Chapter 75Inge — HelgaINGE — HELGA
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
In these last two years, after finishing the travel studies I had brought home with me, I had trained myself more and more into a “Tempio painter,” that is to say, I tried more and more to get behind the painterly soul of this whole creation of mine, hall, dwelling house, park and the grounds adjoining. So I painted ever new and ever larger studies of every corner and end of park and house and hall. At every hour of the day and in every season of the year!
In winter ice and snow landscapes1: firs heavy-laden with snow, from the studio window; then the first green of spring, a magnolia tree covered over with blossom, Azalea mollis in orange flames before the sphinxes at the entrance to the hall. Then apple trees snowed over in pink at the bramble fence, elder trees with their yellowish-white umbels by the well. The rose pergola I paint from every side. Lilac in full flower before the Adorant at Tempio I. Then orgies of sunflowers, avenues of many-coloured mallows, walks of cypress. Wild flaming creeper on the green-painted balcony. Oleander trees in full bloom under the white columns of the entrance. Last summer I took Helga into almost every picture as staffage2, in the goat shed, at the fountain. The Tempio pictures alone made up a considerable exhibition. All the same I have the feeling now that the Tempio is, if I may put it so, painted out for me.
My soul is pressing towards something new. Was the whole Tempio only a phase of development for my life, my art, my soul? I do not know. Perhaps it is only the heavy fates it has brought me again and again in these few years, all the nameless pains and cares it has loaded on me afresh each time, that have spoiled it for me. The poor fairy-tale dream of my life! Ah, fairy tales — in real life! They have a hard time of it. Perhaps that is also the reason for all my insane fates. I chase too much after the extraordinary, after the miracle. I want (quite unconsciously, of course) to shape my own life too out of the real everyday sphere into a miracle, into a fairy tale. And “reality” will not put up with that. It avenges itself on the foolish dreamer. It drives its pointed sword into his flesh and into his heart, until the beauty of his miracles is destroyed. —
Inge visited me in the winter from Dresden, and at her wish we kept a belated and very atmospheric Christmas in the hall. In the autumn I had obtained recitation lessons for her with Friederike S.3 at Dresden. She learned a great deal, with her great gift, and out of these lessons there soon spun itself, after she had gone from Dresden back to J. again, a glowing friendship. To this friendship she gave herself with the whole passion of her nature. I had spent a few winter-spring weeks with Emmy L. at the writers' home in Wiesbaden, and had enjoyed opera and theatre on free seats most kindly given me. When I came back, this friendship of Inge's and Friedel S.'s was beginning to seem almost uncanny to me. At all events it opened Inge's eyes to untenable conditions in her present situation in life, which I had been denied any clear judgment of. And one day Inge came to me. She wanted to take her life into her own hands.
The Admiral settled a fixed monthly sum on each of my children (Helga was of age, of course, and Inge would be in a year) until his death, after he had made them heirs to a small fortune. So both had suddenly become independent. And my life too had changed at one stroke. I was no longer alone in the Tempio. I had my beloved ones at my side, I had won the children back, in soul and in space, I had overcome loneliness, so far as human reckoning goes, to the end of my life. Now at last, at last, happiness had to come — and peace!
For the time being, however, Helga went into the hospital at Britz as a “sister” — full of great ideals. There at Britz I then quartered myself for November and December in a little country inn parlour near the clinic. Helga visited me secretly every day for a quarter of an hour. We kept Christmas together (the three of us) (Inge was at a boarding house in Berlin). There I wrote my Java novel “Erloschene Vulkane,”4 with the motto: “It is not that the passionate soul could ever grow weary with the years — it is only that the disappointments of life slowly make it clear to her that she must always be cold in this lukewarm world, and that most of the things of life are worth no great feeling at all. And also that she must go down miserably if she cannot bring herself to fight out the struggle with fate and death quite alone, in her innermost self.” — —
For the rest of the winter I went to Dresden, and in April we three met again at the Tempio, where Helga came back after six months of nursing, badly disappointed and shaken in her nerves.
Friederike S. had been there with us in the summer of 1915 (we were fed by Helga at that time too). They had been artistically enjoyable days. One recitation followed another; we walked about crowned with roses.
