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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

S A C R I F I C E A N D M O D E R N WA R L I T E R AT U R E
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

Sacrifice and Modern

War Literature
From the Battle of Waterloo to
the War on Terror

Edited by
ALEX HOUEN
and
JAN-MELISSA SCHRAMM

1
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
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© the several contributors 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

To Gillian Beer
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of most of the chapters in this volume were first presented by the
contributors at the ‘Sacrifice and Modern War Literature’ conference that we
co-organized at Pembroke College, Cambridge, in January 2014. We would like to
thank all the contributors for the rich intellectual exchanges from which we all
benefited at that conference as well as over the remaining course of the book’s
gestation period. The majority of the costs of the conference were covered by a
generous Research Initiative Award from Pembroke College, for which we are very
grateful. Some other conference costs were covered by a Conference Funding
Award from the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge: again, we are thankful
for their help. Over the course of editing this volume and writing our own contri-
butions to it, both of us have benefited greatly from receiving separate one-year
Research Fellowship Awards from the Leverhulme Trust: we are particularly apprecia-
tive of the Trust’s support, both of this volume, and of our respective monographs,
which are in progress and to which this volume is related.
In Chapter 6, Figure 6.3 is reproduced with permission of the Louis Raemaekers
Foundation; Figure 6.4 is reproduced with permission from the In Flanders Fields
Museum; Figure 6.5 is reproduced with permission of Swarthmore College; Figure 6.6
is reproduced with the Imperial War Museum’s permission; Figures 6.7 and 6.8 are
reproduced with permission of the Trustees of the Estate of David Jones.
In Chapter 8, Dora Sigerson’s unpublished poem ‘The Second Wife’ is repro-
duced with permission of The Board of Trinity College, The University of Dublin.
In Chapter 9, the lines from Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Out of the Picture’ are
reproduced with permission from David Higham Associates, UK.
In Chapter 11, the lines from Judith Wright’s poem ‘To A.H. New Year 1943’
are reproduced with permission from Meanjin Press, Melbourne University
Publishing. The lines from Herbert Read’s ‘To a Conscript of 1940’ and from
Louis MacNeice’s ‘Prayer before Birth’ are reproduced with permission from David
Higham Associates, UK. The lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ are reproduced
with permission from Faber & Faber, UK.
In Chapter 14, the lines from Michael Longley’s poem ‘Orpheus’ are reproduced
with the Lucas Alexander Whiteley agency’s permission. The lines from Seamus
Heaney’s The Midnight Verdict are reproduced with permission from The Gallery
Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath, Ireland, and the lines from Derek Mahon’s
‘Courtyards in Delft’ are reproduced with permission from the author and from
The Gallery Press. The lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ are reproduced with
permission from Faber & Faber, UK.
An earlier version of Chapter 15 was published as an article, ‘Reckoning Sacrifice
in “War on Terror” Literature’, in American Literary History, 38/3 (2016), 574–95.
The lines in chapter 15 from Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs
are reproduced with permission from University of California Press.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

viii Acknowledgements

The editors are grateful for the permissions they have been granted to reproduce
the copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright
holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material: if omissions
remain in the above list, we would appreciate notification of any corrections that
should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.
All references to the Bible throughout the essays in the volume are to the King
James Version.
Two anonymous press readers furnished us with thoughtful suggestions for
improvements, for which we are grateful. We would also like to thank Jacqueline
Norton, our commissioning editor at Oxford University Press, for all her support
in assembling the book and bringing it to fruition. Our thanks also to assistant
editor Aimee Wright, our copy-editor, Hilary Walford, and our proof-reader, Hayley
Buckley, for their helpful attention to the text at every stage.
We are very grateful as well to various other people who have offered us intellec-
tual support and friendship over the period of the volume’s composition. Alex would
particularly like to thank Matthew Bevis, Geoffrey Gilbert, Adam Piette, Vince
Sherry, and Marcus Waithe. Jan would like to thank Alison Hennegan, Michael
Hurley, Rob Macfarlane, Adrian Poole, Chris Schramm, Anne Toner, and Marcus
Waithe. We also express our hearty gratitude to each other for having made the col-
laboration a really pleasurable confluence of friendship and intellectual exchange!
Thankfully, the libations we repeatedly made to Athena in the form of cakes and
coffee seem to have paid off.
Finally, the immense influence of another figure of wisdom hovers over this
book: that of Professor Dame Gillian Beer, who was a doctoral supervisor for both of
us in the mid-to-late-1990s, and to whom we are greatly indebted for the inspiration
of her scholarly example and her encouragement of our interdisciplinary sensibilities.
This book is dedicated to her.
A.H. and J.-M.S.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

Contents

List of Illustrations xi
Notes on the Contributors xiii

Introduction: Sacrifice and Modern War Literature 1

Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Schramm
1. Wordsworth, Waterloo, and Sacrifice 20
Philip Shaw
2. The Crimean War and (Self-)Sacrifice in Mid-Victorian Fiction 34
Jan-Melissa Schramm
3. The Indian Mutiny and the Blood of Sacrifice 49
Christopher Herbert
4. The Poetics of American Civil War Sacrifice 65
Randall Fuller
5. Character, Sacrifice, and Scapegoats: Boer War Fiction 77
Steve Attridge
6. Bare Death: The Failing Sacrifice of the First World War 92
Vincent Sherry
7. ‘Freely Proffered’?: The Deaths of Rupert Brooke and
Julian Grenfell 113
Tim Kendall
8. ‘A bit of shrapnel’: The Sigerson Shorters, the Hardys,
Yeats, and the Easter Rising 124
Matthew Campbell
9. The Penny’s Mighty Sacrifice: The Spanish Civil War
and Left Poetics 145
Ian Patterson
10. The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture
of the Second World War 161
Mark Rawlinson
11. ‘It is the poems you have lost’: Poetry and Sacrifice during
the Second World War 177
Helen Goethals
12. Sacrifice and the Inner Organs of the Cold-War Citizen 191
Adam Piette
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 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

x Contents

13. The Vietnam War, American Remembering, and the Measure

of Sacrifice, Fifty Years On 207
Philip Beidler
14. ‘Atrocities against his Sacred Poet’: The Orpheus Myth
and the Poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles 222
David Wheatley
15. Reckoning Sacrifice in ‘War on Terror’ Literature 237
Alex Houen
Afterword 255
Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Schramm

Select Bibliography 263

General Index 275
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

List of Illustrations

6.1. German First World War propaganda postcard 93

6.2. British First World War postcard by painter Ernest Hasseldine 94
6.3. Cartoon by Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers 95
6.4. Portrait of dead Belgian soldier taken in Vottem on 7 August 1914  97
6.5. German soldiers with piles of dead bodies 98
6.6. Cover image, Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory  101
6.7. Frontispiece, David Jones, In Parenthesis  107
6.8. End piece, David Jones, In Parenthesis108
8.1. Dora Sigerson tombstone, Glasnevin Cemetery 142
8.2. Dora Sigerson Monument, Glasnevin Cemetery 143
OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

Notes on the Contributors

Alex Houen is a University Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature in the Faculty of English,
and Pembroke College, University of Cambridge. He is the author of Terrorism and Modern
Literature: From Joseph Conrad to Ciaran Carson (Oxford University Press, 2002), editor of
States of War since 9/11: Terrorism, Sovereignty, and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2014), and
co-editor (with Dominic Janes) of Martyrdom and Terrorism: Pre-Modern to Contemporary
Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Jan-Melissa Schramm is a University Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the
Faculty of English, and Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Testimony
and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
and Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative (Cambridge University
Press, 2012), and various articles and chapters on witnessing, testimony, justice, and
scapegoating.
Steve Attridge, an independent scholar, is author of Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity
in Late Victorian Culture: Civil and Military Worlds (Palgrave, 2003) and The Boer War
(Endeavour Press, 2014).
Philip Beidler is a Professor of American Literature at the University of Alabama. His
various publications on the Vietnam War include American Literature and the Experience of
Vietnam (University of Georgia Press, 1982), Re-writing America: Vietnam Authors in their
Generation (University of Georgia Press, 1991), and Late Thoughts on an Old War: The
Legacy of Vietnam (University of Georgia Press, 2004).
Matthew Campbell is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of York. He is the
author of Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and Irish
Poetry under the Union, 1801–1924 (Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Randall Fuller is Herman Melville Distinguished Professor of American Literature at
the University of Kansas. He is the author of From Battlefields Rising: How the Civil War
Transformed American Literature (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Emerson’s Ghosts:
Literature, Politics, and the Making of Americanists (Oxford University Press, 2007).
Helen Goethals is Professor of Commonwealth History in the English Department of the
University of Toulouse. Her publications include The Unassuming Sky: The Life and Poetry
of Timothy Corsellis (Cambridge Scholar Publishing, 2012) and various articles and chapters
on Second World War literature.
Christopher Herbert is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University.
His publications include Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery (Chicago
University Press, 2001), and War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma
(Princeton University Press, 2007).
Tim Kendall is Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Exeter. His
publications include Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (Oxford University Press,
2013), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2007),
and Modern English War Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 31/05/18, SPi

