Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated) (561 page)

Chapter XIII.

PHILIP AND MAGGIE.

Poor Tom bore his severe pain like a hero, but there was a terrible dread weighing on his mind — so terrible that he dared not ask the question which might bring the fatal “yes” — he dared not ask the surgeon or Mr. Stelling, “Shall I be lame, sir?”

It had not occurred to either of these gentlemen to set the lad’s mind at rest with hopeful words. But Philip watched the surgeon out of the house, and waylaid Mr. Stelling to ask the very question that Tom had not dared to ask for himself.

“I beg your pardon, sir, but does Mr. Askern say Tulliver will be lame?”

“Oh no, oh no,” said Mr. Stelling; “only for a little while.”

“Did he tell Tulliver so, sir, do you think?”

“No; nothing was said to him on the subject.”

“Then I may go and tell him, sir?”

“Yes, to be sure. Now you mention it, I dare say he may be troubling about that. Go to his bedroom, but be very quiet.”

It had been Philip’s first thought when he heard of the accident, “Will Tulliver be lame? It will be very hard for him if he is.” And Tom’s offences against himself were all washed out by that pity.

“Mr. Askern says you’ll soon be all right again, Tulliver; did you know?” he said, rather timidly, as he stepped gently up to Tom’s bed. “I’ve just been to ask Mr. Stelling, and he says you’ll walk as well as ever again, by-and-by.”

Tom looked up with that stopping of the breath which comes with a sudden joy; then he gave a long sigh, and turned his blue-gray eyes straight on Philip’s face, as he had not done for a fortnight or more. As for Maggie, the bare idea of Tom’s being always lame overcame her, and she clung to him and cried afresh.

“Don’t be a little silly, Magsie,” said Tom tenderly, feeling very brave now. “I shall soon get well.”

“Good-bye, Tulliver,” said Philip, putting out his small, delicate hand, which Tom clasped with his strong fingers.

“I say,” said Tom, “ask Mr. Stelling to let you come and sit with me sometimes, till I get up again, Wakem, and tell me about Robert Bruce, you know.”

After that Philip spent all his time out of lesson hours with Tom and Maggie. Tom liked to hear fighting stories as much as ever; but he said he was sure that those great fighters, who did so many wonderful things and came off unhurt, wore excellent armour from head to foot, which made fighting easy work.

One day, soon after Philip had been to visit Tom, he and Maggie were in the study alone together while Tom’s foot was being dressed. Philip was at his books, and Maggie went and leaned on the table near him to see what he was doing; for they were quite old friends now, and perfectly at home with each other.

“What are you reading about in Greek?” she said. “It’s poetry; I can see that, because the lines are so short.”

“It’s about the lame man I was telling you of yesterday,” he answered, resting his head on his hand, and looking at her as if he were not at all sorry to stop. Maggie continued to lean forward, resting on her arms, while her dark eyes got more and more fixed and vacant, as if she had quite forgotten Philip and his book.

“Maggie,” said Philip, after a minute or two, still leaning on his elbow and looking at her, “if you had had a brother like me, do you think you should have loved him as well as Tom?”

Maggie started a little and said, “What?” Philip repeated his question.

“Oh yes — better,” she answered immediately. “No, not better, because I don’t think I could love you better than Tom; but I should be so sorry — so sorry for you.”

Philip coloured. Maggie, young as she was, felt her mistake. Hitherto she had behaved as if she were quite unconscious of Philip’s deformity.

“But you are so very clever, Philip, and you can play and sing,” she added quickly. “I wish you were my brother. I’m very fond of you. And you would stay at home with me when Tom went out, and you would teach me everything, wouldn’t you — Greek, and everything?”

“But you’ll go away soon, and go to school, Maggie,” said Philip, “and then you’ll forget all about me, and not care for me any more. And then I shall see you when you’re grown up, and you’ll hardly take any notice of me.”

“Oh no, I shan’t forget you, I’m sure,” said Maggie, shaking her head very seriously. “I never forget anything, and I think about everybody when I’m away from them. I think about poor Yap. He’s got a lump in his throat, and Luke says he’ll die. Only don’t you tell Tom, because it will vex him so. You never saw Yap. He’s a queer little dog; nobody cares about him but Tom and me.”

“Do you care as much about me as you do about Yap, Maggie?” said Philip, smiling rather sadly.

