Dear reader!
Seume's introduction to A Stroll to Syracuse
"Perhaps you will learn little or nothing new here"
Seume's introduction to A Stroll to Syracuse
"Perhaps you will learn little or nothing new here"
Last year I made the journey that I here relate; and I do so because certain men of judgment believed it might perhaps not be unwelcome to many, and even useful to some. Perhaps these men thought I would carry it out differently and better; on that point, in substance, I can only appeal to my own personal conviction—though I readily admit they may be right now and then, so far as the form is concerned.
I hope you are my friend, or will become so; and if neither is the case, I am stubborn enough to believe the fault is not mine. Perhaps you will learn little or nothing new here. The reasonable have known all this for a long while. But it is usually either not said at all or only whispered; and it seems to me necessary that it should now, little by little, be said aloud — firmly and plainly — if we do not mean to drink milk for ever. With that children's food they would gladly keep us always. But without strong fare no man in particular, and no men in general, will thrive: that is true morally as it is physically. I am sorry if I have fallen into a tone of presumption. Yet it is hard — indeed, without betraying the matter it is impossible — to keep a modest tone about certain subjects. I leave what I have said to examination and to its effects, and am content that I wished for what is true and good.
It is a very old observation that almost every writer, in his books, writes only his own self. It cannot be otherwise, nor perhaps should it be; provided only that each beforehand sets himself in a good light and a pure temper. For my own part, I know well that I would rather see the good and rejoice in it, than find the evil and grow angry over it: but joy remains quiet, while anger grows loud.(SN1)
In novels we have now long enough seen old truths—no longer denied—dressed up poetically, presented, and repeated a thousand times over. I do not censure this; it is the beginning: but always it is milk-food for children. We ought at last to become men, and begin to take things in sober historical earnest, without prejudice and rancour, without passion and self-seeking. Places, persons, names, circumstances should be held fast to the facts as evidences, so that everything may become, as far as possible, a matter of record. For history is, in the end, the sole storehouse of our good and our evil.
Such personal designations are necessary and wholesome ventures for mankind—even though all governments may brand them as pasquinades. The whole consists only of personalities, good and bad. Slaves have made tyrants, folly and selfishness have created privileges, and weakness and passion perpetuate them both. As soon as kings shall have the courage to rise to universal justice, they will found their own security, and make the happiness of their peoples by freedom a necessity. But to that end more is required than winning battles. Until then, it must and shall be permitted to every upright man of sense and resolution to believe and to say, that old leaven is old leaven (1).
It may perhaps seem strange that a man who twice went to war against liberty (2) should strike such a tone. The explanation is not difficult. Fate drove me. I am not stubborn enough to wish to thrust my own opinion violently against millions; but I have independence enough never to deny it before millions, nor before their first or their last.
Several men whose names the nation holds in respect have urged me to speak publicly of my life and of my successive formation; but I cannot bring myself to do so. In my youth it was the struggle of a young man with his circumstances and with his own inconsistencies; when I became a man, my involvements were at times of so peculiar a kind that I do not always recall them with pleasure. Who willingly confesses, “I was a fool,” merely to make a few old truths somewhat more striking by example? When, at eighteen years of age, as a theological ward, I ran out from the Academy into the world, it was found on inquiry that I had not stabbed a schoolmate, nor brought a girl into distress, nor left behind me debts—indeed, that I had even paid off the few thalers(3) I owed on the very day before my disappearance. No one could discover the cause of my removal, and I was judged to have strayed into melancholy; in this belief they even caused search to be made for me in the public papers as gently as might be. That a student should pay his debts the day before he runs away seemed a strong proof of madness. I leave it to the philanthropists to reflect on this conclusion, which betrays a very poor opinion of the morals of our youth. To the psychologist the riddle will be solved when I tell him that the sentiments which I have since expressed, here and there and in the following account, were already then alive within me, when I went off with nine thalers and a Tacitus(4) in my pocket. What was a village pastor to do with such fermentations? In a cosmopolitan, grounded firmly on morality, they may yet work some good. The storm in me has never risen so high as to sweep me off the base upon which, as a rational and upright man, I must stand. My fortunes for the most part lay in the circumstances of my life; and that last journey to Sicily was perhaps the first entirely free decision of any consequence.
People have reproached me for being unsettled and flighty: they wrong me. Circumstances drove me, and no higher duty held me fast. To have sat for years over the printing of Klopstock’s Odes and Messiah (5) is hardly the task of a fugitive. They throw it in my face that I seek no office.(SN2) For many offices I feel myself unfit; and it is one of my principles—not resting on ridiculous pride—that the State ought to seek out men for its posts. I am therefore glad to think that in my fatherland there must be thirty thousand men abler and better than I. Were I a minister, I would very likely seldom give a post to a man who asked for it. Many will take this for a whim; I do not. If, as a private man, I will not act strictly by my own principles, who else is to do so?
