Who would have thought, when I chose Wahlheim as a goal for my walks, that it lay so close to heaven? How often I have seen on my wanderings, sometimes from a hillside, sometimes from the opposite side of the river, the hunting lodge that now houses all my desires.
Dear William, I have given a great deal of thought to man’s desire for expansion and his urge to explore and roam the face of the earth, and then again, I think about his inner impetus to surrender willingly to the restrictions imposed by life and to travel in the rut of routine living, never giving a thought to what goes on to right or left.
It is truly marvelous—when I came here first and looked down into the valley from this hilltop—how the entire region attracted me. There…a little forest land…oh, to lose oneself in its shade…. There, a mountaintop…oh, to see the panorama from it! The rolling hills and enchanting valleys…I yearned to lose myself in them.
I would hurry down, but return home without having found what I had hoped to find. Distance is like the future. A vast twilit entity lies before us, our perception is lost in it and becomes as blurred as our eyesight, and we yearn, ah, we yearn to surrender all of our Self and let ourselves be filled to the brim with a single, tremendous, magnificent emotion, but alas…when we hurry to the spot, when There becomes Here, everything is as it was before and we are left standing in our poverty and constraint, our souls longing for the balm that has eluded us. Thus the most restless vagabond yearns in the end to return to his native land and find in his cottage, in the arms of his wife, with his children around him, and in the occupations that provide for them, the joys he sought vainly elsewhere.
When I ride out to Wahlheim in the morning with the rising sun and pick some sweet young peas in the garden behind the inn and string them and read a little Homer as I do so; when I then go into the small kitchen and get a pan and melt some butter and put the pan on the fire to cook them and cover them and sit down beside them to toss them a little every now and then—I can feel so vividly how Penelope’s high-spirited suitors slaughtered oxen and swine and carved them up and roasted them. Nothing can fill me with such true, serene emotion as any features of ancient, primitive life like this. Thank God I know how to fit them into my life without conceit. Oh, how thankful I am that my heart can feel the simple, harmless joys of the man who brings to the table a head of cabbage he has grown himself, and in a single moment enjoys, not only the vegetable, but all the fine days and fresh mornings since he planted it, the mild evenings when he watered it, and the pleasure he felt while watching it grow.
June 29th
The day before yesterday the doctor from our town came out to the lodge and found me on the floor with several of Lotte’s children on top of me, the rest teasing me. He saw me tickling them and succeeding generally in creating an uproar. The doctor is a dogmatic puppet, constantly repleating his cuffs as he talks and pulling out a loose thread here and there. Of course, he found my behavior undignified for a man of my intellect. I could tell by the way he turned up his nose at the whole thing. I didn’t let it bother me, but as he went about his more sensible business, I rebuilt the children’s house of cards, which they had toppled; whereupon he went about town telling everyone that the magistrate’s children had always been wild, but now Werther was ruining them completely.
Yes, dear William, nothing is dearer to me than children. As I watch them and see in everything they do the seed of all the virtue and strength they will one day need, when I recognize future steadfastness and firmness in their present obstinacy, good humor and the ability to pass lightly over the perils on this earth in their mischief, everything so unspoiled, everything still whole—then I want to repeat the Golden Rule of the teacher of mankind: “Unless ye become as one of these…” And then, my good friend, we treat the little creatures, who are our equals, and whom we should use as models, as our inferiors. They are not supposed to have a will of their own. Why not? Don’t we demand free will? What gives us the right to make such a decision? Because we are older and wiser? Dear God in Heaven, Thou dost look down upon old children and young children, and that’s all there is to it! And Thy Divine Son told us long ago which of them pleaseth Thee more. But they believe in Him and don’t hear Him; and that, too, is an old story. And they bring up their children to be like themselves and…farewell, William! I don’t want to ramble on about it.
July 1st
My poor heart, which is worse off than many a heart wasting away on a sickbed, tells me what Lotte must mean to a sick person. She is going to spend a few days in town at the bedside of a worthy woman who, according to the doctor, is about to die. He wants Lotte at her side during the poor creature’s final hours.
Last week I went with Lotte to visit the rector of St.——, a little town in the mountains about an hour away. We arrived there at four o’clock. Lotte took her two sisters with her. As we drove into the courtyard of the rectory, which lies in the shade of two tall walnut trees, the old man was sitting on a bench outside the door, and when he set eyes on Lotte he seemed to come to life. He forgot to use his knobby cane and rose to come forward to greet her without it.
She ran to him and saw to it that he sat down again by the simple expedient of sitting down beside him herself. She brought him greetings from her father and made a fuss of his horrid, dirty little youngest boy, the joy of his old age. You should have seen her, how she kept the old man amused, raising her voice so that his deaf ears might hear her; how she talked about robust young people who had died quite suddenly and praised Karlsbad to the skies and his decision to spend his summers there from now on. She elaborated on how much better she thought he looked and remarked that he seemed to have more strength than when she had seen him last. Meanwhile I paid my respects to the vicar’s wife.
The old man became more and more lively. Of course I had to admire the magnificent nut trees that were offering us such delightful shade, so he began, a little clumsy, to tell us their story.
“We don’t know who planted the old one,” he began. “Some say it was this clergyman, others say it was another. But the younger tree over there is as old as my wife, fifty in October. Her father planted it in the morning of the day she was born…she was born toward evening. He was my predecessor here, and I can’t tell you how much the tree meant to him. Naturally, it means just as much to me. My wife was sitting on a bench underneath it, twenty-seven years ago, when I walked into this yard for the first time, just a poor student.”
Lotte asked after his daughter. She was told that the girl had gone out to the workers in the field with Herr Schmidt, and the old man went on with his story—how the vicar had become fond of him, then his daughter, too; how he had been curate first, then vicar. He was scarcely done when his young daughter came through the garden with the aforementioned Herr Schmidt. She greeted Lotte warmly, and, I must say, she was attractive—a lively brunette with an excellent figure who would have understood very well how to help anyone pass a short stay in the country. Her admirer—Herr Schmidt quite obviously was just that—turned out to be a sensitive and quiet young man who did not seem to want to join in our conversation, although Lotte did her best to include him.
What distressed me most about him was that I thought I could read in his expression that stubbornness and ill humor, rather than any limitations of the mind, prevented him from expressing himself. Unfortunately, this became very obvious later when we went for a walk, for whenever Friederike happened to walk with Lotte or me, the young man’s face—which was swarthy anyhow—darkened so visibly that Lotte plucked at my sleeve and gave me to understand I was paying too much attention to the girl. Now there is nothing that irritates me more than when people torment each other, especially when young people in the prime of their lives, who should be open to all joys, spoil the few good days they have with a dour mien and only find out too late that they have wasted something irretrievable. The whole thing rankled within me, and when we returned to the rectory toward
