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If one knew he was to be blind in a year, like the young musician in Auerbach's exquisite romance, I know of no place in the world where he could garner up so precious a store of memories for the days of darkness, memories that would haunt the soul with so divine a light of consolation, as in that graceful Palace of the Prado.
"Much as I expected," said Raeburn, taking up a Marechal Niel rose from the table and studying it abstractedly. "I've had a sentence of Auerbach's in my head all day, 'The martyrdom of the modern world consists of a long array of thousands of trifling annoyances. These things are in themselves insignificant, but multiplication makes them a great power. You have been feeling this heat, I'm afraid.
He wrote some scenes in Faust the walk in the garden, the first conversation with Mephistopheles, the interview with the scholar, the scene in Auerbach's cellar. Egmont was also begun under the stimulus of the American Rebellion. A way of escaping from his embarrassments was unexpectedly opened to him.
He has published there several volumes of romances and historical novels, some of which have been very successful; but Trueba's real strength is in his poetry and short stories, which may be favorably compared with the best of this class of literature with Auerbach's Tales of the Black Forest, for example.
Another interesting place in Leipsic is Auerbach's Cellar, which, it is said, contains an old manuscript history of Faust from which Goethe derived the first idea of his poem. He used to frequent this cellar, and one of his scenes in "Faust" is laid in it. We looked down the arched passage; not wishing to purchase any wine, we could find no pretense for entering.
Even as Faust had entered into the purity and serenity of Gretchen's chamber, out of the coarseness and profligacy of Auerbach's cellar, so he, leaving behind him the wild life of his youth, had entered into the peace and quiet of a domestic home.
The book of his that pleased me most was 'Edelweiss, which, though the story was somewhat too catastrophical, seemed to me admirably good and true. I still think it very delicately done, and with a deep insight; but there is something in all Auerbach's work which in the retrospect affects me as if it dealt with pigmies.
No visitor to that library, and they numbered many distinguished visitors, American and foreign, from Emerson and Alcott and George Macdonald to others less well known, dreamed that the serene marble features of Goethe would be replaced by the granite fissures of the face of Bismarck; and that Auerbach's Black Forest Stories would be less known than Albert Ballin's fleet of mercantile ships.
During his time in Dresden, however, Auerbach's warm agreement with my artistic projects really did me good, even though it may have been only from his Semitic and Swabian standpoint; so did the novelty of the experience I was at that time undergoing as an artist, in meeting with ever-increasing regard and recognition among people of note, of acknowledged importance and of exceptional culture.
Every character in it is individual and distinct from his neighbour; the language from first to last simple, sensuous, musical. Of this poem Matthew Arnold says: 'It has a breadth, truth, and power which make the famous scene in Auerbach's cellar of Goethe's Faust seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by Shakspeare and Aristophanes.
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