xiv Notes on the Contributors

Ian Patterson is an Emeritus Fellow of Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, where
he teaches modern literature. He is the author of Guernica: Total War (Profile, 2007), and
various articles and chapters on the literature of the Spanish Civil War.
Adam Piette is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Sheffield. His publications
on war writing include Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry 1939–1945
(Macmillan, 1995), The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh University Press,
2009), and (co-edited with Mark Rawlinson) The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-
Century British and American War Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Mark Rawlinson is Reader in English Literature at the University of Leicester. He is the
author of British Writing of the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2000) and
co-editor (with Adam Piette) of The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British
and American War Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
Philip Shaw is Professor of Romantic Studies at the University of Leicester. His publications
include Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (Ashgate, 2000),
Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Palgrave, 2002), and Suffering and Sentiment in
Romantic Military Art (Ashgate, 2013).
Vincent Sherry is Howard Nemerov Professor in the Humanities at Washington University
in St Louis. His other publications on war writing include The Great War and the Language
of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2003) and The Cambridge Companion to the
Literature of the First World War (2005).
David Wheatley is Reader in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author
of Contemporary British Poetry (Palgrave, 2014) and numerous articles and chapters on
Irish poetry.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/05/18, SPi

Introduction
Sacrifice and Modern War Literature

Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Schramm

I
Writing in 1857, after the Crimean War had finally ended forty years of peace in
England, the novelist and clergyman Charles Kingsley meditated on ‘the necessary
human art of war’ and the extent to which ‘the history of the world has been as yet
written in blood’: ‘This . . . is the normal type of human life . . . as long as cruelty and
wrong exist on earth, man’s destiny is to dare and suffer, and, if it must be so, to
die.’1 And, as G. W. F. Hegel observed in his famous Lectures on the Philosophy of
History, translated into English in the same year, given that ‘history [is] a slaughter-
bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue
of individuals have been victimized—the question involuntarily arises—to what
principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered’.2 From
time immemorial, writing about war has been preoccupied with these questions
about the ‘principle’ on which it should proceed and the human costs of its imple-
mentation. The idea of ‘sacrifice’—a multivalent term laden with both theological
and economic associations—has frequently underpinned the literature of war, and
it is the aim of this volume to explore some of the contested forms that sacrifice
has taken in writing that engages with modern conflicts and their consequences
between the nineteenth century and our contemporary period.
While there is a large body of criticism on war literature,3 and another body of
critical work on the social and cultural significance of sacrifice,4 to date there has
been no monograph or edited collection dedicated to exploring the significance of
sacrifice in a corpus of modern war literature. That is despite the fact that over the
last two centuries the costs of war have continued to be associated with sacrifice in

1 Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (1857; London: Thomas Nelson, 1908), 542–3.
2 G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1837), trans. John Sibree and
published as Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1857; London: Bell, 1894), 35.
3 See, e.g., Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural
History (1995; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
4 See, e.g., Derek Hughes, Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera (Cambridge
University Press, 2007), Douglas Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred
(London: Continuum, 2011).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/05/18, SPi

2 Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Schramm

political rhetoric and literary writing, as the chapters of this volume show. Other
critical studies that have focused on the relation of sacrifice and war have been
limited to a single conflict; for example, Allen J. Frantzen’s Bloody Good: Chivalry,
Sacrifice, and the Great War (2004).5 Conversely, Susan Mizruchi’s magisterial
study The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (1998),
which tracks the prevalence of sacrifice as an organizational principle of both the
social sciences and society more generally, does not dwell on the significance of war.6
This volume draws upon their work as points of departure, but it seeks to range
far more widely across a diverse body of writings composed in the course of the
last two hundred years to enumerate, lament, and memorialize the personal and
national costs of war.
In discussing the literature of different military conflicts, the subsequent chapters
show how writers (and others) have invoked differing conceptions of sacrifice even
within the one literary work. There has, for example, been continuing interest in the
traditional sense of sacrifice that harks back to its Latin etymology (sacrum, facere):
to make sacred. In contrast, sacrifice has also been associated with making some
other ideal that inclines more to the secular; for example, ‘democracy’ or ‘freedom’
or the ‘cause’ of a political party. Then again, there has been growing reference in
literature to sacrifice as a kind of economic rationalism that converts costs of life or
limb into military or political gains that are seen as lacking any ideal, whether religious
or secular. In exploring such different senses of sacrifice in relation to war, writers
have frequently drawn on religious and literary traditions while making innovations
in literary form and genre to offer fresh perspectives on how war in their cultural
context is underpinned by religious and secular values. In order to consider some of
those traditions and innovations, we need to consider first how religious and secular
values of sacrifice have become increasingly imbricated.

II
At the start of the nineteenth century, it was still possible to speak of a widespread
public adherence to orthodox Christian literalism, which ensured that the Old
and New Testaments of the Bible were venerated as reliable records of external
miraculous events. The story of man’s creation and redemption took centre stage
of this Christian cosmology, providing a reassuring narrative framework for the
events of the human life cycle—birth, marriage, and, most importantly, death:
We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed . . . for the trumpet shall sound, and
the dead shall be raised incorruptible . . . So when this corruptible shall have put on
incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to
pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy
sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (1 Cor. 15:51–5)

5 Allen J. Frantzen, Bloody Good: Chivalry, Sacrifice, and the Great War (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004).
6 Susan Mizruchi, The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998).
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/05/18, SPi

Introduction 3

But, despite a shared faith in Christ’s resurrection and eternal life for believers,
Catholics and Protestants disagreed strenuously about how the founding sacrifice
of their religion should be understood and commemorated. Protestant writers
often expressed discomfort with the perceived brutality of Catholicism, with its
Mass of Sacrifice and its explicit iconography of suffering saints: Anglican sermons
frequently described Christ’s crucifixion not in terms of the explicit and prolonged
sufferings of the body, but as a manifestation of divine ‘Sorrow’. English writers
insisted less on devotion to Christ’s wounded body and more on the crucial role of
self-abnegation—submission to God’s will and the commitment of one’s self to the
greater good in the vocation to which one was called—as a mechanism of defence
against the alleged exponents of self-interest, the advocates of capitalism, utilitar-
ianism, and laissez-faire economics. In fact, so great was the literary suspicion of
self-interest that authors from Charles Dickens to George Eliot felt compelled to
advocate an ethics of self-sacrifice: ‘better to be Abel than Cain’ in Dickens’s terms,
‘more comfortable to be the calf than the butcher’ in Eliot’s.7 The trope of self-sacrifice
proved to be extraordinary supple, offering novelists a rich range of theological
options for narrative closure: in its Protestant formulation, the idea of self-sacrifice
could inspire a life of service lived mindfully for others (in the cases of Dickens’s
Bleak House (1852–3) and Little Dorrit (1857)), but in its more literal (and
residually Catholic) manifestation the idea of sacrifice also provided a template for
understanding those cases in which efforts to educate or incorporate the outsider
eventually resulted in scapegoating and tragic death (for example, in Dickens’s
Hard Times (1854) and Eliot’s Romola (1863)).
The economy of (self-)sacrifice that underpinned both models presupposed
some reward for altruism in this life or the next. In the most famous of the sac-
rificial novels, Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities (1859), the protagonist Sidney Carton
voluntarily lays down his life for his friend on the scaffold during the French
Revolution while recalling the promises of John 11:25: ‘I am the Resurrection and
the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live’. Although
Dickens is aware of the potential self-interest of such heroism, on the whole he
triumphs in depicting Carton’s death as a foundational act of patrilineal legal
­succession: above all, it is a reverential parody of the liturgy of Holy Communion
as Dickens draws upon the liturgical invocation of Hoc Est Corpus Meum, ‘this is
my body, broken for you: do this in remembrance of me’ (1 Cor. 11:24) to create
a distinctively Protestant textual icon. Sacrifice is here re-presented in a sanitized
form for a generation traumatized by the Crimean slaughter. In Romola, Eliot
revealed a more nuanced awareness of the moral complexity of such transactions—
while the sacrificial victim follows in the footsteps of Christ’s Passion and gains
sacred value from that mimetic journey, his death also illuminates the risk that the
rhetoric of religious submission could be used to indoctrinate the ‘one’ voluntarily

