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 described here. I publish this account because several discerning men believed it might be welcome to many readers and even useful to some. Perhaps they expected me to write it differently and better. On the substance I can appeal only to my own conviction, though I readily admit that, where the form is concerned, they may sometimes be right.
I hope you are my friend, or will become one. If you are neither, I am stubborn enough to believe the fault is not mine. Perhaps you will learn little or nothing new here. Sensible people have known all this for a long time. But it is usually either not said at all or said only in whispers; and it seems to me necessary that, little by little, it should be said aloud, firmly and clearly, unless we intend to drink milk for ever. They would dearly like to keep us always on children’s food. But without solid food no individual man, and no body of men, will grow strong: that is as true morally as it is physically. I am sorry if I have fallen into a presumptuous tone. Yet with certain subjects it is difficult—indeed, without betraying the cause, impossible—to preserve an air of graceful modesty. I leave what I have said to be tested and to have its effect, and am content that I intended what is true and good.
It is a very old observation that almost every writer writes only himself into his books. It cannot be otherwise, nor perhaps should it be, provided that each first places himself in a good light and a pure frame of mind. I know that I would rather see what is good and rejoice in it than find what is evil and grow angry over it; but joy remains quiet, while anger grows loud.(SN1)
For long enough, novels have dressed up in poetry, displayed, and repeated a thousand times old truths that no one now denies. I do not condemn this; it is a beginning. But it is still only milk for children. At last we ought to become adults and begin to treat matters with sober historical seriousness, without prejudice or rancour, without passion or self-interest. Places, people, names, and circumstances should accompany the facts as evidence, so that everything may become, as far as possible, a matter of record. In the end, history alone is the storehouse of our good and our evil.
This is admittedly difficult. Challenge an old religious prejudice and even now you are called godless; probe a political prejudice more closely and speak of corruption, and you are immediately classed among the agitators. Either label can then very easily be made synonymous with “villain”. Whoever holds the stamp strikes the coin. Anyone who still has something to hope or fear for himself dare not put his feelers outside his shell.
We should never say, as one so often hears and reads, that princes or their ministers are bad. We should say instead: here this prince acts unjustly, inconsistently, cruelly; here this minister acts as a private profiteer and tormentor of the people. Naming individuals in this way is a necessary and salutary risk for humanity, even if every government brands it as libel. The whole is made up only of individuals, good and bad. Slaves have made tyrants; stupidity and selfishness have created privileges; weakness and passion perpetuate both. As soon as kings have the courage to rise to universal justice, they will establish their own security and make the happiness of their peoples through freedom a necessity. But that requires more than winning battles. Until then, every upright man of sense and resolution must be free to believe and say that old leaven is old leaven(1).
It may seem strange that a man who twice took the field against liberty(2) should speak in such a tone. The riddle is not hard to solve: fate pushed me. I am not obstinate enough to force my own opinion violently upon millions, but I have independence enough never to deny it before millions—or before the highest and lowest among them.
Several men whose names the nation honours have urged me to speak publicly about my life and my gradual development, but I cannot bring myself to do it. In my youth there was the struggle of a young man against his circumstances and his own inconsistencies; when I became a man, my entanglements were sometimes so peculiar that I do not always recall them with pleasure. Who willingly confesses, “I was a fool,” merely to make a few long-familiar truths somewhat more forceful by example? When, at eighteen, I ran out of the university and into the world as a theology student, inquiry established that I had not stabbed a fellow student, got a girl into trouble, or left debts behind. Indeed, I had paid the few thalers(3) I owed on the very day before I disappeared. No one could discover the reason for my departure. They concluded that melancholy had led me astray and, on that assumption, even had the public papers search for me as gently as possible. That a student should pay his debts the day before running away seemed powerful evidence of insanity. I leave philanthropists to reflect on a conclusion that betrays a very poor opinion of the morals of our young people. The psychologist will understand the riddle when I say that all the convictions I have since expressed here and there, and in the following narrative, were already alive in my mind when I set off with nine thalers and Tacitus(4) in my pocket. What was a village pastor to do with such ferment? In a citizen of the world, firmly grounded in morality, it may yet produce some good. The storm within me has never risen high enough to sweep me from the ground on which I must stand as a rational and upright man. Most of my fortunes lay in the circumstances of my life, and my recent journey to Sicily was perhaps my first wholly free decision of any consequence.
I have been reproached for being restless and inconstant; that does me an injustice. Circumstances drove me, and no higher duty held me fast. Sitting for several years over the printing of Klopstock’s Odes and Messiah(5) is hardly the work of a fugitive. I am reproached for not seeking an office.(SN2) I feel unfit for many offices, and one of my principles—not founded on ridiculous pride—is that the state should seek out men for its posts. I am therefore glad to have reason to think that my fatherland must contain thirty thousand men abler and better than I. If I were a minister, I would very probably seldom give an office to a man who asked for it. Many will call this a whim; I do not. If I, as a private individual, will not act strictly by my principles, who will?