“Oh yes, I should think so,” said Maggie, laughing.

“I’m very fond of you, Maggie; I shall never forget you,” said Philip. “And when I’m very unhappy, I shall always think of you, and wish I had a sister with dark eyes, just like yours.”

“Why do you like my eyes?” said Maggie, well pleased. She had never heard of any one but her father speak of her eyes as if they had merit.

“I don’t know,” said Philip. “They’re not like any other eyes. They seem trying to speak — trying to speak kindly. I don’t like other people to look at me much, but I like you to look at me, Maggie.”

“Why, I think you’re fonder of me than Tom is,” said Maggie. Then, wondering how she could convince Philip that she could like him just as well, although he was crooked, she said, —

“Should you like me to kiss you, as I do Tom? I will, if you like.”

“Yes, very much. Nobody kisses me.”

Maggie put her arm round his neck and kissed him.

“There now,” she said; “I shall always remember you, and kiss you when I see you again, if it’s ever so long. But I’ll go now, because I think Mr. Askern’s done with Tom’s foot.”

When their father came the second time, Maggie said to him, “O father, Philip Wakem is so very good to Tom; he is such a clever boy, and I do love him. — And you love him too, Tom, don’t you? Say you love him,” she added entreatingly.

Tom coloured a little as he looked at his father, and said, “I shan’t be friends with him when I leave school, father. But we’ve made it up now, since my foot has been bad; and he’s taught me to play at draughts, and I can beat him.”

“Well, well,” said Mr. Tulliver, “if he’s good to you, try and make him amends and be good to him. He’s a poor crooked creatur, and takes after his dead mother. But don’t you be getting too thick with him; he’s got his father’s blood in him too.”

By the time Tom had reached his last quarter at King’s Lorton the years had made striking changes in him. He was a tall youth now, and wore his tail-coat and his stand-up collars. Maggie, too, was tall now, with braided and coiled hair. She was almost as tall as Tom, though she was only thirteen; and she really looked older than he did.

At last the day came when Tom was to say good-bye to his tutor, and Maggie came over to King’s Lorton to fetch him home. Mr. Stelling put his hand on Tom’s shoulder, and said, “God bless you, my boy; let me know how you get on.” Then he pressed Maggie’s hand; but there were no audible good-byes. Tom had so often thought how joyful he should be the day he left school “for good.” And now that the great event had come, his school years seemed like a holiday that had come to an end.

George Eliot, watercolour by Caroline Bray, 1842

Frasers Magazine for Town and Country, 51: 306 (1855:June)

IT was between three and four o’clock on a fine morning in August that, after a ten hours’ journey from Frankfort, I awoke at the Weimar station. No tipsiness can be more dead to all appeals than that, which comes from fitful draughts of sleep on a railway journey by night. To the disgust of your wakeful companions, you are totally insensible to the existence of your umbrella, and to the fact that your carpet bag is stowed under your seat, or that you have borrowed books and tucked them behind the cushion. ‘What’s the odds, so long as one can sleep?’ is your formule de la vie, and it is not until you have begun to shiver on the platform, in the early morning air that you become alive to property and its duties, i.e., to the necessity of keeping a fast grip upon it. Such was my condition when I reached the station at Weimar. The ride to the town thoroughly roused me, all the more because the glimpses I caught from the carriage window were in startling contrast with my preconceptions. The lines of houses looked rough and straggling, and were often interrupted by trees peeping out from the gardens behind. At last we stopped before the, Erbprinz, an inn of long standing in the heart of the town, and were ushered along heavy-looking in-and-out corridors, such as are found only in German inns, into rooms which overlooked a garden just like one you may see at the back of a farm-house in many an English village.