7 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1864–5; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 770; George
Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1896), 218. For discussion of this theme in
more detail, see Jan-Melissa Schramm, Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–37.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/05/18, SPi

4 Alex Houen and Jan-Melissa Schramm

to consent to his or her own sacrifice for the ‘good’ of the ‘many’.8 The nineteenth
century was the era of democratization, in which ‘the people’ acquired political
significance as a constitutional entity, yet narrative art by and large continued to
focus on the individual: this was at least in part driven by the ethical idea of ­‘sympathy’
that powered Victorian realist writing. For George Eliot, the pedagogic agenda of
the Victorian novel was to encourage the education of our sympathies through the
practice of imaginative identification—to expand our capacity for compassion by
learning to ‘change places in fancy with another’, in Adam Smith’s influential
formulation.9 Such readerly identification was habitually directed towards characters
on the margins of political power—women, children, working-class men—thus
positioning art as inherently sympathetic to the plight of the scapegoat rather than
the masses for whom such a scapegoat might be sacrificed. For much Victorian
writing that addressed the duty of an active Christian—in the army or otherwise—
the greatest ethical aporia was precisely the tension between a willingness to die for
or to kill for a greater good. The proximity of sacrifice and revenge was revealed in
the copious literature that addressed the atrocities of the Indian Mutiny of 1857—
for example, Frederic Cooper’s The Crisis in the Punjab (1858) and V. D. Majendie’s
Up Among the Pandies (1858), published almost coterminously with Dickens’s
Little Dorrit (1857) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859), yet much less figurative in their
depiction of the brutalities of sacrifice. And Victorian war poetry grappled with
precisely these fine discriminations between the duty to die or be killed; famous
examples range from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s rousing ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’
(1854), which celebrated a willingness to die even when the command to do so
resulted from a ‘blunder’, to Thomas Hardy’s Poems of the Past and Present (1901),
which referenced the solitary and confused sufferings of combatants in the Boer
Wars. While the ideals of ‘muscular Christianity’ and athletic prowess underpinned
the expansion of empire in the nineteenth century, the process of colonization
depended on the brutal reality of blood spilt on both sides, with almost genocidal
damage inflicted on some native peoples as a consequence.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, the foundations on which the confi-
dent faith of the nation was premised were dealt a number of devastating blows:
textual and historiographical studies increasingly positioned the events of first the
Old, but eventually also the New, Testament as at best poetic and allegoric and at
worst fictional or even fraudulent. In the 1830s, Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology
(1830–3) challenged the temporal framework of the biblical stories of creation with
the discovery that the evidence of the fossil record testified to the existence of a
‘deep time’ prior to the emergence of human life on earth. Finally, Charles Darwin’s
formulation of an evolutionary explanation for life on earth, dependent entirely on
random forces of natural and sexual selection, completed the displacement of man
from his privileged position as protagonist of God’s story. While the national loss of
communal faith was gradual rather than instantaneous, the i­mplications of these

8 Schramm, Atonement and Self-Sacrifice, 216–32.

9 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (1759; Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–12.
 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 24/05/18, SPi

Introduction 5

developments echoed across the century. How was death to be understood if there
was no Christian judgment, no afterlife? It was undeniable to all that ‘the human
Body dies, and that it sees Corruption’: how was the body of Christ, then, to be
reconfigured after The Origin of Species (1859)?10 If Christ was not raised, then his
death was simply another example of state-sanctioned judicial execution, an idea
explored in Chartist and socialist fiction such as Eliza Lynn Linton’s The True
History of Joshua Davidson (1872), which depicted his disciples dying on the barri-
cades in Paris during the Commune of 1871 and Joshua himself torn to death by
an angry mob of clergymen on his return to England. The emphasis on Christ’s
humanity forced authors to address the politics of capital punishment and the
ideologically driven theatricality of the rituals that underpinned the English legal
system. Yet, even as scepticism, positivism, and science seemed increasingly to
effect the ‘disenchantment’ of the world in the course of the nineteenth century,
the literature of the period does not suggest a simple or straightforward narrative
of secularization. In fact, the political resurgence of Catholicism in the 1830s and
1840s was followed by an extraordinary renaissance of Catholic art in the second
half of the century, together with a concomitant national rediscovery of the uses of
ceremonial and the senses in worship by the end of the century. Victorian concep-
tions of the significance of sacrifice in pursuit of a greater good were contested but
not discarded at the century’s end.
Nor were the conceptions of sacrifice as ‘making sacred’ simply dissolved in the
new wars of the nineteenth century. Much critical attention has been paid to the
importance of Siegfried Sassoon’s and Wilfred Owen’s poems that criticize the ideals
of noble sacrifice associated with giving up one’s life in fighting for one’s country.
Both poets question the religiosity of those ideals, yet their poetry inclines more to
criticizing the Church’s role in upholding them than in questioning spirituality,
God, or Christ—see, for example, Sassoon’s ‘The Redeemer’ (1916) and Owen’s
‘At a Calvary near the Ancre’ (1920). As Paul Fussell and Jay Winter have argued,
the critical focus on First World War poetry that ‘de-sacralizes’ the religious and
‘romantic celebrations of sacrifice’ has often lost sight of the many poems written
by soldiers and civilians alike that ‘re-sacralized’ it throughout the war as well as in
its wake.11 There were also concerted efforts to ensure that soldiers had access to
reading matter that would inspire spiritual and religious faith: for example, Robert
Bridges’ anthology The Spirit of Man (1916) was printed to be used by troops, and
contained a wide selection of relevant poetic and philosophic texts that attest to
spirituality being ‘the basis and foundation of human life’,12 while Oxford University
Press sold 4.5 million copies of the New Testament for use in the field.

