstrous passions. It was not healthy company for me. —

I had now begun a picture: “Irene von Spilimberg on the Death-Gondola.”15 The picture that Scheffel's words had called up before my soul back in my earliest youth: the lying-in-state of the great woman painter, Titian's last beloved, on the Piazzetta, garlanded with flowers by the people. I lived through the whole unwritten Scheffel novel again, the poet having been driven out of Venice by the cholera in the midst of his detailed source-study for it, so that he had to flee to Castel Toblino. Everything came back to me that he had told me then. But I also went to the library and fetched out the relevant books. A shining artist's life rose up before me. How the young artist had come down from her battlemented castle in Friuli, had risen like a meteor over Venice, and had gone out again just as fast. Over her studio she had written the motto: “Si fata tulissent.” —

But the gods had not willed it. The meteor went out at twenty-one, by a rival's dagger or by poison. The story becomes unclear at this point. Following a bizarre whim, I decided to give Irene my own features. She was, after all, a painter and a poet like me. Blonde and blue-eyed into the bargain. I had myself photographed life-size as a corpse. I still possess the picture.16 I shall probably not look very different on the last pillow — “as human features, when life has gone out — with its low, small everyday doings, find their way back to the noble form — that the passion of living blurred — back to the beauty of their young soul.”

These lines are my own, and are, I believe, true.

Later, long after I had finished the picture and steered my life into other channels, I was in Friuli and at the castle of the Spilimberghi. And saw Titian's original portrait of Irene in the castle of the Counts Maniago, a family related to Irene's line. Very, very strange days I spent there. They gave me the impulse for my novella “Im Friaul,”17 which appeared at the time in “Westermanns Monatshefte” and then in the volume of novellas Tollkraut.

At home things did not grow more comfortable. I spent a summer on Sylt and fetched fresh strength of nerve from its surf. Oswald's letters then always became so mild and conciliatory that I talked myself round again into believing that everything was my fault alone, and returned with the very best intentions to the Findlingsstraße, with its view of the pale chain of Alps.

And then suddenly came the realisation that I was in a certain condition for the second time. I was beside myself about it, turned over the darkest thoughts — but nothing was any use. Oswald sent me to Warnemünde the following summer to build up my strength, and I came home far advanced. The birth was normal; it was a boy, and he was baptised Botho18! He was black as a little devil and had a great resemblance to his father. —

Soon I had got over it all. The christening went off comparatively splendidly. Prince Ernst was present.

It became summer again. It was the Writers' Day in Munich. We meant to attend. But Princess Marie of Meiningen, our friend's sister, had put up at the “Rheinischer Hof” and had invited us to breakfast. It grew very late for the excursion to Tutzing that the writers' association was making. Oswald gave it up, but since the Jensens wanted to come too, who had recently moved to Munich, I went alone. (I had introduced the prince to the Jensens. He had fallen in love with the fifteen-year-old Käthe19, and three years later they became man and wife.)

I got into the departing train just in time. In those days I wore what was called a Goethe plait.

At Tutzing all the writers were presented to me, among others the novelist Konrad Telmann20. He told me that years before — prompted to it by the Jensens — he had wanted to visit me in Rome, but had refrained out of shyness after all. He also presented his mother to me, Frau Justizrätin Zitelmann. A very dear, talkative old lady. The next day we met again at the Chiemsee. Oswald had come along this time too, and the two men — the great blond giant with the speaking eyes, the red beard and the sunken chest, and Oswald, the small, dainty artist of living with the short-sighted velvet gaze, seemed extremely congenial to each other at this first meeting.

The next day Telmann visited us with his mother. Then they travelled on. — I heard nothing from them for a few weeks, and had all kinds of upsets with Leni, who turned out to be a thief and a prostitute under police supervision, and was being secretly treated with mercury21. It was a dreadful discovery. For years she had been taking bedding and linen to the pawn office with the help of the landlady, humbugging her that it was being done for the poor mistress and in her name. Everyone shuddered at the depth of corruption in this so open-hearted-looking Upper Bavarian girl. Naturally we sent her packing. Later she was cured again, and ended as a child-murderer in prison. In our house she had had the most various male visitors every night, and for a long time nobody in the building had noticed.

“You can hardly deny this person breadth of vision,” I remarked to Oswald.

I had recently brought out my first poems, “Regina Vitae,”22 with a Berlin publisher. Theodor Storm, as I have already written, spoke of their strong and great talent; but Paul Heyse was appalled at them. “These are stammered pages of a diary — far too intimate for the public.” — There was a poem to Oswald in it, too:

“You have come — an angel of light, yet light is akin to fire — and you will go — a demon of nothing23, who has burnt my life to ashes.”

After the shock with Leni I went for a few weeks with a new maid and the children to the “Ellerburg,” the inn near Kufstein was called something like that. Oswald went to Colberg.

At Kufstein I painted a few flower pieces and took long walks into the Kaisergebirge. The children stayed with the maid close by the house. Some time before, I had sent my poems “Regina vitae” to Telmann and asked for his judgement. Once I had stayed out longer, and was coming back from an enormous walk. On the way home my poem “Solitude”24 had come into my mind (which many maintained was my best):

“My heart's blood I would give — could it redeem me from you, O solitude! —”

The children were already asleep with the maid in the next room. In the dark I reach onto the table for the matches and get hold of a small parcel, evidently a book.

I make a light and find a book and a letter from Konrad Telmann. In it he says: “How can one apply the everyday yardstick to a creature of genius25 — there is always a little gypsy blood in it as well.” — I could not help laughing when I thought of Oswald's years of effort to make a correct everyday lady out of me.

About “Regina vitae” he wrote: “Perhaps this and that in it may be found fault with by some; but this these poems do show: that you are a real, genuine poet by the grace of God.”

The letter was of 22 September. On 5 October the second came. And then in May the last letter before the first momentous meeting again — before the decision of three human destinies!