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Title: Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.
Author: Jean Paul
Language: English
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Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source: Making of America
http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog
2. Greek words are transliterated within brackets, e.g. [Greek:
naos].
3. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
4. [=a] represents a macron above the letter a.
JEAN PAUL'S WRITINGS.
_TITAN_.
2 vols. 16mo.
_FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES_.
2 vols. 16mo.
_LEVANA, OR THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION_.
1 vol. 16mo.
_THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS_.
1 vol. 16mo.
_HESPERUS_.
2 vols. 16mo.
_LIFE OF JEAN PAUL_.
By Mrs. E. B. Lee. Preceded by his Autobiography.
1 vol. 16mo.
* * * * *
The above are published in uniform volumes by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Boston.
HESPERUS
_Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days_
A BIOGRAPHY
FROM THE GERMAN OF
_JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER_
TRANSLATED BY
CHARLES T. BROOKS
"The Earth is the _cul-de-sac_ in the great city of God,--the
camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer
world,--the coast of God's creation,--a vaporous halo around a better
sun,--the numerator to a still invisible denominator,--in fact, it is
almost nothing at all."
_Selections from the Papers of the Devil_.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1865.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
University Press:
Welch, Bigelow, And Company,
Cambridge.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
A work which has three prefaces by its author may be thought by some to
need, and by others not to permit, a very long one from its translator.
This is the first of Richter's romances which took hold of the German
public. After he had long tried in vain, by a variety of literary
devices, to entice or provoke the people's attention, and win or force
a way to their hearts for his wit and his wisdom, his odd fancies and
his noble sentiments, on the appearance of Hesperus, the siege, as
Carlyle says, ("the ten-years'-siege of a poverty-stricken existence"
Jean Paul himself calls it,) may be said to have terminated by storm.
It was the Hesperus that brought Richter to Weimar. It was in Hesperus,
and as Hesperus, that this singular genius rose on the horizon of
Goethe and Schiller,--the latter of whom (as will be well remembered)
tells his great friend that he has met "Hesperus," a strange being,
like a man who has dropped from the moon. English readers may have
different opinions on the question whether he "came down too soon" or
too late. The Translator seems to see signs that Jean Paul is to be
better and better understood and appreciated among us in this free and
forming Western world, and he concludes his introduction of this second
great labor to the public with the benediction upon the book which, in
the closing paragraph of _his_ second Preface, the author so touchingly
pronounces on this evening and morning star of his heart.
The Translator is exceedingly indebted to his friend, Professor Knorr
of Philadelphia, and to his former teacher, Dr. Beck of Cambridge, for
their kind and patient assistance in correcting the proof-sheets of his
work; and from the keen and practised eye of Mr. George Nichols he also
received for some time valuable aid.
Newport, R. I.
PREFACE
TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Two long Prefaces follow on the heels of this third,--the first that of
the second edition, and the next that of the first. Now, if I make this
third again a long one,--and perhaps also, in fact, the many remaining
ones of future editions,--I do not see how a reader of these latter can
get through the lane of antechambers to the historical picture-gallery:
he will die on his way to the book.
I report, then, briefly. In this edition such amendments have been made
as were most needed and easiest. In the first place, I have frequently
translated myself into German out of the Greek, Latin, French, and
Italian, and in fact in every instance where the speech-cleanser, with
proper respect for the subject itself, demanded it. Once for all, we
writers must all accommodate ourselves to the verbal-alien-bill, or
decree for exiling foreigners, of Campe, Kolbe, and others; and even
our beloved Goethe, however much he too "emergiert" and "eminiert,"
will at last, in some future edition or other, have, for example, to
throw both of these very words, which in the latest[1] he brings
forward in the same line, out of the book. Is it not time, now that we
have ejected the foreign peoples which had been long enough encamped in
Germany, that we should send after them what has still longer remained
behind,--their echo, or words?
Only let Kolbe, or any other Purist, be a reasonable man, and not
exhort us to change the technical words which are the common property
of cultivated Europe--e. g. of music, of philosophy--into vernacular
ones which will not be understood, especially in cases where the hand
of the interpreter would snatch and pluck away the butterfly-dust of
variegated allusions. For example, the name Purist itself may serve as
an example. Supposing one should call Arndt a _political Purist_ of
Germany, and Kolbe should substitute political _speech-purifier_, or
pure of speech, this small conceit would give up in the translation the
little bit of ghost that it haply possessed.
Even if the author, however, has not turned out such things,--as some
philological anchorites do, who, like the windpipe, eject all foreign
matter with disagreeable coughing and spitting, and only retain their
native air,--still he has at least sought to imitate the glaciers,
which from year to year gradually shove down foreign bodies, such as
stone and wood, from their sides. How diligently I have done this in
the present edition of Hesperus, on every side, may be seen by the old
printed copy interlined with the new emendations, and I could well wish
Herr Kolbe would just travel to Berlin and inspect the copy. At least I
will beseech the German Society there, which some years ago made me a
member, to go to the bookstore and see for themselves what their
colleague has done, what erasions and substitutions he has made.
The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language,
and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians,
who--e. g. Alexander von Humboldt--import the whole Latin Linnæus into
the midst of our language, without any other German signs of
distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or
tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to
the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him
through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already
shown its capability of creating a German Linnæus when we read a
Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken?
For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and
grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers.
For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever
fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and
great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of
children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our
prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words
which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into
a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose
upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild
with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the
English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem
full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and
fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares!
The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third,
improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly
through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully
eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or _Es_'s, in compound
words, wherever I found them, which on the very title-page of the
_Dog's_-Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to
endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language
against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I
was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it
had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses
for right of possession.
Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the "_Morgen-Blatt_
letters on compound words" has been waiting, not so much for a
thorough-going _examination_, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,)
but first of all for a comprehensive _reading_ of them, which, to be
sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart
from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not
yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the
speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands
before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.
Finally, in the third place, after the double amendment of two
editions, (for the first received great improvements, and in fact
_before_ it was printed,) a third was undertaken which had for its
object to let fly at harshnesses, obscurities, mistakes, and other
over-lengthenings and overshortenings of dress.
But, heavens! how often must not a writing-man have to improve upon
himself, who is hardly over half a century old! Were he to live, in
fact, into a Methusalem's millennium, and continue to write, the
Methusalem would have to append so many volumes of emendations that the
work itself would have to be annexed to them as mere preliminary
matter, appendix, or supplementary sheet.
For several years the author has found in his earlier works, in a high
degree, a fault which he has met with in Ernst Wagner, Fouqué, and
others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the passion for
enacting, in his authorial person, the trumpeter, or usher, of the
emotions, which the subject himself should have and show, but not the
poet. E. g. "With sublime calmness Dahore replied." Why add _sublime_,
when it is superfluous, presumptuous, and premature, provided the
answer really exalts, or, if it does not so, the result is still more
pitiful? The poet who, in this way, is the _fore-echo_ of his
personages, takes for his model certain modern tragic poets, like
Werner, Müllner, &c., who prefix to every speech for the actor the
bookbinder's directions: "With touching emotion,"--"with a sigh of
painful remembrance out of the depths of sorrow,"--mere sentences of
intensity, or rather of impotence, which only a pantomimic dance needs
or can follow, but which no piece of Shakespeare's, of Schiller's, or
of Goethe's needs, because, indeed, the speech itself teaches how to
speak it.
For the rest, I have not the courage, now that I am a quarter of a
century older and more aged, to give the first youthful outstreamings
of the heart a different channel, and a weaker fall and course. Man in
later life too easily regards every change in his junior as an
improvement; but as no man can take the place of another, so, too,
cannot the same man act as his own substitute in his different periods
of life, least of all the poet.
The best _wedded_ love is not what the _maidenly_ was; and so, too, is
there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first
things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are
so innocent and good; and all _blossoms_ come so _pure-white_ into the
world, in which by and by,--as Goethe says,[2] even of material colors,
"The sun tolerates no white." Therefore shall all the ardent words of
my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and
for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled
and unchanged. Even the Now shall take nothing from the Once. For
although during these twenty-five years I have been made, by some
imitations and echoes of the book, actually sick of myself,
nevertheless I overcome the disgust of this self-surfeit by the hope
that the youth who wrote will again, by and by, find young men and
young women to read him, and that hereafter, even for older readers,
more will survive of the thing imitated than of the imitations.
And so, then, may this Evening Star--which was once the morning star of
my whole soul--run its _third_ circuit around the reading world in the
fuller light of a better position toward the sun and the earth!
JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
Baireuth, January 1, 1819.
PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION.
I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable
sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may
perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which
continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides
from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as
master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of
a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Saturday and
fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after
which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf
or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease,
while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to
pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover--the paper with organic
globules and layers of ph[oe]nix ashes, that whole brilliant
pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most
unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I
address myself, and _thou_ myself like a Quaker, and order myself about
a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do
not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived
for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.
And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a
sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface.
It is headed:--
ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND
EDITION OF HESPERUS.
"But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a
long way through two antechambers into the passengers'-room of the
Book.--Joke in the beginning.--Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine
Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.--The conclusion from the
reflection.--Bring out many resemblances between the title Hesperus and
the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens:
That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that
both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the
one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo),
appears only as a black spot.--(In your copy-book of letters you must
have made numbers of such allusions.)--The world expects that the
Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer,
or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will
tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pass, and bring the world to its
right bearings.--Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on
words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest
wax cakes, but no honeycomb.--No one so very much resembles as pedants
do the magpies, which are at once thievish and _garrulous_: they dilute
and filch.--Into the critical hell precisely those classes of persons
are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely,
the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the
diarrh[oe]a.--Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who
announce loss and gain."----
This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written
as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that
the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life,
and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of
humility, or a bloody shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the
critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good
works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst
characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on
our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new
similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few
flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary
kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our
mouths the same _goutée_ over and over again, under the appearance of
six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation
of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a
potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third
course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the
fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one
had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of
brilliants,--and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which,
fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery,
and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.----
Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always
bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just
as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of assaf[oe]tida were
thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The
only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after
the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that
they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or
writing on which they pass judgment; and even this blame applies only
to the greater part of them.----
"Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the
unveiling and unshelling of women's arms,[3] bosoms, and backs at the
present day can mean, just as, formerly, peacocks were served up on the
game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and
heads, unpicked.--It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that
the shell-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise,
because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with
denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some
starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of
which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless
spots.--Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught
and boiled in the moulting-season."----
This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was
obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of
connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the
moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except
the year of birth.
"You must deviate from other authors," the plan goes on, "and glide
silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may
see just what you are.--One expects from the Preface to a second
edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the
after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the
register!--
With pleasure!--First, I have corrected all typographical
errors,--then all slips of the pen,--then many cacophonies of
language,--moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits
and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did
so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because
I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of
errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,--the jurist,
theological ones,--the physician, both,--the mathematician, all of
them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?--The woman
is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for
_coldness_ in _books_, as in _cakes of chocolate_, he holds to be proof
of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a
chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same
correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the
purport of the one which he really despatched.----To which opinion
shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?--Most properly to his
own, as the world to its own.--
For the rest, my little[4] work can hardly see so many _printed_
editions as I have arranged of _written_ and improved ones in
my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less
indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story
itself, therefore,--even supposing I had forgotten that it is a
true one,--there is little to change for the better, because the work
is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a
stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the
right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an
essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,--which I easily explain
by the want of episodes,--that the moment I take out from the first
story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the
third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far
in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build
in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and
fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a
mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched
houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts
the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise,
just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about
it, that in its case this cannot be done.
However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic
_changes_ and _improvements_ by true _enlargements_ of it through
historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived
and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I
am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to
supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand
corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which
however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply
turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any
others.
My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in
the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the
gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be
quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.----Heaven grant it! I have slim
hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that
I had--although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in
my Pantheon-Pandemonium--still, however, at least hung them farther
apart.
"On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical
_grafting-knife_ rather than the _weeder_!"
I just said that I have done so.
"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is
great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer
movement of the exalted heart is taken with a _reverse_ movement,--in
short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),--make
believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they
resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according
to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially
organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest,
and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,----and therefore at the end
of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"----
Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!--How could I
remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world
has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic[5] fragments of my Evening Star,
which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or
deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may
easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a
hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?--And how hard and cold must the soul
be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of
the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or _third_, into which
it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread
relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings,
and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in
this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands
in the _second_ world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become
brothers?--
Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star
above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago
for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye
as a rainy star,--only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the
_moonlight_ of poesy for the _morning_ of truth, and dismiss too early
its morning dreams!--But into the torture-chambers and through the
prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for
him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the
sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever
looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a
little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves,
some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any
eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy
brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.--Nay, and if I ever grow
too old, then comfort me also!
Hof, May 16, 1797.
PREFACE, SEVEN REQUESTS, AND CONCLUSION.
PREFACE.
I Was going to be indignant, in the beginning, at some hosts of readers
with whom I know not what to do in this book, and I was about to
station myself at the gate of Hesperus as porter, and with the greatest
incivility send off particularly people who are good for nothing, for
whom, as for a prosector, the heart is nothing but the thickest muscle,
and who carry a brain and heart and interior parts generally as moulds
of plaster statues do their stuffing of wood, hay, and clay, merely in
order to turn out _hollow_ from the casting. I was on the point, even,
of scolding at honest business-people who, like Antoninus the Great,
thank the gods that they never did much at poetry; and at those to whom
the chapel-leader, Apollo, must discourse on a rebeck, or straw fiddle,
and his nine soprano girls with the ale-house fiddle and corn-stalk
bass-viol. Nay, even at the reading sisterhood of the Romances of
Chivalry, who read as they marry, and who among books, as among
gentlemen's faces, pick out, not the fair, feminine ones, but the wild,
masculine ones.----
But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his
Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I
not rather in the first line address _those_ readers, and take them by
the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present
with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?--Come, dear, weary
soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded
year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a
dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness; and thou, crushed
spirit, for whom the present is a wound and the past a scar, come into
my _Evening-Star_ and refresh thyself with its little glimmer; but, if
the poetic illusion gives thee sweet, fugitive pains, be this thy
conclusion from it: perhaps that, too, is an illusion which causes me
the longer and deeper ones.--And as to thee, loftier man, who findest
our life, which is passed only in a _glass_, darkly, less than thyself
and death, and whose heart a veiled great spirit grinds brighter and
purer in the dead dust of other mouldered human hearts, as one polishes
the diamond with the dust of a diamond, I may call thee, too, down into
my evening and night star to such eminence as I am able to throw up,
that, when thou seest gliding around it at the foot, as around
Vesuvius, _morganic fays_ and mist groupings and dreamy worlds and
shadowy lands, thou shalt perhaps say to thyself, "And so is all dream
and shadow around me; but dreams imply spirits, and clouds countries,
and the shadow of the earth a sun and a universe?"--
But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the
after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human
race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the
procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly
body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with
silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and
the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised
to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as
lightning does man, destroys, but not _disfigures_; to thee, noble
spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, "Deign to look upon
my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may
make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a
thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and
sucks the blood of victims!"--And yet I have thought of thee all
through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening
piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining
maul-stick[6] of my weary hand.
As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised
petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore
present only the
First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, "Dog-Post-Days,"
until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the
Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because
the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the
Homoiomereia[7] of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable
little human bodies; and the
Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the
critics only, not to anticipate me in their _fugitive leaves_,[8] which
they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to
leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have
only once. And finally the
Fifth Petition, which one knows already from the Lord's Prayer.[9]
CONCLUSION.
And now, then, become visible, little peaceful Hesperus--Thou needest a
little cloud to veil thee, and a little year, in order to have
completed thy orbit!—Mayest thou stand nearer to Truth and Virtue, as
thy image in heaven does to the sun, than the earth into which thou
shinest does to either of the three; and mayest thou, like that star,
never withdraw thyself from the sight of men, except by hiding thyself
in the sun! May thy influence be fairer, warmer, and surer than that of
the Almanac-Hesperus, which superstition places on the misty throne of
_this_ year!--Thou wouldst make me happy a second time if thou shouldst
be an _Evening-Star_ to some withered mortal, and to some blooming one
a _morning star_. Sink with the former and rise with the latter; glow
in the evening sky of the first between his clouds, and overspread his
past life-road up the mountain with a soft lustre, that he may
recognize again the far-off flowers of youth; and rejuvenate his
antiquated recollections into hopes!--Cool off the fresh youth in the
early hours of life, as a tranquillizing morning star, ere the sun
falls hot upon him and the whirl of day sets in!--But for me, Hesperus,
thou art now well set; thou hast hitherto journeyed on beside the
earth, as my companion-planet, as my second world, on which my soul
disembarked as it left the body to the buffetings of earth; but to day
my eye falls sadly and slowly off from thee and thy white flower-bed,
which I planted around thy coasts, down upon the damp, cold ground
where I stand, and I see how we are all encompassed with coolness and
evening, torn far away from the stars, amused with glowworms,
disquieted with _ignes fatui_, all veiled from each other, every one
alone, and feeling his own life only through the warm, throbbing hand
of a friend, which he holds in the dark.----
Yes, there will indeed come another age, when it will be light, and
when man will awake out of sublime dreams and find--the dreams again,
because he has lost nothing but sleep.--
The stones and rocks, which two veiled shapes, Necessity and Sin, like
Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw behind them at the good, shall become new
men.--
And on the western gate of this century stands written: Here is the
road to Virtue and Wisdom; just as on the western gate of Cherson[10]
stood the sublime inscription: Here leads the way to Byzantium.----
Infinite Providence, thou wilt make the day dawn.--
But still struggles the twelfth hour of the night; nocturnal birds of
prey shoot through the darkness; spectres rattle; the dead play their
antics; the living dream.
JEAN PAUL.
In the _Vernal Equinox_, 1794.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
1. DOG-POST-DAY.
Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--Overture
and Secret Instructions of the Book.
2. DOG-POST-DAY.
Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
3. DOG-POST-DAY.
Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart.
4. DOG-POST-DAY.
Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.--Courtiers, and a Noble
Man.
5. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate sitting on Music.
6. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-Puff.--
Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
7. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
8. DOG-POST-DAY.
Examinatorium And Dehortatorium Of Conscience.--The Studious
Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
From Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
Intercalary Day.
9. DOG-POST-DAY.
A heavenly Morning; a heavenly Afternoon.--A House without Walls; a
Bed without a House.
10. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.
11. DOG-POST-DAY.
Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre à
Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
12. DOG-POST-DAY.
Polar Fantasies.--The Singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.--Third
Intercalary Day.
13. DOG-POST-DAY.
Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of Eden.--
Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
14. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
Confessions.
15. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Parting.
16. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Potato-Form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The
Thistle of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.--Fourth Intercalary
Day.
17. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
18. DOG-POST-DAY.
Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors
of the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
Flachsenfingeners.
19. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in
Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by
Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without
Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.
20. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on Shoulders.--Walk to
St. Luna.--Fifth Intercalary Day.
21. DOG-POST-DAY.
Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
22. DOG-POST-DAY.
Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
and Stabs.-A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
Giulia's dying Epistle.
23. DOG-POST-DAY.
First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
Race-Weeks.
24. DOG-POST-DAY.
Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play of Iphigenia.--Difference
between Plebeian and Patrician Love.--Sixth Intercalary Day.
HESPERUS,
OR
45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
1. DOG-POST-DAY.
Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--
Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of
St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April
that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from
Göttingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,--the other disliked
it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.
The party of the 1st of May, or Tuesday, consisted of the Chaplain's
son, Flamin, who had been educated with the Englishman till his twelfth
year in London, and till his eighteenth in St. Luna, and whose heart
with all its venous ramifications had grown into the Briton's, and in
whose ardent breast during the long Göttingen separation there had been
_one_ heart too few; next, of the Chaplain's wife, a native
Englishwoman, who loved in my hero a countryman, because the magnetic
vortex of nationality reached her soul over land and sea; and, finally,
of their eldest daughter, Agatha, who all day long laughed out at
everything and doted on everything without knowing why, and who, with
her polypus-arms, drew every one to herself who did not live quite too
many houses off from her, as food for her heart.