10 Robert Holmes, The Resurrection of the Body, deduced from the Resurrection of christ, and
illustrated from His Transfiguration: A Sermon Preached before the University of Oxford, at St Mary’s, on
Easter-Monday, March 31, 1777 (Oxford: Daniel Prince, 1777), 12–13.
11 See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975; Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2000), 131; Winter, Sites of Memory, 219–22.
12 Robert Bridges, The Spirit of Man: An Anthology in English and French from the Philosophers and
Poets Made by the Poet Laureate in 1915 and Dedicated by Gracious Permission to His Majesty the King
(London: Longmans Green & Co., 1916), p. iii.
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their nature and to turn them to the advantage of one’s fellow-beings, for we
soon noticed that those who treated the matter as a mere joke, approaching
it in a frivolous mood, generally failed in all they attempted. As might be
expected, the persons whose fund of magnetism was most considerable,
proved also to be those who could most easily induce in others the magnetic
trance. All seemed to resolve itself into that one process of mental
concentration, and someone remarked that this word “concentration” was
the one most often heard, and that formulated the rule of life and scheme of
education in our family. Perhaps I owe it to the habit acquired then, that I
am never absent-minded, but always able to concentrate my thoughts on the
matter in hand, and taking into consideration my lively imagination, I think
this may be looked upon as an educational triumph!
Whilst “concentration” was thus the order of the day among us, it
happened that my mother heard of the marvellous cures, recalling those told
of in the Bible, being worked in Paris by a “Faith-healer,” as we should
certainly now call him, since they were effected by no other means than the
simple laying-on of hands. One of the patients then under treatment, and
making rapid progress, was Schleiermacher’s daughter, Countess Schwerin,
whose case so nearly resembled my mother’s own, that the latter could not
refrain from writing to tell my father all she had heard, with the result that
on his way home from America he stopped in Paris, to make further
enquiries. He called on the magnetiser, whose name was Count Szápary,
and begged him to undertake my mother’s case. This request met at first
with a decided refusal, it being impossible for him, the Count stated, to
abandon for a new patient the many now being treated by him, these being,
moreover, already so numerous that he could not think of adding to them.
He did, however, in the end so far modify his refusal, as to promise that in
the course of a journey he was about to take, and which should lead him
Rhinewards, he would certainly pay my mother a visit, and see what could
be done for her.
Three days had not yet passed over our heads in Bonn since my father’s
return, when the little garden gate was suddenly flung open by a stranger of
distinguished presence—in spite of a slight limp (the result, we afterwards
learned, of a carriage accident, some time previous, in Hungary)—and in
whose thick dark moustache the first silvery threads were beginning to
appear, though not yet in the rather long and wavy thick dark hair, a lock of
which, escaping, was continually falling over his forehead. My father went
forward to meet this gentleman, whom he introduced as Count Szápary, and
who brought the scrutinising glance of his big black eyes to bear on our
little group, with but little, at first sight it seemed, of the kindly smile which
on better intimacy lit up his face so constantly. His own wonderful powers,
which he was now bent on using for the good of mankind, had been
revealed to him by chance, some might call it, in reality by his despairing
efforts to procure by mesmerism the boon of sleep and respite from pain for
an invalid daughter, given up by the regular doctor. To his glad
astonishment, not only did the magnetic passes send the patient into a
refreshing slumber, but a repetition of the experiment was equally
successful, and, being persevered with, in time restored her to health. In his
gratitude for his child’s life being spared, the father determined to use his
gift henceforth for the benefit of others, and in order to cultivate it
systematically, he went to Paris to study medicine for a time, and
establishing himself there, the cures wrought by him were very soon widely
talked of. There was a minute of suspense as the thoughtful, enquiring
glance rested on my mother, and we trembled lest the objections urged
against my father’s pleadings in Paris should still be maintained. But at that
critical moment, poor little Otto happened to join us, and again the sharp
restless eyes travelled from the sorely tried young mother to the unhappy
child, and back again to the pale, emaciated father, already in a rapid
decline, and all hesitation was at an end. The spectacle of so much suffering
was decisive for the man whose whole life was given up to alleviating
human misery. Without further demur he agreed to devote his time, his skill,
to the case before him. “But,” he hastened to add, after a rapid examination
of his patient, “your life I can perhaps save, more I cannot say, I cannot
promise that you will ever recover the use of your limbs!” And indeed at
that time it looked as if the one leg were completely atrophied, it was as if
withered—literally reduced to skin and bone. When our new friend took his
leave, it was with the promise to return in a very few weeks’ time, to
accompany us himself to Paris, as he feared that without him my mother
might not even survive the journey.
So we set out for Paris, my brother Wilhelm and I in one railway
compartment with tutor and governess, Otto in another for himself with his
faithful attendant, our good old nurse, and my mother in hers, in the
hammock slung for her, with my father and Fräulein von Preen close at
hand, and Count Szápary standing beside her, steadying the hammock with
the one hand, whilst with the other he continued uninterruptedly making the
mesmeric passes, to still the frightful paroxysms of pain, which almost
threatened to prove fatal during the journey. Terrible as it was, it yet
differed from former journeys undertaken under like circumstances, in the
absence of the overpowering smell of chloral, ether, and other medicaments,
for all such were from this moment abolished and never heard of more. It
was not astonishing, when we did arrive safely and were installed in the
house taken for us in the Champs Elysées, that directly he had seen his
patient carried upstairs and put to bed, Count Szápary should have sought
his own room, and falling exhausted on his bed, have slept on without
waking for ten hours.
Next day began the treatment—no easy matter, as my mother’s extreme
weakness made it necessary to proceed with the utmost precaution, and
Count Szápary afterwards owned that he had more than once feared that she
might die while undergoing it. But he persevered, and was rewarded at the
end of six months by perceiving a faint twitching in the toes of the till then
apparently lifeless foot. “Ah! you will be able to walk again after all!” he
exclaimed in his delight, and continued the massage so vigorously and to
such good purpose, that life seemed to return gradually to the whole of the
paralysed limb, and in the course of a few weeks the patient could actually
take a few steps. Only a very few at first, leaning on her companion’s arm,
and with the tears streaming down her cheeks with the effort and the pain,
sometimes severe enough to make her faint away before it was over. But
through it all she could see us watching her, the first time she was taken into
the garden, and she told us afterwards of our anxious faces, mine flushed
with excitement as I ran towards her, whilst Wilhelm turned deadly pale as
he tried to move away every little pebble in her way in the path. Then, a few
days later, Otto also was allowed to look on, and for him it was something
even more solemn and wonderful, for it was the first time in his life that he
had seen his mother able to walk a step. Without a word he went up to her,
took her by the hand, and walked slowly beside her the whole time, in
perfect silence. For all of us it was the grandest and most impressive event
of our whole childhood, something that seemed to partake of the nature of a
miracle, and that brought the stories of miraculous cures in times of old
quite near to us, making them a more living reality than to most people,
since we had ourselves with our own eyes witnessed something similar in
the person of one so near and dear to us. It will readily be believed, that our
admiration and gratitude for him who had wrought this marvel knew no
bounds. To say that we looked upon him as a saint, seems but a feeble
expression of the feeling of veneration with which we regarded him.
Of the actual working of the cure, of the mode of treatment, we saw
nothing, and heard but little; I only know that little by little, the terrible
convulsions were transformed into regular exercise of the muscles, in fact
into an involuntary process of therapeutic gymnastics. In course of time, not
only was the cure complete, but her own fund of natural magnetism had
been discovered to be so exceptional, that my mother was anxious to
celebrate her restoration to health by performing a like good work for
others, and began visiting Count Szápary’s other patients with him,
undertaking a portion of the treatment. At her pressing invitation the lame
Fräulein von Bunsen came to stay with us, and thanks to the combined
efforts of my mother and Count Szápary, she also was set on her feet again
and able to walk after being for five-and-twenty years considered beyond
all hope of recovery!
For my mother it was the beginning of a new life in more meanings than
one, for it was now her turn, after her own miraculous cure, to cultivate and
turn to account in the service of humanity, the gift bestowed upon her
unawares. She perhaps never became quite so strong as had been at first
hoped, and, in fact, she often felt far from well, but the lameness never
returned. And it very soon became clearly established, that the possession of
magnetic force by no means corresponds to our physical strength or indeed
to our bodily health. Concerning this, very thorough investigations were
made by my father, who would not have tolerated the idea of anything
being done by his wife which could possibly have been harmful to her own
health. On that point there could be no shadow of doubt; our experiments in
mesmerising and table-turning furnishing constant examples of the presence
of these powers in a transcendent degree in persons of specially fragile
build and constitutional delicacy. It was just by these that feats were
accomplished, which would not merely have taxed their ordinary strength,
but would have been impossible to the strongest man. All this will no longer
seem so very surprising at the present day, but the period I deal with is of
fifty years ago, when these marvels were not yet subjects of common
parlance. No Charcot had yet made his experiments with suggestion and
hypnotism; indeed, the very names were scarcely known. My father, who
was so little inclined to credulity that friends and relations had dubbed him
the unbelieving Thomas, gave himself up to the serious study of the
question. His naturally philosophic bent found here ample matter for
reflection. “I have not the dogmatic arrogance,” he was accustomed to say,
“which would enable me to deny the existence of phenomena, simply
because I fail to comprehend them!” Investigating them in this spirit, from
the purely scientific point of view, he acquired the conviction that they were
manifestations of an inner life, the proof of a persistence of thought
independent of cerebral cognition, and he therefore gave to the book he
wrote on the subject, the title, “Subconscious Mental Life.” I am aware that
the theory he upheld is now much contested, that there are those who, while
they do not dispute the genuineness of the manifestations, would ascribe
them to quite another cause, looking upon them as of purely objective
nature, and entirely independent of the medium. Time alone can decide
which of these two schools of psychical research is the better justified.
Then, at all events, it had not yet occurred to any of us to seek the
explanation of these phenomena from without, everything appearing
sufficiently to demonstrate their origin in our own mentality; a belief which
did not, however, in the least preclude our full recognition of the superiority
of the results achieved, to all similar performances by the same individual
in the normal state. Our experiments were now no longer confined to mere
spirit-rapping or observations made on subjects during the mesmeric trance;
they were henceforth specially directed to psychography, and with the most
gratifying results. It was perhaps the manifestations in this higher sphere
which overcame the last barriers of my father’s incredulity; the simple
manner in which they were obtained, by means of a pencil, passed through
a large woollen ball, on which two persons placed their hands, absolutely
preventing any possibility of fraud. Very often he made the experiment
himself, together with one other person, generally a young girl whose store
of magnetism was known to be above the average, and he was able thus to
convince himself that the movements of the pencil, tracing characters with
lightning rapidity in its course across the paper, were entirely independent
of human agency.
Questions of deepest import were asked, answers on subjects either of
private or of general interest obtained, and many a philosophic doubt laid to
rest, by this spirit-writing. And these messages, I cannot sufficiently repeat,
seemed to have as a rule little in common with the mental powers or culture
of the person through whom they were transmitted, being on an altogether
different plane, a higher intellectual level than that of society in general.
Certainly no means was neglected of raising the tone of conversation
among the ever-widening circle of friends who assembled for these séances;
all frivolous chatter was banished, gossip was a thing utterly unknown, and
it is hardly too much to say, that it was in a well-nigh religious spirit that
most of us gathered round the table on which the manifestations took place.
Among the guests in our house, was the aged musician, Neukomm, and
very often, as a preliminary to the evening’s proceedings, he would seat
himself at the organ, and by a soft and solemn prelude would induce in all
present a frame of mind suitable to the solemnity of the occasion. As I was
now in my twelfth year, and my mind unusually developed for my age, I
was allowed to participate in all that went on. Above all, I loved to hear my
father talk of those philosophic questions that occupied his own thoughts,
and it was from this time that dated the delightful long walks we took
together, in which he instructed me in the history of philosophy, explaining
to me the various philosophic systems, and reading to me passages from his
own writings, thereby giving me my first insight into the metaphysical
problems in which his soul took refuge from the noise and bustle of the
world. His dream it doubtless was, to make of me a philosopher like
himself, and his enthusiasm and earnestness could not fail to arouse my
interest in the themes on which he waxed so eloquent; but my own bent was
a different one—the field of metaphysical speculation, as thrown open to
me by my beloved and revered father, might well entice my spirit awhile,—
my sojourn there could be but brief, it was in another dreamland I was
eventually to find my home, and already, unknown to everyone, I had made
my first excursions, my first timid flights within those realms. Everything I
heard, everything I saw, each fresh addition to my store of knowledge, each
wonderful revelation of the world above and beyond the perception of the
senses, into which it was our privilege to obtain a glimpse by the
marvellous experiences chronicled above—all this did but furnish material
for my active imagination, and was absorbed, and pondered over, and
woven into the intangible, unsubstantial fabric of many a future song.
Meantime, the influences of the hour were naturally all-powerful in
magnifying the veneration in which I held my parents. It was in truth no
ordinary every-day existence which they led; and that which was most
remarkable was the perfect harmony in aim and action of these two so
dissimilar natures, and their admirable co-operation in furthering the well-
being of their fellow-creatures, the special gifts of each being employed to
the same end, my father’s theoretically, my mother’s in the direction of
practical utility. Of the cures which the latter was enabled to work, I shall
tell elsewhere; suffice it to say in this place, that they were effected with a
swiftness, and attended with circumstances so remarkable as to surpass if
anything those of Szápary himself. In later years, when the extraordinary
cures wrought by Metzger and other masseurs were spoken of in my
mother’s presence, it did not astonish anyone who knew her that she should
calmly remark, with a pitying smile—“That is all very well, but it is nothing
to what I could do! I had but to stretch out my hand and say—Rise up, thou
art healed!”
The somnambulistic experiments I witnessed were perhaps more
marvellous than all the rest. It would almost seem as if in the case of the
somnambulist the law of gravitation were abolished, so entirely free from
the trammels of material existence does the human body appear to be while
in this state. Certainly my mother often appeared to us no longer to tread the
earth, she seemed to float rather than walk, and any further and more
complete abolition of what we are accustomed to term the laws of nature,
would assuredly have occasioned among us no surprise at all. No amount of
familiarity, on the other hand, could ever do away with the feeling of awe,
with which my mother’s ecstatic trance invariably inspired us. Unconscious
of all around, she sang and prayed—the words and melody alike of her own
composition; it was a deeply moving spectacle.
Brought up in an atmosphere so highly charged with the marvellous, it
has ever been impossible to me to assume a sceptical attitude towards
mysteries which elude my comprehension. The word supernatural seems to
me to be an absolute contradiction in terms. Who are we that we should
dare to set limits to the forces of nature, and to decide that this or that
occurrence is beyond her control? Did we but understand such events
aright, we must needs acknowledge them to be perfectly natural. Egyptian
priests of old, and Indian fakirs of the present day may alike laugh us to
scorn, that in our ignorance and impotence we presume to question the
existence of forces whose workings they have fathomed and turned to such
good account. Recourse to the supernatural is but a return to nature. For this
reason it may well be that outside the domain of surgery, wherein such
incontestable triumphs have been achieved, of the whole of our modern
medical practice the so-called nature-cures will in the end alone survive.
They rest indeed on a purely rational basis, the treatment being none other
than the art of transforming pathological phenomena into therapeutical
processes.
I refer of course to the treatment I have myself seen practised and to the
examples quoted here. The system made considerable demands on the
goodwill and concurrence of the patient, these being, in the opinion of
Count Szápary, indispensable conditions of its success. An entirely different
principle is acted upon, I am aware, by those who practise massage at the
present day. With them the patient remains entirely passive, and the
massage itself is alone supposed to work the cure. I will not enter into the
question of the respective merits of the two systems, I would merely point
out the benefit that accrued to the patient from the independence to which
he was encouraged by the earlier one. All who had sufficient energy to
follow the prescribed path, were able in course of time to continue the
treatment alone, whilst such as were found incapable of making the
necessary effort for recovery, and disposed to fall into a morbid state of
dependence on the doctor, were dismissed as a hindrance to the others.
Every phase of illness was treated as a stepping-stone to progress, every
symptom turned to account; the somnambulistic trance, for instance, was
made use of as a stage in the transition from sickness to health, a state of
repose deeper and more refreshing than ordinary sleep, during which by no
other means than the rest prescribed by nature, the weakened frame and
overstrung nerves might recover their equilibrium. Every step in the
treatment was accompanied by prayer; it bore indeed from first to last a
markedly religious character. All the members of our little circle felt
themselves lifted above the common wants and desires of humanity by the
nobler prospects which the wider horizon opened out before them; we were
as neophytes whom some rite of initiation sets apart for holier purposes. It
was difficult to live invariably on that exalted level, the circumstances
might not always be propitious, and on myself they seemed sometimes to
bear too heavily. It was the sight of so much suffering, the perpetual
intercourse with invalids, that preyed on my spirits and against which my
own youthful health and strength could at times scarce react. But at such
moments my mother’s iron discipline stood me in good stead. I had been so
well drilled, and had my feelings under such perfect control, that neither to
her nor anyone else, and scarce even to myself would I ever have
acknowledged that life had sometimes become a burden to me. I knew that
for the sake of others I must keep a smiling face, and do my best to cheer
them, whatever my own sadness.
Count Szápary was always cheerful, or at any rate always wore an
appearance of cheerfulness, laughing and singing with the joviality of a true
Hungarian, and rejoicing in magnificent health and strength. This doubtless
aided him to give confidence to his patients, who must have been trying at
times with their whims and caprices. It has been given to few to benefit
their fellow-creatures to a like extent, or to reap the harvest of benedictions
that will forever blossom round his name.
 CHAPTER X

