The coffins had been let down into their common grave. At the head of the grave stood Uncle Ernst bareheaded, and bareheaded stood the crowd in a wide semicircle around him.
Bareheaded, silent, looking up to the stately man whose figure stood out giant-like from the hillside in the rosy evening light.
And now he lifted his great eyes, which seemed to embrace the whole assembly in one glance, and now he raised his deep voice, whose bell-like tones carried every word distinctly to the extreme edge of the circle:
“My friends all! I may call you so, for in the presence of a great sorrow all men are friends, and in this lies the healing and saving power of a tragic fate, and also its necessity. As my shadow falls here upon you, so does everyone stand between other men and the sun of fortune, and each envies the other his portion, which should, he thinks, belong to him; and he forgets that it is only an outward show that he so eagerly desires, a glittering show without warmth, and that the warmth which he should indeed desire dwells in the heart of every man, and is that alone which makes life worth having, or even possible. Woe to us poor human creatures, that we forget this for long, loveless years, forget the sublime words that love is above all, and drown the pleadings of the heart that longs for love with the hollow tinkle of our meagre knowledge and our paltry wisdom! Woe to the individual, and woe to the nation!
“Woe to the nation that forgets it, and exists for generations and centuries in crass selfishness and blind hatred, till the hereditary foe breaks into its fields, and, waking the people from their dull dreams, reminds them at length that they are brothers; and as brothers they stand by one another, as we have done on innumerable battlefields in the most glorious and most righteous of all wars, only on returning home to begin anew the struggle over mine and thine—the wild, desolating struggle of self-advancement, that feels no shame and knows no mercy, desires no peace and gives no pardon, and respects no right but that of the victor, who scornfully tramples the conquered under foot. Oh, my friends! we have experienced this! These last years will remain noted as the most shameful, following immediately upon the most glorious in our history—a melancholy memorial and sign how low a great nation can sink.
“But our great German nation cannot, will not sink deeper.
“Let us, my friends, take this fearful storm with its desolating horrors, which have now exhausted themselves and upon which this sublime peace has come down from heaven, as a token that the storm which is now raging through German society will sweep away the poisonous vapours of self-love, and make the glorious German sun shine brighter than before; that the barren waters which now cover so many acres of young green grass will pass away, and offer a new land for fresh honest labour and honest golden fruits.
“May this hope and this assurance soften the grief for the beloved dead whom we now commit to the sacred bosom of the earth—this hope, this assurance, and the certainty that they have not died in vain; that they were blossoms struck down by the storm to warn the gardener that he must tend and cherish the noble tree more carefully.
“The call comes thus to us the elders and old men. As they died gladly and joyfully, without asking whether they might not still live, hastening to death as to a feast, so must we live without asking whether we had not rather die.
“The call comes thus to you who are younger, to you all the louder and more urgently, the longer the road stretches before you, the more powerful are the obstacles that rise in your path.
“Oh! thou bright star of day, whose last ray now shines upon us, and thou holy sea, and thou reviving earth, I take you all to witness the vow which we make at the grave of these too early dead: to renounce from this hour all littleness and meanness, to live henceforth in the light of truth, to love each other with the whole strength of our hearts! May the God of truth and love overrule all to the honour of man, and the glory of the German name!”
The voice of the speaker died away, but the echo of his words reverberated in the hearts of the hearers as they pressed silently round to offer the last honours to the dead, bathed in the reflection of the rosy glow which the sun, now set, threw up to the sky, and which the sky lovingly returned to the earth.
Endnotes
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No translation can give the full effect of the play upon the word “Schmidt;” Anglicè, Smith. —Translator’s Note ↩
Colophon
The Breaking of the Storm
was published in by
Friedrich Spielhagen.
It was translated from German in by
S. E. A. H. Stephenson.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Robin Whittleton,
and is based on transcriptions produced in by
Charles Bowen
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Early Morning After a Storm at Sea,
a painting completed in by
Winslow Homer.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in and by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
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May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for