The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it
also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel
(Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose
culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it,
if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well
conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with
her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the
window-curtains, and without having even the _frisure_ of her hat, or
of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second
adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against
Tuesday,--although he said least, because he could not talk and
had only recently been baptized,--was to be carried to church on
Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the
guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her
godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,[11] among the _savans_ of earth, and
got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but
he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a
circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the
churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished
godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy
fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!
The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this
party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to
have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,--a regular
ball-room and _plaza de armas_ of the same,--and of these the Chaplain
wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with
hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much
stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts.
It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames
out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of
his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the
sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with
gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go,
that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and
constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not
go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of
which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the
tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?...
For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer
people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of
these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there
are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.
We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and
concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns
as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,--the accent
must fall on the first syllable,--or Sebastian, by abbreviation
_Bastian_, as the Eymanns called him,--or Victor, as Lord Horion, his
father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just
as my prose-prosody requires,)--Horion had, through the Italian
Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region,
and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be
palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on
Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly,
he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account _would_ be
scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral
lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father,
however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage
for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the
residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at
once moral blinders and _eye-glasses_, and _guided_ his vision while he
_sharpened_ it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For
that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Göttingen,
who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he
caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Göttingen people,
to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the
Doctor's head-piece,--that _Pluto's helmet_, which makes, not, like the
mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,--and thrust
on his finger the Doctor's ring,--that _ring-of--Gyges_, which only to
others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his
father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of
Göttingen?
His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would
come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three
times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into
the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our
Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;--fine tournaments and
watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes
in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;--besides, we
have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not
before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag[12] a
hair-bag,--and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of
April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his
shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to
gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and
sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now
resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.
We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen
while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters,
drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved
Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring
nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an
English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with
his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his
head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate
very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,--how he
once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village
together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously
bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and
true friend Hain,[13]--how he would often, after a child's baptism,
post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout
spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they
wept,--and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one
ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.
But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like
Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;--for with them
and courtiers wit itself is caprice;--they cannot approve that Victor
should love to _descend_ to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a
Frenchman would rather _creep upward_ to people of _ton_. For women,
who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the
humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts
them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to
what is artistically so,--folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a
national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a
cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched
choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements
of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable
gusto,--merely because he made believe to himself that all this
intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the
rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design.
In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it,
one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious
books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed,
is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I
elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a
juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek
comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have
caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part,
and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I
merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans
through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the
administration), and exalt, in perfect silence--behind the dropped
curtain of my face-skin--the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.
To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all
knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest
charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to _ourselves_
sweet thoughts without _ennui_, why shall not another be suffered to
awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her
children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son
was (for Victor always called her his mother),--how he relied upon her
in all things,--how he was always sporting without ever teasing
anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest
strangers,--and how she could open before him better than to any
matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A
court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,--_Zeusel_ he writes
himself,--once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case
of _lachrymal fistula_, because he thought that no eyes could weep but
diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the
biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good
Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him
the friendly hand, and say: "Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart
opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of
tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are
lined with affrighted ones clinging to the _twigs_, and despairing ones
clinging to the _leaves_, that, in such a life, where not only follies,
but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an
aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in
sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man
who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou
art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should
laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them."
In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,--a fragrant
leaf-skeleton,--sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that
he would--for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way--remove
the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because
his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the
rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments,
and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist
will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched
here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry
on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure
you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assaf[oe]tida and stuff the parsonage
with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay,
it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself
to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very
oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the
palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent
rosewood-oil."
He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the
roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose
into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men
are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the
skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact,
that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the
second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain,
sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched
and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;--he himself stood in the
background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan
was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off
the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who
read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not
have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the
fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir,
while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the
trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills
and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, _en
passant_: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his
swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second
mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in
limbo,--if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only
wonder was how he continued alive,--he alone was the one, and no devil
beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats
in peace,--and was himself very much so.
In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and
listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not
be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's
content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so
much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his
spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements
of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He
started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up
with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in
your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the
Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and
Country, 1785, recommends this course."
His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it
snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody
into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the
cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin,
and see what _he_ is doing therein. Nothing,--but out of it he is at
this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without
saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of
pent-up storms--(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have
scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his
velvet-knee cleaner than he)--could not possibly lie longer on his
pillow,--he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a
friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in
the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the
wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved
one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a
dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender
emotions and dreams;--its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to
fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes
could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill,
on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times.
He cursed and thundered at all his passions--to be sure _with_
passion--which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in
friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and
twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and
never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder--" Ashamed at his
self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.
His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by
plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the
cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit
of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend
_exactly_ as for a loved woman deserves either. But there are men who
go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at
the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher
than the _commercial treaty_ of self-interest, the _social contract_
of civility, or even than the _boundary_ and _barter agreement_ of
love, such a one,--but I wish he had never ordered me from the
publisher!--whose withered heart knows nothing of the _Unitas Fratrum_
of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler
vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and
sorrow--But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he
knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who
desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues
stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the
spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.
Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there
was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader
at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on
a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too,
and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's
rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the
coucher.
The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring,
the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and
covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist
whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and
whenever it is created, not by the "four _faculties_," but by greater
ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and
streams like a drag-net,--when the clouds, pressed down by their
weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,--when in one
quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood
with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the
moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and
when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each
other and exchange places,--who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands
and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists
move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this
white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor,
with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly
see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our
rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its
blue opening over our heads....
The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are
going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than
by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more
feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves
best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys
nothing about the whole thing except--May-butter, and from his mouth,
amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but--spittle, and both,
because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his
throat and stomach.
As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal
gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out
from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each
regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes,
but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,--that is to say, with
porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no
privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add,
that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over
six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of
artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new _yellow_
balls,[14] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder
sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the
muskets,--I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady
readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted
whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to
dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that
the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,--unless I
leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's
voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"
Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was
just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;--with a round hat,
with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and
attacked him with intent to destroy,--less from hatred than from love.
It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms,
face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that
had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a
second,--the first utterances were their two names.
The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and
stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck,
around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said
he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a
minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again
directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a
thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love;
he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long
therein, and made all good again.
With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under
the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,--for Spring
had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all
the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,--the
two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the
German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he
talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom,
laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.
The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had
themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal.
Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort
of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from
Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My
children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army,
"to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which
he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my
retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from
begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely,
to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces,
because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again
to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."
He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make
presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is
spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons,
gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."
The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen
and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the
trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more
_on_ their bodies than _in_ them, namely, anything at all. In our
days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary
of equipment and provisioning,--but in fact there are discreet
ones,--first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be
preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case
of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are;
secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,[15] of two equally virtuous
youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to
the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted,
because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and,
thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls,
cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of
vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of
up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,--the people advantageously
fall into two classes of paupers,--the protected and their protectors;
and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!
When my three beloved _personæ_ at length arrived in front of the
parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and
demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after
them from Flachsenfingen,--the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness
smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had
Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother,
and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the
midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four
Englanders--not foreigners, but horses--came trotting up. Now for the
first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was;
and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to
come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short
interval which the father occupied in passing from the carriage-door to
the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty
_for_ the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his
son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic
attack had deprived of his speech.
I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not
yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as
punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in
order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father,
Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings,
who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only
with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.
When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom
there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse
trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly
extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had
to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under
the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he
restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that
the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down
along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion
and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile,
the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and
lied to him _quantum satis_; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a _dolum
bonum_, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer
themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help
out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son
entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son
arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and
disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst
the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet
brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious
attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a
ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the
least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber.
Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were
equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized
at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes,
which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy
beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that
might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of
preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling.
Only the veiled Briton,--a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely,
like a high mountain over a torrid zone,--he offered to the filial hand
a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate
which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to
the grave or no farther than this minute....
Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny
took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy
of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens
of the cataract--that smoke-ball[16] and cloud cast over creation--down
into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three
lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son.
Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a _son_ and a _slave_ of the
dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or
tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart!
And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's
globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-balls,[17] ah, how little earth
it takes to exalt or to crush thee!
"Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?" said the
delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical
instrument. "Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw
thee first of all." The son could not stir for emotion. "Bandage me,
the light is painful! _Was_ it thou? speak!" He bandaged in silence the
open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid
from that noble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping,
then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any
longer;--he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon
the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and
when he felt on his trembling breast the _quicker_ beatings of his
father's heart, and the _tighter_ embrace of his gratitude,--then was
the best child the happiest,--and all rejoiced at his joy, and
congratulated the son more than the father....
Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this
History dead.
For now it is actually gone,--not a word, not a syllable of it do I
know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or
dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;--the
Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better
things to do and to lay open now, namely,
THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.
Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning;
but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,--in fact,
at the Equator, for I reside on the island of _St. John's_, which lies,
as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely
surrounded by the principality of _Scheerau_. For nothing can be less
unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book
(the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times),
than my latest home product, the _Invisible Lodge_,--a work, the
reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his
children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict
the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this
Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the
name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have
steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our
productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being
transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an
island,--namely, the isle of _St. John's_, on which I now live and
write.
The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses
to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title,
Dog-post-days.
It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking
in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun
itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore
Island,[18] that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye
glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those
wing-casings of growing Spring,--the plain and coast around me looked
like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered
and hid in vales and bushes round about,--the moon lay as yet behind
the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the
whole rim of heaven,--the blue sky was at length pierced with silver
spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was
looking only at the heavens,--when something plashed on the earth....
It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean,
and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and
rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an
utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a
conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the
character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with
me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her
sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.
"_To his Well-Born_,
_Superintendent of Mines_,[19] _Mr. Jean Paul_,
_on_
_Free_. _St. John's_."
This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was
pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog
consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their
portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in
sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which
intoxicated me still better,--a package of letters. _Savans_, lovers,
people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters;
business-people, not at all.
The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the
one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with
kings and emperors;[20] and that there were few mining intendants of my
stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty
left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should
go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon
and the Möser[21] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical
department, but then what flattery!)--that every one who possessed a
life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set
about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house
as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,--that
it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before
whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had
already passed into another lane,[22] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends
this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not
bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the
bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure
should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my
feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness,
only _then_ bring up the rear with the final flourish, that _modesty
forbids them to say more_, when they have already said everything that
modesty _can_ forbid.
At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to
make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he
intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"--he writes more copiously, but I
abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with
uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour
scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed
beast of a rat,--"to establish everything for me by documentary
evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of
the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not
wholly to be trusted,--in time he will explain everything to me,--for
this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is
still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof,
but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it
falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;--accordingly
the epistolary _Spitz_ will regularly swim back and forth as a _poste
aux ânes_,[23] but I must not on any account sail after the postman;
and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself _Knef_,
"shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that,
instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick
cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."
How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who
is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's
rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.
I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything
nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I
were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best
world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches
not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for
nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which,
again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere
_Declinatorium_[24] of our perpetual _horizontal_ deviations from the
cold pole of truth, and an _Inclinatorium_[25] of our _vertical_ ones
from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to
be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy,
that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance
by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,'
and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition
that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.
"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires,
because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down
as among the duties of _medisance_, and so pardon them, because they
hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In
books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several
or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their
_incognito_ is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so
unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe
few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has;
he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their
pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them;
and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living
descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so
weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist
can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his
pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual
abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility,
pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will
fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole
public, or all Germans, with an æsthetic lethargy, a political
enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does
not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who
reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and
if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner
witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this
historical drama--especially as he plays only the prompter--is
the--Dog. JEAN PAUL."
I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it
depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this
History to the learned world or not.
But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the
sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but
only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder
through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...
... _Spitzius Hofmann_ is the name of the dog; _he_ was the rat, and
was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A
whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at
have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to
read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him
to-day--for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my
writing--glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty,
I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the
fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his
repeating-watch,--the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the
sheets,--the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all
to him;--he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children
must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the
other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one
breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with
the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons,
but charms,--like the apothecaries, who draw at once _medicines_ and
_aqua vitæ_,--so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the
immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes
have, and _vice versâ_; and as this biography is set to music, because
Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far
more than Gessner's harmonious prose[26]), he can, when he has done
reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as
if I read the work;--the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of
its illuminated circle of waves before my island,--I stand on the best
footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;--everything is
ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an
alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the
bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body
blooms, my mind produces,--and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed
and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through
the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how
much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future
may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death
may lay under my roots,--nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing
joyfully--thou good destiny!--my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling
leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with
the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much
articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart,
while contemplating these _leaves_, may forget, in short, gentle
dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings----O, why is a man
sometimes so happy?
For this reason: because he is sometimes a _littérateur_. As often as
Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special
map the little life-stream of a _literatus_, which runs over some
lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus:
"Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature
happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an
inkhorn,--his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer)
the Easter-fair,--his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a
bookcase,--and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written
or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the
2. DOG-POST-DAY.
Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What
is your name?--your character?--your business?"
The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius--i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy
Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name--had, in his
younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and
the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which
cost him but a single _don gratuit_ from his subjects, and he succored
and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his
own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female sex, like all
travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the
greater number of them, that, like Titus, or like one sailing westward
round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a _day_, but seldom a
_night_, without making others, and consequently being themselves,
happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation
of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him
in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven
Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the
Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the
Monsieur, or _Mosye_: these names were probably meant to allude to
Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in
no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed
for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure,
sensual and somewhat feeble, but--except where he _feared_--extremely
philanthropic.
Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he
cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a
hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion.
What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion
of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the
second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court.
Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers--from an
excessive deference to political and domestic relations--throw an
unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship,
twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to
adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single,
tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.
The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed--by the lord,
whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited
monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful
niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual
Old Man of the Mountain as he at once _younger_ and more _smooth_.
But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The
beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her
his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her
twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after
its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit.
Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without
showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his
deep black eye.
The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something
to his taste, for the reason that he _had_ found what was still more so
in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved
them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le
Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same
person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign,
so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and
transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.
These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall
happily get back again to our St. Luna.
A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper,
held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been
unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably
near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master
in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor
instituted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so
many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath
never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and
Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superstition and
childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again,
he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were
next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit
from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself
a _conscientia dubia_, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to
understand that "his vow, especially before getting absolution from it,
he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point
therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had
neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil." In other words,
the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off
only from the _unmarried_ sex, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns,
that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound
adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme
strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain
wholly from the simple form.
It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now _increased_
love for his four grand dukes or _little_ dukes in Gaul stood to the
fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission
and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London,
because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with
him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so
heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the
mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently),
after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from
him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian,
the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a
concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had
been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only
confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the
Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more--to be found there.
Fate often gives man the balsam before the wound: January received his
fifth son, whom I shall never call anything but the Infante, still
earlier than the tidings of his forfeited blessing of children. The
chief Chamberlain, Von Le Baut, had wedded the mother of the Infante
(his Lordship's niece); but he dated his marriage three quarter-days
back, instead of announcing it one later. I have never been able to see
the connection of this anachronism or misreckoning of time with the
Prince's vow. For the rest, dangerous as January's _votum_ made him to
the _husbands_ of his court, and harmless to the _fathers_,
nevertheless, the virtuous confidence which the husbands reposed in the
female virtue which they had appropriated to themselves by marriage was
so unlimited, that they, without hesitation, led that virtue into the
midst of his unbridled flames. Nay, they even disdained the fear of
being suspected of doing so in order that, when he laid down his crown
on the toilet-table of their spouses, they might play with the shining
wall-crown (_corona muralis_) as with a _joujou_, and with its
brilliancy throw a dazzling light into people's windows: for a courtier
cares more to own his wife than to watch over her.[27]
It will come on presently, cry the puppet-players; it will be over
presently, say I.
When, at length, his Lordship returned empty-handed, he was
greatly surprised, not at the presence of the Infante, but at his
adoption,--namely, at the marriage of Le Baut. But this High
Chamberlain was--and no one minded it less than Horion--an ardent
friend of the Prince; this rendered him capable of doing for him
(as Cicero requires) even that which he would never have done for
himself,--namely, a dishonorable action. In fact, it is an uncommon
piece of good fortune for a courtier or a world's man, whose honor his
high position exposes often to the worst of weather, that this honor,
however sensitive to slight contusions,[28] easily gets over great
ones, and can, if not by words, yet by deeds, be assailed without
injury. Something similar is remarked by physicians in regard to
madmen, or rather their skin, which to be sure feels the lightest
touch, but on which no blister will draw. The Prince was knit to Le
Baut by a threefold ligament,--by gratitude, son, and wife; his
Lordship plucked the ligament asunder; that is to say, he laid bare
to his niece the Chamberlain's heart, and discovered to her the
poison-bag therein, and a dramatically carried out _plan_, which she
had hitherto regarded as an _indulgent confidence_. All the nobility
and pride of her nature flamed up in her with shame and wrath, and,
pursued by crashing recollections, she flew with her child, and with
the prospect of a second, out of the city to a country-seat of his
Lordship's.
Now the Prince with his Lordship and his court (including even Dr.
Culpepper) returned to Germany. Le Baut tarried awhile longer to
appease the niece and persuade her to take the journey. But it was not
only impossible to draw all her deeply sunk roots out of the land of
freedom and go with the party to Germany, but she even separated
herself, not only by seas, but by a bill of divorce, from the filthy
favorite. She was obliged to leave with the Chamberlain her second
child, his real daughter; but the first, the Infante, she clasped to
her maternal breast. Le Baut was glad enough to let it be so, and
thought that after the building-oration the scaffolding of the building
should also go into the house-stove. But when he appeared under the
German throne-canopy, his sun (January) stood at the summer solstice,
which from decreasing warmth gradually passed over to cold storms.
January's love could more easily rise and fall than stay still, and the
greatest crime with him was absence. Le Baut, stripped of both wife and
child, must needs lose now in comparison with his Lordship, because the
latter came upon the stage, and under January's throne-canopy as
treasurer and coast-warden of two treasures left behind in London. But
there were deeper reasons. His Lordship easily governed the Regent,
because he held him in neither by his own nor other people's vices, but
by his own virtues. In the first place, he required nothing of him, not
so much as diet and chastity. Secondly, he lifted no cousins into the
saddle, but tipped bad men out of it; he bore him like a hawk on his
gloved fist, but the falconer did it not for the purpose of darting the
Prince upon doves and hares, but in order to make him at once
_watchful_ and _tame_. Thirdly, his firmness and his fineness mutually
compensated each other: the best one to rule over changeable men is the
unchangeable. Fourthly, he was not the favorite, but the associate,
remained always a Briton and a lord and the country's beneficent
bee-father (apiary), whereas January was the queen-bee and in the
queen-bee's prison. Fifthly, he was one of the few men to whom one must
be _equal_ in order to resist their will; and any one who would play
the juggler's trick of throwing a padlock on his mouth slyly, soon had
one to fetters and manacles on his own soul. Sixthly, he had a good
cheese. This last point needs no copious explanation. In Chester he had
a farmer, who produced a cheese, the like of which was not to be found
in Europe; but to princes generally an extraordinary cheese is more
gratifying than an extraordinary address of thanks from the provincial
syndic.
With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found
the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in
January's face, gradually more and more legible. Still he read it
through several times every week, in order to read it correctly; he
could now no longer procure any lapdog a place, that is, a lap,--his
letters of recommendation were Uriah's-letters,[29]--and now, when he
actually succeeded in getting, through his Lordship, the charge of
chief Chamberlain, he thought it high time to try, against the gout in
his knee, bathing at his knightly seat of St. Luna year in and year
out, and so he set off, having first been obliged to solemnly promise
the whole court that he should come back well.