A walk in the morning in search of lodgings confirmed the impression that Weimar was more like a market town than the precinct of a court. ‘And this is the Athens of the North!’ we said. Materially speaking, it is more like Sparta. The blending of rustic and civic life, the indications of a central government in the midst of very primitive-looking objects, has some distant analogy with the condition of old Lacedaemon to shops are most of them, such as you would, see in: the back street-s of an English provincial town, and the commodities on sale are often chalked op the doorposts A loud rumbling of vehicles may indeed be heard now and then; but the rumbling is loud not because the vehicles are many, but because the springs are few. The inhabitants seemed to us to have more than the usual heaviness of Germanity; even their stare was slow, like that of herbivorous quadrupeds We set out with the intention of exploring the town, and at every other turn we came into a street which took us out of the town, or else into one that led us back to the market from which we set out. One’s first feeling was — how could Goethe live here in this dull, lifeless village? The reproaches cast on him for his worldliness and attachment to court splendour seemed ludicrous enough, and it was inconceivable that the stately Jupiter en redingote, so familiar to us all through Rauch’s statuette, could have habitually walked along these rude streets and among these slouching mortals. Not a picturesque bit of building was to be seen; there was no quaintness, nothing to remind one of historical associations, nothing but the most arid prosaism.

This was the impression produced by a first morning’s walk in Weimar, an impression which very imperfectly represents what Weimar is; but which is worth recording, because it is true as a sort of back view. Our ideas were considerably modified when, in the evening, we found our way to the Belvedere chaussee, a splendid avenue of chesnut trees, two miles in length, reaching from the town to the summer residence of Belvedere; when we saw the Schloss, and discovered the labyrinthine beauties of the park; indeed, every day opened to us fresh charms in this quiet little valley and its environs. To any one who loves Nature in her gentle aspects, who delights in the chequered shade on a summer morning, and in a walk on the corn-clad upland at sunset, within sight of a little town nestled among the trees below, I say — come to Weimar. And If you are weary of English unrest, of that society of ‘eels in a jar,’ where each is trying to get his head above the other, the somewhat stupid bienetre of the Weimarians will not be an unwelcome contrast, for a short time at least. If you care nothing about-Goethe and Schiller and Herder and Wieland, why, so much the worse for you — you will miss many interesting thoughts and associations; still Weimar has a charm independent of these great names.

First among all its attractions is the Park, which would be remarkably beautiful even among English parks, and it has one advantage over all these, namely, that it is without a fence. It runs up to the houses, and far out into the corn fields and meadows, as if it had a ‘sweet will’ of its own, like a river or a lake, and had not been planned and planted by human will. Through it flows the Ilm — not a clear stream, it must be confessed, but like all water, as Novalis says, ‘an eye to the landscape.’ Before we came to Weimar we had had dreams of boating on the Ilm, and we were not a little amused at the difference between this vision of our own and the reality. A few water-fowl are the only navigators of the river, and even they seem to confine themselves to one spot, as if they were there purely in the interest of the picturesque. The real extent of to park is small, but the walks are so ingeniously arranged, and the trees are so luxuriant and various, that it takes weeks to learn the turnings and windings by heart, so as no longer to have the sense of, novelty. In the warm weather our great delight was the walk which follows the course of to Ilm, and is overarched by tall trees with patches of dark moss on their trunks, in rich contrast with the transparent green of the delicate leaves, through which the golden sunlight played, and chequered the walk before us. On one side of this walk the rocky ground rises to the height of twenty feet or more, and is clothed with mosses and rock plants; on the other side there are, every now and then, openings — breaks in the continuity of shade, which show you a piece of, meadow land, with fine groups of trees; and at every such opening a seat is placed under the rock, where you may sit and chat away the sunny hours, or listen to those delicate sounds which one might fancy came from tiny bells worn on the garment of Silence to make us aware of her invisible presence. It is along this walk that you come upon a truncated column with a serpent twined round it, devouring cakes, placed on the column as offerings — a bit of rude sculpture in stone. The inscription — Genio loci — enlightens the learned as to the significance of this symbol, but the people of Weimar, unedified by classical allusions, have explained the sculpture by a story which is an excellent example of a modern myth. Once upon a time, say they, a huge serpent infested the-park, and evaded all attempts to exterminate him; until at last a cunning baker made some appetizing cakes which contained an effectual poison, and placed them in the serpents reach, thus meriting a place with Hercules, Theseus, and other monster-slayers. Weimar, in gratitude, erected this column as a memorial of the bakers feat, and its own deliverance. A little farther on is the Borkenhaus, where Carl August used to play the hermit for days together, and from which he used to telegraph to Goethe in his Gartenhaus. Sometimes we took our shady walk in the Stern, the oldest part of the park plantations, on the opposite side of the river, lingering on our way to watch the crystal brook which hurries on, like a foolish young maiden, to wed itself with the muddy Ilm. The Stern (Star), a large circular opening amongst the trees, with walks radiating from it, has been thought of as the place for the projected statues of Goethe and Schiller. In Rauch’s model for these statues the poets are draped in togas, Goethe, who was considerably the shorter of the two, resting his hand on Schiller’s shoulder; but it has been wisely determined to represent them in their ‘habit as they lived,’ so Rauch’s design is rejected. Of classical idealising in portrait sculpture, Weimar has already a sufficient exemplar ad evitandum in the colossal statue of Goethe executed after Bettina’s design, which the readers of the ‘Correspondence with a Child’ may see engraved as a frontispiece to the second volume. This statue is locked up in an odd structure, standing in the park. and looking like a compromise between a church and a summer-house (Weimar does not shine in its buildings!). How little real knowledge of Goethe must the mind have that could wish to see him represented as a naked Appollo with a Psyche at his knee! The execution is as feeble as the sentiment is false; the Apollo-Goethe is a caricature, and the Psyche is simply vulgar. The statue was executed under Bettina’s encouragement, in the hope that it would be bought by the King of Prussia; but a breach having taken place between her and her royal friend, a purchaser was sought in the Grand Duke of Weimar, who, after transporting it at enormous expense from Italy, wisely shut it up where it is seen only by the curious.