Inge is now studying Latin and Greek. When she came to the Tempio, after the settling of accounts with the Admiral, she wrote in the visitors' book of the hall: 17 June 1915. Accession to government.5 Then she put the house through a thorough cleaning. Every cupboard was emptied out, laid on its face and worked over on the outside of its back with brush, floods of water and soap. Every drawer rearranged, the whole house turned upside down; mountains of things declared useless thrown on the rubbish heap. Coming home one day I found the floor of the studio covered a foot deep in papers. Garments too were unpicked.
But everything is settling back into place. I am already slowly beginning to know again where everything is.
And this furor teutonicus too has ebbed away. Only love remains. And grows and grows!
Helga, as I have already mentioned, came from Britz to us at the Tempio and now took over the management in her turn. Three goats were the first thing she acquired, the gardener and the charwoman were dismissed and a new manservant, the immortal Johann, engaged. Then he too, at first deferred, had to go to the war. We got no replacement. Nothing was left for Helga but to muck out herself and empty the pits.
This furor teutonicus too has gone up in smoke! But love has grown, the love between me and my children. It has let us grow together inseparably.
What the future will bring me with them, and whether, as I feel, peace will come at last to my wild, restless soul through them, that shall be told by the second, if smaller, volume of my life's novel6, to whoever has followed the confused, mad hieroglyphs of my destiny this far, a destiny that has still not been able to tame me, even if it is slowly changing me.
And if to the end I did not compel the world to come to me, if the robber-knight in me7 cried out in wild pain all my life long, may his Janus head, the paschal lamb, yet find a mild understanding and recognition among all those who take the trouble to test my life for its truth.
Then perhaps my picture will shine a little while into the future after all, not because it was great but because it was genuine. Then perhaps it will outlive what glitters and sparkles today and yet soon goes out.
May other human souls learn from my life to be more sensible than I was, and nevertheless, like me, from the beginning until today and until the end, to stay true in their innermost selves to themselves and to their ideals, not because they want to but because they cannot do otherwise. Then they have worked, in their own sense, for eternity, even if they were no stars but only glow-worms.
How few are eternal stars!
“And fame and love are only the foam of waves8, Scattered and blown away, in the element, the wet one. And fame and love are only delusion and dream, And fame and love are a shining of the sea.”
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑In winter ice and snow landscapes — What follows is the longest list of her own pictures anywhere in the memoir — fourteen subjects in nine sentences, each of them a painting made at the Tempio in 1915 and 1916. Nothing else in the book gives so much of her work at once, and none of it is titled. Snow-laden firs seen from the studio window; the first spring green; a magnolia in blossom; Azalea mollis burning orange in front of the sphinxes at the hall door; apple trees pink under blossom at the bramble fence; elders in flower by the well; the rose pergola from every side; lilac before the Adorant; sunflowers, mallow avenues, cypress walks; wild creeper flaming on the green balcony; oleanders under the white entrance columns. Then the summary, which is the useful part for anyone trying to reconstruct what she painted: the Tempio pictures by themselves would have made a substantial exhibition. Two of the objects in the list can be identified from elsewhere in this project — the sphinxes she had copied from the Darmstadt lodge, and the Adorant, a cast of the Praying Boy of the Berlin antiquities collection. Anything answering to these descriptions in a sale room is a late picture, made after the money ran out. (The gallery on this site)
- ↑I took Helga into almost every picture as staffage — So her daughter is the figure in a whole series of late paintings — in the goat shed, at the fountain — and any Tempio picture with a young woman in it is likely to be Helga. Staffage is the studio word for the small figures put into a landscape to give it life and scale, and it is a curiously cool word for what this is. Helga was twenty-two, had come back from six months of nursing at Britz with her nerves gone, and was running the house, keeping the goats and emptying the cesspits; and through that summer her mother was putting her into picture after picture. This is the only identification of a sitter in the whole memoir, and it applies not to one canvas but to almost all of a year's work. It gives anyone looking at an unattributed Preuschen garden picture of 1915 or 1916 a name for the figure in it. (The gallery on this site)