Properly, now, the preliminary history would be, according to promise,
ended, so that I might get well on in the later history this work
contains, were I not absolutely obliged on the Court-Chaplain's account
to add this much more:--
The only place of which Le Baut had the presentation at court was
the parish of St. Luna. He invested therewith, as its patron, the
Rat-contradictor Eymann, who had begged from him in London the oral
vocation to the Court-Chaplaincy, and who could no longer obtain it.
Hence the Dog-post-days always call him the Court-Chaplain, although in
fact he is only a country pastor.
From the slight circumstance that Eymann, as travelling preacher,
accompanied January's retinue, a great deal grew out. Eymann, at his
Lordship's country-seat, offered to his present wife the neck- and
breast-pendant of a heart hollowed with consumption, as a slight gift,
which was accepted. To the couple while still in England their Flamin
was born. Her Ladyship loved in the person of the Court-Chaplain's wife
a worthy sister of her sex, and a worthy fellow-citizen of her native
land; she urged her with fervent prayers to stay in England, and when
all were refused, she begged and prevailed upon her at least to let her
Flamin--in order to be at all events half a Briton--stay behind in the
society of Victor and the Infante, till the friendly trio[30] should be
transplanted simultaneously into German soil.
The Parson's wife was strong enough to sacrifice for the sake of her
Flamin's finer education the enjoyment of his presence, and left him
behind under the eyes of love and in the little arms of childish
friendship. The same training hand--_Dahore_ was the name of the
teacher--reared and watered the three noble flowers, which sucked from
one kind of bed and ether three kinds of color, and developed unlike
stamens and honeycups. Dahore had the hearts of all children in his
tender hand, simply because his own never boiled and blustered, and
because an ideal beauty sat upon his youthful form and an ideal love
dwelt in his pure breast. The three children loved and embraced each
more warmly in his presence, as the Graces enfold each other before
Venus Urania: they even bore all the same name, as the Otaheitans
exchange names with those they love. When they had attained some
ripeness of years, his Lordship came to put them all with Dahore on
board ship for Germany. But before the embarkation the Infante caught
the small-pox and was made blind, and Dahore was obliged to return with
him to the distressed and weeping lady. Victor had long and
speechlessly hung on the neck of his sick friend and clung around
Dahore's knee, refusing to part from his two loved ones; but his
Lordship parted them: Flamin and Victor were, from that time, educated
in Flachsenfingen, the former for a jurist, the latter for a physician.
There are some improbabilities in Spitzius Hofmann's gourd-flask; but
the Dog must be held responsible for what he delivers. Now the story
goes straight forward again.
His Lordship, during the cannonading of the tattered or riddled
garrison, withdrew with Victor into another apartment; and his first
word was, "Unbandage me a moment, and leave thy hand in mine, that I
may be sure of thy attention, for I have much to say to thee." Good
man! we all remark that thou art more tender than thou art willing to
appear, and we all praise it. Not _coldness_, but _cooling-off_, is the
greater wisdom; and our inner man should, like a hot metal-casting in
its mould, cool but slowly, in order that it may round itself out to a
smoother form: for that very reason has Nature--just as they _warm_ the
mould for statuary metal--poured his soul into an _ardent_ body.
He continued: "I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to
dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy
arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy." Victor
interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind.
His Lordship answered, reluctantly, "One eye was probably so already
before thy departure for Göttingen, but I did not know it."
"But the other?" said Victor.
Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he
looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and
hurriedly, "Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and
larger."
"That is, perhaps," replied he, for he guessed his thought, "an ocular
illusion of the sensitive retina.[31] You spoke of a gunpowder-plot."
"They have found out," his Lordship continued, "that the Prince's son
is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at
that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I
shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I
was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I
shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his
mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes
as thou hast given me."
"Then," Victor broke out, "not the best of men, but his enemies, will
be hurled down."
"No, I am to be _hurled down_ first (to express myself in thy
fashion),--but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage
to interrupt other people like fools,--for my absence is just what they
want."
I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt
whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no
longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist
have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they
tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself
out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom
are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a
visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the
coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion.
Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held
together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between
the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the
case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank,
their mental structure, and their frequent separation.--
"But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess--"
(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without
children, as Spitz says.)
"The Princess brings along with her a stream of diversions, in which he
will no longer hear any voice but that which lures to pleasure. An
interrupted influence is as good as lost. And then, too, I am, up to a
certain point, so tired of this game, that I gladly flee from the new
engagements in which this new arrival would involve me. Should she, as
they say, not love him, she might so much the more easily govern him;
and then my absence would be, again, not good. But, setting me aside,
what dost thou propose to do during my absence?"
After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, "Thou wilt be his
Physician-in-ordinary, Victor." Victor's hand twitched in his father's.
"Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply
because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how
any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary,
thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange
fetters until I come again; then will I impose still softer ones on
him, and go back forever. My engagement has had hitherto the design
merely of averting strange ones, particularly a certain--" Then, with
full heart and changed voice, "My beloved! it is hard in this world to
win Virtue, Freedom, and Happiness, but still harder to diffuse them.
The wise man gets everything from himself; the fool, from others. The
freeman must release the slave, the philosopher think for the fool, the
happy man labor for the unhappy."
He rose, and presupposed Victor's Yes. The latter had therefore to
dribble out his rhetorical flood during the leave-taking. He began
with compressed breath: "I detest most cordially the simoom of the
court-atmosphere ..." (his Lordship has to answer for it with me, that
the son leaves out here the concessive conjunction, "to be sure":
whoever lets it be seen that he expects obedience, gets it at least in
a prouder shape) "which sweeps over nothing but prostrate men, and
turns him to powder who remains upright! I wish I could be in an
antechamber on a court-day; I would say to all in my thoughts: 'How I
hate you and your sour honey of pleasure- and plague-parties; the
cursed watchman's- and rower's-bench of your card-tables; the gifts of
full dishes of slaughtered provinces (I mean your gaming-plates and
your meat-plates)!' But I know very well I can never express myself
strongly enough upon the servile, tide-waiting court-oysters, who know
not how to stir or open anything--not excepting their hearts--but only
their shell, to draw something in ..."
"I have not _interrupted_ thee yet," said his Lordship, and stood still
for a moment.
"Meanwhile," the son continued, "I wade with the greatest pleasure down
to the oyster-bank ... O, my dear father! how could I help going? Why
have I not hitherto left your diseased eye unbandaged, that you might
see in my face the absence of a single objection to your wishes? Ah!
around every throne hang a thousand wet eyes, upturned by maimed men
without hands; above sits iron Fate in the form of a prince, and
stretches out no hand. Why shall not some tender-hearted man go up, and
guide Fate's rigid hand, and with one hand dry, down below, a thousand
eyes?"
Horion smiled, as one who should say, Young man!
"But I beg only for some legal postponements and delays, in order that
I may get time to be more stoical and foolish,--foolish,--that is, I
mean--contented. I should be glad to laugh and go on foot for two
months longer among the good people around us, and by the side of my
Flamin, particularly just now in the almanac spring and in that of my
years, and before the ship of life freezes into the harbor of old age.
Stoical I must be at any rate. Verily, did I not lay Epictetus's manual
as a serpent-stone[32] to myself and my wounds, in order that the stone
might suck out the moral poison; were I to go out of the house with a
breast full of cancer-sores; what would the court think of me?... Ah!
but I mean it seriously. The poor inner man--dried up by the
intermittent fever of the passions, exhausted by the heart-palpitation
of pleasure, burning with the wound-fever of love needs, like any other
sick man, solitude and stillness and tranquillity, in order to get
well."
Though he named the word "tranquillity," his inner being was agitated
even to the dissolving-point, so much had the passions already stirred
his blood and shaken his heart.
And now the two went back in a deepening silence of harmony to Eymann.
"I have a request for my Flamin."
"What is it?" said his Lordship.
"I do not yet know, but he wrote me he would soon name it."
"Mine to him is," said his Lordship, "that, if he will get a place, he
must love the Pandects better than tactics, and, instead of the rapier,
take the pen."
The son had been treated too politely by the father to have courage
enough to ask for his secrets, especially that relating to the
whereabouts of January's son. I treat the reader with the same
delicacy, and hope he will have just as little courage; for, when any
one explains himself guardedly, nothing is more uncivil than to put a
new question.
His Lordship now travelled back, a cured man, to the Prince.
3. DOG-POST-DAY.
Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart!
The departure of his Lordship was the removal of the dam which had
hitherto stood in the way of the flood of narrations, questions, and
pleasures. The first investigation upon which the Parsonage entered
was, to see whether it was really the old Bastian. And he it was, hide
and hair; even the left side-lock he had still, as of old, shorter than
the right. When the butcher's boy comes home from Hungary, he wonders
that his kin are the same old pennies; they, however, wonder that he is
no longer so. But in the present case there was mutual delight at the
unchangedness on both sides. On every face lay the halo of joy, but
on each composed of different rays. On a soft face, like Victor's,
rapture looks like virtue. Old Appel, who had never, in all her life,
turned over any leaves but those of David's Psalter and that in an
ox's stomach,[33] expressed her pleasure all day long to the brass
kettles by scouring them with unusual zest. The Vienna hospital for
animals--consisting of an old pug and puss, who no longer hated
each other, just as in the old man the good and bad souls are
reconciled--and the bird-collection under the stove, which was one
rusty-black bulfinch strong, took their full share of interest in the
general uproar, and introduced themselves, and--which no ambassador
would have done--waived the right of the first visit. Agatha expressed
her joy only with her lips, by keeping silence with them, and pressing
them to her brother's. To the Court-Chaplain's credit, it is reported
that he took the invalid pug, who had the podagra in his hind-feet and
the chiragra in his fore-paws, and shoved him quietly in his basket
keeping-room and chamber under the stove again; restored the
architectural order of the chairs without scolding; and rocked the
little Bastian amidst the joyful confusion of tongues, that he might
not wake up and aggravate it. But in the highly refined heart of
Victor's countrywoman, the Chaplain's wife, the rays of joy from the
whole family came to a focus, and diffused through her whole bosom the
living glow of love. She smiled right into Victor's face to such a
degree that she knew no way of escape but by bethinking herself of his
destined chamber, which she directed to be opened and shown to him.
Agatha flew forward with the jingling bunch of keys; and the guest, as
he entered, was followed by only so many people as there were in the
house, all eager to see what he would say to it.
He surrendered himself to all this friendly handling, not with the vain
egotism of a cultivated stranger, but with a delighted, docile, almost
child-like confusion; it gave him not the least concern that he looked
like a child, so gentle, so glad, and so unpretending. In such hours it
is hard to sit down, or to listen to a story, or to tell one....
Everybody began one, but the Chaplain interposed: "We have quite other
things to talk about." But no _quite other things_ came. Everybody
wanted to enjoy the stranger where there were only four ears, but the
six remaining ears could not be kept away. My description of his
confusion is itself confused, but so it is with me always; for
instance, when I describe haste, I do it, unconsciously, with the
greatest. To a heart like his, that hung rocking in the feathers[34]
of love, was there any need that it should see in every notched
window-sill, in every smooth pavement-pebble, in every round hole
drilled by the rain in the door-step, his boyhood's years mosaically
pictured, and that he should enjoy in the same objects age and novelty?
Those boyish years, which appeared to him out of a shadow, abiding on
the lawns of St. Luna, between happy Sundays and among beloved
faces,--those _boyish years_ held a dark mirror in their hands, in
which the glimmering perspective of his _childish years_ ran backward;
and in that remote magic-night stood, dimly gleaming, the form of
_Dahore_, his never-to-be-forgotten teacher in London, who had so
loved, so indulged, so improved him. "Ah!" thought he, "thou unrequited
heart, too warm for this earth, where beatest thou now? why can I not
unite my sighs with thine, and say to thee, Teacher, Beloved? O, man
often perceives but late how much he was loved, how forgetful and
ungrateful he was, and how great the heart he misunderstood." What
nourished his still pleasure the most was the thought that he had
earned it by his filial obedience to his father, and by his resolve to
undertake the future labors-of-Hercules at court; for into every great
joy of his the doubt would fall, like a bitter stomach-drop, whether he
deserved it,--a doubt which reigning houses, palatines, patriarchs, and
grand-masters have skilfully taken from them in childhood. The better
sort of men find pleasure sweetest only after a good action,--the
Easter-Festival after a Passion-Week.
My lady-readers will now want to hear what was cooked for dinner;
but the documents of this Post-day, which reach me half by wheel and
half by water, state, in the first place, that no one had any
appetite,--which joy takes away more than grief,--except the three
regiments, which slashed like veterans into the enemy,--that is, into
the leavings of the table; secondly, that the meal was still leaner
than the guest himself. We will, however, hereby invite all the
reading-societies in a body to the _immovable_ feast of the 4th of May,
the Friday when, for the first time, Victor's arrival and his godson's
churchgoing are suitably celebrated.
The Parson's wife extricated the beset darling in the afternoon from
the musical circle of so many tones, and smuggled him away from under
the eyes of her husband, whose Directress and Lady Mayoress she was,
and led him to his chamber, that she might there, before him alone,
distress and delight herself, and speak out her heart, like a mother.
Long-suppressed sighs and antiquated tears now forced their way out of
the opened motherly heart into another and tender one, which was,
indeed, her son's best friend. She complained to him of Flamin's
excitability, which Victor used always to allay; of his love for
military life, while, after all, he was a scholar; and, finally, of the
company he kept,--namely, he went roving round with a young page, one
_Matthieu_, son of the Minister _Von Schleunes_, a dissolute,
universally-beloved, universally-spoiled, bold, artful young scoffer,
who, when his service allowed it, would spend his time either over
yonder with the Chamberlain's people, or here with her son: "Heaven
only knew what designs he had in his visits at a citizen's house." She
rejoiced that Victor would bear off his old friend out of the traps and
fangs of this rake. Victor pressed her hand with emotion, and said: "I
could hardly think of sharing his heart with the best bond-fellow.
Not so much as fall in love should he dare to, if it depended on me.
Only me must he love, and one other person, who depicts him quite
wrongly,--namely, yourself." He greatly mistrusted, also, her drawing
of the sun-spots of Matthieu, because women seldom comprehend eccentric
men, and because maidens, indeed, often love wild youths, but matrons
(enlightened by marriage) always prefer gentle ones.
He easily drew the hearts of married women into his drag-net by a
certain kindly gallantry towards them which a German saves for
unmarried ones. Old ladies and old tobacco-pipes, however, easily
cleave to men's lips. The younger pigeons he enticed to himself by his
_comic salt_, as they catch turtle-doves by another kind. A _bon-mot_
is to them a _dictum probans_; a _pasquin_, a _magister sententiarum_;
and the critical calendar of scandal is to them a Kant's Critique of
the Pure Reason, in an improved edition. With his medical doctor's
ring, also, he fastened to himself female souls; as physician, he laid
claim to corporeal mysteries, and then the spiritual easily follow
these.
In the evening, when the woodland stream of the first jubilation had
run out, three sober words were at length possible. The Parson, too, by
this time, scolded less; for joy had made him rabid in the forenoon.
Anger and the body are strengthened together, and therefore by
pleasure. Hence in January and February, when dogs get the longer
madness, men have the short one of wrath; hence convalescents grumble
more at all about them, just as people do under strong mental
excitements,--e. g. Dog-post scribes; hence, too, in the exhaustion
following sick-headache, or a fit of intoxication, one is gentler than
a lamb.
Towards evening, there already transpired something of consequence.
Apollonia swept and dusted her blood-relationship and her guest with
her whisks even sooner than the spiders and the dust. On the 4th of May
was this day's arrival of the long-absent fugitive to be right properly
celebrated. Flamin and Victor led the way through the Parsonage garden,
whose _memorabilia_ and _curiosa_ are so edifying that the
correferent[35] of these acts wishes he could, by the Dog-express,
portray the garden to me more clearly. The Chaplain had stamped off
many beds, not into rectangles, but had curved and twisted them into
the shape of Latin characters, in double black-letter, to represent the
initials of his family. His own (E) he had sowed with radishes;
Apollonia's (A), with capuchin-lettuce;[36] Flamin's (F), with
rape-cole; Sebastian's (S), with sweet-root, or _Glycyrrhiza vulgaris_
(liquorice). Whoever was not present had left for him, at all events, a
vacant place and _almanac royal_ among squashes and Stettin-apples,
round which was wrapped a perforated paper with the name cut out,
which, after the peeling off of this wrappage, would appear green or
red on the pale fruit. Victor, as he passed along by a C made of
tulips, asked his Flamin the meaning of it. "Why dost thou ask?" he
inquired; and the loquacious Parsonage-people, following after, drove
away the answer.
Beyond the Parsonage-meadow stood--one had only to leap the brook--a
hill, and thereon an old watchtower, in which there was nothing but a
wooden staircase, and overhead nothing but a board covering instead of
the Italian roof, both of which the Chamberlain had had made, that the
people--not himself, for the unfeelingness of magnates labors for the
feeling of minorites--might up there look round them a little. One
could see from there the columnar architecture of the Creator, the
Swiss mountains, standing, and the Rhine moving along with his ships.
On the tower two linden-trees had grown aloft, twined together by
nature, so as, sometimes, with their foliage, which had been hollowed
out into a green niche and underlaid with a grassy bench, to fan, up
there, a fevered islander. The loving party climbed the battlement, and
carried up with them in their rural breasts a tranquillity which softly
copied therein the still outer heaven that encircled these good hearts
with its veiled suns. One lingering cloud gave a farewell glow, but it
melted away before it burned out.
Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St.
Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of
_gravamina_ (grievances) upon the consistorial councils and the rats.
All at once, Agatha, like her saintly namesake, was invoked down below
by the organ-blower _loci_, who was _valet-de-place_ of the village,
and Parsonage-coachman. When certain authors say, "The coachman was
blind, and the horse was deaf," they exactly reverse the case. The
churl was deaf. He had in his _mouchoir de Vénus_--the handkerchief is,
with the common people, at once letter-bag and envelope, because a
letter is as important and rare a thing to them as a good one is to a
reviewer--to-day discovered and unwrapped an epistle to Agatha, which
he should have delivered yesterday with his Lordship's: but coachmen
consider a master only as the mock-sun and second party to the horse,
and the lady absolutely as no more than a parasite-growth of the
stable; hence "immediately" means with them one or two or three days;
and "to-morrow forenoon" meant, on the Ratisbon notification-programme
of matters to be voted on, one or two or three years. Agatha, with more
eagerness, hurried down, held the letter towards the lighter quarter of
the west, and deciphered something, which, with sparkling eyes, she
carried in a gallop up the stairs. "She is coming to-morrow!" she cried
out to Flamin; for she seemed almost, in the person of every one of her
friends, to love only the companion and friend of her other friends.
The case was this: _Clotilda_, Le Baut's only daughter by his first
wife (his Lordship's niece), was coming from the Girls' Institute in
Maienthal, where she had been educated, back to her father.
"Do _you_ take good care!" said the Chaplain's wife; "she is very
beautiful."
"Then," said he, "I shall much rather take care _not_ to take care."
"In fact," she continued, "all that is beautiful is now gathering
around you" (here he tried to confuse and chastise her by a flattering
look, but in vain). "The Italian Princess comes, too, on St. John's
Day; and she is said to be as charming as if she were no princess at
all, but only an Italian woman." There she did most princesses wrong;
but a certain irony upon her own sex was the only fault of the
Chaplain's wife, to whom, as to many other mothers, there were almost
no step-sons and hardly anything but step-daughters.
He hoped, he replied, that very few princesses, even in America, had
yet been married, in whose affections he could not have become
completely entangled, and that merely from pity for such a poor, tender
creature or heraldic beast, pressed under the seal-stamp and then on
the contracts, which were often the only children of these marriages.
"The young Mothers of the Country are really, like bee-mothers, set up
for sale in their queen's prison, and wait to see into what hive the
bee-father, or Father of the Country, will this year trade them off
again."
