Robert Walser - The Tanners

Kaspar cried out: “I’d rather the devil came for me right this minute! Italy! Why Italy? Am I suffering from an illness, must I be sent to recover in the land of oranges and pine trees? Why should I go to Italy when I can be here, a place I like? Would I have anything better to do in Italy than paint, and am I not able to paint right here? Or do you mean I should go to Italy because it’s so beautiful there? Isn’t it beautiful enough here? Can it possibly be more beautiful there than here, where I live and work, where I behold a thousand beautiful things that will remain when I myself have long since rotted away? Is it possible to go to Italy when one wishes to be productive? Are the beautiful things more beautiful in Italy than here? Maybe they’re just more sophisticated, and for this reason I prefer not to see them in the first place. When sixty years from now I’ve reached the point of being able to paint a wave or a cloud, a tree or a field, then we’ll see whether or not it was clever of me not to go to Italy. Can I be missing out if I haven’t seen those temples with their columns, those humdrum town halls, those fountains and arches, those pine and laurel trees, those Italian folk costumes and splendid edifices? Must one wish to devour everything with one’s eyes? I find it infuriating when people accuse me of harboring plans to become a better artist in Italy. Italy is just a trap we bumble into if we’re stupendously dumb. Do the Italians come visit us when they wish to paint or write? What use is it to me to go into raptures over bygone cultures? Shall I — if I am honest with myself — have enriched my spirit by these means? No, I’ll just have spoiled it, made it cowardly. Let an ancient, vanished culture be as magnificent as it likes, let it trump us in vibrancy and splendor, there’s still no cause for me to go snuffing about in it like a mole; I prefer to observe it, as long as this is feasible and amuses me, in books, which are constantly at my beck and call. In truth, lost, bygone things are never so utterly worthy of our estimation; for when I gaze about me in the present, which is so often disparaged as lacking beauty and grace, I find no dearth of images that delight me and beautiful sights enough to fill both eyes to overflowing. This mania for all things Italian that has strangely, shamefully beset us makes my blood boil. Perhaps I am mistaken, but even twenty bristly devils stinking up the air and waving their horrific pitchforks around wouldn’t manage to drag me off to Italy.”

Klaus was shocked and saddened by the vehemence with which Kaspar was gauging matters. He’d always been like this, and, as things stood, it couldn’t be anticipated how a person might succeed in establishing fruitful relations with him. Klaus said nothing, merely offered his brother his hand in parting, for they had reached the place where he was staying.

Back in his monotonous room, he said to himself: “So now I’ve lost him all over again, and all because of a perfectly innocent, well-meaning but in fact somewhat incautious remark. I just don’t know him well enough, that’s all, and maybe I never shall. Our lives are too different. But perhaps the future, which we never quite fathom, will bring us together some other time. It’s best to wait and endure as one slowly becomes a more seasoned better person.” Feeling terribly lonely, he resolved to depart again soon and return to his own province.

Sebastian was a young poet who recited his poems from a small stage to the audience seated below. Thanks to the impetuousness of his performance, he tended to wind up looking a bit ridiculous. He’d run away from home at an early age, living in Paris at sixteen and returning home at twenty. His father was music director in the small town where Hedwig, the sister of the three brothers, also resided. There Sebastian lived out his odd ne’er-do-well existence, sitting or lying for days at a time in a dusty attic room, stretched out on a narrow bed in which he slept at night without taking the trouble to tidy it before going to sleep. His parents considered him a lost cause and let him do as he pleased. They gave him no money, for they considered it inappropriate to support the dissolute lifestyle to which they knew he was prone with financial contributions. Sebastian could no longer be persuaded to undertake serious university studies; with some book or other tucked beneath his arm, he would wander about in the mountains and forests, often not returning home for days and passing the night, when the weather even halfway permitted, in tumbledown huts no longer used by human beings, not even rough, savage shepherds, in meadows whose altitude made them closer to the heavens than to any human civilization. He always wore the same threadbare suit of light yellow cloth and let his beard grow, but otherwise made a point of looking attractive and clean. He tended his fingernails more carefully than his mind, which he allowed to go to seed. He was handsome, and since it was known he wrote poems, his person was soon surrounded by a half-ridiculous, half-melancholy aura of enchantment, and plenty of serious-minded people in town honestly pitied the young man and warmly took his part every chance they got. As he was excellent company, he was often invited to social gatherings, which was some small compensation for the fact that the world was setting him no tasks that might satisfy his urge to achieve something. Sebastian possessed this urge to a considerable degree, but he’d strayed too far from the tracks of generally accepted and prescribed strivings. When he now strove, it was perhaps too fiercely, and, since he realized his strivings did him no good, he no longer felt much desire to pursue them. He also played songs of his own composition on the lute, singing along in his pleasant soft voice. The only injustice — a large one, to be sure — that had been done him was that he’d been coddled as a schoolboy, thereby helping him arrive at the notion that he was something like a child prodigy. How this proud fantasy insinuated itself into the boy’s receptive heart! Grown women favored the company of this lad, who was old beyond his years and understood such a great many things, and he inspired them with an incomparable attraction at the expense of his own human development. Sebastian was in the habit of saying: “My days of glory lie far behind me now.” It was horrifying to hear so young a man speak in such a way. Indeed, no matter what he did, aspired to, set about and performed, he managed to do this so wearily, coldly, and half-heartedly that he didn’t truly do anything, he was just toying with himself. Hedwig once said to him: “Sebastian, listen to me, I think you often cry over yourself.” He nodded his head, confirming this. Hedwig felt pity for him and sometimes slipped him a little money or something of the sort to make his life somewhat more bearable. Now, for example, she’d taken him along on this little trip to visit her brothers. This same evening when Klara was so blissful, Klaus sad and lonely, Simon in good spirits, and Kaspar irritable and overbearing, the two of them, Hedwig and her bard, went strolling silently, slowly along the shore of the lake. What was there to say; and so they kept silent. Kaspar approached them, saying:

“I hear you’ve been working on a poem that’s to mirror the events of your life. How can you mean to portray a life when you’ve scarcely yet experienced one? Just look at yourself: How strong and young you are, and to think that youth and strength like this plans to cower behind a desk singing its life in verse. Save it for when you’re fifty. Besides, how shameful, a young man crafting poetic lines. That’s not work, it’s just a hiding-place for the idle. I wouldn’t be saying any of this if your life were completed and had been crowned by some great, extenuating experience that would justify a person letting his flaws, virtues and meanderings pass in review. You, however, appear never to have failed, nor to have carried out a good deed either. Start writing poems when you’ve established yourself either as a sinner or an angel. Or better yet, don’t write poems at all.”