Elective Affinities (19 page)

‘I therefore consider my client entirely justified in revoking
his bequest, and that in so doing he is being more than fair and reasonable, for the members of this family have been injured in a way that precludes all possibility of recompense. They have been deprived of the bitter-sweet sensation of sacrificing to their dear departed and of the consoling hope of one day reposing beside them.’

‘The matter is not so important,’ Charlotte replied, ‘that one should trouble oneself with a law-suit over it. I so little regret my action that I shall be glad to make up to the church whatever it will be losing. I must confess to you quite frankly that your arguments have not convinced me. The pure feeling that, at least after death, we are all one and all equal, seems to me more comforting than this obstinate obdurate continuing on with the personalities, attachments and circumstances of our life. What do you think?’ she asked the architect.

‘In such a matter as this,’ the architect replied, ‘I have no wish either to contend or to pronounce judgement. Let me say, with respect, what my art and my way of thinking suggest to me. We are no longer so fortunate as to be able to press to our heart the remains of a beloved one in an urn; we are neither rich nor happy enough to be able to preserve them entire in great ornate sarcophagi; we cannot even find room for them inside the church, but are directed out into the openair; all this being so, we have every reason to approve the style which you, madam, have introduced. If the members of a parish lie side by side they are still reposing beside their loved ones and with them, and if the earth is to receive us one day I can think of nothing more natural or more cleanly than that the mounds which have arisen fortuitously and are gradually subsiding should be levelled without delay, so that the earth, since it is now borne by all together, shall lie more lightly on each.’

‘And are all these people to pass on without any kind of memorial, without anything to be remembered by?’ said Ottilie.

‘By no means!’ said the architect. ‘It is only a particular place we ought to renounce, not a memorial. The architect and the sculptor are vitally interested that mankind should expect from them, from their art, from their hand, a perpetuation of its existence, and that is why I should like to have well-conceived, well-executed monuments, not scattered about all over the place but erected on a spot where they can expect to remain. Since even saints and kings forgo the privilege of being laid to rest in the church in person, let us at least set up memorials and inscriptions there, or in galleries around our burial grounds. They might assume a thousand forms, and be ornamented in a thousand ways.’

‘If artists are as rich in ideas as that,’ said Charlotte, ‘tell me why we can never get away from the form of a petty obelisk, a truncated column or a funeral urn. Instead of the thousand designs of which you boast I have never seen anything but a thousand repetitions.’

‘That may well be so with us,’ the architect replied, ‘but it is not so everywhere. And in general I would say that designs and their proper application are a ticklish business. In the present case especially there are many difficulties to overcome: it is hard to make a grave subject attractive, or when dealing with a joyless one not to produce something joyless. I have a large collection of sketches for monuments of all kinds and I occasionally display it: but a man’s fairest memorial is still his own portrait. It gives a better idea of what he was than anything else can do. It is the best text to the music of his life, whether there was much music or little. Only it has to be painted during his best years, and this is usually neglected. No one gives thought to preserving living forms, and when they do, they do so very inadequately. A mask is taken of a dead man, and this death-mask mounted on a block, and they call it a bust. How rarely can an artist impart life to such a thing!’

‘Perhaps without knowing or intending it,’ said Charlotte,
‘you have turned this conversation entirely in my favour. A portrait is an independent thing; wherever it stands, it stands in its own right, and we shall not require that it should mark the actual grave. But shall I confess a strange feeling I have? I feel a kind of aversion even towards portraits. They always seem to be uttering a silent reproach. They point to something distant and departed and remind me how hard it is to do justice to the present. Think how many people we have seen and known and how little we meant to them and how little they meant to us! We meet the witty man and we do not talk with him, we meet the learned man and we do not learn from him, we meet the much-travelled man and we discover nothing through him, we meet the amiable man and we show him no love in return.

‘And, unhappily, this is not the case only with passing acquaintances. Societies and families behave so towards their finest members, towns towards their worthiest citizens, peoples towards their most admirable princes, nations towards their greatest men.

‘I once heard it asked why one always speaks well of the dead, but of the living more circumspectly. The answer was: because we have nothing to fear from the former, while the latter could still cross our path. So impure is our concern for the memory of others: it is mostly no more than a selfish joke; while it is, on the other hand, a deadly serious matter to keep our relations with the living constantly alert and alive.’

CHAPTER TWO

U
NDER
the inspiration of this incident and the discussions attending it, they went along to the burial-ground next day and the architect put forward several happy suggestions for brightening and embellishing it. And it was agreed that his efforts should also be extended to include the church, a building which had attracted his attention from the very first.

This church, strongly constructed in the Gothic style and pleasingly ornamented, had stood there for several centuries. It was apparent that the architect of a nearby monastery had exercised his skill on this smaller building too, and it still made a solemn impression, although the redecoration of the interior for the Protestant service had robbed it of something of its repose and majesty.

The architect did not find it difficult to extract from Charlotte a moderate sum which he intended using to restore both exterior and interior to their original condition and to harmonize them with the churchyard. He was himself very dextrous and it was agreed to keep on some of the workmen still engaged in building the pavilion until this pious work too should have been completed.

They were now in a position to examine the building itself with all its surrounds and adjuncts, and to the great delight and astonishment of the architect they found a little side-chapel which had previously been hardly noticed and which was even more ingeniously and delicately constructed and assiduously and pleasingly ornamented. And it also contained many carved and painted remains of the older form of worship, in which feast-days were denoted by different images and vessels and each was celebrated in its own particular way.