A woman cannot possibly comprehend how a man whom she esteems can
fall in love, except with her; and she can hardly wait to get sight of
his beloved. Quite as curious is she about this man's style in his
love,--that is, whether it is of the Flemish or French or Italian
school. The Chaplain's wife questioned her confidential guest on this
point also.
"My harem," he began, "reaches from this watchtower to the Cape, and
away round the globe: Solomon is but a yellow straw-widower compared
with me. I have in it even his wives; and, from Eve with her Sodom's
Borsdorf-apple down to the latest Eve with an Imperial apple, and even
to a marchioness with a mere fruit-piece, they are all in my hold and
breast."
A lady excuses esteem for her sex on the ground that she is included
therein. Women themselves have not so much as an idea of the
peculiarities of their sex.
"But what says the favorite Sultana to this?" asked the Grand
Inquisitress.
"She--" He paused, less from embarrassment than as one sunk in the
fulness of glowing dreams. "_She_, of course--" he continued. "I pledge
my head, meanwhile, that every youth has two periods, or, at least,
moments. In the first, he stakes his head that he would sooner let his
heart mould in his thorax or chest, and his _poples_ or knee-joint grow
lame, than that either should stir for any other woman than the very
best of her sex,--for a real angel, a decided Quinterne.[37] He
absolutely insists on the highest prize in the marriage Loto,--that is,
in the first period; for the second comes, and cheats him out of so
much. The female Quinterne would naturally require a _male_ one; and,
in case he were _that_,...
"I am a stupid drawing, an _ambe_, a double number, I say, and
absolutely refuse to let the period have its talk out; but I shall
still be on the look-out for the _Quinterne_.... And here let me ask,
What would be the use of being a man if one were not a fool? Well, now,
if I should draw the above-mentioned Quinterne,--which, to be sure,
without any extravagant hope, I may well presuppose,--I should not be
indifferent on the subject, but in raptures. Good heavens! I must
instanter be frizzled, and have my profile taken. I should make verses
and _pas_, and both with their traditional _pedes_ (or feet); I should
bend myself oftener than a devout monk, to make bows and (where there
was anything to gather) bouquets; body, soul, and spirit I should have
consist with me of so many finger-tips and feelers, that I should
perceive at once (the Quinterne would perceive it still quicker) if our
two shadows should come in collision. The touch of the smallest little
end of a ribbon would be a good conductor to the electrical ether,
which would shoot out from me in lightnings, as she would be charged
negatively and I positively; and as to touching her hair, that could
not create any less explosion than if a world should fall into the
dishevelled[38] hair of a bearded comet....
"And yet what does it all amount to, if I have sense, and consider what
she deserves, this good creature, this faithful, this undeserved one?
What, in fact, were dull verses, sighs, shoes (boots I should put
away), one or two hands pressed, a sacrificing heart, but a slight
_gratial_ and _don gratuit_, if thereby a creature was to be obtained
who, as I see more and more, has everything belonging to the fairest
angel that conducts man through life (invisibleness perhaps excepted);
who has all virtues, and arrays them all in beauties; who gleams and
gladdens like this spring evening, and yet, like it, conceals her
flowers and all her stars, except the star of love; into whose
all-powerful and yet gentle harmonica of the heart I would fain be so
absorbed in listening; in whose eyes I would behold with such
extraordinary delight the tear-drops of the tenderer soul, and the
beamings of the loftier one; by whose side I could so fondly remain
standing through the whole flying _opera buffa_ and _seria_[39] of
life,--so fondly, I say, that so the poor Sebastian might at least,
when, in life's holy evening, his shadow grew longer and longer, and
the landscape around--him melted away to a broad shadow, and he
himself, too, that I might at least behold _both_ shadowy hands," (one
of them Flamin was just then holding,) "and exclaim--" (Checking
himself:) "Here comes the-old bellows-blower, too, with something in
one of his!"
As he could no longer either hide his emotion behind jest, nor the
signs of it in his eyes behind some low-hanging linden-leaves, it was a
real piece of good luck, that, just at the second when his voice was
about to give way to it, he looked over the watch-tower, and saw the
coachman come racing over again. The man cried from below, "he had got
it from Seebass, but not till this moment." Agatha flew down
passionately, and, after reading a billet below, darted off across the
meadow. The bellows-blower ascended slowly, like a barometer before
settled weather, and lifted himself and the billet he had brought back
with him,--not a minute the sooner for all the beckoning overhead
there,--with his levers, to the top of the tower. In the billet was
written, in Clotilda's hand, "Come to thy bower, beloved friend!"
All eyes now ran after the runner, and fluttered with her through the
clear-obscure of evening into the Parsonage, around whose arbor,
however, no one could yet be seen. Hardly had Agatha caught sight of
the opening of the latter, when her hurrying became flying; and when
she was almost up to it, a white form flew out with widespread arms and
into hers, but the arbor concealed the end of the embrace, and the eyes
of all lingered long in vain expectation up in the cloister of love.
The Chaplain's wife, who generally would allow maidens only
degradations and not elevations of rank, now imparted to Clotilda all
the seven consecrations, and praised her so much--perhaps also because
she was a countrywoman of hers on the mother's side--that Victor could
have embraced the eulogist and her subject at once. The Chaplain added,
as his mite to her praise, that he had printed the initial of her name
(C) with tulips in red, like a title, and that the letter would shine
out, when the bed bloomed, far and wide.
The husband and husbandman began now to break in more and more upon the
sphere-music of night with the reed-stops of his cough; at last, he
made off with Victor's enthusiastic female friend, and left the two
friends alone, in the lovely night, with the two full hearts that
panted to pour themselves out into each other.
Flamin had, during this whole day, shown a deepening silence of
touching tenderness, which seldom found its way into his being,
and which seemed to say, "I have something on my heart." When the
watch-tower was comparatively deserted, Victor, who had become full of
loving and softening dreams, could no longer conceal his tear-swimming
eyes: he opened them freely before the oldest darling of his days, and
showed him that open eye which says, "Look right through, if thou wilt,
down to my very heart; there is nothing therein but clear love." ...
Silently the vortices of love swept round the two, and drew them nearer
together; they opened their arms for each other, and sank into each
other's without a sound, and between the brother-hearts lay only two
mortal bodies. Covered deep by the stream of love and ecstasy, they
closed for a moment their enraptured eyes; and when they opened again,
there stood the night sublimely before them, with its suns withdrawn
into eternal depths; the milky-way ran, like the ring of eternity,
around the immensity of space; the sharp sickle of the earthly moon
glided, cutting, across the short days and joys of men.
But in that which stood under the suns, which the ring encircled, which
the sickle smote, there was something higher, clearer, and more lasting
than they: it was the imperishable friendship lodged in these
perishable integuments.
Flamin, instead of being satisfied by this exhausting expression of our
speechless love, became now a living, flying flame. "Victor! in this
night give me thy friendship forever, and swear to me that thou wilt
never disturb me in my love to thee."
"O thou good soul! I have given thee my heart long since, but I will
gladly swear to thee again to-day."
"And swear to me that thou wilt never plunge me into misfortune and
despair."
"Flamin! that distresses me too much."
"O, I beseech thee, swear it! and lift thy hand and promise me, even if
thou hast made me unhappy, nevertheless that thou wilt not forsake me
nor hate me." ... Victor pressed him to his bosom. "But we will come up
hither when we can no longer be reconciled,--O, it pains me, too,
Victor!--up hither, and embrace each other, and throw ourselves down
and die!"
"Ay!" said Victor, in a low and exhausted voice. "O God! has anything
happened, then?"
"I will tell thee all. Now let us live and die together."
"O Flamin! how inexpressibly I love thee to-day!"
"Now will I let thee see into my whole heart, Victor, and reveal to
thee all."
But, before he could do it, he had to man himself by holding his peace;
and they remained a long time silent, lost in the depths of the inner
and outer heavens.
At last he was able to begin, and to tell him that that Clotilda, about
whom he had jested to-day, had written herself in ineffaceable
characters on his heart; that he could neither forget nor possess her;
that the creeping fever of a frightful, frenzied jealousy burned,
galling, within him; that he could not, to be sure, say a word to her
about his love, according to her prohibition, until her brother (the
Infante) should come back and be present; but that she, to judge by her
demeanor, and according to Matthieu's assurances, had perhaps some
regard for him; that her position must be an eternal wall of separation
between them, so long as he took the _juristic_ instead of the
_military_ road to promotion; and that on this last, if his Lordship
would lend him a hand in the matter, he would attain to Clotilda more
swiftly on similar steps; and that the request of which he had spoken
in his letters to Victor was just this,--that he would repeat all to
his Lordship, and beg his assistance. In fact, his wild arm could hold
the sword better than the balance of justice. A frightful
predisposition to jealousy, which even from future possibilities
catches palpitations, was the chief reason.--Victor rejoiced that he
could give his feelings the best language,--namely, action, and
assented to all he required, with delight at his confidence, and at the
absence from his communication of dreaded news; and so, newly attached
to each other, they went to rest. And the Twins--that ever-burning,
intertwined name of friendship--glimmered in the west, beckoning upward
out of an _earthly_ eternity; and the heart of the Lion blazed on their
right....
There are men laid upon this earth, and bound to the soil, who never
erect themselves to the contemplation of a friendship which winds
around two souls, not earthy, metallic, and unclean bonds, but the
spiritual ones that interweave this world itself with another and man
with God. Such ones, degraded to the dust, it is, that, like
travellers, regard from below the temple that hangs round the Alpine
peaks as baseless and airy, because they do not themselves stand on
the heights, and on the great floor of the temple,--because they know
not that in friendship we revere and love something higher than self
(which latter cannot at once be the _source_ and the _object_ of
love),--something higher, namely, the embodiment and reflection of the
virtue which in ourselves we only _approve_, and not till we see it in
others can _love_.
Ah! can, then, higher beings judge severely the weaknesses of the
shadowy groups that seek to hold fast to one another, driven apart as
they are by north winds,--who would fain press to their bosoms the
noble, invisible form of each other over which the thick and heavy
earthly mask hangs,--and who fall, one after another, into graves into
which the mourned draw their mourners?
4. DOG-POST-DAY.
Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.[40]--Courtiers,
and a Noble Man.
Clotilda, as Sebastian learned the next morning, had originally meant
to stay at the seminary till after St. John's; but, as her best friend
and schoolmate _Giulia_ had gone beforehand, not to her parents, but to
the long home, her distressed eyes must needs draw themselves away by a
speedier departure from the grave-mound which lay like a ruin over her
forlorn heart. Without packing up, she had fled from the flowerless
Golgotha of her wounded soul; and a second contemplation of it, and a
second departure, and a renewal of the old tears, still awaited her.
Never was a great beauty praised in a more unembarrassed manner by a
little one than Clotilda was by Agatha. Generally, the only thing
maidens appreciate about maidens is the heart; the evanescent charms of
another's face have so little worth in their eyes, that they hardly
care to mention them. Young men are justly reproached with selecting by
preference beautiful youths for their friends. In the case of girls, on
the contrary, their eulogists make much of the fact that they entirely
despise female beauty, as a too loose and base cement-and-mortar of
friendship, and that, therefore, to a beautiful woman, the _heart_ of
the very ugliest is more precious than the face of the handsomest on
the five zones and scarfs of the earth. Agatha was otherwise: she ran
over, the first thing in the morning, to the palace, to dress her
friend.
Flamin behaved still worse. He could not wait for the reality itself to
hang up Clotilda's Madonna-image in the chambers of Victor's brain: he
anticipated it with the pen-and-ink sketch of a painter, which is, at
least, not cold; for painters, in the _æsthetic_ and in the
_calligraphic sense_, seldom write well. The painter had, merely for
the sake of seeing and sketching Clotilda, stretched himself, almost
every Sunday morning, on a hill of Maienthal, where he transferred to
his note-book the glittering landscape round the seminary; and the
beautiful head which looked out of the eighth window he transferred
into his heart. Even Flamin, who generally set even the vignettes of
prose above the living oil-paintings of poetry, found, in the following
Madonna or Clotilda of the artist, something to his taste:--
"When my conscious being is a single thought, and burns; and when, with
the flames waving around me, I dip my hand into colors, to cool myself
therein;--then, when the lofty beauty[41] that forever beams within me
lets fall its image on the waves which tremulously picture heaven and
earth, and sets on fire the clear stream; and then, when an image of
Pallas, descending from heaven, rests upon the stream, a lily-casing
and cast-off wing-wrappage of an up-flown angel,--a form whose
unstained soul no body, but only the snow which lies around the throne
of God, and out of which the angels weave their fleeting vehicular
bodies,[42] encloses; and when the most delicate drapery is too coarse
and hard, and becomes a wooden frame around that divine breath on the
countenance, around that trembling flowered-velvet of flesh, around
that skin of white roses transfused with a glow of red ones; when this
reflection of my shining soul falls upon the colored surface,--then
every one will turn round, and think Clotilda is lying asleep on the
bank.... And here my art is over; for, ah! when she awakes, and when,
for the first time, the soul shall move these charms like wings; when
the fast-closed bud of the lips shall break into a smile, and the bosom
breathes in half a sigh, and, from modesty, breathes it not out again;
when the sighs, veiled in songs, steal from those lips,--which, like
two souls, hover over without touching each other--as bees steal out of
roses; when the eye stirs between gleams and tears;--then, when at
length the goddess of heavenly love approaches her daughter, and
electrically touches her still heart, and says, 'Do thou, too, love';
and now, when all charms tremble and bloom out, shrink and languish,
hope and shudder, and the dreaming heart shuts itself up more deeply
into its blossoms, and hides itself, trembling, behind a tear, from the
happy one who has divined and deserves it;--then the happy one is mute,
the happy one and the artist."
Victor saw beside him the happy one, who was his friend, looked upon
him with moist eyes, and said, "Of that thou wast worthy!" But now
twenty rowels spurred him to follow Agatha to the palace;--the
pen-and-ink drawing of the artist; the arrangement of dresses; the
relationship; the desire which every man has to see the Grace and
Infanta of his friend; the desire which _not_ every one has, but he
had, to speak with any one for the first time (rather than for the
eighth time); and, most of all, the evening of yesterday. Flamin's fire
had yesterday burned Victor's bosom to a heap of tinder, through which
nothing but sparks were running. He should have set all before him
indifferently, because the contest _against_ love differs in nothing
from the contest _for_ it, except in order of precedence. But let not
the reader by any means imagine that now (as in one of your emasculated
and emasculating romances) the Devil is to break loose in our
biography, and the hero is to march into the palace and there fall down
before Clotilda, and beg, on bended knee, "Be the heroine!" and go
about to wrangle with her, out of love, and with the former _pastor
fido_ out of hatred, and actually play nothing else than the æsthetic,
self-seeking, sensitive--scamp. If I should wish this last, I could
excuse myself only on the ground that then I might perhaps come to some
biographical murders and duels. I hope, however, I may still, without
injury to morals or honesty, in the course of these pages make out a
murder or homicide or two, at least in the last volume, where every
æsthetic reaper thins out his characters, and throws half of them into
the _oubliette_ or family-vault of the inkstand.
Victor had too many years and acquaintances to allow himself, with so
little regard to days of grace and double usance,[43] on the spot,
before supper,--_cito citissime_,--what hast thou, what canst thou?--to
fall in love. His optic nerve daily unravelled itself into finer and
more delicate fibres, and touched all points of a new form, but the
sore feelers curled back again more readily; every month the sight of a
new face, like new music, made a _stronger_ and _shorter_ impression.
He could only talk his way into love, not see it. Only words winged by
virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the
pollen of love from one soul into another. But such a love, of the
better kind, is annihilated by the least immoral alloy. How could it
form and filter up in a defiled heart, filled with high-treason against
a friend?
Victor would have gone to the palace as early as half past nine, but
the Lady Chamberlain had not yet combed out her eyebrows and the King
Charles's spaniel.
Seebass brought a billet to Flamin:--
"I cannot see you, my dearest, to-day. Three Graces hold me fast, and
the third you yourself have sent. Tell your British friend he must love
me because I love you. Surgery may do without sympathy, but friendship
cannot.
"Your Matthieu."
An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace,
there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which
Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's--first lover. Nothing is
more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none
but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley
gradation,--that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers,
so that an honest _pastor fido_ can come and ask after the brother when
he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl
who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister
whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our
_Turkish_ decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his
opera-glass at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the
latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could
not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a
chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a
contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the
womanly refinement of her character.
Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper
from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He
personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He
could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen
troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole
court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale
and the cockerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch[44] and
Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and
every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it
used to be part of the _ton_ in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity
once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a
stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no
wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures,
he grew stronger and _healthier_ than the whole burnt-out, evaporated
court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too
roguish.
Victor and the reader and I have still, after all, only an indistinct,
blurred crayon-drawing of Matthieu in our heads. My hero was somewhat
pleased with him, as every eccentric man is with an eccentric one; it
was a fault of his, that he pardoned too easily those of energy, even
moral ones. With redoubled curiosity did he now take his way to the
palace, or rather to its great garden, which joined thereto its
semicircle of green beauties. He put in at the harbor of an embowered
alley, and was delighted at the way in which the pierced shadow of the
arbor, around whose iron skeleton tender twigs wound-like soft hair
around hair-needles, glided dazzlingly over his body. Side by side with
his arbor another parallel one passed along. He followed some scattered
black paper snippings as way-marks. The fluttering of the morning wind
tossed down from a twig a little leaf of fine paper, which he picked up
to read. He was still on the first line, "Man has two minutes and a
half, one in which to smile once, ..." when he ran against an almost
horizontal queue, which was a black club of Hercules, compared with
mine or the reader's plaited capillary tube. The queue was projected by
a head crooked downward, which, peering in a listening attitude out of
a niche in the arbor, was cutting a female profile, the original of
which in a by-avenue was talking with Agatha. At the rustle of Victor's
approach, the person, whose half-face was being stolen through the
niche, turned round with surprise, and saw the proprietor of the
Cyclops-queue with the profile-scissors, and also the hero of the
Dog-post-days. The proprietor, without saying a word, thrust his
artistic hand through the bush-work, and reached out to her her shadow
or shadow-cutting.[45] Agatha took it, smiling; but the nameless one
seemed to assume toward the cutter of forms and faces that seriousness
which, on female faces, is nowise distinguished from contempt but in
its ambiguousness, because his scissors awoke too strong a suspicion of
his having been listening. Victor could perceive nothing of the
nameless one yet except her stature, which, although bent forward a
little, still surpassed the ordinary height. The face-cutter turned
about with two flashing black eyes toward Victor, received him very
politely, knew his name, told his own,--Matthieu,--and had, at his
eighth pace, already had four good ideas. The fifth was, that he,
unsolicited, introduced my hero to the couple in the side-arbor. The
leafy nunnery-grating came to an end; a female form stepped forth, and
Victor was so struck by it, that he, who knew little about
embarrassments, or was made only more quick-witted by them, began his
introductory sermon without the exordium, and that was--Clotilda. When
she had said three words, he listened so to the melody instead of the
text, that he understood not a word of what she was saying....
I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the
very _silhouette_ which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My
correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful.
Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are
incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my
fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing,
steadily looked at all the time,--so much the more, as it might seem
actually to have been cut from the very face[46] of another loveliest
female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this
earth: I mean the Fräulein von * * *, at present maid-of-honor in
Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her.
Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm
touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's
cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober,
retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female sex, was
mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought
his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set
himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and
consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society.
Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did
occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one
does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an
Omai,[47] or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, "How could sitting down ever
become her,--or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry,
or stooping down to read a note?" I am a still worse ninny beside the
above-mentioned court dame.
