Читать книгу Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Various - Страница 3

It is worth while to live in the city, that we may learn to love the country; and it is not bad for many, that artificial life binds them with bonds of silk or lace or rags or cobwebs, since, when they are rent away, the Real gleams out in a beauty and with a zest which had not been save for contrast.

Contrast is the salt of the beautiful. I wonder that the ancients, who came so near it in so many ways, never made a goddess of Contrast. They had something like it in ever-varying Future – something like it in double-faced Janus, who was their real 'Angel of the Odd.' Perhaps it is my ignorance which is at fault – if so, I pray you correct me. The subtle Neo-Platonists must have apotheosized such a savor to all æsthetic bliss. Mostly do I feel its charm when there come before me pictures true to life of far lands and lives, of valley and river, sea and shore. Then I forget the narrow office and the shop-lined street, the rattling cars and hurried hotel-lodgment, and think what it would be if nature, in all her freshness and never-ending contrasts, could be my ever-present.

I thought this yesterday, in glancing over an old manuscript in my drawer, containing translations, by some hand to me unknown, of sketches of Sweden by the fairy-story teller Hans Christian Andersen. Reader, will they strike you as pleasantly as they did me? I know not. Let us glance them over. They have at least the full flavor of the North, of the healthy land of frost and pines, of fragrant birch and of sweeter meadow-grass, and simpler, holier flowers than the rich South ever showed, even in her simplest moods.

The first of these sketches sweeps us at once far away over the Northland:

'WE JOURNEY

'It is spring, fragrant spring, the birds are singing. You do not understand their song? Then hear it in free translation:

''Seat thyself upon my back!' said the stork, the holy bird of our green island. 'I will carry thee over the waves of the Sound. Sweden also has its fresh, fragrant beechwoods, green meadows, and fields of waving corn; in Schoonen, under the blooming apple trees behind the peasant's house, thou wilt imagine thyself still in Denmark!'

''Fly with me,' said the swallow. 'I fly over Hal-land's mountain ridges, where the beeches cease. I soar farther toward the north than the stork. I will show you where the arable land retires before rocky valleys. You shall see friendly towns, old churches, solitary court yards, within which it is cosy and pleasant to dwell, where the family stands in circle around the table with the smoking platters, and asks a blessing through the mouth of the youngest child, and morning and evening sings a holy song. I have heard it, I have seen it, when I was yet small, from my nest under the roof.'

''Come! come!' cried the unsteady seagull, impatiently waiting, and ever flying round in a circle. 'Follow me into the Scheeren, where thousands of rocky islands, covered with pines and firs, lie along the coasts like flower beds; where the fisherman draws full nets!'

''Let yourself down between our outspread wings!' sing the wild swans. 'We will bear you to the great seas, to the ever-roaring, arrow-quick mountain streams, where the oak does not thrive and the birches are stunted; let yourself down between our outspread wings, – we soar high over Sulitelma, the eye of the island, as the mountain is called; we fly from the spring-green valley, over the snow waves, up to the summit of the mountain, whence you may catch a glimpse of the North Sea, beyond Norway. We fly toward Jamtland, with its high blue mountains, where the waterfalls roar, where the signal fires flame up as signs from coast to coast that they are waiting for the ferry boat – up to the deep, cold, hurrying floods, which do not see the sun set in midsummer, where twilight is dawn!'

'So sing the birds! Shall we hearken to their song – follow them, at least a short way? We do not seat ourselves upon the wings of the swan, nor upon the back of the stork; we stride forward with steam and horses, sometimes upon our own feet, and glance, at the same time, now and then, from the actual, over the hedge into the kingdom of fancy, that is always our near neighborland, and pluck flowers or leaves, which shall be placed together in the memorandum book – they bud indeed on the flight of the journey. We fly, and we sing: Sweden, thou glorious land! Sweden, whither holy gods came in remote antiquity from the mountains of Asia; thou land that art yet illumined by their glitter! It streams out of the flowers, with the name of Linnæus; it beams before thy knightly people from the banner of Charles the Twelfth, it sounds out of the memorial stone erected upon the field at Lutzen. Sweden! thou land of deep feeling, of inward songs, home of the clear streams, where wild swans sing in the northern light's glimmer! thou land, upon whose deep, still seas the fairies of the North build their colonnades and lead their struggling spirit-hosts over the ice mirror. Glorious Sweden, with the perfume-breathing Linea, with Jenny's soulful songs! To thee will we fly with the stork and the swallow, with the unsteady seagull and the wild swan. Thy birchwood throws out its perfume so refreshing and animating, under its hanging, earnest boughs – on its white trunk shall the harp hang. Let the summer wind of the North glide murmuring over its strings.'