I have been criticised for leaving Russian service. I arrived there by chance and left by chance. I was poorly rewarded; that too was probably chance, and I am still too sound in body and soul to let it spoil my soup. At the most critical moment—the crisis with Poland—I handled in Grodno and Warsaw the German and French diplomatic correspondence among General Igelström(6), Potocki(7), Möllendorf(8), and the other Prussian and Russian generals, because headquarters happened to have no other officer who could do so much work with the pen. “You are not yet bound,” Igelström said when he gave me Möllendorf’s first letter. “You have not sworn an oath.” “An honest man,” I replied, “knows and does his duty without an oath; an oath will not hold a scoundrel.”
Matters of great importance were taken from the senior staff officers and entrusted to me while Möllendorf was still demanding the Pilica as a frontier, and later, when the Russians were organising and directing the Polish dietines(9) according to rules entirely their own. For a time, only(SN3) Igelström, Friesel(10), and I knew the whole plan. I worked day and night until the final hour, when the first cannon shot landed beneath my window. I think I did not neglect my duty as a soldier either, even if, during the long bombardment, I sometimes sat safe from grapeshot in a wall niche beside the grenadiers, leafing through my pocket Homer. The general had dozens of men for the Russian papers; for the German and French work—which can hardly have been unimportant in such circumstances—he had no one but me. Igelström himself, Apraksin, Pistor, Baur, 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 who had played something for one of the Zubovs(11) was preferred to me in return.
That is perhaps not unusual elsewhere either. It was my fate to be taken prisoner. When the whole affair was over, General Igelström sent me to Italy with a severely wounded young man—a friend of mine whose father was his friend—so that the invalid might take the waters at Pisa. We could not go; the French occupied everything. The Empress(12) died. I could not possibly be back at my post by the day Paul had fixed by ukase(13), and I was struck off the service. Russia shows little of the finer kind of humanity when it looks down upon the plain. I had already been half resolved not to return; now I was wholly so. Since I had committed no fault in service, the Emperor, after I addressed him very frankly, at last granted me a formal honourable discharge, which General Pahlen(14) sent to me. In Russia it is otherwise customary to let officers who have rendered some service keep their pay; I received nothing. That was perhaps merely the spirit of the age, and it would be weakness in me to be angry about it. If I raised the matter now, people would regard it as long obsolete, and the substance of the answer would be: “We lions have hunted.” I will spare myself the rest. If I did not possess some knowledge, a little philosophy of life, and a great deal of contentment, I might now be carrying the Emperor’s coat around my German fatherland for a crust of bread.
I have never lowered myself by asking for anything I had not earned, nor do I always wish to ask even for what I have earned. There are many ways in the world to live honestly; and when none remains, there are still some ways not to live any longer. Whoever has done his duty from pure conviction need not be ashamed, when his strength finally fails, to leave the stage. One must not count on human approval. Today people erect columns of honour; tomorrow they demand ostracism for the same man and the same deed.
If I have lived perhaps another forty years and then find nothing more to do, there may still be one small recourse: to dust out the corners of my memory and bring out my story for the correction of the young. 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. Things will surely go as they have gone until now, for I have no claims, no fear, and no hope.
You, dear reader, will know how to sift what I offer here in my travel narrative. I answer for everything I saw, so far as I may trust my own views and perceptions; and I have reported nothing that I had not repeatedly heard from reasonably credible men. If I have written about political matters with some frankness and warmth, I believe such frankness and warmth become a man, whether or not they please some people. For the rest, I am as quiet a citizen as one could find in the whole Meissen district(15); scarcely a gate clerk could be quieter. Much has since moved on and come to pass, as could be foreseen, without becoming any better. If I made the rounds now, I would probably have more to tell and could provide evidence for my earlier opinions.
I should certainly have liked to write a book with aesthetic merit too, but character and truth would suffer too greatly from anxious polishing. No one can present either the subject or himself as better than they are. I am well aware that these pages are not reading for a lady’s dressing table. Much would have to be removed and much altered. But if, here and there, a good, unprejudiced, upright, resolute man can make use of a few thoughts for himself and others, the memory of it will give me pleasure.
Leipzig, 1803.
Seume
After conscientious reflection, I have found myself unable to alter anything essential. The facts were as I relate them, and in everything else my conviction dates from neither yesterday nor the day before. Truth and justice will always be my only sanctuary. Why should I try to distort anything? I have nothing to hope for, and I intend to fear nothing. Critics will no doubt still find much to object to in the presentation and style, and I shall not stubbornly dispute the justice of their comments. But it was impossible for me to recast the whole more thoroughly, and in the moulding its livelier individuality might have been lost rather than improved.
I do not offer this as a complete picture, but as an honest contribution, for my contemporaries, to the character of our age. I am content if it preserves no more than the stamp of a man who loves truth and is open, unprejudiced, independent, and upright. One man cannot swim against the current of his time; but whoever has strength holds fast and does not let it sweep him away. Nor have I abandoned the hope that one day there will be justice in its original form, although the unhappy experiments may continue for many a Platonic year(16). Let each person act courageously while his day lasts.