At last came Le Baut into the garden, after the first toilet, and his
wife after the second. The Chamberlain--a short, supple, bedizened
thing, that will pull off its hat before the Devil in hell when it
enters there--received the son of his hereditary enemy in an uncommonly
complimentary manner, and yet with a dignity, for which, however, not
his heart, but his rank, gave him strength. Victor, for the mere reason
that he imagined him an injured person, cherished a predisposition of
good-will towards him. Although Le Baut's tongue was almost, like his
teeth, false and inserted, and consequently the words were so, too,
which were made up of dentals and linguals, still his neither coarse
nor uncourteous flatteries--among which his attitudes and intentions
also are to be counted--pleased our honest Victor, who could not hate
fine flatterers, as being weak persons. The Chamberlain's lady--who was
already in the years which a coquette seeks to conceal, although she
had still more reason to conceal the preceding ones--received our
well-disposed hero with the sincerest voice that ever yet issued from a
false Judas's bosom, and with the most artful face, on which it seemed
impossible that the deceptions of love could ever have found room for a
glance.
The new company took away Victor's embarrassment at once. He soon
remarked, indeed, the peculiar fighting- and dancing-positions of the
circle towards each other. Clotilda seemed reserved and indifferent
towards all, except her father. The step-mother was refined towards the
Chamberlain, haughty towards her step-daughter, obliging towards
Victor, and bore herself with an easy and subservient coquetry towards
Matthieu, who, on his part, was, toward the wedded pair, alternately
complimentary and ironical; towards Clotilda, cold as ice; and towards
my hero, as courteous as Le Baut was to all. Nevertheless Victor was
more joyous and free than any of them, not merely because he was under
the free heavens,--for a room always lay upon him like a blockhouse,
and a chair was like the stocks,--but because he was among _fine_
people, who, despite the most angular relations, give to conversation
four butterflies'-wings, that it may--in contrast to the clinging
caterpillar, who impales himself on every thorn--fly without noise and
in little curves over all prickles, and alight only on blossoms. He was
the greatest friend of fine people and fine turns of expression; hence
it was that he took so much pleasure in the society of a Fontenelle, a
Crébillon, a Marivaux,--of the entire female sex, and particularly of
the decently coquettish portion of it. Do not mistake me. Ah! upon his
Flamin, upon his Dahore, on all great men who were exalted above the
refined, cowardly, vacant microcosmologists of the great world, his
whole soul hung glowing; but for that very reason did he seek out,
with a view to greater completeness, the smaller men, as fringe and
corner-trimmings, with so much zeal.
Four persons had at this moment four telescopes pointed at once at his
soul: for himself, he took nothing of the kind into his hand, because
he was too good-natured and too happy to be the spy of a heart; and
only after the lapse of some days did he observe the image which any
one with whom he had been in company left behind in his brain. He did
not conceal himself, and yet he was seen in a false light: good men can
more easily see into bad ones than the latter can into the former. He
guessed others better than they guessed him. Only Clotilda deserves a
word of defence for having, even until after dinner,--during which Le
Baut, the greatest story-teller of this story-telling century, carried
through his part,--regarded him as too malicious and satirical. But she
could hardly do otherwise: a woman easily discerns the human, but
hardly the divine (or devilish), nature in a man, with difficulty his
worth, but easily his intentions, and his inner complexion more so than
his contour. Matthieu gave occasion for her error, but also (as I shall
presently report) for its retraction. This Evangelist,[48] who was a
much greater satirist than his namesake in the New Testament, placed
almost all Flachsenfingen on his private pillory, from Prince and Court
down to Zeusel;[49] only the Minister (his father) and his many sisters
he was compelled, unfortunately, to leave out, and likewise those
persons with whom he happened at the moment to be talking. What was
called calumny in him was at bottom an exaggerated Moravianism. For, as
St. Macarius commands that one shall, out of humility, add twenty
ounces of evil when one has five, but with regard to good, the
reverse,--accordingly ingenuous, courtly souls, seeing that no one will
use this modest language, endeavor to speak it in every one's name, and
always ascribe to him whose humility they wish to represent fifteen
ounces more of evil and less of good than he really has. On the
contrary, in the case of present company, they find this mediatorial
system of satisfaction unnecessary: hence the life of such court-nobles
is wholly dramatic; for as, according to Aristotle, comedy paints men
as worse, and tragedy as better, than they are, so do the nobles
referred to bring forward in the former only _absent_, in the latter
only _present_ persons. I do not know whether this perfection will go
to the length of atoning for a real fault of the Evangelist,--namely,
that, like the Romans on the Lupercalia, he--too often made thrusts at
the female sex. Thus, for instance, he said to-day, maidens and
raspberries were wormy before they were ripe; female virtue was the
red-hot iron which a woman (as was also the case in the old ordeals)
had to carry from the font (the baptismal-day) to the altar (the
wedding-day), in order to maintain her innocence, &c. Nothing fell upon
Clotilda--and the same I have always found the case with the best of
her sex--more keenly than satire upon her whole sex; but Victor was
astonished at her art--very peculiar to her sex and to worldly
experience at once--of concealing the fact, that she both--endured and
despised.
The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to
phosphoresce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the
whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by
the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's
discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda,
who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart.
The young nobleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love
with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that "the gayer or more earnest
tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female
electrical-eel had struck at his bosom." I must confess it,--Victor's
effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect
for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he
often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately
always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady
accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.[50] People like her cannot
comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones.
They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening.
Not once in the whole day was he able,--although the invisible eyes of
his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's noble figure, at her
secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when
she merely spoke to Agatha,--for all that, he never found himself able
to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always
impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other
caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden,
where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense
by merriment, as it always was,--whereas serious, sad, passionate
conversations diminished it,--and when Clotilda granted him only a very
cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not
divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who
assumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it:
then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many
tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a passage; and as
often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered
in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak
out!
But there was only _one_ soul for him, to which Nature had attached
those treadles, as to pedal-harps, which impart to every thought a
higher tone of the spheres, to life a holy worth, and to the heart an
echo from Eden: that soul was not his once so-loved Flamin, but his
teacher, Dahore, in England, whom he had long ago lost from sight, but
never from his dreams. The shadow of this great man stood, as it were,
projected upon the night, hovering and erect before him, and saying,
"Dear one, I see thy inward weeping, thy sacred longing, thy desolate
heart, and thy outstretched, trembling arms; but all is in vain; thou
wilt never find me, nor I thee." He gazed at the stars, whose exalting
science his teacher had even then instilled into his youthful soul; he
said to Clotilda: "The topography of the heavens should be a piece of
our religion; a woman ought to learn the catechism and Fontenelle by
heart." And then he described the astronomical lessons of his Dahore
and the teacher himself.
From Clotilda's face there broke forth a great transfiguration, and she
depicted with words and looks her own astronomical teacher at the
Seminary,--how he was just as noble and just as quiet,--that he called
himself _Emanuel_, and bore no surname, because he said, "With
transitory man, with one whose genealogical tree so speedily sank into
nothingness, the difference between family names and baptismal names
was too slight";--that, unhappily, his noble soul inhabited a shattered
body, which already bent low toward the grave,--that he was, according
to the assurance of her Abbess, the gentlest and greatest man who had
yet come from the East Indies (his native country), although there were
some singularities of his way of life in Maienthal, which one had to
overlook....
Matthieu, whose wit borrowed from the snake his line of beauty, his
poisonous tooth, his leap, and his coldness, said, softly and
composedly: "It is well for his withered body that he was not made
astronomer and night-watchman here at once; he applied, several years
ago, for a telescope and a horn."
Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry
redness, like the morning before the rain: "If," said she, quickly,
"you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this
characteristic among his." But the Chamberlain came to the Page's
assistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been
refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only
one whose attentiveness was not ironical,--our Victor, on whom the
reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,--and asked, more in
the tone of hope than of assertion, "Should one expect anything like
that of such a mind?" "Of mine sooner," he replied, by way of evasion;
for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it
often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded
a question with so much reliance on his negative. "As often as I walk
through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more
pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under
the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the
homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred
times wished me a horn and six verses."
The Chamberlain and his _associé_ took this for clumsy persiflage; the
latter--perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage
of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump--went on
unshamed with his, and asserted that the best method of making the
aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;--to be
sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in
him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair.
Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation;
for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running
up and down,--with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock
with images,--with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak
and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening
roar,--and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic
picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a
village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty
_New-Year's fair_ of Life, made Victor's noble bosom at once heavy and
full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human
ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was
the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian _tail-piece_ of a village-fair (like
Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond,
indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are
capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any
nobler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's Æneid), he could endure as
little as La Mettrie's[51] disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on
the frontispieces of the Vade Mecum.
Like a true youth, he forgot himself and all around him, half-stretched
out his arms, and said, with an eye in which one saw a soul longingly
laboring at a portrait of Emanuel: "Now I know thee, thou nameless one!
thou art the lofty man, who is so rare.... I assure you, Herr Von
Schleunes, this Mr. Emanuel has something in him ... No, amidst this
life on the wing, a thing which darts so _prestissimo_ out of one
rain-shower into another,[52] and from cloud to cloud, should not keep
its bill open on the stretch for one continued peal of laughter.... I
have read today somewhere: Man has only two and a half minutes, and
only one for a smile...." He had quite lost himself in the thicket of
his feelings, else he would have kept back more than he did, especially
the last line of the leaf found in the garden. Clotilda was startled at
something or other. He would now gladly have read the leaf through. She
related to him now those characteristics of her teacher into which she
knew better how to enter; that he was a Pythagorean, went only in white
robes, had himself put to sleep and waked with flute-music, ate no
leguminous fruits or animal food, and often walked half the night under
the stars.
Lost in mute rapture over the teacher, he hung with enthusiastic eyes
upon the friendly lips of the pupil, who was ennobled by her interest
in a sublime and singular genius. She found here the first man whom she
had ever put into an unfeigned enthusiasm for her Pythagorean favorite;
and all her chasms turned themselves, blooming, towards Emanuel's
image, like flowers toward the sun. Two fair souls discover their
affinity first of all by the like love which binds them to a third. The
full, inspired heart loves to hush and hide itself in a finery-room,
which holds only heterogeneous persons, but when it finds therein
its second, then in its joy at that its silence and secrecy and the
finery-room are all forgotten.
The quicksilver of Victor's morning gayety had fallen ten degrees. In
the twilight of his soul nothing peered forth but the paper which he
wanted to read, and in fact presently read out in the avenue; and so he
took an early leave.
The leaf had blown out of Clotilda's loose Album, and was written
by--Emanuel.
"Man has here two and a half minutes,--one to smile, one to sigh, and
half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.
"But the grave is not deep, it is the gleaming footmark of an angel who
seeks us. When the unknown hand sends the last arrow at the head of
man, he bends his head in anticipation, and the arrow merely takes off
the crown of thorns from his wounds.[53]
"And with this hope, go forth from Maienthal, noble soul! but neither
continents nor graves nor the second world can sunder or bind together
two human beings: but only thoughts part or marry hearts.
"O, may thy life hang full of blossoms! From thy first Paradise may a
second, as from the midst of one rose a second, be destined to bloom!
May the Earth glow in thy sight, as if thou stoodest above it, and
followedst with thine eye its path in heaven! And as Moses died because
God kissed him, so be thy life a long kiss of the Eternal! And may thy
death be mine!... EMANUEL."
"O thou good, good soul!" cried Victor, "I can now no more forget thee.
Thou must--thou wilt--take an interest in my weak heart!" From his
inner strings the drops of vapor that choked their music had now fallen
off. His brain became a radiant landscape, in which there stood nothing
but Emanuel's shining form. He arrived late at the parsonage, with a
face expressive of blissful emotion; and in this glow he arrayed before
his spectators the image of Clotilda, to whom he gave everything an
angel has, even the wings that threatened a short stay. His friendship
raised him so far above the suspicion of a suspicion, that he thought
he could give his friend no warmer or tenderer proof of the same, than
by the strongest sympathetic praise of Clotilda; Flamin's love for her
passed over through this friendship into his soul. The feeling for the
beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable sweetness and moral
tenderness. For Victor I answer, in this matter, that he understood,
indeed, how a friend can sacrifice his love to another, but not how the
other can accept the offering; but for Flamin I cannot stand security
that he is cool enough, and a sufficient connoisseur of men, to regard
the prize-medals which Victor stamps upon Clotilda, and upon which he
sets her beautiful face and his coat of arms, as only just so many
coins _de confiance_, and as pledges of brotherly fidelity. He was too
impetuous and too ambitious to see, or even to listen to, the truth;
for his open-hearted friend had to suppress many a tender reproach,
which would have tried him too much, because he had too much love of
praise and fieriness of spirit, and too little self-confidence. Hence a
flatterer like Matthieu fastened himself so much the more firmly with
his ivy-hooks into the fissures of this rock. When he a little harshly
called the nameless Emanuel an enthusiast, Victor said little more
about him that day. Flamin--either because he was a Jurist, or because
he was a Hotspur, or both--could endure anything better than poets,
philosophers, courtiers, and enthusiasts,--one excepted, who was all
these at once, namely, his Sebastian Victor.
5. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate Sitting on Music.
I must here--premise, once for all, that I should be very stupid if I
did not notice the multitude of improbabilities in this history: I am
well aware of them all; nay, I have observed some of them--e. g. in
Clotilda's behavior, or those in my hero's medical doctorship--even
sooner than the reader, because I have--read everything before he has.
I therefore delayed no longer, but entreated my correspondent by
to-day's Hofmann-mail to write me by the dog the next time, in his
portrait-box, what we were all about. I told him flatly, that the devil
a bit did he know, though I did, however, of the readers and their
tyranny. I must tell him (I said) that they were people of sense, whom
a Biographer, nay, even a Romance-architect, dared not approach with
poetic deception, but they would say, like the Areopagus, "Give us the
naked historical fact here, without any superfluous poetic dressing
up." And in fact it was a marvel to me, I went on to say, that he
should not yet know that they had so much, partly understanding and
partly four-leaved clover[54] in them, that, if the greatest authors
and tragic poets should undertake to be fine, and by æsthetic
juggleries to excite in them fear, like cuppers, or pity, like beggars,
they would cold-bloodedly let these men work till they were tired, and
say, "We are not to be caught." That the Reviewers, however, were still
more crazy and clever, and were perhaps the best _Skotometers_
(measurers of darkness), at the same time that they were the
wretchedest _Photometers_ (light measurers) going. And finally, I said
right out to my historical adjutant, that it was no injury to him, but
very much to me, that I should be translated into several languages,
and therein, for every improbability in the text, be dragged down into
the scourging-cellar of a note, and there sorely lashed, without daring
to open my mouth, if the interpreting scoundrel who translated (or
transported) my gourd-bottle-case like a cask of wine, from one country
to another, should, on the way, as all carriers do, outwardly
besprinkle and inwardly fill up the wine with water.--He must, at
least, (I entreated him) give me an answer, that I might show it to the
readers, as an evidence that I had written to him.
By the next Dog-post-day, therefore, at all events, great things may be
expected.--
Besides, the 4th of May comes into that also, with what should
seem its two important Thanksgiving festivals for the arrival of the
two Sebastians,--the little one into the world, the elder at the
bathing-town.--Even Clotilda is to be there to-morrow, and Victor is
very eager (and so am I) to see her in the sunshine of love beside
Flamin; for over yonder all her charms seemed to bloom round a heart
not yet smitten and ripened by love's ray, as flower-leaves hide the
_white heart-leaves_ from the sun.... Matthieu came to-day to take
leave, because he was going back to-morrow to the city. Our hero was
less and less pleased with him, and a Page's history, which he related
of himself, renewed Victor's resolve to fulfil soon the entreaty of the
Parson's wife by ridding himself of such a fellow.
Matthieu, as Page, rendered service to the chief Tutor's lady, I
believe both the greater and the lesser service. Nevertheless, he had
once to smuggle an Abbate and conscience-keeper into one of her
cabinets, which was destined to be the confessional and holy place to a
degree of which, to be sure, her stupid, jealous husband had no notion.
Now there was in the next room a musical armchair, upon which, in fact,
one played with no other instrument than the rump; so soon as one sat
down in it, it began its overtures, and I myself once sat in such
a one at Prince Esterhazy's. Our Mat,[55] as all the citizens of
Flachsenfingen called him,--some government people called him even the
Evangelist,--appointed the Abbate two hours too soon; but, lest the man
with the shorn peruke should be tired of waiting, he first carried in
the music-making chair as resting-bench and anchoring-ground for weary
expectants. Toward three of the night, when the company was gone,
except the chief Tutor, the counsellor of conscience, weary of
standing, let his rump sink at last into the easy-chair stuffed out
with favorite arias, and woke up with his breeches the whole wailing
music therein with its thrilling passages, without the least
possibility of stilling the cabinet-serenade of this alarmer. At last
the husband darted like a herring at the final cadences (or falls), and
dragged from his organ-stool the sedentary conscience-man in the midst
of counterpoint and shakes, and spoiled his quail-call for him, I
believe, by an administered cudgelling. The chief Tutor's lady easily
guessed the master of the chair, Mat; but so very much a matter of
course is pardon at court,--not merely _past_ offences, but _future_
ones being forgiven there by good, easy female souls,--that the chief
Tutor's lady did not avenge herself upon Mat, although he _served_ her
two weeks and a half longer, till after just two weeks and a half....
Victor was indignant at Flamin's laughter; he loved drollery, but not
bantering. His sweetened blood began gradually with this _mother of
vinegar_ to grow sour towards this Mat, whose cold, ironical gallantry
toward the honest Agatha of itself exasperated him, though her
phlegmatic, and, as it were, married pulse, beat in his absence and in
his presence at the same rate. Still more heart-burning matter and acid
collected in Victor's bosom, from the fact that he, who tolerated
everything,--vain men, proud ones, atheists, enthusiasts,--could
nevertheless not endure men who regard virtue as a kind of refined
provision-bakery, wantonness as allowed, the spirit as an almsgatherer
for the flesh, the heart as a blood-syringe, and our soul as a new
shoot of the body. But this was what Matthieu did, who besides had a
passion for philosophizing, and threatened to infect Victor's friend,
who, in fact, was as cold toward the whole world of poets and spirits
as a statesman, with his philosophical cancer-poison.
In the evening he endeavored to sound, a little nearer to Flamin's
ear, a blast upon a second Trumpet of Fame against the departed
pseudo-Evangelist. It was in the garden that he blew it. He took the
hand of which Matthieu's was not worthy into his better one, and began,
with the finest and heartiest forbearance,--which one must grant even
to true friendship for a hollow friend,--his iconoclastic attack. For
while he charged it upon the lady of the Chamberlain, that she threw
down at Agatha from her high post looks nowise cleaner than what
monkeys used to throw down from their high roosts at passers-by; and
while he blamed the young Page, that, like many of the nobility, only
among the nobility could he scent best (perhaps by the help of
contrast) the heretical odor of one belonging to the burgher-class, and
that his words and looks at the palace flew like icicles at the good,
warm heart of Agatha; at the same time the reproach of this May-frost
toward the sister was only a pretext behind which he veiled the
observation, that the Page would not be Flamin's friend, if he were not
Agatha's lover.
Flamin's silence (the sign of his indignation) gave the stream of his
eloquence a new and swifter descent; in addition to this a nightingale,
poetizing in Le Baut's garden, woke up all the echoes of love in his
soul.--He therefore grasped, of course, both of Flamin's hands in that
effervescence which always transformed his steps toward an object into
springs, and thereby overshot the mark. Many plans miscarry, because
the heart toils after the head, and because at the end of the execution
one applies less caution than at its beginning. He looked upon his
beloved, the fluting throat of the nightingale set the text of his love
to music, and with indescribable emotion he said: "Best one, thy heart
is too good not to be outwitted by those who cannot reach thee. O if,
some day, the sharp edge of court _ton_ should pass bloodily across the
veins of thy breast (Flamin's looks seemed to ask, Art thou not then
even satirical?)--O if he, who has no faith in virtue and
disinterestedness, should one day himself cease to show any; if he
should sorely betray thee; should the hand, which court-life had
hardened, like a lemon-squeezer, wring blood and tears from thy heart,
then, I beseech thee, despair not, only not of friendship,--for thy
mother and I love thee far otherwise. O verily, at the time when thou
art forced to say, Why did I not hearken to my friend who so warned me,
and to my mother who so loved me?--then mayest thou come to me, to one
who never changes, and who prizes thy error higher than self-interested
vigilance; then would I lead thee weeping to thy mother, and say to
her, take him wholly, thou only art worthy to love him." To all this
Flamin said not a word. "Art thou sad, my Flamin?" "Tired!" "I am sad;
the plaints of the nightingale strike upon my soul like echoes of
_future_ ones," said Victor. "Are you pleased with this nightingale,
Victor?" "Indescribably, as if she were a friend of my innermost soul."