There is true fatherland's love there. I doubt if there was ever yet real patriotism in a hot climate – the North is the only home of unselfish and great union. Italy owes it to the cool breezes of her Apennines that she cherishes unity; had it not been for her northern mountains in a southern clime, she would have long ago forgotten to think of one country. But while the Alps are her backbone, she will always be at least a vertebrate among nations, and one of the higher order. Without the Alps she would soon be eaten up by the cancer of states' rights. It is the North, too, which will supply the great uniting power of America, and keep alive a love for the great national name.

Very different is the rest – and yet it has too the domestic home-tone of the North. In Sweden, in Germany, in America, in England, the family tie is somewhat other than in the East or in any warm country. With us, old age is not so ever-neglected and little honored as in softer climes. Thank the fireside for that. The hearth, and the stove, and the long, cold months which keep the grandsire and granddame in the easy chair by the warm corner, make a home centre, where the children linger as long as they may for stories, and where love lingers, kept alive by many a cheerful, not to be easily told tie. And it lives – this love – lives in the heart of the man after he has gone forth to business or to battle: he will not tell you of it, but he remembers grandmother and grandfather, as he saw them a boy – the centre of the group, which will never form again save in heaven.

Let us turn to

'THE GRANDMOTHER

'Grandmother is very old, has many wrinkles, and perfectly white hair; but her eyes gleam like two stars, yes, much more beautiful; they are so mild, it does one good to look into them! And then she knows how to relate the most beautiful stories. And she has a dress embroidered with great, great flowers; it is such a heavy silk stuff that it rattles. Grandmother knows a great deal, because she has lived much longer than father and mother; that is certain! Grandmother has a hymn book with strong silver clasps, and she reads very often in the book. In the midst of it lies a rose, pressed and dry; it is not so beautiful as the rose which stands in the glass, but yet she smiles upon it in the most friendly way; indeed, it brings the tears to her eyes! Why does grandmother look so at the faded flower in the old book? Do you know? Every time that grandmother's tears fall upon the flower, the colors become fresh again, the rose swells up and fills the whole room with its fragrance, the walls disappear, as if they were only mist, and round about her is the green, glorious wood, where the sun beams through the leaves of the trees; and grandmother is young again; a charming maiden, with full red cheeks, beautiful and innocent – no rose is fresher; but the eyes, the mild, blessing eyes, still belong to grandmother. At her side sits a young man, large and powerful: he reaches her the rose, and she smiles – grandmother does not smile so now! oh yes, look now! – But he has vanished: many thoughts, many forms sweep past – the beautiful young man is gone, the rose lies in the hymn book, and grandmother sits there again as an old woman, and looks upon the faded rose which lies in the book.

'Now grandmother is dead. She sat in the armchair and related a long, beautiful story; she said, 'Now the story is finished, and I am tired;' and she leaned her head back, in order to sleep a little. We could hear her breathing – she slept; but it became stiller and stiller, her face was full of happiness and peace, it was as if a sunbeam illumined her features; she smiled again, and then the people said, 'She is dead.' She was placed in a black box; there she lay covered with white linen; she was very beautiful, and yet her eyes were closed, but every wrinkle had vanished; she lay there with a smile about her mouth; her hair was silver white, venerable, but it did not frighten one to look upon the corpse, for it was indeed the dear, kind-hearted grandmother. The hymn book was placed under her head – this she had herself desired; the rose lay in the old book; and then they buried grandmother.

Upon the grave, close by the church wall, a rose tree was planted; it was full of roses, and the nightingale flew singing over the flowers and the grave. Within the church, there resounded from the organ the most beautiful hymns, which were in the old book under the head of the dead one. The moon shone down upon the grave, but the dead was not there; each child could go there quietly by night and pluck a rose from the peaceful courtyard wall. The dead know more than all of us living ones; they are better than we. The earth is heaped up over the coffin, even within the coffin there is earth; the leaves of the hymn book are dust, and the rose, with all its memories. But above bloom fresh roses; above, the nightingale sings, and the organ tones forth; above, the memory of the old grandmother lives, with her mild, ever young eyes. Eyes can never die. Ours will one day see the grandmother again, young and blooming as when she for the first time kissed the fresh red rose, which is now dust in the grave.'