MARY BARNES
I see her still, in her plain black dress, coming towards the castle from
the landing-stage of the steamer, and crossing the quadrangle with soft,
noiseless tread, as gentle and calm as the breath of the evening breeze,
bringing with her an atmosphere of comfort and peace of which we became
conscious even before she had crossed the threshold.
We were looking out for her with impatience and some misgivings, my
brother Wilhelm and I, for the advent of a new nurse is an event of no small
importance in children’s lives, and already, scarce three and four years of
age as we were respectively, we had undergone the trial of parting with the
dear old one who had made herself so justly beloved, and whose place was
taken by a younger woman, whom we detested with equal vehemence and
on equally good grounds. So we ensconced ourselves firmly in the broad
window-sill to have a better view of the new-comer, wondering to ourselves
which of her two predecessors she would resemble. Our doubts were
dispelled even before Barnes entered the house; the quick, unerring instinct
of childhood told us that many happy days were in store for us in the care of
this good, kind soul, who came along as noiselessly as a leaf wafted hither
by the wind. I do not think she was at all beautiful—in point of fact rather a
plain-featured elderly woman, with at times a decided squint; but our eyes
had quickly discerned the beauty of the soul under that homely exterior, and
lovely she ever remained to us. We saw in her a sort of guardian angel,
shielding us from every peril that might beset the path of childhood,
watching over our health with untiring zeal, and entirely wrapped up in our
happiness. For herself she seemed to ask nothing, to want nothing, to have
no wishes or desires beyond those that affected the well-being of her little
charges. That the motherly instinct should be so strong in her, and should,
so to say, pervade her whole person, was the less surprising considering that
she had, as she herself told us, from the age of ten played the part of the
mother they had lost to her own younger brothers and sisters. She was the
ideal nurse; scrupulous in the fulfilment of all her duties, and her honest
simplicity coupled with such innate delicacy of feeling as to lend a certain
refinement to her whole person. She was at her happiest as she sat, needle
in hand, watching our games, and from time to time laying down her work,
the more thoroughly to enter into our merriment; we might laugh and romp
to our heart’s content, her calm was unruffled, her patience inexhaustible.
Our childish intuition had not been at fault in foreseeing that under her
kindly sway our nursery would once more become a little paradise, the
dearest corner for us in the whole house. We should have asked nothing
better than to be left there as long as possible; but alas! the governess was
already on the way to whom I was to be handed over, and who was
antipathetic to me from the very first, her cleverness availing nothing to
conceal that she was both underbred and ill-tempered. I fled as often as I
could from her harshness and bad manners, back to the dear old nursery—
back to the good angel, Barnes! I was surely somewhat young to have been
removed at all from those gentle influences, but the step had been judged a
wise one by my parents, in order to turn to account as early as possible the
magnificent health and excellent abilities with which I was blessed. To this
young, but physically fragile couple—the valetudinarian father, pale,
melancholy, of sedentary and studious habits, and the mother, whose own
natural liveliness was being undermined by the attacks of an insidious and
baffling malady—to them there may well have been something
disconcerting and almost alarming in the temperament of such a child, the
quintessence of health, restless as quicksilver and blithe as a bird, in whose
young limbs the joy of living pulsed wildly and on whose lips snatches of
song were forever alternating with ringing laughter! It cannot be wondered
at if they only saw in my high spirits a sure sign of frivolity, and that on
every occasion on which my indomitable will showed itself, I should
simply have been condemned as headstrong and obstinate.
I seized, then, every possible opportunity to rush off to the nursery, to
shake myself free of all fetters and restraint—to breathe freely once more! I
kept up the habit for some time of going every now and then to spend a
quiet hour with Barnes, helping her with her mending and sewing, for her
needle was never idle, and it was so soothing to sit and talk with her. I have
said how she watched over us, tending us with such admirable care that my
brother’s health improved from the day she entered our house. But all that
was nothing compared to the superhuman devotion, the heroic self-sacrifice
of the life which began for her from the moment of poor little Otto’s birth.
She it was who first discovered what was wrong with the unfortunate child,
and with tenderness and loving care that are beyond all praise and which
words are inadequate to describe, she gave herself up heart and soul to his
service, mitigating as far as might be the terrible sufferings that made a
martyrdom of his short life. Day and night she was at her post,
indefatigable, uncomplaining, holding him in her arms for hours at a time to
ease his pain and enable him to breathe with a little less difficulty, her
whole thought how to bring some relief to the poor tortured little frame.
What those tortures were, none knew so well as the faithful Barnes, and I
have therefore chiefly borrowed her own simple words, when I have tried to
tell the story of my poor little brother’s life. He did not live to complete his
twelfth year, but in that short space of time he had suffered so unutterably
and with so little respite, one could not have wished the trial to be
prolonged. Hardest of all it was to his devoted nurse to leave him before the
end, but even that sacrifice was demanded of her, my mother believing it to
be for the boy’s good and all important for the formation of his character
that he should not be left too long under feminine control. Just as she had
never complained of fatigue or discomfort during all the sleepless nights
and weary days in which she had watched beside him, so now this hardest
trial brought no murmur to her lips. She accepted it with the same pious
resignation, bravely hiding under a smiling face her own aching heart, in
order to soften the pangs of separation to her beloved foster-child. Otto had
always called her Nana, and Nana she remained for us, even after she had
left us altogether to take charge of the nursery of the Grand Duchess of
Baden, in whose service she died.
But before the end came for Otto, Barnes was sent for once more, and
stayed with him some days, days unspeakably precious to both, until all was
over. And again she had the courage, the supreme courage of true affection,
to smile as she bade him that last farewell!
Were it not for my profound conviction, that in publishing these
reminiscences, I am but extending to a larger circle of friends and
sympathisers the confidence already reposed in some, I should never have
the courage to throw open the sacred precincts of the Past. But the lesson of
these lives may be useful thus, and bring hope and comfort to souls still
fainting under their heavy burden.
Above all do I feel it a duty, when I hear so much said of the
worthlessness of human nature, to tell of the good which I have witnessed
and experienced. Fate has perhaps in this dealt more kindly with me than
with most, for I have met far more good than evil, and have seldom been
disappointed and deceived where I have bestowed affection and trust.
Can one even believe in absolute malevolence? May not those who
appear animated by ill-will sometimes be simply mistaken? Surely the
noble-minded Lamartine was right, when he spoke of “les pauvres
méchants!” With some of them it is perhaps sheer clumsiness; they think to
show their affection, but its object is crushed to death by it, as surely as the
victim of a bear’s uncouth embrace!
How should those who are born with a bear’s ungainly paws, bear the
branch of palm or scatter lilies throughout the world! There are a few, like
our good Barnes, whose hands were made to carry lilies. Wherever she
turned, balsam sprang forth. Her own life was joyless, but for the comfort it
brought to others, and therein she found abiding happiness.
Barnes lies buried in the church at Meinau, and a tablet with a most
touching and beautiful inscription is put up to her memory. But what is that
beside the tablet on which her memory is engraved within my heart!—I still
see her with her eyes riveted on Otto’s face, following every change in it
with an expression of the deepest concern, and the words, “that poor child!”
ever and anon breaking involuntarily from her lips. Of herself, her own
sufferings, her own fatigue, never a word; it was always of him she spoke,
of his marvellous patience, his unexampled fortitude. Surely she must be
rewarded now, in seeing him no longer writhing with pain, but radiant in
health and youthful beauty, having shuffled off this mortal coil, to live on
triumphant with the life of the spirit.
 CHAPTER XI