"Thus are people imposed on; it is _Matthieu singing_," Flamin quickly
answered. For the Evangelist differed from a nightingale in nothing
except size. And then Flamin, somewhat irritated, and yet with a
pressure of his friend's hand, took his departure.
6. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-puff.--
Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
Knef's answer is wretched: "By your well-born's favor, dated the 6th
instant, I see that the public has taste and some refinement, which
does not surprise me, since the same is treated like gold-leaves, which
are beaten out thin and fine, first within a book of parchment, and
then between two of sheep-skin leaves, and thus, in like manner, by
being passed from one book to another, and therein through the force of
the press-bar, is made as fine as cavalier-paper.[56] If the public
keeps on reading in this way a year or two, it may at last be more
clever than Germany itself. Touching the improbabilities in our
work, several such are of course desirable, because without them a
biography or a romance gives miserable satisfaction, since it wants the
charm by which the German hospital-ship and ship of fools, full of
original romances, proves so attractive to us, ... which ship, as
secretive-gland of disagreeable works, may justly be called the liver
of the Republic of Letters, and the bookstore the gall-duct. But in
reference to improbabilities, I am myself only too apprehensive that
even the few on which we rely may in the end disappear. I am, &c."
The wag, as one may easily see, would fain pull the wool[57] over my
eyes and those of the reader. For me, however, it is a magnificent
document in evidence that I have done my part by writing to the rogue.
There are certain persons who, if in the evening they were very warm
and friendly, the next morning are very gloomy and cold,--like
Maupertuis's half-suns, which burn only on one side and disappear
from us when they turn towards us the earthly half,--and if they were
cold, the next time they are warm. Flamin forgot the next morning both
the warm evening and the night-chill. Today is the festival of
churching! Over there with Sebastian he launched out like a German
police-puritan and purist, with fire-devils[58] and musketry against
churching,--against infant-baptismal festivals,--against felling trees
for Christmases and Whitsuntides,--against holidays, and against all
the merry-makings of mankind.
Nothing in our century so enraged Victor as its haughty
crusade-preachings against unfashionable follies, whereas with
unfashionable vices it makes contracts of subsidy. He took a long
breath to start with, and then showed that the good of a state, as of a
man, consisted not in riches, but in the use of riches, not in its
commercial, but in its moral worth, that the sweeping out of the
ancient leaven and most of our institutions and pandects and edicts had
for their object only to enhance princely incomes, not morality, and
that one wanted to have vices and subjects, like the old Jews, bring
their offerings only in one city, namely, the residence city,--that
humanity, from time immemorial, had cut its nails only on its bare
_hands_, not on its covered _feet_, which often themselves decayed on
that account,--that economical and sumptuary laws were still more
needful to princes themselves, at least to the highest classes, than to
the lowest,--that Rome owed to her many holidays much of her
patriotism.... Flamin had no eye for the little pearl-print of domestic
joy, for infusory-flowerets of pleasure; on the contrary, his soul kept
step with a Brutus when he strode majestically up to Pompey's statue,
and with a sigh over fate drove the scissors of the Parcæ into the
greatest heart of earth, which confounded its worth with its right.
Victor had room in his heart for the most unlike feelings.
I cannot repeat often enough, that to-day is the churching. I will
sketch it for posterity; not, however, with that curtness with which a
newspaper-writer condenses the funeral of a king into three sheets, but
a little more circumstantially. For the stately initial letters of this
day the Parsonage had quite other reasons _in petto_ than one has ever
yet, to my knowledge, been pleased to disclose to our age: three
interested parties wished to deceive each other,--at least, two did a
third.
In the first place, the Lady of the Parsonage wished to deceive our
hero, who did not know that to-day was the birthday of his father, and
that that personage--whom she had taken the liberty of inviting--was
coming today for the space of five minutes. In the morning, she set her
two daughters to boiling yarn, in order that they might confess nothing
to Victor,--at least, not the truth; for it is a well-known
superstition that yarn boils whitest when one lies soundly over the
operation. Hence we should be the more watchful when women lie, and
inquire whether they mean, by their poetical deceptions, to _burn
anything else white_ except yarn. Her beloved Victor--that was her
plan--should to-day present to her husband, whose cradle-festival[59]
also fell on to-day, the usual congratulation, and afterward halve it,
and carry it on to his Lordship, who was to arrive with his own
birthday.
Secondly, Sebastian and she wished to deceive the old Chaplain, who had
forgotten that he had been born, which absence of mind had already
occurred to him at his first birthday. Mankind keep the run of
another's life better than of their own; truly we make altogether too
little account of a history which once was ours, and which is the shell
of hours that have flown away, and yet the drops of time through which
we swim do only in the distance of memory form the rainbow of
enjoyment. Men know when all emperors were born and all philosophers
died; women know, by reckoning time, only this, when their husbands,
who are _their_ regents and classic authors, underwent both. Victor,
whose delicate feeling was seared by too great attentions to himself,
was glad that Eymann's shoulders must bear half of to-day's honor.
Thirdly, the Lord of the Parsonage wanted to play his deception as well
as any one else, and in fact upon everybody. As this Festival-day was
to him--like the three High Festivals of the Cloisters--at the same
time shaving-day, on which the wisest heads make the foolishest faces,
the barber must needs cut with the razor-lancet upon the skin of the
soul-keeper, as upon the bark of a birch-tree, a memorial of himself;
but the little blood that flowed out suggested to the Parson a cleverer
thought than what the cupper left therein, which, however, secreted the
nervous sap, that, according to the merest sciolists, is the grease of
our mental motions, the gold solution of our most significant ideas,
and the spirit of our spirit. This cleverer thought which I so much
praise was, to have a vein opened in his left arm, to conceal it from
the whole household, in the evening to congratulate his Lordship and
everybody, and, at last, to strip up his sleeve and show the wound,
like a Roman, and say, "Congratulate me, I pray, on the bleeding!" He
executed his idea, and the shaver was obliged, to his amazement, to
hack something else beside the chin. The wounded man escorted him even
to the outer door, not so much from politeness, as in order that he
might not hold forth to the whole domestic company on the subject, but
keep the occurrence absolutely to himself, except in houses where
there was a beard and an ear. For let an historian be ever so much the
_month-hand_ of the age, and consequently the newspaper-compositor its
_hour-hand_, and accordingly a woman its _second-hand_, still, after
all, the beard-trimmer is both, woman and _second-hand_.
As Flamin and Victor passed down into the sitting-prinking-summer and
winter-room, from amidst none but glad faces protruded one sullen one,
which belonged to the Parson, who was plunging about like one
possessed: there were two things which he could not possibly nose
out,--his Bible and his powder-puff. Three minutes before he had thus
lamented: "Am not I and my wretched life then singled out for a true
Passion-history? Let an urn of fortune be given me, from which anybody
else would claw out, as if he were crabbing, whole kingdoms. So soon as
the Archfiend sees it to be me, he drops his dung in; and I claw that
out instead of crabs and kingdoms, and nothing more. It would have gone
finely to-day, the Devil saw,--we should have had until four o'clock in
the afternoon no fun, but dog's-work; but then we should have broken
loose; then would have come the dinner in the summer-house, the
congratulation and salutation and real jollity.... And for you all
this is still waiting; but to me, if the puff and the Bible do not
appear, just send some of the soot and ashes (the leavings of the
evening-feast) that I may brush therewith Fox's [his horse's] bit, and
in the evening I can weed radishes by the summer-house."
At this moment, he had to salute, with the dipped flag of his poll, his
tasselled cap, the Briton just entering,--when the gesture shook out of
the cap a hair-tuft, which, to be sure, was not the long-sought Bible,
but was the puff, which had been given up for lost. That is to say, the
thinking and reading world, to which one does not often disclose the
weightier facts, must at least come at this one,--that the Court
Chaplain, just as men are snatched from among men to overtop and master
the rest, precisely so bound up the hairs which his comb plucked out,
into a skin-fascicle or hair-union, in order to powder therewith the
others that were left standing,--which now could not, of course, by
this most exalted spirit and pentameter,[60] be well christened
anything else than a hair-puff. Nevertheless, Eymann's face was longer
than his cap; he let this syringe of the coloring powder of his head
lie and cool there, and said, "If I don't ferret out the Bible, then I
don't see how this tuft alone is to get me out of the scrape."
As the Bible was sought before Luther's time, so now was the Canstein
Bible, with its black beetle's-wing-shells. If anything could make this
hard blow still more bitter, it was this,--that Eymann's band, like his
reason, lay between the lost canonical leaves[61] as in a napkin-press;
for the clergy, especially the Pope, love to make the Bible commentary
a smoothing-press and finery-box to their outer man. Although he had
eight other Bibles, even the simple Biblical Chrestomathy of Seiler, in
the house, and to-day, at week-day church, did not need any at
all, still it was certainly better and more human--that is, more
foolish--that he should whistle the head of his vestry-beadle, the
schoolmaster, to the window, and postpone divine service, like a
reformation, by a quarter of an hour's interim, than that, instead of
simply the hour of tolling, he should change nothing less than Bible
and bands. Good heavens! how like exegetists and Kennicottists[62] they
searched and smiled! "This hunting for the Bible," said Sebastian,
"redounds to a clergyman's honor, especially as he seeks the truths in
the Bible only by _daylight_, not by _funeral-torches_."
The monks, like the lighters of the street-lamps, have a _ladder_ and
much oil, but with the oil they _extinguish_ the lamps and their own
thirst, and with the ladder they conduct those who light them again up
to the gallows.
As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks'
child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from
vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right
hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw,
thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the
supporting amulet of children (particularly of _Dauphins_), saying,
meanwhile: "The miserable little brat would lie there through all our
misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, 'What's that to me?' if I
didn't stir him up." And just at this moment something fell, not like a
shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even
to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second
story, and found at his feet a smashed--mouse under his long-sought
Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of
the students' or Dr. Luther's mousetraps,[63] for which one needs only
a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates.
Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical
vellum-mould, and Seiler's Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward
the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: "Poor
schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but
neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the
Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese
Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away
nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to
extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then,
_auto-da-fés_ also?"
I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to
ask why the case of a mouse's death should interest it more than the
shooting down of an army in general history,--the loss of another's
hair-puff more than Christina's abdicated crown.[64] ... This interest
arises from the source whence it comes with those to whom the case
really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the
readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one
moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the
firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate
does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed
so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a
trifle, when it takes up _many_ moments, becomes so great to us, and
this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the _Orbis
Pictus_,[65] consists of points--of black and golden ones--seems so
long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious
mood stand so near to our mirthful.
Except Flamin, all moved to church, godfather and godchild. It was a
so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every
rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the
parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for
the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks,
to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon
did into empty pots.[66] In German countries, mine and a few others
excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,--one to
recognize it, and one more to do it away. The _views_ of a consistory
always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders
(_circularia_) do.
In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right
angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again,
or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair
childhood's days,--figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones,
which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew,
opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish
sorrows here,--among them the length of the sermon,--and of his
childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the
voluntary and Eymann's kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He
pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove
his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the
child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. "Ah! then," said
Horion,--and we will say it with him,--"all was to thee as yet
infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm,
quickening time, when a father is still God the Father, and a mother
the mother of God, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits,
graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the
four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers
were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely
day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of
morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the
skeleton remains there,--the latticed pew."
But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus,
how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and
becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,--at evening, when we
stand low in the western horizon and go out,--then, when we turn round,
and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,--oh! then,
how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,--the garden of
childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising,
and still suffused with an old, pale redness,--how much more magically
will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to
tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far
from the grave, and hopes here below no more.
To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years
given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only
parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a
nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their
illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year,
went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to
the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with
a real childish gusto to think that there were four _moving_
creatures[67] in the temple,--the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the
Exchequer-master of the poor's-box,[68] and himself. Is there anything
more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long,
horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but
stiffened statues?
After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of
peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &c. Only
the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five
o'clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip
out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or
quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and
programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to
Apollonia, that _majoress-domo_,--must carry away bean-poles and
seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,--fan out therefrom
butterflies that had burst the cocoons and waked up bottle-flies,--tie
back the twigs which had grown over the windows,--lug down the
orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree,
out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid
harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung[69] so often as its
strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian
to take part in these puppet-plays,[70] and between them, in this
preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to
labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations:
"Master Godfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,--this festival
may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a
middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I
think, throw upon us the most favorable light." All went well,--even
the clouds dispersed,--Clotilda would come. The primate of the
festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,--the little
six-weeks'-man,--memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform
after five o'clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of
festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.
The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady
scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the
first manna in life's wilderness. But not till five o'clock did the
mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little
speaker to close his throat-lid[71] and eyelids at once. At first I had
come near suppressing--from respect for the Parson's lady--the fact
that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among
the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I
flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a
theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged
as others, if she _had_ children or milk....
Before I say that Clotilda came, I will, inasmuch as she has eight
residences,--although many a magnate who owns sixteen noble residences
still seeks a seventeenth with walls in which he may sleep,--offer a
slight excuse for her going into the house of a common citizen; but she
needs after all no other justification than the fact that she was in
the country, where often the oldest blood can avail itself of no better
intercourse than that of citizens, unless perhaps it is that of cattle,
which even some not uncultured cavaliers really prefer....
It strikes five o'clock,--the matchless beauty enters,--the moon hangs
down towards her out of heaven like a white leaf newly budded,--the
gay, innocent blood in St. Luna rises under her influence like the
tide,--all is rehabilitated.
But the sixth chapter is run out.... And as Spitz is not yet on hand
with the seventh, the reader and I can exchange with each other a
rational word. I confess, he has long appreciated me and my doings; he
sees clearly that all goes on in the finest biographical train,--the
dog, my littleness, and the heroes of these dog-days. Nor have I ever
denied that he will continue to be more and more dazzled by the
splendor and sparkle of this foot-birth,[72] since I am so very busy,
waxing, rubbing, and polishing at it,--more so than if it were a man's
boot or a military horse's-hoof in Berlin. Nay, I need not wait to have
it foretold to me from any cup of coffee-grounds (for I see it already
from my knowledge of human nature and from the coffee which I drink)
that this is saying the very least, and that the proper reading-rage
will then, and not till then, come over the poor dear fellow, when, in
the course of this work, at which, as in the low-warp tapestry,[73] two
workmen weave sitting in one chair, the historic figures of this
tapestry, together with their grouping, shall come forth from the ball
of the foot to the seam of the skull. At present there is hardly a
heel, a shin-bone, a stocking finished....
But when twenty or thirty ells of the work have been run off, then can
I and my by-sitter expect what I will here portray: the reader will
hurry as if the Devil were after him; to get through one Dog-post-day
he will let six courses grow cold and the dessert warm. But what am I
saying? An incarnate Romish king shall ride through the streets and a
cannon-thunder bring up the rear,--he shall not hear it; his better
half shall give in his library the best of suppers to a connubial
excrescence,--he shall not see it; the excrescence itself shall hold
assaf[oe]tida under his nose, shall give him in sport light blows with
a woodman's axe,--he shall not feel it, so beside himself shall he be
on my account, regularly out of his senses.
Now that is a misfortune, the certainty of which I seek vainly to
hide from myself. When it once comes on, and I have unhappily brought
him into that historical clairvoyance where he no longer hears or
sees anything except my characters, which are put in _rapport_ with
him,--neither father nor cousin,--then I may be sure that he will hear
a mining-superintendent still less,--for story is what he wants, and of
_me_ he knows absolutely nothing more,--nay, I will suppose, I should
let off the motliest fire-works of wit, yes, that chains of
philosophical conclusions should hang down in skeins out of my mouth,
like ribbons from a juggler's,--what would it avail me?
Nevertheless, ribbons must hang down and fire-works play; but it shall
be in this way: As from each year so many hours are left off that the
remainder of four years makes out an intercalary day,--and as with me
after four Dog-post-days there will always be so many Postscripts, so
much wit and acuteness lying quite idle, as so much unsalable
stuff,[74] that a regular _intercalary day_ could well be made,--it
shall be made as often as four dog-dynasties have gone by; only this is
still requisite, that I first conclude and ratify with the reader the
following boundary agreement and domestic contract, in form and manner
to wit:--
I. On the part of the reader it is allowed and granted to the
mining-superintendent on St. John's, him and his heirs and assigns,
from this time forward, after every fourth Dog-post-day, to prepare and
print a witty and learned intercalary day, in which there is no
narrative.
II. On the part of the mining-superintendent permission is given the
reader to skip over every intercalary day and read only the historical
days, in consideration whereof both powers waive all _beneficia
juris_--_restitutionem in integrum_--_exceptionem læsionis enormis et
enormissimæ_---_dispensationem_--_absolutionem_, _etc_. At the Congress
of St. John's, May 4, 1793.
Thus reads the genuine instrument of the so-called Dog-contract between
the mining-superintendent and the reader, and this Act of Renunciation
may and must, in future misunderstandings between the two powers, be
laid before an umpire or a confederate court,[75] as the single ground
of decision.
7. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
His Lordship excepted, all are now sitting and waiting for me in the
parsonage-garden; but the garden itself not a mortal soul is yet
acquainted with. It is a Chrestomathy[76] of all gardens, and yet no
larger than the church. Many gardens resemble it in being at once
kitchen-gardens, flower-gardens, and orchards; but it is also a _jardin
des animaux_, as it contains in fact the whole Fauna of St. Luna, and a
botanical garden, too; it is overgrown with the entire Flora of the
village; and it is a garden of honey-bees and humble-bees also, as
often as they happen to fly into it. Meanwhile such minor merits are
really hardly worth naming, when a garden once has, like this, the
merit of being the greatest English garden through which a man ever
strode. It hides not only its end,--as every park, like every purse,
must do,--but even its beginning, and seems to be merely the terrace
from which one can see into that which one cannot see over, but, like
Cook, may well circumnavigate. In the English parsonage-garden there
are not single ruins, but whole broken-up cities, and the greatest
princes have rivalled each other in their passion for furnishing it
with romantic wildernesses and battle-fields and gallows-trees, to
which (and that carries the illusion still higher) real rogues are
tied, into the bargain, as fruit-pendants. The buildings and shrubs of
different parts of the world are there, not huddled together into an
absurd neighborhood, but neatly kept apart from each other by regular
seas or water-scapes, which its size easily makes possible, since it
contains over nine million square miles; and with what taste, in fact,
these masses are brought together, the reader may estimate from the
fact that all lords and all reviewers in the literary periodicals, and
the readers themselves, are drawn into the garden and often stay
therein sixty years.--
The Parson thinks also to get some credit from it as a Dutch garden,
particularly by a peruke made of water, which hangs not on a wig-stand,
but on a tin pipe, and which leaps so in curls that already several
city-parsons have wished they could wear it. Butterfly-show-glasses
kept off the night-chills from precocious roses of silk and early
cucumbers of wax. Cucumbers which consisted of real cucumbers, he was
the first among all pastors to put in, in order to worry himself with
the fear that they might freeze; for this fear he must have, in order
to rejoice whenever a glass bottle was broken in his house: he could
then carry this ice- or glass-mountain (which, in the case of wines,
unfortunately heightens every year as our thirst does) into the garden,
and with this manure-bell cover the heart-leaves. Round more important
beds he ran a motley, mosaic border of crockery; his family was his
verge-tool,--I mean, they had to break for him the few porcelain cups
which he needed, in order with this motley powdered sugar to set off
the more considerable patches, as a prince enchases and berings himself
with the variegated order-ribbons drawn through the button-holes of his
antechambers. As he could not set _whole_ cups round the beds, but must
first analyze them by his chemists, a reviewer who eats with him must
avail himself of my hint to understand how it happens, if such a
consumptive patient is not beside himself for rage, when some very
valuable vessel is broken; for only when it happens to worthless ones
is he no longer master of himself. Every housewife should set off such
a bed as an Arndt's garden of Paradise, as a Golgotha for porcelain
whereof the _fashion is changed_, for the good of her soul, in order
that she may not lose her senses when a cup falls. "Dearest!" I would
say, "bear up under this misfortune like a Christian woman; it, will
turn out for thy advantage either in eternity yonder, or here in the
garden."