As autumn advanced and the sunshine became precious, we preferred the broad walk on the higher grounds of the park, where the masses of trees are finely disposed, leaving wide spaces of meadow which extend on one side to the Belvedere allee with its avenue of chesnut trees, and on the other to the little cliffs which I have already described as forming a wall by the walk along the Thri. Exquisitely beautiful were the graceful forms of the plane: trees, thrown in golden relief on a back-ground of: dark pines Here we used to turn and turn again in the autumn afternoons, at first bright and wann, then sombre with low-lying, purple clouds; and chill with winds that sent the leaves raining from the branches. The eye here welcomes, as a contrast, the white facade of a building looking like a small Greek temple, placed on the edge of the cliff, and you at once conclude it to be a bit of pure ornament — a device to set off the landscape; but you presently see a porter seated near the door of the basement story, beguiling the ennui of his sinecure by a book and a pipe, and you learn with surprise that this is another retreat for ducal dignity to unbend and philosophize in. Singularly ill-adapted to such a purpose it seems to beings not ducal. On the other side of the Ilm the park is bordered by the road leading to the little village of Ober Weimar, another sunny walk which has the special attraction of taking one by Goethe’s Gartenhaus, his first residence at Weimar. Inside, this Gartenhaus is a homely sort of cottage, such as many an English nobleman’s gardener lives in; no furniture is left in it, and the family wish to sell it. Outside, its aspect became to us like that of a dear friend whose irregular features and rusty clothes have a peculiar charm, It stands with its bit of garden and orchard, on a pleasant slope, fronting the west; before it the park stretches one of its meadowy openings to the trees which fringe the Ilm, and between this meadow and the garden hedge lies the said road to Ober Weimar. A grove of weeping birches sometimes tempted us to turn out of this road up to the fields at the top of the slope, on which not only the Gartenhaus, but several other modest villas are placed. From this little height, one sees to advantage the plantations of the park in their autumnal colouring; the town, with its steep-roofed church, and castle clock-tower, painted a gay green; the bushy line of the Belvedere chaussee, and Belvedere itself peeping on an eminence from its nest of trees. Here, too, as the place for seeing a lovely sunset — such a sunset as September sometimes gives us when the western horizon is like a rippled seat of gold, sending over the whole hemisphere golden vapours, which, as they near the east, are subdued to a deep rose-colour.