The architect could not resist at once including this chapel
in his plans: his particular intention was to restore it as a monument to the taste of a bygone age. In his mind’s eye he had already decorated the blank walls according to his own inclination, and he looked forward to being able in this connection to exercise his talents as a painter. Only for the moment he kept all this a secret from the others.

But first of all he kept his promise to show the ladies his collection of drawings and sketches of ancient tombs, monuments, urns and other such objects and, when conversation turned to the simple grave-mounds of the Norse peoples, he brought out his collection of weapons and utensils found in such graves. They had been cleaned and set out in portable drawers and compartments fixed to carved cloth-covered boards, so that these ancient solemn objects had taken on a certain modishness, as if they were in the showcase of a shop. And now that he had begun displaying his collections, and since the solitude in which they were living demanded the production of some entertainment, he began to appear every evening with some portion of his treasures. They were mostly of German origin: old coins and seals and other objects of that kind. All these things took the imagination back to more ancient times, and when he finally started to illustrate his talks with woodcuts, the earliest copperplates, and with other examples from the beginning of printing, and since the church was at the same time also growing back into the past day by day, they at length had to ask themselves whether they were really living in modern times, or whether it was not a dream, and they were now dwelling among quite different customs, habits and ways of life.

Prepared for in such a fashion, a large portfolio which he brought out last of all produced its maximum effect. It contained, to be sure, only figures drawn in outline, but, because they had been traced directly from the pictures they represented, they had entirely preserved their antique character. And how fascinating they found this antique character to
be! Purity radiated from all the figures: if they were not all noble, it was clear they were all good. Cheerful composure, happy acknowledgement of one above us, silent submission in love and expectation, was inscribed on every countenance and expressed in every gesture. The old man with the bald head, the boy with abundant locks, the cheerful youth, the earnest man, the transfigured saint, the hovering angel, all seemed blessed in an innocent contentment, a pious expectation. The commonest action had in it a touch of ethereal life, and the character of each of the figures seemed to be fitted for an act of worship.

Into such a sphere most people gaze as into a vanished golden age, a lost paradise. Perhaps Ottilie alone was situated to feel she was among her own kind.

After this, it was impossible to resist the architect’s offer to paint the space between the pointed arches of the chapel after the model of these ancient pictures, and so preserve his memory in a place where things had gone so well for him. He spoke of this with a certain sorrow: he could see that, the way things were going, his stay among such splendid society could not last for ever, but might perhaps even have to end quite soon.

For the rest, these days were not very eventful, but there were many occasions for talking seriously together, and we are therefore taking the opportunity here to offer a number of extracts from what Ottilie noted of these conversations in her journal; and we can think of no better way of introducing them than recording an image that leaps to our mind as we leaf through the beloved pages.

We understand that the English navy has a certain arrangement by which every rope in the royal fleet, from the stoutest to the finest, is spun in such a fashion that a red thread runs through it which cannot be extracted without unravelling the whole rope, so that even the smallest piece of this rope can be recognized as belonging to the Crown.

Similarly, there runs through Ottilie’s journal a thread of affection and inclination that binds everything together and characterizes the whole. It is this thread which turns into the peculiar property of the writer these observations, thoughts, aphorisms copied down, and whatever else is there, and makes them significant for her. Every single passage we have selected bears indisputable testimony to the truth of this.

From Ottilie’s Journal

To repose one day beside those you love is the pleasantest idea you can have when you come to think about the Beyond. ‘To be gathered to your fathers’ is such a heartfelt expression.

There are many kinds of memorial and memento which bring us closer to those who are far away and those who have departed, but none is more meaningful than the portrait. There is something exciting about being with a much-loved portrait, even if it is not a good likeness, just as there is sometimes something exciting about arguing with a friend. You have the pleasant feeling that you are divided, and yet can never be separated.

Sometimes you are with a real person in the same way as you are with a portrait. He does not have to speak, or look at you, or concern himself with you at all: you see him and feel what he means to you, indeed he can even come to mean more to you, without his doing anything about it, without his realizing in any way that his relationship with you is merely that of a portrait.

You are never satisfied with a portrait of people you know; which is why I have always felt sorry for portrait painters. You rarely ask the impossible, but that is what you ask of them. They are supposed to incorporate into their portrait everyone’s feelings towards the subject, everyone’s likes and dislikes; they are supposed to show, not merely how they see a particular person, but how everyone would see him. I am not surprised when such artists gradually grow insensitive, indifferent and self-willed. This would itself be a matter of indifference if it did not mean one would have to go without the likenesses of so many dearly-loved people.

It is indeed true: the architect’s collection of weapons and
ancient utensils, which were, together with the body, covered with great mounds of earth and rock, testifies to us how vain is man’s provision for the preservation of his personality after death. And how inconsistent we are! The architect admits he has himself opened these graves of our ancestors, and yet he continues to occupy himself with monuments for our posterity.

But why take it all so seriously? Is everything we do done for eternity? Do we not dress in the morning so as to undress again at night? Do we not travel in order to return? And why should we not wish to repose beside our own people, even if it is only for a hundred years?

When you see all the gravestones which have sunk down and been worn away by the feet of churchgoers, and even that the churches themselves have collapsed over their own tombs, you can still think of life after death as a second life, which you enter into as a portrait or an inscription, and in which you remain longer than you do in your actual living life. But sooner or later this portrait, this second existence, is also extinguished. As over men, so over memorials time will not let itself be deprived of its rights.