Part 35 (2/2)

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!

The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages.

”He who does not provide for his own house,” St. Paul says, ”is worse than an infidel.” And I think, he who provides only for his own house is just equal with an infidel.

An idle reason lessens the value of the good ones you gave before.

When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to me to be alive and talking to me.

Very few men, properly speaking, _live_ at present, but are providing to live another time.

If the men of wit and genius would resolve never to complain in their works of critics and detractors, the next age would not know that they ever had any.

As universal a practice as lying is, and as easy a one as it seems, I do not remember to have heard three good lies in all my conversation, even from those who were most celebrated in that faculty.

GOETHE IN HIS OLD AGE [Sidenote: _W.M. Thackeray_]

In 1831, though he had retired from the world, Goethe would nevertheless very kindly receive strangers. His daughter-in-law's tea-table was always spread for us. We pa.s.sed hour after hour there, and night after night, with the pleasantest talk and music. We read over endless novels and poems in French, English, and German. My delight in those days was to make caricatures for children. I was touched to find (in 1855) that they were remembered and some even kept to the present time; and very proud to be told, as a lad, that the great Goethe had looked at some of them.

He remained in his private apartments, where only a very few privileged persons were admitted; but he liked to know all that was happening, and interested himself about all strangers. Whenever a countenance took his fancy there was an artist settled in Weimar who made a portrait of it.

Goethe had quite a gallery of heads, in black and white, taken by this painter. His house was all over pictures, drawings, casts, statues and medals.

Of course, I remember very well the perturbation of spirit with which, as a lad of nineteen, I received the long-expected intimation that the Herr Geheimrath would see me on such a morning. This notable audience took place in a little antechamber of his private apartments, covered all round with antique carts and bas-reliefs. He was habited in a long grey or drab redingote, with a white neckcloth and a red ribbon in his b.u.t.ton-hole. He kept his hands behind his back just as in Rauch's statuette. His complexion was very clear, bright, and rosy. His eyes extraordinarily dark, piercing, and brilliant. I felt quite afraid before them, and remember comparing them to the eyes of the hero of a certain romance called ”Melmoth the Wanderer,” which used to alarm us boys thirty years ago; eyes of an individual who had made a bargain with a Certain Person, and at an extreme old age retained these eyes in their awful splendour. I fancy Goethe must have been still more handsome as an old man than even in the days of his youth. His voice was very rich and sweet. He asked me questions about myself, which I answered as best I could. I recollect I was at first astonished, and then somewhat relieved, when I found he spoke French with not a good accent.

_Vidi tantum._ I saw him but three times. Once walking in the garden of his house in the _Frauenplan_; once going to step into his chariot on a suns.h.i.+ny day, wearing a cap and a cloak with a red collar. He was caressing at the time a beautiful little golden-haired granddaughter, over whose sweet fair face the earth has long since closed, too.

Any of us who had books or magazines from England sent them to him, and he examined them eagerly. _Fraser's Magazine_ had recently come out, and I remember he was interested in those admirable outline portraits which appeared for a while in its pages. But there was one, a very ghastly caricature of Mr. Rogers, which, as Madame de Goethe told me, he shut up and put away from him angrily. ”They would make me look like that,” he said; though, in truth, I can fancy nothing more serene, majestic, and _healthy_-looking than the grand old Goethe.

Though his sun was setting, the sky round about was calm and bright, and that little Weimar illumined by it. In every one of those kind salons the talk was still of Art and Letters. The theatre, though possessing no extraordinary actors, was still connected with a n.o.ble intelligence and order. The actors read books and were men of letters and gentlemen, holding a not unkindly relations.h.i.+p with the _Adel_. At Court the conversation was exceedingly friendly, simple, and polished.... In the respect paid by this court to the Patriarch of Letters, there was something enn.o.bling, I think, alike to the subject and the sovereign.

With a five-and-twenty years' experience since those happy days of which I write, and an acquaintance with an immense variety of human kind, I think I have never seen a society more simple, charitable, courteous, gentlemanlike, than that of the dear little Saxon city where the good Schiller and the great Goethe lived and lie buried.

LITTLE BILLEE [Sidenote: _W.M. Thackeray_]

Air--”Il y avait un pet.i.t navire”

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