The Schloss is rather a stately, ducal-looking building, forming three sides of a quadrangle. Strangers are admitted to see a suite of rooms called the Dichter-Zimmer (Poets’ Rooms), dedicated to Goethe, Schiller, and Wieland. The idea of these rooms is really a pretty one: in each of them there is a bust of the poet who is its presiding genius, and the walls of the Schiller and Goethe rooms are covered with frescoes representing scenes from their works. The Wieland room is much smaller than the other two, and serves as an antechamber to them; it is also decorated more sparingly, but the arabesques on the walls are very tastefully designed, and satisfy one better than the ambitious compositions from Goethe and Schiller. A more interesting place to visitors is the library, which occupies a large building not far from the Schloss. The principal Saal, surrounded by a broad gallery, is ornamented with some very excellent busts and some very bad portraits. Of the busts, the most remarkable is that of Gluck, by Houdon — a striking specimen of the real in art. The sculptor has given every scar made by the small-pox; he has 1eft the nose as pug and insignificant, and the mouth as common, as Nature made them; but then he has done what, doubtless, Nature also did — he has made one feel in those coarsely-cut features the presence of the genius qui divinise la laideur. A specimen of the opposite style in art is Trippel’s bust of Goethe as the young Apollo, also fine in its way. It was taken when Goethe was in Italy; and in the Italianische Reise, mentioning the progress of the bust, he says that he sees little likeness to himself but is not discontented that he should go forth to the world as such a hubscher Bursch — a good-looking fellow. This bust, however, is a frank idealization; when an artist tells us that the ideal of a Greek god divides his attention with his immediate subject, we are warned to take his representation cum grano. But one gets rather irritated with idealization in portrait when, as in Dannecker’s bust of Schiller, one has been misled into supposing that Schiller’s brow was square and massive, while, in fact, it was receding. We say this partly on the evidence of his skull, a cast of which is kept in the library, so that we could place it in juxtaposition with the bust. The story of this skull is curious. When it was determined to disinter Schiller’s remains, that they might repose in company with those of Carl August and Goethe, the question of identification was found to be a difficult one, for his bones were mingled with those of ten insignificant fellow mortals. When, however, the eleven skulls were placed in juxtaposition, a large number of persons who had known Schiller, separately and successively fixed upon the same skull as his, and their evidence was clenched by the discovery that the teeth of this skull corresponded to the statement of Schiller’s servant, that his master had lost no teeth, except one, which he specified. Accordingly it was decided that this was Schiller’s skull, and the comparative anatomist, Loder, was sent for from Jena, to select the bones which completed the skeleton.* The evidence certainly leaves room for a doubt; but the front fuyant of the skull agrees with the testimony of persons who knew Schiller, that he had, as Rauch said to us, a ‘miserable forehead;’ it agrees, a1so, with a beautiful miniature of Schiller, taken when he was about twenty. This miniature is deeply interesting; it shows us a youth whose clearly cut features, with the mingled fire and melancholy of their expression, could hardly have been passed with indifference; it has the langer gansehals (long goose-neck), which he gives to his Karl Moor; but instead of the black, sparkling eyes, and the gloomy, overhanging, bushy eye-brows he chose for his robber hero, it has the fine wavy, auburn locks and the light-blue eyes, which belong to our idea of pure German race. We may be satisfied that we know at least the form of Schiller’s features, for in this particular his busts and portraits are in striking accordance; unlike the busts and portraits of Goethe, which are a proof, if any were wanted, how inevitably subjective art is, even when it professes to be purely imitative — how the most active perception gives us rather a reflex of what we think and feel, than the real sum of objects before us. The Goethe of Rauch or of Schwanthaler is widely different in form, as well as expression, from the Goethe of Stieler; and Winterberger, the actor, who knew Goethe intimately, told us that to him not one of all the likenesses, sculptured or painted, seemed to have more than a faint resemblance to their original. There is, indeed, one likeness, taken in his old age, and preserved in the library, which is startling from the conviction it produces of close resemblance, and Winterberger admitted it to be the best he had seen. It is a tiny miniature painted on a small cup, of Dresden china, and is so wonderfully executed, that a magnifying-glass exhibits the perfection of its texture as if it were a flower or a butterfly’s wing. It is more like Stieler’s portrait than any other; the massive neck, unbent though withered, rises out of his dressing gown, and supports majestically a head, from which one might imagine (though, alas! it never is so in reality) that the discipline of seventy years had purged away all meaner elements than those of the sage and the poet — a head which might serve as a type of sublime old age. Amongst the collection of toys and trash, melancholy records of the late Grand Duke’s eccentricity, which occupy the upper rooms of the library, there are some precious relics hanging together in a glass case, which almost betray one into sympathy with ‘holy coat’ worship. They are — Luther’s gown, the coat in which Gustavus Adolphus was shot, and Goethe’s court coat and schlafrock. What a rush of thoughts from the mingled memories of the passionate reformer, the heroic warrior, and the wise singer!