On the Heights Part 125

"You're still too heavily laden?" said the grandmother.

"How so?"

"If a wagon's loaded too heavily, you can't grease its wheels so as to stop their creaking. You must wait till it's empty. Then you can raise it with a jack-screw, take off the wheels and grease the axles. The burden you still bear is the thoughts of the past; lay them aside, and you'll soon feel relieved."

At last I know why I get up in the mornings. Something seems to say to me: "Thou shalt labor. To-day, this will be finished; to-morrow, that."

And when I lie down to rest, there is always something more in the world than there was at daybreak.

"Work!" "Work!" is the daily, hourly watchword here. They think of nothing but work. It is a necessity of their being, just as growth is to the tree. It is this that makes them so self-reliant.

There is misery and discord, even here.

In the kindness of her heart, Walpurga said that she could not endure the thought of the old blind pensioner's being obliged to eat his meals alone, and that she meant to have him at the table with the rest.

"I won't have it!" said Hansei. "Not a word more about it; I won't have it."

"Why not?"

"Why? You ought to know that yourself. If Jochem has once been at the table, you can never get rid of him again. So we'd better not have him at all. You don't know how an old blind man eats."

After that, not a word was spoken during the meal. Walpurga made believe that she was eating, but she was merely choking down her tears, and left the table soon afterward. She is keenly sensitive to such rudeness and cruelty; but she never complains, not even to me.

(During a violent storm.)

What a fright I have had to-day! My little pitchman told me that a man had hanged himself somewhere in the vicinity.

"It had to come," thought he. "The man had hanged himself fifteen years ago, but they cut him down, and he lived on. But it was just as if he always had a rope around his neck--people who've once tried anything of that sort, never die a natural death."

How his words startled me.

Can it be that such dread fate is yet in store for me?

I answer: No! It shall not be!

To sit in my warm room and look out at the driving snowstorm, is like going back in thought to the hurly-burly of the great world.

Nine weeks have pa.s.sed already.

I still have a dull, heavy feeling, as if I had been struck in the head with a hammer. I merely exist, but it seems as if life were again dawning upon me. When I awake in the mornings, I am obliged to ask myself who and where I am, and to recall all my woe. But then work soon summons me away.

I have nothing more to look for, be it from the outer world, or the morrow. I am forced back upon myself and the present. For me, there are neither letters nor books, and the very roads are closed. To arise in the morning and know that no tidings, whether of joy or sadness, can come from without; to have nothing to fall back upon but one's self and the undying laws of nature: he who can lead such a life, self-contained and yet contented, must be like the child illuminated by its own radiance--the child painted by Correggio.

Hammer and axe, file and saw, all that once seemed to me instruments of torture for poor enslaved humanity, I have found the instruments of deliverance. They banish the demons that dwell within us. Where these tools are wielded by industrious hands, evil spirits cannot tarry. The redeemer who will consecrate labor, is yet to come.

At last, I find myself obliged to be content without doing anything in the way of art.

Although wood is useful, and in many respects indispensable, it cannot be applied to serve beauty apart from usefulness. The substance with which my art, or rather trade, employs itself, is unequal to the demands of art, except for decorative purposes. Bronze and marble speak a universal language, but a wooden image always retains a provincial character. It addresses us in dialect, as it were, and never attains to the perfect expression of the ideal. We can make wooden effigies of animals or plants with which we are familiar, and can even carve angels in _relievo_, but to make a life-size bust, or human figure, of wood, were entirely out of the question.

Wood carving is only the beginning of art, and is faltering, or, at best, monotonous, in its expression.

What has once existed as an organism cannot be transformed into a new organic structure. Stone and bronze, however, do not acquire organic shape, except at the hands of man.

If a Greek of the days of Pericles were to behold our images of the saints, how he would shudder at our barbarism.

This journal is a comfort to me. I can express myself in my own language and feel perfectly at home. I cannot, at times, avoid regarding my constant use of the dialect of this region as a sort of affectation. Everything that I say appears to me distorted. I feel as if wearing a strange costume, and as if my soul were concealed behind an iron mask. Although I am a child of the mountains, the words I utter seem strange and foreign. A dialect proves poverty of resources. It is an imperfect instrument; a kettle-drum, for instance, on which one can play neither concertos nor fantasias. Or, to put it differently, the language of Lessing and Goethe is like the beautiful b.u.t.terfly that has left the chrysalis to which it can never more return.

Alas! The one terrible thought confronts me at every turn. I have offended and denied you, ye who represent the spirit of my people and of humanity. You fostered me, and I have abused the gifts which education bestowed upon me. I must remain in exile.

The fire that still smolders within me must be extinguished.

My heart is so heavy that it seems to drag me down, as if weights were hanging to me.

I am so weary, so exhausted, that I feel as though my limbs must break under me! I should like to do nothing but sleep; to sleep always.

I should like to perform a pilgrimage to some place or person, as an act of expiation.

I now understand the basis of a religion of symbols--a religion that speaks to the eye.

I will go hence--to Italy, to Spain, to Paris, to the East, to America.

I will go to Rome and become an artist. I must be one. If I am still to live on in the wide world, I must enjoy it fully and deny myself nothing, for I am not of a self-sacrificing temperament. I could hurl the full cup of life into the abyss, but to see it before my eyes, and yet languish and mortify myself--that I cannot do. I will, I must go.

Something calls me hence. Naples lies before me. I see a villa on the sh.o.r.e; merry excursions by water; a crowd of laughing, singing, gayly attired creatures--I plunge into the current of life. Better there than in that of death. And yet--I cannot--