THE FAMILY VALETTE

It was on my governess, Fräulein Josse, that devolved the pleasing task
of bringing a little innocent amusement into our lives. She lent herself the
more willingly to this, I fancy, that she was often in her inmost soul
distressed to see us thus early initiated into so much sorrow and suffering,
such painful daily experiences naturally robbing us of the healthy
unthinking lightheartedness, befitting our age. Nor was she in the least a
partisan of the uncompromisingly matter-of-fact system of education on
which we were brought up. She actually read some Mährchen aloud to us,
and we absolutely revelled in the enchantments of that delicious fairy-
world, whose gates were thus thrown open to us. This was the beginning of
a quite new sort of game, in which even poor little Otto could take part,
these delightful stories being acted over and over again by us, and we grew
quite inventive in devising characters for him, which he could impersonate
sitting in his chair, and thus have the illusion of playing his part. It was kind
Fräulein Josse too, who gave me the “Wide, Wide World,” the only book in
the least resembling a novel which I was allowed to read while in my teens.
I was so fond of it, that I used to hide it under a chair, whence I could fetch
it out and devour a few pages, in the hours when I ought, perhaps, to have
been committing lines of Horace or Ovid to memory, or writing an essay on
some period of Church history.
The “Wide, Wide World” thus became, with “Augustin,” the story I have
already mentioned, the favourite reading of my childhood, and those two
simple books were my inseparable companions all through my schooldays.
My own pleasure in them had been so great, I would have liked to share it
with others, and one of the very first things I did on arriving in Roumania,
was to have “Augustin” translated into the language of my new country.
Unfortunately, the translator’s knowledge of Roumanian was insufficient, a
circumstance of which I was then unable to judge, so my plan did not
succeed.
 During my first stay in Paris, whither Fräulein Josse had accompanied
us, in 1853-54, I made the acquaintance of her best friends there, a family
called Valette. My governess and Madame Valette had known one another
as young girls, the latter being the daughter of the Pasteur Affiat, pastor of
the French Protestant community in Hanau, so that both were delighted at
thus meeting again. And now, Madame Valette’s husband being pastor of
the little Protestant chapel in the Marais, it became our delight, Wilhelm’s
and mine, to wander over there with our governess, to spend our weekly
half-holiday with the Valette children. Every Thursday then, we set out on
foot from our house in the Champs Elysées, for the picturesque little
dwelling in the Rue Pavée, that quaint old-fashioned street, whose very
name conjures up such pleasant memories for

