And he, staring at me a moment aghast, struck his hands together above his head. 'Thy father!' he cried, 'Thy father! It is he who speaks—it is he speaking in thee. Such words come not unaided from the mouth of eighteen, from the mouth of one confirmed by these very hands. Ach, miserable maiden, it is not with such as thee that Paradise is peopled. The taint of thy parentage is heavy upon thee. Thou art not, thou canst not be, thou hast never been, a child of God.'
And that was all I got for my pains.
Tell me, what mood were you in when you wrote? Was it not, apart from its dejection, one rather inclined to peevishness? You ask, for instance, why I write so much about a tipsy trumpeter when I know you are anxious to hear about the other things I never tell you. I can't imagine what they are. You must let me write how and what I like—bear with me while I discourse of roses and nasturtium-beds, of rain and sunshine, clouds and wind, cats, birds, servants, even trumpeters. My life holds nothing greater than these. If you want to hear from me you must hear also of them. And why have you taken so bitter a dislike to our gifted young neighbor down the hill, calling him contemptuously a fiddler? He is certainly a fiddler, if to fiddle in one's hours of ease produces one, and perhaps you would be twice as happy as you are if you could fiddle half so wonderfully as he does. He is gone. His holiday either came to an end or was put to an end by Johanna's fiancé. Now, in these early September days, this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of cloudy mornings and calm evenings and golden afternoons, he has turned his back on the hills and forests, on the reddening creepers and sweetening grapes, on the splash of water among ferns and rocks, on all those fresh, quiet things that make life worth having, and is sitting at a desk somewhere in Berlin doggedly bent on becoming, by means of a great outlay of days and years, a Landrath, a Regierungsrath, a Geheimrath, and a Wirklicher Geheimrath mit dem Prädikat Excellenz. When he has done that he will take down his hat and go forth at last to enjoy life, and will find to his surprise that it isn't there, that it is all behind him, a heap of dusty days piled in the corners of offices, and that his knees shake as he goes about looking for it, and that he can no longer even tune his fiddle by himself but has to have it done for him by the footman.
Isn't that what happens to all you wise men, so prudently determined to make your way in the world? You must be very sure of another life, or how could you bear to squander this? The things you are missing—oh, the things you are missing!—while you so carefully add little gain to little gain, or what I would rather call little loss to little loss. I see no point in slaving day after day through one's best years. Suppose you do not, in the end, have a footman to open your door—the footman is merely a symbol, conveniently expressing the multitude of superfluities that gather about the declining years of the person who has got on, things bought with the sacrifice of his life, and none of them giving him back the lost power, gone with youth, to enjoy them—suppose, then, you do not end gloriously with a footman, what of that? I must be blind, for I never can see the desirability of these trappings. Yet they surely are of an immense desirability, since everybody, really everybody, is willing to give so much in payment for them. Our elder neighbor down the hill has actually given his eyes and his back; he peers at life through spectacles, and walks about like Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, bent double through poking about for years in the muddy pools of little boys' badly written exercises; and here he is at fifty still not satisfied with what he has earned, still going on drudging the whole year round, except for his six short weeks in summer. His wife is thrifty; they have only the one son; they live frugally; long ago they must have put by enough to keep them warm and fed and clothed without his doing another stroke of work.