- ↑Friederike S. — A teacher of recitation at Dresden, masked to an initial. Not identified in this project — and she is the person who gets Inge out of the adoptive house. The sequence is set down without comment and does a great deal of work. She arranges the lessons in the autumn; a glowing friendship follows, given the whole passion of the girl's nature; she is away in Wiesbaden for some weeks; she comes back and the friendship has begun to seem almost uncanny to her — fast unheimlich, from a mother who had spent twenty years trying to get her daughters back. And then, in the very next sentence, she says what it achieved: it opened Inge's eyes to conditions she herself had never been allowed to see clearly, and Inge broke with the house she had been adopted into. Friederike S. appears once more, at the Tempio in the summer of 1915, giving recitations. She is not named, and no trace of her has been sought here; a Dresden teacher of Vortragskunst in 1914 should be findable in the city directories and the conservatory registers. (The adoption, earlier in this memoir)
- ↑my Java novel “Erloschene Vulkane,” — Extinct Volcanoes, written in an inn parlour at Britz in November and December, out of the Java of the second world journey — and published by Janke in 1921, three years after her death. The novel is set on Bosscha's estate at Malabar, where she had stayed in 1909, and the title counts the twenty-two extinct volcanoes visible from it. Written here, in two months of a wartime winter, in a rented room near the hospital where her daughter was nursing, so that Helga could visit her for a quarter of an hour a day in secret. That makes four novels in the two years covered by chapters 66 to 75: Yoshiwara at Biskra, the Mormon book at Algiers, Der aussätzige König at the Tempio, and this one at Britz. Of the four, two were printed — both by Otto Janke, both after she was dead. (Her works)
- ↑17 June 1915. Accession to government. — Regierungsantritt, the word for a monarch coming to the throne, written by a nineteen-year-old in her mother's visitors' book. It is the exact date of the break with the family that had adopted her. The memoir gives very few dates and almost never a day. This one is precise because it was written down at the time, in the guest book of the exhibition hall, by Inge herself — and the joke in it is a whole character: she is not arriving, she is acceding. The adoption had been in 1906, when she was ten; the chapters about it are the most painful in the book. Nine years later she walks out of it and dates her own reign from the doorstep. What follows in the same paragraph is what the accession consisted of, which was cleaning the house from top to bottom and throwing out mountains of her mother's things. (The adoption, earlier in this memoir)
- ↑the second, if smaller, volume of my life's novel — It was never written. She lived two more years and died in December 1918, and this book was published eight years after that by her daughter. The memoir stops in the summer of 1915 because that is where the manuscript stops. What she promised the second volume was the answer to the question the whole book asks — whether the children would bring her peace — and she did not get to write it. What happened instead is partly recorded elsewhere: the war ground on, the money did not come back, she died at Lichtenrade on 12 December 1918 at sixty-four. Helga, the daughter who is emptying the cesspits at the end of this chapter, brought the book out in 1926 with a dedication of her own at the front. So the last thing in the volume is a promise of a sequel, and the first thing in it is her daughter's foreword to a book she did not live to finish. (Helga's dedication, at the front of the book)
- ↑the robber-knight in me — The two figures the whole memoir has been built on, set against each other one last time: the robber-knight and the paschal lamb, one face and the other of a single head. Raubritter, the robber-knight of the German middle ages who took what he wanted from the road below his castle, is her word for the side of herself that seized, travelled, refused and offended. The Osterlamm, the paschal lamb, is the sacrificial victim of the Passover and of Easter. She has used the pair before, and here she makes them a Janus head — not two natures in conflict but one head with two faces, which cannot be seen at the same time and cannot be separated. The sentence asks not to be forgiven but to be checked: mein Leben auf seine Wahrheit hin zu prüfen, to test my life for its truth. That is what this whole project is trying to do, and she asked for it. (Mors Imperator)
- ↑And fame and love are only the foam of waves — The last thing in the book: the first stanza of her own poem “Und Ruhm und Liebe” (“And Fame and Love”), printed in the Allgemeine Kunst-Chronik in December 1893 and in Via passionis (1895), page 67. She quotes it from memory, and her fourth line is not the stanza's. In print the stanza's fourth line reads “Und Ruhm und Liebe sind nur Meeresleuchten”, “are only a shining of the sea”. “Sind ein Meeresleuchten”, “are a shining of the sea”, is the line that closes the whole poem, set apart on its own after the last stanza: there the one changed word, ein for nur, is the poem's last turn, and the memoir ends on it. The German rhymes abab on Wellenschaum and Traum, feuchten and Meeresleuchten, in loose iambic pentameter, with the same four words opening three of the four lines. The English keeps the line count and the repetition and lets the rhyme go, which is this translation's rule for her verse. Meeresleuchten is the phosphorescence of the sea, which she had watched from ships on two voyages round the world — a light that is real, and is made by living things, and cannot be kept. (Via passionis (1895), page 67)