H. M. Queen Elisabeth of Roumania

me after all these years. What happy hours we passed, playing in the
beautiful garden, which our friends shared in common with several other
families, whom we also learned to know. It was such a delicious new
sensation to us, of freedom from all restraint and supervision, our elders
always remaining together talking, leaving us children to race unmolested
through house and garden, exercising our active young limbs and our sound
young lungs, and clearing away the cobwebs from our tired brains.
Staircase, passages, basement, how well I remember it all, and the pastor
himself, whom we thought at first rather stiff, but who occasionally unbent
to joke with us. And his dear good wife, who let us do just whatever came
into our heads, never interfering with our wildest play, as we tore through
the rooms, springing down the stairs two or three steps at a time, and hiding
in dark corners, whence we could spring out and frighten one another. On
cold dull days we stayed indoors, acting charades, or sitting contentedly
round the big dining-room table covered with oil-cloth, telling stories in
turn, laughing and chattering, so perfectly happy and at our ease in these
modest surroundings, and learning more French in half-an-hour than in a
whole week’s lessons.
The eldest daughter, Marie, was almost grown up, but I was especially
fond of her, she was the leader in all our games, and told us most delightful
stories. Her next sister, Minna, was more reserved, and did not care to join
in our play, but then came two, just of our own age, Cècile and Charlotte.
The last-named, who died quite young, was the sweetest little creature, and
I still see her flying to meet us, with her long fair curls streaming behind
her, and flinging her arms round us both in her joy to welcome us. The only
son, a gentle, dreamy lad, of a serious turn of mind, afterwards became a
pastor. Marie afterwards married the son of the celebrated preacher,
Adolphe Monod, whose sermons were so much talked of, that it was a great
disappointment to me not to be taken to hear him, but my mother would not
consent to our going to church before we had attained our twelfth year.
The French Protestants gave me the impression at the time of being
rather stiff and formal people, austere and almost morose in their religious
views, though I really hardly know what it was made me think so, as we
never heard them discuss religious matters at all. We simply came there to
play, and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly, and if the gloomy appearance of the
parents was sometimes in striking contrast to the high spirits of our little
companions, that may of course have been due to quite other causes than a
depressing creed, and I have often thought since that with the large family
and very small means, there were probably material cares whose existence
we did not even suspect. Of cares of that nature we knew nothing; we had
others, in our own home life, of which of course we never spoke to our little
friends, and they very likely used equal discretion concerning their family
troubles towards us. Children who have never been encouraged to chatter,
nor had the evil example of gossip before their eyes, are naturally discreet,
and very great reserve was always impressed on us by our parents.
The good custom of the weekly half-holiday, with which we became
acquainted in Paris, was found to be so beneficial, sending us back
refreshed and invigorated to our lessons next day, that, once introduced, it
was not given up on our return to Neuwied, but became firmly established
with us. The afternoon then was, however, no longer entirely devoted to
play, but a part of it employed for those delightful lessons in book-binding
—only another form of recreation, and perhaps, of more lasting enjoyment
than the running wild, good as that was at the time.
Every Saturday I attended a class in the rue des Saints Pères, le cours de
l’Abbé Gaultier, it was called, and to this also I walked, accompanied by
Fräulein Josse. The professor, the Abbé Gaultier, sat at a green table, round
which all the young girls were ranged, behind each one her mother or
governess sitting, and then we were questioned on the lessons done during
the week and our written work was examined, and fresh subjects given to
prepare for the following week. It was rather an ordeal for me, with my
invincible shyness, and accustomed as I had always been to learning alone,
to have to speak out before all these strangers, and in a language that after
all was not my mother-tongue. And some of the other little girls were so
bright and clever, they always had something to say and turned their
answers so prettily, the poor little German envied them their readiness and
brilliancy, and felt quite dull and awkward in their midst. Only once did I
bear off the honours, but that was not in the least by my cleverness or
presence of mind, but simply by sheer honest stupidity.
We had just been told in the grammar lesson to form a sentence in the
imperfect tense, to show that we understood the right use of the imperfect.
Here I was on my own ground, for I at once made a sentence bringing in
two imperfects, and waited in burning impatience for it to be my turn to
reply, feeling this time sure of my jeton. These “counters” or good-marks
were given for every correct answer, and twenty of them made up what was
called a présidence, twenty of which again entitled to a brevet, or certificate
with a seal attached, the highest honour of all. I was in two classes, for
certain subjects with little girls of my own age, but had been put into a
higher one for history, in order that I might learn French history very
thoroughly, and this it was that stood in my way, for history was my
aversion and dates a stumbling-block to me—I never could remember a
single one!—My failures in this field I however made up for in the
grammar lesson, which was already my passion, and my lips were quivering
with impatience to bring out my example of the imperfect tense. At last the
Abbé Gaultier looked in my direction. “Quand j’étais petite, je ne
réfléchissais pas!” The good priest came close up to me:—“Et maintenant?”
I turned crimson, but blurted out quite honestly: “Maintenant je ne réfléchis
pas non plus!”—The whole room burst out laughing, but the professor
quietly placed one of the much-coveted red counters before me with the
words: “Tenez, mon enfant; violà dix jetons, pour votre jolie phrase et pour
votre naïve réponse!” And thanks to this I really did get the brevet at last, of
which I had again nearly been deprived by the unlucky history-lesson.
My painful timidity made the classes somewhat of a trial to me; I felt ill
beforehand at the thought of having to answer questions in public as it
were, I hated to have to play the piano before people, and as for an
examination, I should never have been able to pass even a very easy one! I
have been the same my whole life long, and I laughed heartily one day at
the perspicacity of one of our Ministers, who after accompanying me on a
visit to some school, told me with a smile, when the inspection, speech-
making, and prize-giving were all happily over, that he believed there had
been only one person who felt intimidated in the whole assembly, and that
was myself! It was quite true; I was afraid to put any questions to the
children lest they should answer wrong, and was much too anxious on their
behalf, to pay any attention to what they did say. On such occasions I
always remember my own troubles with those wretched chronological
tables, with which my poor memory was to be burdened! And then the
horrors of arithmetic! The cells, whose function it should be to deal with
numbers and calculations, must be altogether lacking in my brain! Perhaps
if such dreary subjects could have been taught me in verse, I might have
learnt something, for it is hard for me to forget any little tag of verse I have
ever heard, and I remember every one of those that formed a summary of
the chapters in our first simple little books of history. If only they had
thought of teaching me dates in rhyme, I should not be so shockingly
ignorant as I have remained to this day!
 It was I suppose, because of my intense love of poetry, and that I felt so
perfectly in my native element there, that my shyness always left me
directly I had to read aloud or recite. I felt sure of myself then, and threw
myself with passion into the verses I declaimed. We learned long poems by
heart, “The Prisoner of Chillon,” Schiller’s “Lay of the Bell,” whatever we
liked, and in whatever language we preferred, and recited them every
Sunday to our parents, to our own great delight. My mother declaimed so
admirably herself, that she was by no means easy to please, she insisted on
good elocution, and showed us how by modulation of the voice to give the
right expression to the words. We were all apt pupils, I fancy; what
delicious drollery poor little Otto put into Bürger’s poem, “Emperor and
Abbot,” when he was only five years old!
For all my shyness I had, before we left Paris, grown quite reconciled to
the lessons in a big class, feeling how much more easily one learns together
with companions of one’s own age, even if the incentive of rivalry, perhaps
too active with some of these, played a very small part in my own case.
This little taste of school-life made my lonely lessons seem so dull to me
afterwards, that I was always longing to have a peep at a real school, not
this time a fashionable cours, like that I had attended in Paris, but a simple
village school, full of little peasant children. So one morning I actually
managed to steal out of the house unseen, and running away as hard as I
could, I joined the children from the home-farm on their way to school. Oh!
how I enjoyed myself! I sat on the bench between the farmer’s little boy and
girl, and joined in the singing with the whole strength of my lungs, though
the small girl kept trying to put her hand before my mouth, for she thought
it highly improper that a princess should be singing with peasant children!
It was a glorious day; but the most glorious day must come to an end, and
this one ended sadly for me, for when I was missed, my parents were
frightened to death, and the hue and cry was raised, and servants and game-
keepers sent out in all directions, till at last I was found, seated in triumph
in the midst of the village school, and putting my whole heart and soul into
the singing! I was shut up in my room for the rest of the day, as a
punishment for the alarm I had given, and I was in such disgrace for some
time afterwards, that I was terribly ashamed of my escapade, and hardly
liked to think of it any more, much less to plan another; but now, when I
look back, it is a satisfaction to me that for once in my childhood I did
break through my fetters and emancipate myself so thoroughly!
 That was the year after our return from Paris. The next year, Marie
Valette came on a visit to us, and we spent many pleasant hours together,
reading and working. I was very busy at needlework just then, principally
plain sewing, for our hospital, and very proud I was at my contribution, all
of useful things I had made myself, underclothing for the poor people,
which I was able to take them. While Marie and I sat at work, Fräulein Jose
read aloud to us, and that somewhat recalled the pleasant days in Paris,
when we met at her parents’ house, and all sat round the big table, while
one of the party told or read a story to the rest. And these simple pleasures
of my youth are still those I prefer—beautiful needlework with agreeable
conversation, or a good book read aloud, in a sympathetic circle. I am still
very fond of reading aloud myself, and can do that to a very large audience.
It is perhaps the only time when I quite forget my shyness!
But I did forget it as a child too, at times, and above all in the society of
good, kind, simple people like the Valettes, who just left us to ourselves, to
amuse ourselves in our own way. For that reason, it would have been
ungrateful indeed, if I had not given a corner among my Penates to Marie
and her family. The whole remembrance is a pleasant one, beginning with
the long walk through the streets of Paris, which we learned to know so
well, we could almost have found our way through them blindfold. And the
merry party round the dinner-table, for we dined there, and only returned
home quite late in the evening. Our garden was too small for the other
children to come to play in it with us, and then it would have disturbed the
invalids, who had, of course, to be considered first. Both for the sake of the
sick people, and of my father’s work, it was no place for noisy games and
joyous laughter; we had to creep about like little mice, and it was indeed a
relief to us to get away, to escape into a fresher atmosphere, and shake off
all the sadness that oppressed our young souls. To have been aided to this
was an inestimable boon, and I still think with affection and gratitude of
those, to whom we owed those happy hours.
 CHAPTER XII