Near a house, Dutch garden-ornaments, with their homely minuteness,
make a better figure than thrilling Nature, with her eternal majesty.
Eymann's clipped and carved parsonage-garden was in fact merely a
continued family-room without roof or partition.
As the Parson twitched our Victor round through the garden, the guest
almost forgot to praise the garden as a magazine of ideas, simply
because he was looking forward too curiously and warmly to the arrival
of Clotilda, and her demeanor towards his friend. Fortunately it
occurred to him that the Parson counted upon incense-offerings and
censers; he was so unwilling to defraud a laurel-hoping heart, that he
for that very reason loved to attach himself to people of some merit,
that so he might indulge his humane disposition to praise, without
expense to the truth. Victor rejoiced at the prospect of Flamin's and
Clotilda's meeting: how beautifully, he thought, will the moonlight of
soft love fall upon his and her proud faces! And he held in store a
rich tolerance and love for their love. For he not only had so much
insight into the fleeting nature of our pleasures, that he could hardly
be angry over the maddest, but he could even be present at the
journeyman's greeting (or methodology) of--two lovers with real
pleasure. "It is very foolish,"--he said in Göttingen,--"every
good-hearted man opens his arms in sympathy, when he sees friends,
brothers and sisters, or parents embrace each other; but if a couple of
monkeys in love dance round before us at the end of Cupid's string, and
though it were on the stage, not a devil of us will take any interest
in them, unless they dance in a romance. But why? Certainly not from
selfishness, otherwise the wooden heart in the human block would also
in the presence of friendship between others, or filial love, remain
nailed fast; but, because the love of lovers is selfish, we are so too;
and because in a romance it is not so, we are not so either. I, for my
part, go on in my thinking, and make believe to myself in regard to
every span of lovers I meet, that they were printed and bound, and I
had them from the circulating library for paltry reading money. It
belongs to the higher disinterestedness to sympathize even with its
opposite. And by all means with you, poor women! Would you or I, then,
oftentimes, with this life of yours so frittered away in sewing,
cooking, washing, know that you had a soul, unless it fell in love?
Many of you through long tearful years have never lifted your head
except in the short, sunny day of love, and after it your bereft heart
sank back again into the cool depths; so water-plants lie all the year
drowned in water, only at the time of their bloom and love do their
ascending leaves sit upon the water and sun themselves gloriously,
and--then fall down again."
At last Clotilda entered, in conversation with the Parson's wife. She
had on a crape hat, with a black lace portcullis, which at once
beautified, divided, and concealed with a pierced shadow her beautiful
face. But her eye avoided Flamin's eye, and only at times stole
thoughtfully after it. He proved that precisely people of the greatest
courage have the least with regard to beauty; he advanced not towards
her one step. She asked our Victor eagerly about the arrival and the
health of his Lordship. She then proposed to him, with the usual
medical uncertainty of her sex, whether such an operation often
transpired so easily, and whether he had already restored to many so
much as he had to his father: he answered both questions in the
negative, and she sighed openly. His respectful distance towards her
would have increased by that at which his friend kept himself from her,
had he not had something to hand her,--Emanuel's note. He could not
steal it, as he had already repeated to her the first line; secondly,
he must present it _under four eyes_ (he could not through Agatha, for
example), because he knew how she carried discretion to the extreme
limits. Clotilda was one of those persons--troublesome to this
biographer and his hero--who love to conceal all trifles: e. g. what
they eat, where they are going to-morrow; who are furious with a friend
if he blabs out how on St. Thomas's day last year they had a slight
headache. With Clotilda it arose not from fear, but from a dark
presentiment that he who babbled indifferent mysteries might at last
tell weighty ones. He felt towards her, notwithstanding her pride, a
mighty drawing to sincerity. He led her aside to the pomegranate-tree,
and there--sparing her by his open-hearted lightness of manner the
burdensome obligation she might feel with regard to a secret--handed
her back the leaf. She was astonished, but said at once, her surprise
related merely to her own negligence; i. e. she trusted him, but had
some suspicion or other of her house-mates, and of the manner in which
it got into the arbor. She took advantage of the orangery, and bent her
inspired face close to the pomegranate blossoms. Victor could not
possibly stand there alone so stupid; he, still a little struck with
her astonishment, and at last with her almost too great pride, felt
also a hankering after the pomegranate incense, and held his face down
in it toward hers. He should have known, however, that any one who
smells of anything does not look at the thing, but straight before him.
Hardly, then, had he applied his olfactory nerves to the blossoms, when
he opened his eyes, and Clotilda's large eyes stood opened full upon
him; they were just at the highest and most effective elevation, of
45°, whether you speak of eyes or bow-shots. He turned his pupils
forcibly down toward the leaves; she, still more prudently, stepped
back from the bewildering orangery.
However, she was not embarrassed. He thought it unjust toward Flamin to
observe her sentiments towards himself; but still he remarked this
much,--that the observatory on which one would watch the occultations
of her heart must be higher than is necessary in regard to other women.
The custom of being admired had made her proof against that showing up,
as in a glass, the impression of her charms with which men so often win
to themselves the attention of woman's vanity. She was, as I have said,
not embarrassed, but went on to tell her listener something further of
Emanuel's character, which she lately, out of respect for her teacher,
had not been willing to lay before such unholy ears,--namely, that he
firmly believed he should die a year hence in the midnight of St.
John's day.[77] Victor could easily guess that she herself believed it;
but what he did not guess was, that this proud one, from pure
tenderness of heart, had hastened her purpose of leaving Maienthal on
St. John's day, in order not to meet the beloved man on the anniversary
of the future day of his death. According to her account, this Emanuel
had had a painfully exalted position among men; he was alone; he had
had great friends on his bosom, but all had passed into the grave, and
therefore he would also hide there his own head. Years give to stormy,
over-vigorous men a finer harmony of the heart, but from refined, cold
natures they take more than they give. Those strong hearts resemble
English gardens, which age always makes greener, fuller, more leafy;
whereas the man of the world, like a French one, is covered by years
with dried-up and disfigured boughs.
Victor grew more troubled; every word which he won from her he regarded
as a sacrilege upon his friend, the more so as the latter did not
understand so well as he the art of opening a conversation with a lady.
He had not the heart to shine, because he feared thereby to be a rival
of his friend for her good graces. His Flamin seemed to him to-day
taller, more beautiful, and better than ever, and he himself shorter
and more stupid. He wished a thousand times his father had already
come, that he might deliver to him with the greatest ardor Flamin's
prayer for his aid in obtaining Clotilda.
At last he came, and Victor drew a full breath again. The good youth
often seeks, by acts of sacrifice, to reconcile his conscience again
with his _thoughts_. With heart-beatings of enthusiasm he awaited the
moment of solitude. A garden detaches and draws together people in the
easiest manner, and only in such a place should one impart secrets;
Victor could soon, in an arbor which wove itself on four chestnut-trees
with its blooming vein-work nest-wise over their heads, embrace his
father with trembling emotion, and speak and glow for his friend with
tongue and heart. His Lordship's surprise was greater than _his_
emotion. "Here," said he, "is something which has long since fulfilled
thy prayer in a different way; but I wished to reserve for thee the joy
of bearing the message";--and therewith he gave him a most gracious
autograph, wherein the Prince called the practising Advocate Flamin
into the Administrative Council.
A most gracious autograph is the _Tetragrammaton_[78] and means of
grace, which works supernatural effects and state-miracles; and the
illustrious writing-thumb is the magic thief's-thumb,[79] as it were,
by which the different wheels of the state-repeating-watch--the
lever-wheel, the face-wheel, often merely the hand--is shoved forward
or backward, according as it desires an hour earlier or later.
Hence ministers often climb up and cut off for themselves such a
thief's-thumb to carry in their pockets.
Sebastian is seized by joy, as by Habakkuk's angel, by the hair of the
head, and carried through the garden, and driven with his news to the
first he might meet, and that proved to be the Chaplain, who, with a
comic face, swore it was all a fib of Victor's; but his restrained
jubilation almost burst his compressed veins. Victor had no time for
refutation, but hurried off with such a message to the heart to which
it rightly belonged,--the mother's. The mother could not shape her
mouth to anything but a blessed smile, into which the drops of joy
overflowed from her eyes. No joy in nature is so sublimely affecting as
the joy of a mother at the good fortune of a child. But the son, in
whose soul, such as it was to-day, this sunbeam of fate was really
needed, could not, in the surprise, be immediately found.
His Lordship, meanwhile, talked with Clotilda as with a daughter, and
gave her a letter from her mother and the intelligence of his
approaching departure. His manly kindness, guided by respect and graced
by refinement, ennobled her attentiveness to his looks; and as she came
forth from the affectionate and low-toned conversation with sparkling
eyes, her tall form, which usually stooped a little, was raised by a
certain inspiration to a noble stature, and she stood in the temple of
Nature, as a priestess of the temple, infinitely beautiful. His
Lordship separated from her. She found Flamin near the tulip-formed
letter C, and the Goddess of Fortune appeared to him in the sweetest
human incarnation, to deliver to him her gift. We need not say that the
news and the news-bearer threw him into equal ecstasy.
Joy had shaken up the whole bee-garden in a swarming-bag and turned it
into chaos. The foaming wine-fermentation could not work itself off
till it ended in clear, tranquil rapture. His Lordship took himself out
of the way of a gratitude swelled by so many ripieno[80] voices and off
to his carriage, when the mother with her dumb heart-fulness overtook
him; but nothing could she get from her blissfully burdened heart to
her lips, save the modest words, that "to-day was his birthday, and his
son did not know it, and ought _also_ to have been surprised with a
rapture." He tried to escape from her with a grateful smile, and said
that he must hasten back to the Prince, who perhaps had taken as kind
an interest in this very day as she; but Sebastian, with his friend
whom he had found, overtook him at the garden-gate, and the hurrying
lord was delayed a little longer by a swift embrace of his son. Not
until he was off did the mother, who longed to unburden her love, clasp
tenderly Victor's hand, and, forgetting the agreement, asked: "O
dearest, why, then, did you not congratulate him on his birthday? For,
indeed, _I_ could not." Now for the first time he understood and felt
the sudden embrace of his father, and stretched out his arms after him
and would fain reciprocate it.
Here the old Parson, also coming out of the garden, struck in and said,
as if talking nonsense, "I wish he were Administrative Councillor"; but
his wife, without making any reply to that, said to him with
overflowing voice and love, "Such a cradle-festival thou hast never yet
lived to see as to-day's, Peter!" Agatha looked at her inquiringly and
admonishingly. "Just out with it," said she, and enfolded the children
and drew them both into the paternal embrace, "and wish your good
father length of days and three more blessed children."
The father could not say anything, but stretched his hand toward the
mother, to round the group of the loving Eden. Victor's sympathetic
blood swelled up in his heart, to dissolve it in love, and he thought
the silent prayer: "Never may any misfortune, All-gracious One, tear
these entwined arms asunder!" But Flamin soon drew himself out of the
concatenation, and said to Victor with a most grateful pressure of the
hand, "Thou knowest not how I am always wronging thee." The Chaplain
thought he should hide his emotion from all by saying: "I wish I had
not deceived you. I have let myself be bled, but it was a stupid thing;
if I had only known! only known! It is true; there, see for
yourselves!" And finding that this mask was not adequate to cover the
whole emotion of his soul, he called, in an overloud tone, to the poor
forgotten Apollonia, who was rocking at the house door the awakened
Bastian, to "come here!" But the poor girl, whose merely distant
participation in the general mingling of hearts touched our Victor's
tenderest feelings, shyly hesitated, till the mother came and
indemnified her against any loss by all that for which mothers are
never repaid. But not until the Parson's wife held her child in her
arms and on her lips, did she feel that the imprisoned flames of her
affections found vent, and her heart its alleviation.
Ah, that man should receive the fairest love precisely at the time when
he does not yet understand it!--alas that not until late in life's
year, as he contemplates with a sigh the love of other parents and
children, he should say hopefully to himself, "Ah, thus did mine
certainly love me too!"--alas that then the bosom to which thou wouldst
hasten with thy thanks for half of a life, for a thousand unappreciated
anxieties, for an inexpressible, never returning love, is already lying
crushed under an old grave, and has lost the warm heart which so long
loved thee!...
In domestic happiness the calm, cosey pleasures driven in between four
narrow walls are only the most accidental constituent; its nervous and
vital fluid is the blazing fire-fountains of love which spring out of
kindred hearts into each other. The involuntary surprise had
disconcerted the intentional ones. But the flood of joy had swept all
parties together; and they still remained in the same confidential
closeness to each other, when it had abated again. They sat down to the
entertainment in the summer-house. Seldom are banquets spiced as this
one was, by two extraordinary advantages,--want of food and want of
room. Nothing whets the appetite so much as the fear of its not finding
enough to satisfy it. It had been contrived by Sebastian, that for each
guest only his favorite dish should be provided; for the Parson,
stuffed crabs and potato cheese; for Flamin, ham; for the Hero, good
Harry's beans. But in this case every one wanted another's favorite
dish, and set his own up at auction.[81] Even the ladies, who generally
eat and do not eat, like fishes, nibbled a little. The second
intoxicating ingredient which they had, thrown into their cup of joy,
was the table, together with the garden-house, of which the former
would not hold the food nor the latter the feeders. Sebastian had
betaken himself, with Agatha, to an affiliated table which had been
adjoined outside to the window of the banquet-hall, merely for the
purpose of screaming in from out there and whining, more than eating.
This caprice was, at bottom, a covered modesty which feared being
honored inside at the expense of the other guests, on his Lordship's
account. His own solitude--perhaps in a painful sense--pictured to him
the shy Appel, who, as vestal of the hearth, ate only the drawback toll
of returning dishes, merely to try how they had tasted to others. He
could not longer endure the thought of this separation, but took wine
and the best of the dessert, and carried it in to her in her kitchen
winter quarters. As, in doing so, he displayed upon his face, instead
of his gayety towards girls, of which she might have made a too humble
interpretation, the greatest seriousness of courtesy; he was so happy
as to have given to a soul pinched up by nature itself--with no other
flower-pot here to send its roots round in than a cooking-pot, and only
the kitchen for its concert-hall and the spit for its music of the
spheres--a golden evening and a long memory of pleasure. Let no one
maliciously thrust his fist in the way of such a good snail-soul, and
laugh to see how she wriggles over it; and let him who stands upright
willingly stoop and gently lift her along over her little stone.
As to Clotilda, before dinner things went very well, but after dinner
very ill. I speak of Sebastian, who, after the handing in of the
petition to his Lordship, was happier and more light-hearted, and
actually talked as frankly with Clotilda as if she were--a bride. For
he had already said in Hanover, that "there was not a more tedious and
holy thing than a bride, particularly if it were a friend's; sooner
would he fritter away his time about the musty Pandects in Florence, or
a holy body in a glass shrine at Vienna, than about her." In fact, it
was hard to fall in love with Clotilda; I know the reader would not
have done it, but would have gone coldly away again. "Her Grecian nose
under the almost manly breadth of forehead," he would have said, "this
sister-nose to all Madonnas and this frontier wild-game[82] so rare on
German faces, her still but bright eyes, which seek nothing beyond
themselves, this British gravity, this harmonious thoughtful soul,
raise her above the rights of love. And even if this majestic form
should incline to love, who could ever be so selfish as to pocket the
present of a whole heaven, or so proud as to shoot his heart into hers
like a smoke-ball, and becloud thereby this still, pensive serenity?"
The reader will be glad to read his own words.
But after dinner things went differently. Under Victor's cerebral
membrane, some hobgoblin had so thrown into pi all the letters of his
ideas in the inner letter-case, that he was up to this time gay, but
unsatisfied. He had tried to tie and untie Agatha's hair, to separate
her double-bows into unequal, and for that very reason into equal
halves again; but the operation had not pleased him as usual,--to-day's
interludes of domestic love had put his mirthful spirit wholly out of
joint,--and it seemed to him as if, withdrawn from the present joy, he
should be happier, at least for a few minutes, in some quiet corner,
and he particularly longed to see the sun set.
Add to all this the sight of Clotilda's increased love towards
Agatha,--the sight of his friend, who, by the deepening silence of his
tenderness, his mildening voice, and by a devotedness so irresistible
in impassioned natures, commanded every heart, "Love me,"--and,
finally, the spectacle of night....
He had already been long sad, when he seemed still gay. Now the mother
took the little hero of the forenoon out under the bland evening heaven.
They all stood outside of the garden-tabernacle-of-the-covenant, in the
first temple of man's devotion. The evening-blood of the sinking sun
flowed into the clouds, as into the sea sinks the blood of its giants
dying in its depths. The porous cloud did not avail to hide the heavens;
it swam round about the moon, and let her pale silver glisten from
amidst the slags.
The red clouds painted the infant. Every one took lightly his soft
hands, which had already burst from the bud of pillows and the
chrysalis of swaddling-bands. Clotilda--instead of lavishing on the
little one carnally coquettish caresses, as many girls do _before_ or
_for_ men--poured down a steadily streaming look full of hearty love on
the new man, untied his too tight and cutting shirt-sleeve, screened
from him the moon at which he was squinting, and said, playfully,
"Smile this way and love me, _Sebastian_!" She could not possibly have
meant to charge this line with metaphorical _ricochet_-shots; besides,
the elder, unswaddled Sebastian knew full well that she could have
anticipated no double sense; nay, he knew the rule, that the very
anxiety wherewith some people banish certain subjects from their talk
betrays the presence of the same in their thoughts. And yet, for all
that, he had not the courage to smile like the rest, or to take the
little hand which she had touched in his. She turned to him, and said,
"But how does the child learn _our language, unless it has already a
language it can master_?"
... I have, out of mere regard to the philosophers, had this printed in
italics.
"Then it follows," he answered, "that the language of pantomime must
signify just as much as articulate speech. As often as I see a deaf and
dumb man go to sacrament, I think of this,--that all the instruction
you can give imports nothing into man, but only indicates and arranges
what is already there. The child's soul is its own drawing-master, the
teacher is simply its colorist."
"What if this lovely evening," she continued, "should one day come up
again to the memory of this little one? Why does the sixth year look
more beautiful in remembrance than the twelfth, and the third still
more beautiful?" A beautiful woman one cannot interrupt so easily as an
ex-Dean; and so she was permitted to recur to this reminiscence: "Herr
Emanuel once said, one should relate to children every year the story
of their past years, in order that they might one day look back through
all their years, even into the haze of the second." It is as if I heard
the above-mentioned maid of honor[83] personally speaking, under whose
thin lace cap there lay more philosophy than under many a doctor's
beaver, as quicksilver sticks in crape, and runs through leather.
Victor answered, with the usual sympathy of his good heart: "Emanuel
stands near to man, and knows him. Two scene-painters lead man, beset
by magic, through the whole stage,--_Memory_ and _Hope_; in the present
he is uncomfortable; enjoyment is poured out for him, as for Gulliver,
only into a thousand Liliputian moments; how shall that intoxicate or
satisfy? When we picture to ourselves a happy day, we compress it into
a single happy thought; when we come upon it, this thought is diluted
through: the twenty-four hours."