'THE CELL PRISON

'By separation from other men, by loneliness, in continual silence shall the criminal be punished and benefited; on this account cell prisons are built. In Sweden there are many such, and new ones are building. I visited for the first time one in Marienstadt. The building lies in a beautiful landscape, close by the town, on a small stream of water, like a great villa, white and smiling, with window upon window. But one soon discovers that the stillness of the grave rests over the place; it seems as if no one dwelt here, or as if it were a dwelling forsaken during the plague. The gates of these walls are locked; but one opened and the jailor received us, with his bundle of keys in his hand. The court is empty and clean; even the grass between the paving stones is weeded out. We entered the 'reception room,' to which the prisoner is first taken; then the bath room, whither he is carried next. We ascend a flight of stairs, and find ourselves in a large hall, built the whole length and height of the building. Several galleries, one over another in the different stories, extend round the whole hall, and in the midst of the hall is the chancel, from which, on Sundays, the preacher delivers his sermon before an invisible audience. All the doors of the cells, which lead upon the galleries, are half opened, the prisoners hear the preacher, but they cannot see him, nor he them. The whole is a well-built machine for a pressure of the spirit. In the door of each cell there is a glass of the size of an eye; a valve covers it on the outside, and through this may the warden, unnoticed by the prisoners, observe all which is going on within; but he must move with soft step, noiselessly, for the hearing of the prisoner is wonderfully sharpened by solitude. I removed the valve from the glass very softly, and looked into the closed room – for a moment the glance of the prisoner met my eye. It is airy, pure, and clean within, but the window is so high that it is impossible to look out. The whole furniture consists of a high bench, made fast to a kind of table, a berth, which can be fastened with hooks to the ceiling, and around which there is a curtain. Several cells were opened to us. In one there was a young, very pretty maiden; she had lain down in her berth, but sprang out when the door was opened, and her first movement disturbed the berth, which it unclasped and rolled together. Upon the little table stood the water cask, and near it lay the remains of hard black bread, farther off the Bible, and a few spiritual songs. In another cell sat an infanticide; I saw her only through the small glass of the door, she had heard our steps, and our talking, but she sat still, cowered together in the corner by the door, as if she wished to conceal herself as much as she could; her back was bent, her head sunk almost into her lap, and over it her hands were folded. The unhappy one is very young, said they. In two different cells sat two brothers; they were paying the penalty of horse-stealing; one was yet a boy. In one cell sat a poor servant girl; they said she had no relations, and was poor, and they placed her here. I thought that I had misunderstood, repeated my question, Why is the maiden here? and received the same answer. Yet still I prefer to believe that I have misunderstood the remark. Without, in the clear, free sunlight, is the busy rush of day; here within the stillness of midnight always reigns. The spider, which spins along the wall, the swallow, which rarely flies near the vaulted window there above, even the tread of the stranger in the gallery, close by the door, is an occurrence in this mute, solitary life, where the mind of the prisoner revolves ever upon himself. One should read of the martyr cells of the holy inquisition, of the unfortunates of the Bagnio chained to each other, of the hot leaden chambers, and the dark wet abyss of the pit of Venice, and shudder over those pictures, in order to wander through the galleries of the cell prison with a calmer heart; here is light, here is air, here it is more human. Here, where the sunbeam throws in upon the prisoner its mild light, here will an illuminating beam from God Himself sink into the heart.'

Last we have

'SALA

'Sweden's great king, Germany's deliverer, Gustavus Adolphus, caused Sala to be built. The small enclosed wood in the vicinity of the little town relates to us yet traditions of the youthful love of the hero king, of his rendezvous with Ebba Brahe. The silver shafts at Sala are the largest, the deepest and oldest in Sweden; they reach down a hundred and seventy fathoms, almost as deep as the Baltic. This is sufficient to awaken an interest in the little town; how does it look now? 'Sala,' says the guide book, 'lies in a valley, in a flat, and not very agreeable region.' And so it is truly; in that direction was nothing beautiful, and the highway led directly into the town, which has no character. It consists of a single long street with a knot and a pair of ends: the knot is the market; at the ends are two lanes which are attached to it. The long street – it may be called long in such a short town – was entirely empty. No one came out of the doors, no one looked out of the windows. It was with no small joy that I saw a man, at last, in a shop, in whose window hung a paper of pins, a red handkerchief, and two tea cans, a solitary, sedate apprentice, who leaned over the counter and looked out through the open house door. He certainly wrote that evening in his journal, if he kept one; 'To-day a traveller went through the town; the dear God may know him, I do not!' The apprentice's face appeared to me to say all that, and he had an honest face.