KARL SOHN, THE PORTRAIT-PAINTER

If ever a face on this earth may be said to have been irradiated and
illumined by the light of genuine kindliness—of the pure goodness of heart
that transcends all other human qualities—it was the countenance of our
beloved friend, Karl Sohn, the Düsseldorf artist. His features were not
regular, but were refined and spiritualised by the beauty of the soul that
shone through, the gentleness of his physiognomy being only enhanced by
the commanding character of the lofty, well-chiselled brow, shaded as this
was by soft masses of thick fair hair. He was tall of stature, well
proportioned and of dignified bearing, his step light and easy, in spite of his
great height, and with something almost willowy in his gait; every
movement was impregnated with grace and harmony. There was a peculiar
charm in his conversation, and this may probably have been in great
measure due to the soft deep tones of his finely modulated voice, as clear
and caressing as the sound of a silver bell, wrapt in velvet. But much of the
fascination doubtless lay in the graceful and appropriate gestures with
which he accompanied his words, and which lent singular force to his
graphic descriptions. Thus, in expatiating on the beauties of some
landscape, words and action seemed to go together to call it up before our
eyes, one broad sweep of his well-shaped hand making the undulating line
of the distant mountain-range visible to everyone.
What a pleasure it was to listen to that mellow voice, and to the low
laugh with which he sometimes interrupted his own stories. Sohn was one
of those exceptional, happily constituted beings, themselves so perfectly
harmonious, that their presence seems to diffuse an atmosphere of peace
and contentment, into which as each one enters he feels on better terms with
himself and others. The world was full of beauty for him, as it is for few of
us, and the joy he felt in every aspect of the beautiful—in Nature, in
children, in the human form divine, and in pleasant companionship—was,
like the whole nature of the man, at once ingenuous and profound. He had
laid out for himself a little garden round his house in Düsseldorf, with so
much skill, that the small space really looked like a miniature park. The
effect was charming; but the proprietor seemed almost to find it necessary
to apologise for such a display of luxury, saying deprecatingly,—“The
beautiful is a necessary condition of existence to us poor artists! So
indispensable is it to us, that we would willingly make every other sacrifice,
just to be able to surround ourselves with things of beauty!”
It was through his pupil, my great-uncle Charles, that we first became
acquainted with Sohn. My uncle, who had been a musical dilettante for the
first fifty years of his life, attaining I believe a certain proficiency on the
French horn, had recently turned his attention to painting, in which art he
was still a mere tyro at the time of my parents’ marriage. At first he was
always sending for Sohn, to ask his criticism and advice, and by sheer hard
work and perseverance he succeeded in the end in painting very good
portraits. There was one of my mother, for which she declared she sat to
him no less than seventy-five times. To beguile the tedium of those long
sittings, she learned by heart the parts she was going to play in private
theatricals, repeating the lines aloud without fear of disturbing the artist,
who was quite absorbed in his work, and very hard of hearing into the
bargain. But in the one play occurred a phrase so singularly appropriate,
that she could not resist raising her voice for it to reach the ears of the deaf
old man, who peeped out astonished from behind his easel and shook his
finger at her, as she exclaimed:—“Dear Uncle! must I then really be bored
to death!” And her subsequent assurance that this was only in her part only
half mollified him. In spite of the long sittings, the portrait was not a
success; it however brought Sohn to our house, and two admirable pictures
of my mother by him represent her in all her youthful bloom at that period.
The one is in a red velvet dress, her face framed in a mass of fair curls; the
other in her riding-habit, just as he had seen her jump down from her horse,
flushed with the exercise of a long ride.
These were the first two pictures Sohn painted in our family, but he was
henceforth every year a welcome visitor, often making a stay of many
weeks among us, and painting more than one portrait of each member of the
family. He was inspired to his finest work, one of his many portraits of my
mother—by seeing her in the ecstatic trance. So deeply had this impressed
him, that it was almost under similar conditions that he worked, altogether
removed from this earthly plane, blind and deaf to all that went on around
him, and entirely absorbed in the contemplation of the radiant, transfigured
countenance of his model, and in the feverish effort to transfer to his canvas
some faint reflection of the wondrous radiance diffused over her whole
person. In his despair of obtaining this effect from the ordinary resources of
his palette, he was forever seeking some new means, devising some new
combination of colour, he would fain have dipped his brush in pure light,
have steeped the whole picture in unclouded sunshine! Something of this
has been felt by all those who have striven, with like fidelity and with the
same gross materials, to copy the dazzling hues even of some simple
flower; has one but tried, with such poor pigments, with our muddy
bismuths and dingy ochres, to reproduce the lily’s transparent whiteness or
the rich gold of the humble buttercup, we can the better appreciate the
vanity of all attempts at imitating on so feeble and limited a scale, the
radiant tints and subtle, endless gradations of Nature’s colour-box,
employed by the Divine Artist! We must needs perforce, for lack of the
clear strong light, throw up our dim half-lights and faded colours by deeper
shadows. But Sohn for this once would none of such artifice. Disdaining
every expedient of contrast, he laid on the colours simply and boldly, after
the manner of the Early Masters, painting with the pious enthusiasm, the
sacred fire that was theirs, and borrowing something of their technical
methods to impart the expression of holy rapture to the face, a diaphanous
delicacy to the folded hands, to give to the kneeling figure the semblance of
a martyr at the stake, a saint to whose beatific vision the gates of Heaven
are flung open wide!
Sohn made a picture of my brother Wilhelm and myself, at four and five
years of age, hand in hand; such a speaking likeness, that as we stood
beside it holding a big wreath of flowers, when it was given to my father on
his birthday, he kept looking from the painting to us, and then back again to
the picture—quite puzzled for a moment, he assured us, as to which were
the real children and which their portrait! Such restless beings as small
children can never be very easy to paint; but Sohn succeeded wonderfully
in catching the expression on each little face,—my brother’s serious and
dreamy, with an almost stolid determination to keep quiet, and mine, all life
and movement, with sparkling eyes and a dancing smile, that betokened
anything but the requisite immobility of pose. It was an amusing contrast;
Wilhelm stood firm as a rock, whilst all my efforts to keep still as I was
bidden only made me tremble from head to foot with impatience, and at one
sitting resulted in my fainting away after I had actually accomplished the
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