It has been blamed in me that I left the Russian service. By chance I went there, and by chance I went away. I was ill-rewarded; that too was probably chance: and I am still too sound in body and soul to let such things spoil my broth. In the most critical period—the crisis with Poland—I handled at Grodno and Warsaw the German and French diplomatic correspondence between General Igelström (6), Potocki (7), Möllendorf (8), and the other Prussian and Russian generals, because there happened to be no other officer at headquarters who could work so much with the pen. “You are not yet bound,” said Igelström to me, when he gave me Möllendorf’s first letter. “You have not sworn.” — “The honest man,” I replied, “knows and does his duty without an oath, and the rogue is not kept to it by one.”
Matters of great importance were taken from the old staff-officers and given to me, while Möllendorf was still pressing for the Pilica as a frontier, and later, when they were arranging and managing the Dietines (9) in Poland by wholly new rules. For a time only (SN3) Igelström, Friesel (10), and I knew the whole plan. I worked day and night up to the last hour, when the first cannon-shot fell under my window; and I think I did not fail in my duty as a soldier either, though, during the long fire, I sometimes sat, grapeshot-proof, in a wall-niche beside the grenadiers, leafing through my pocket Homer. For the Russian papers the general had dozens of men; for the German and French, which could hardly be unimportant in such a situation, he had no one but me: Igelström himself, Apraxin, Pistor, Bauer, and others can testify to this. By the time the Frenchman Sion arrived, the most important business was already done. Yet now and then a fiddler was preferred to me, who had played something for one of the Subovs (11).
That too is perhaps not unusual elsewhere. I had the fate to be taken prisoner. At the close of the whole affair General Igelström sent me, with a young man severely wounded—my friend, whose father was his own friend—to Italy, that the invalid might use the baths at Pisa. We could not go; the French held everything. The Empress (12) died; on that very day I could not possibly return to the post which Paul had fixed by ukase (13), and so I was struck off the service. There is little fine humanity in Russia when it looks upon the flatland. Already before this I was nearly resolved not to return, and now I was wholly so. The Emperor, on my very frank representation to himself—since I had committed no fault of service—at last sent me the formal honourable discharge, which General Pahlen (14) forwarded to me. In Russia it is customary to leave officers who have done some service their pay; I received nothing. That perhaps was simply the spirit of the time, and it would be weakness in me to be vexed. Were I now to set the matter in motion, people would deem it long antiquated, and the sense of the result would run: “We lions have hunted.” — I will spare myself the afterword. Had I not some knowledge, a little philosophy of life, and much contentment, I might now be carrying the Kaiser's coat about my German fatherland for a crust of bread.
I have never humbled myself in life to ask for anything I had not earned; nor do I even wish always to ask for what I have earned. There are in the world many ways to live honestly; and when none remain, there are still some by which one may cease to live. Whoever has done his duty out of pure conviction need not, at the end, when his strength fails, be ashamed to step down. One must not count on the approval of men. Today they raise columns of honour, and tomorrow they require ostracism for the same man and the same deed.
If, after perhaps forty more years of life, I find nothing left to do, there may still be one small escape: to dust out the corners of my memory and bring forth my story for the correction of the younger. For now I wish to live, and to live well and quietly, as well and quietly as one can live without a penny in reserve. It will surely go as it has gone hitherto: for I have no claims, no fear, and no hope.
What I offer here in my travel narrative you, dear reader, will know how to sift. I stand by everything I have seen, so far as I may trust my own views and perceptions; and I have set down nothing that I had not repeatedly heard from men of tolerable credibility. If I have spoken of political matters with some freedom and warmth, I believe this freedom and warmth befit a man, whether they please some or not. Besides, I am as quiet a citizen as perhaps there is in the whole Meissen district (15)—hardly a gatekeeper more so. Much has since advanced and arrived, as was to be foreseen, without becoming any better. Were I to make the round now, I would likely have more to tell and could furnish evidence for my former opinions.
I would indeed like to have written a book that showed aesthetic merit also; but character and truth would suffer too much from anxious polishing. No one can give the thing and himself better than both are. I feel quite well that these pages cannot be reading for a lady’s dressing-table. Much would have to be cut, and much would have to be different. But if here and there a good, unprejudiced, upright, resolute man can use some thoughts for himself and others, then the remembrance will give me joy.
- Leipzig, 1803.
After careful reflection I have been unable, in the main, to alter anything. In fact, the things were so as I relate them; and in all else my conviction is not of yesterday or the day before. Truth and justice shall ever be my only sanctuary. Why should I seek to falsify? I have nothing to hope, and I wish to fear nothing. Concerning manner and style, the critics will no doubt still find much to object to, and I shall not stubbornly contest the justice of their remarks. Yet it was impossible for me to remould the whole more thoroughly; and the more vivid individuality would perhaps have been lost rather than gained in the casting.
I do not lay this down as a complete picture, but as an honest contribution to the characterisation of our age among contemporaries; and I am content if by it I maintain only the stamp of a man who loves truth, is open, unprejudiced, independent, and upright. Against the stream of the time, indeed, no single man can swim: but he who has strength holds fast, and will not be swept along. Nor do I yet renounce the hope that some day there shall be original justice, although the unhappy experiments may last for many a Platonic year (16). Only let each one act with courage, for his day endures.