'In the tavern in which I entered, the same deathlike stillness reigned as upon the street. The door was indeed closed, but in the interior of the house all the doors stood wide open; the house cock stood in the midst of the sitting room, and crowed in order to give information that there was some one in the house. As to the rest, the house was entirely picturesque; it had an open balcony looking out upon the court – upon the street would have been too lively. The old sign hung over the door and creaked in the wind; it sounded as if it were alive. I saw it from my window; I saw also how the grass had overgrown the pavement of the street. The sun shone clear, but as it shines in the sitting room of the solitary old bachelor and upon the balsam in the pot of the old maid, it was still as on a Scottish Sunday, and it was Tuesday! I felt myself drawn to study Young's 'Night Thoughts.'

'I looked down from the balcony into the neighbor's court; no living being was to be seen, but children had played there; they had built a little garden out of perfectly dry twigs; these had been stuck into the soft earth and watered; the potsherd, which served as watering pot, lay there still; the twigs represented roses and geranium. It had been a splendid garden – ah yes! We great, grown-up men play just so, build us a garden with love's roses and friendship's geranium, we water it with our tears and our heart's blood – and yet they are and remain dry twigs without roots. That was a gloomy thought – I felt it, and in order to transform the dry twigs into a blossoming Aaron's-staff, I went out. I went out into the ends and into the long thread, that is to say, into the little lanes and into the great street, and here was more life, as I might have expected; a herd of cows met me, who were coming home, or going away, I know not – they had no leader. The apprentice was still standing behind the counter; he bowed over it and greeted; the stranger took off his hat in return; these were the events of this day in Sala. Pardon me, thou still town, which Gustavus Adolphus built, where his young heart glowed in its first love, and where the silver rests in the deep shafts without the town, in a flat and not very pleasant country. I knew no one in this town, no one conducted me about, and so I went with the cows, and reached the graveyard; the cows went on, I climbed over the fence, and found myself between the graves, where the green grass grew, and nearly all the tombstones lay with inscriptions blotted out; only here and there, 'Anno' was still legible – what further? And who rests here? Everything on the stone was effaced, as the earth life of the one who was now earth within the earth. What drama have ye dead ones played here in the still Sala? The setting sun threw its beams over the graves, no leaf stirred on the tree; all was still, deathly still, in the town of the silver mines, which for the remembrance of the traveller is only a frame about the apprentice, who bowed greeting over the counter.'

Silence, stillness, quiet, solitude, loneliness, far-away-ness; hushed, calm, remote, out of the world, un-newspapered, operaless, un-gossipped – was there ever a sketch which carried one so far from the world as this of 'Sala'? That one shopboy – those going or coming cows – the tombs, with wornout dates, every point of time vanishing – a living grave!

Contrast again, dear reader. Verily she is a goddess – and I adore her. Lo! she brings me back again in Sala to the busy streets of this city, and the office, and the 'exchanges,' and the rustling, bustling world, and the hotel dinner – to be in time for which I am even now writing against time – and I am thankful for it all. Sala has cured me. That picture drives away longings. Verily, he who lives in America, and in its great roaring current of events, needs but a glance at Sala to feel that here he is on a darting stream ever hurrying more gloriously into the world and away from the dull inanity – which the merest sibilant of aggravation will change to insanity.

Reader, our Andersen is an artist – as most children know. But I am glad that he seldom gives us anything which is so very much of a monochrome as Sala.

I wonder if Sala was the native and surnaming town of that other Sala whose initials are G. A. S., and whose nature is 'ditto'? Did its dulness drive him to liveliness, even as an 'orthodox' training is said to drive youth to dissipation? It may be so. The one hath a deep mine of silver – the other contains inexhaustible mines of brass – and the name of the one as of the other, when read in Hebrew-wise gives us 'alas!'

But I am wandering from the Northern pictures and fresh nature, and must close.