"I think of that," she replied, "as often as I walk through meadows; in
the distance are flowers upon flowers, but, near at hand, they are all
scattered apart, and separated by the grass. But yet, after all,
_memory is enjoyed only in the present_."
Victor continued to think only of the flowers, and said, abstractedly,
"And in the _night_ the flowers themselves look like grass,"--when it
began suddenly to sprinkle.
They all stepped, in solemn mood, into the summerhouse, on whose
roof the rain pattered down, while through the open windows the
alternately shutting and opening moon's eye threw in like a glacier its
snow-glances,--the tepid blossom-breath of the whole glistening
landscape stole with healing balm on every human sigh, every burdened
bosom. In this confined circle, separated from nature by the
alternation of night and moonshine, one must needs take refuge in
something near and familiar, in the old harpsichord. Clotilda's voice
might make a flute-accompaniment to the whispering rain without. The
Parson's wife begged--her to favor them, and with her favorite _aria_
from Benda's Romeo,--"Perchance, my lost repose! perchance one day in
the grave I may find thee!" &c.,--a song whose tones like fine
dissolving perfumes penetrate the heart through a thousand entrances,
and tremble there, and tremble more and more intensely, till at last
they shiver it to atoms, and leave nothing of it behind in the
harmonious annihilation but tears.
Clotilda without any hesitating vanity consented to sing. But for
Sebastian, in whom all tones came in contact with naked, quivering
feelers, and who could work himself into sadness at the very songs of
the herdsmen in the fields--this, on such an evening, was too much for
his heart; under cover of the general musical attentiveness, he had to
steal out of the door....
But here, under the great night-heaven, amidst higher drops, his own
can fall unseen. What a night! Here a splendor overwhelms him, which
links night and sky and earth all together; magic Nature rushes with
streams into his heart, and forcibly enlarges it. Overhead, Luna
fills the floating cloud-fleeces with liquid silver, and the soaked
silver-wool quivers downward, and glittering pearls trickle over smooth
foliage, and are caught in blossoms, and the heavenly field pearls
and glimmers. Through this Eden, over which a double snow-shower of
sparks and of drops played and whirled through a misty rain of
blossom-fragrances, and wherein Clotilda's tones, like angels that had
got lost, went flying about, now sinking and now soaring through this
magic-maze, Victor staggered, dazzled, overwhelmed, trembling and
weeping, and sank down exhausted into the arbor where he had to-day
fallen on his father's heart. He thought over the wintry life of that
good father amidst mere strangers to the heart, and his solitary, sad
celebration of today's festival, and the cold, empty room in the
paternal bosom, which once the lost form of the beloved one had
inhabited, and he yearned painfully for the heart of his invisible
mother. He lifted his leaning head into the rain, and from the large
open eyes fell not strange drops alone. He glowed through his whole
being, and night-clouds must cool it. His finger-tips hung down,
lightly folded in one another. Clotilda's tones dropped now like molten
silver-points on his bosom, now they flowed like stray echoes from
distant groves into this still garden. He spoke no name, he thought no
thought, he neither acquitted himself nor accused himself; he saw it
all as in a dream, when now a thick night glided across the garden, and
now a sea of light swept after it.
But it seemed to him as if his bosom would burst, as if he should be
blest could he at this moment embrace beloved persons, and crush in the
closeness of that embrace in a blissful frenzy his bosom and his heart.
It was to him as if he should be over-blessed, could he now before some
being, before a mere shadow of the mind, pour out all his blood, his
life, his being. It was to him as if he must scream into the midst of
Clotilda's tones, and fold his arms around a rock, only to stifle the
painful yearning.
He heard the leaves drip, and took it for a continuing rain. But the
_Staub-bach_ of the heavens had scattered itself in spray, and only
Luna's fall of light any longer besprinkled the landscape. The sky was
deep-blue. Agatha had been seeking him during the rain, and had only
just found him. He woke up, obediently and silently went out with her,
and met only cleared-up heavenly faces,--then all his nerves quivered,
and he was compelled with a mute obeisance to take his painful and
friendly leave. Each one had his own thoughts on the subject. But the
Parson's wife told the company, he loved to hear music at a distance,
only it always made him too melancholy.
Ah, when he reached his chamber, a happy and consoling thought embraced
his soul. Clotilda's dirge, and all, fixed before his sight the form of
the exalted Emanuel,--and it seemed to say: "In a year I shall be
already under the ground, only come to me, poor child, I will love thee
till I die!" Without desiring a light, he wrote with streaming eyes,
which no light could have helped, this letter to Emanuel:--
"EMANUEL!
"Say not to me, I know thee not! How can man, on this little grain of
sun-dust called the earth, on which he warms himself, and during the
swift moments which he counts off on his pulse between the flash of
life and the stroke of death, still make a distinction between
acquaintances and non-acquaintances? Why do not these little creatures,
who have wounds of the same kind, and for whose coffins Time takes the
same measure, fall without hesitation into each other's arms, and sigh,
'Ah, we are doubtless like each other and acquainted!' Why must first
these fleshly statues into which our spirits are chained move towards
and touch each other, before the beings disguised therein can imagine
and love each other? And yet it is so human and so true a thought: what
then does Death take from us except fleshly statues, what from our eyes
but the loved countenance, what from our ears but the dear voice, and
the warm bosom from our own? Ah, Emanuel! be to me no dead man! Accept
me! Give me thy heart! I will love it!
"I am not very happy, my Emanuel! When my great teacher, Dahore,--that
shining Swan of heaven, who, fastened to life by his broken wing-joint,
looked up wistfully at other Swans, as they winged their way toward the
warmer latitudes of the second life,--ceased to write to me, he did it
in these words: 'Seek my duplicate! Thy breast will continue to bleed,
until thou coverest its scar with another, and the earth will agitate
thee more and more violently, if thou standest alone,--and only around
the solitary do ghosts creep.'
"Emanuel, art thou not tranquil and gentle and indulgent? Does not thy
soul yearn to love all men, and is not a single heart too narrow for it
to shut itself up therein with its love, as a bee is shut up in a tulip
when it folds itself to sleep? Hast thou not had enough of the
repeating-work of our merry bells and mourning-bells, and art thou not
weary of the family likeness of all evenings and times? Dost thou not
look, out from this fleeting earth over the long way above thee, that
thou mayst not grow nauseous and giddy, as one for the same reason
looks out of a carriage into the road? Believest thou not in men around
whom floats the mountain air of a higher position, and who up on their
height stand in the midst of a still heaven, and look down into the
thunders and rainbows near the earth? Believest thou not in a God, and
seekest thou not his thoughts in the lineaments of nature, and his
eternal love in thy breast? If thou art and thinkest all this, then
thou art mine; for thou art better than I, and my soul would fain lift
itself to a higher friend. Tree of the higher life, I embrace thee, I
twine around thee with a thousand faculties and tendrils, that I may
mount up out of the trampled mire around me! Ah, a great man might
heal, tranquillize, quicken, exalt me,--me, poor creature, only rich in
wishes, distracted by the war between my dreams and my senses,--flung
sorely to and fro between systems, tears, and follies,--disgusted at
the earth, which I cannot replace for myself, laughing merely from
anguish at the tearful comedy, the most contradictory, saddest, and
merriest shadow among all the shadows in the wide night.... O fair,
good soul, love me!
"HORION."
Leaning his head on his hand, he let his tears flow, without thinking
or looking, till nature was spent. Then he went to the harpsichord, and
sang over to its accompaniment the most passionate passages of his
letter; what strongly moved him always impelled him to singing,
especially the emotion of longing. What can it matter to us that it was
prose?
At the last line of his epistolary song the door slowly opened.
"Is it thou?" said a voice.
"Ah, come in, Flamin!" he answered.
"I only wanted to see whether you had come back," said Flamin, and went
away.
I think it is necessary that I should here insert at least the
following, namely, that Victor possessed too much fancy, humor, and
thoughtfulness not to give out, when these three strings were violently
struck at once, pure dissonances, which, with more harmonious intervals
between these faculties,[84] would not have appeared; that he had,
therefore, more _leaning_ to enthusiasms and enthusiasts than
_disposition_ that way; that his negative-electrical philosophy had
always to contend with his positive-electrical enthusiasm for the
balance of power, and that from the effervescing of these two spirits
came nothing but humor; that he wanted to have all his carnations of
joy on the same bed, although one adulterated the colors of the rest
(e. g. refinement and enthusiasm, exaltation above the world and
familiarity with the tone of the world); that from all this, beside
irony and the highest tolerance, must also result a heavy, immovable
feeling of the nothingness of our inner moods, so fleeting and sketched
with such a contrariety of colors; and that he, whom the bad man
regards as two-sided and the well-disposed one as changeable, needs
nothing, for the gracing and rounding off of his Adam or Palladium
buried up in so much wood, but the scythe of Time. Time then be it.
8. DOG-POST-DAY.
Examinatorium and Dehortatorium of Conscience.--The Studious
Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
from Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
Intercalary Day.
I wish the story were done, so that I might get it printed; for I have
already too many subscribers to it among the common folk. An author
in our days accepts advance payment for his book from the lowest
fellow,--the tailor makes his pre-payment in clothes, the hair-dresser
in powder, the landlord in rooms.
Every morning Victor gave himself a curtain lecture under the bed-quilt
for the evening previous; the bed is a good confessional and
audience-hall of conscience. He wished that yesterday's garden-club
would take him for a veritable fool instead of a lover. "Ah, if Flamin
himself should torment himself with jealousy, and if our hearts, once
so long parted, should already come to be so again!" Here the bed-box,
from a confessional, grew to be a fiery oven. But an angel laid himself
in beside him, and blew away the blaze. "But what, then, have I done?
Have I not with a thousand-fold pleasure spoken, acted, kept silence
for his sake? Not a look, not a word, can be charged against me,--what
else then?" The angel of light or fire had now to blow terribly against
the shooting flame. "What else? Thoughts, perhaps, which however, like
field-mice of the soul, leap under the feet, and stick like adders. But
could the disciples of Kant impute to me then, that I took the little
image of the loveliest and best form, which I hitherto vainly summoned
up in the lands of three lords, and threw such a Raphael's head, such
an antique of Paradise, out of the window of the _villa_ of my brain,
like apple-parings and plum-stones? I should wonder at the Kantians, if
they did. And if it must stay there, am I to be an ox, ye Catechists,
and coldly glower[85] at it? Not I. Nay, I will trust myself, and
demand of the fairest heart even friendship, and yet leave to it its
love!" Dear reader, during this whole summary process before the
judicial commission of conscience, I have said to myself, over thirty
times, "Neither of you, you nor the reader, is a hair more honest with
your conscience!"
He drew himself slowly by the bed-cord out of the bed, which he used to
quit with a spring; some wheel of his ideas stuck within him. He read
his yesterday's letter, and found it too stormy. "That is just our
insignificance," said he, "that everything which man holds to be
eternal freezes over night; not across our face do the most vehement
gales pass more swift and traceless than across our heart. Why then am
I not to-day what I was yesterday, and perhaps shall be to-morrow? What
does man gain by this boiling up and down? And what has he then within
himself to build upon?"
Meanwhile, the fire-wheel of our earthly time, the sun, had whirled up
its revolving streams, and burned on the shore of the earth. He flung
up the window, and was fain to bathe his naked breast in the fresh
morning wind, and his hot eye in the Red Sea of Aurora; but something
within him interposed itself like an after-taste between him and the
enjoyment of the morning-land. The remorse of conscience for _future_
actions spoils a good man utterly for enjoyment.
There rose slowly within him an overmastering emotion,--the former
night passed by again before him with its flashing rain, and brought
back to him his passionate heart and Emanuel's shadow,--he ran more and
more vehemently, and in fact transversely, through the chamber,--tied
his night-gown tighter, shook something from his eye, gave a
perpendicular jump, jerked out a "No!" and said, with an inexpressibly
serene smile, "No! I will not cheat my Flamin! I will neither seek nor
shun her, nor will I desire her friendship till the time of his highest
happiness. As I look upon thee[86] yonder, so will I upon her glorious,
heavenly bust, without desiring that it take on warmth, and turn on me
its cold plaster eye. But thou, my friend, be happy and all blessed,
and never mayst thou once remark my conflict!"
Now, for the first time, did the church-attire of morning gladden him,
and the morning air flowed like a cool necklace over his hot bosom, and
threw back the playing hair and shirt-frill. He felt that now he was
worthy to have written to Emanuel, and to have looked up at the
heavens....
Flamin entered with some coldness, which was increased by the sight of
the letter. Victor was not to be made cold; only when, down below, no
one reminded him by a word of his yesterday's Dithyrambics, then did
he, from fear of being betrayed, make an angry, covert oath, if _she_
came, not to come,--which could be kept, too, for she did not come. She
had still to bring away luggage from Maienthal, to besprinkle her
friendships, and once more to set foot in the magic circle of her
beloved teacher; and had, therefore, gone off.
The following weeks danced now like just so many hours in Anglaises and
Cotillons before Sebastian. His forenoons hung full of fruits, his
afternoons full of flowers; for in the morning his soul with its
exertions lived in his head, towards evening in his heart. In the
evening one loves cards, poems, confidential talk, woman, music, very
much; in the morning, very little; in the spirit-hour is that love at
its highest strength.
Except two other doubts that troubled him,--the first was, whether
his Emanuel would write to him soon enough to enable him to visit
him before he should be harnessed to the pole of the court and
state-carriage; the second was the fear of being so too soon,--now he
had hardly anything to do except to be happy or to make others so; for
precisely in these weeks fell his holy or Sabbatical weeks...
I know not whether the reader is yet acquainted with them; they are not
found in the improved almanac; but they occur regularly (with some men)
either immediately after the vernal equinox or in the after-summer.
With Victor the first alternative was the one,--exactly in the middle
of spring. I need not inquire whether it is the body, the weather, or
who or what, that rings in this truce of God in our breast; but I must
describe how they look, the Sabbatical weeks. Their form is precisely
this: in a holy or Sabbatical week, many--e. g. I--are put off with
mere Sabbatical days or hours. At first, one slumbers lightly, as on
balanced clouds,--one awakes like a serene day. At evening one had made
a firm resolve beforehand, and had therefore written it down in ciphers
on the door, to grow better, and to apply the weeding-knife every day
to one bed of weeds at least,--on awaking one is still so minded, and
in fact carries it out. The gall, that excitable spirit, which usually,
when it is poured, instead of into the duodenum, into the heart or
heart's blood, sends up boiling and hissing clouds, is now in a few
seconds absorbed or precipitated, and the exalted mind _feels calmly
the bodily effervescence_ without any of its own. In this lull of the
wings of our lungs, one utters only soft, low words, one clasps
lovingly the hand of every one with whom he speaks, and one thinks,
with melting heart, "Ah! I could not begrudge it to one of you, if you
were still happier than I." On the clean, healthy, tranquil heart, as
on the Homeric gods, light wounds immediately close. "No!" thou keepest
saying in the Sabbatical week, "I must for some days to come maintain
this tranquillity." Thou requirest, as material for joy, hardly
anything but existence; nay, the sun-sting of a rapture would condense
this cool, magical, transparent morning haze into a tempest. Thou
lookest up steadily into the blue, as if thou wouldst fain give thanks
and weep, and around upon the earth as if thou wouldst say, "Wherever I
might be to-day, there I should be happy!" and a heart full of sleeping
storms thou carriest, as a mother does her child sunk into slumber,
shyly and watchfully over the soft flowers of joy.... But the storms
start up, nevertheless, and assail the heart!...
Ah, what must we not all already have lost, if the pictures of blissful
days win from us nothing but sighs! O tranquillity, tranquillity, thou
evening of the soul, thou still Hesper of the weary heart, which always
abides beside the sun of virtue, if at thy very name our inner being is
dissolved into tears, ah, is not that a sign that we seek thee, but
have thee not?
Victor owed the _siesta_ of his heart to the sciences,[87] particularly
_Poetry_ and _Philosophy_, which two move, as do _comets_ and
_planets_, around the _same sun_ (that of Truth), and differ only in
the _shape_ of their orbits, as comets and poets have the _greater
ellipse_. His training and talents had accustomed him to the vital air
and oxygen of the study, which is also the only dormitory of our
passions, and that only cloister and haven of bliss for men who would
escape the broad whirlpool of the senses and fashions. The sciences
are, more than virtue, their own reward, and they make one a partaker
of happiness,--she only makes him worthy of it; and the prize-medals,
pensions, and positive rewards, and the _patent_ which many scholars
would fain get for their studying, belong at most to the literary
apprentice-brethren, who make it a penance and a torture, but not to
the masters of the chair, who make it a pleasure and a delight. A
scholar has no _ennui_; only a throne-incumbent has to prescribe for
himself, against this nervous consumption, a hundred court-festivals,
cavaliers of honor, whole countries, and human blood!
Good heavens! a reader who, in Victor's Sabbatical weeks, should have
taken a ladder and climbed up to his window,--would he have espied
anything there but a jubilant thing, that went gliding about over the
fields of learning as among islands of the blest?--a thing which, in
its ecstasy, knew not whether it should think or compose or read, and
particularly _what_ or _whom_, out of the whole _high_ nobility of
books ranged before it. In this bridal chamber of the mind (such are
our study-chambers), in this concert-hall of the finest voices gathered
from all times and places, the æsthetic and philosophical enjoyments
almost overpowered his faculty of choice. Reading hurried him into
writing, writing to reading, thinking to sentiment, and the latter to
the former.
I could go on with more satisfaction in this description, if I had
previously written how he studied; namely, that he never wrote without
having read himself full[88] on the subject, and the reverse, that he
never read without having first _thought_ himself _hungry_. One should,
he said, without an intense occasion and impulse from without, i. e.
from within, not only not make verses, but even a philosophical
paragraph; nor should any one set himself down and say: "Now, at three
o'clock on this Bartholomew's day, I will go at it, and cleverly prove
the following proposition." I can now proceed.
Now when, in this mental laboratory, which served less for analytic
chemistry than for synthetic science, he ascended from the turmaline
which attracts grains of ashes to the sun which attracts worlds, and
even to the unknown sun toward which solar systems fly; or when the
anatomical charts were to him the perspective sketch of a divine
architecture, and the dissecting-knife became the gnomon of his
favorite truth: that, in order to believe in a God, there was need of
nothing more than two men, of whom the one might be dead, too, that the
living one could study him, and turn over his leaves[89]; or when
Poetry, as a second nature, as a second music, wafted him upward softly
on her invisible ether, and he chose undecidedly between the pen and
the keys, when he wanted to communicate aloft; ... when, in short, in
his heavenly sphere, supported on a human cervical-vertebra, the nebula
of ideas gradually resolved itself into bright and dark parts, and
beneath an unseen sun filled itself more and more with ether,--when one
cloud became conductor to another,--when at last the gleaming mass of
cloud came together,--then did the inner heaven (as the outer one often
does), by eleven o'clock in the forenoon, grow from all the flashes
into one sun, from all the drops into one flood, and the whole heaven
of the upper faculties came down to the earth of the lower ones, and
... some blue patches of the second world were for a flying moment
open.
We cannot delineate our inner states more philosophically and clearly
than by metaphors, i. e. by the colors of related states. The narrow
defamers of metaphors, who, instead of the brush, would rather give us
the black-lead, ascribe to the _coloring_ the unrecognizableness
of the _drawing_; but they ought to charge it merely on their
non-acquaintance with the original subject. Verily, nonsense plays
hide-and-seek more easily in the roomy, abstract, artificial words of
the philosophers--since words, like Chinese shadows, increase with
their circumference at once the obscurity and the emptiness of their
contents--than in the narrow green hulls of the poets. From the Stoa
and the Portico of thought one must have an outlook into the Epicurean
gardens of poetry.
In three minutes I shall come back to my story. Victor said, he must
have mountain-, garden-, and swamp-meadows, because he possessed
_three_ different whimsical souls, which he must drive to pasture on
three sorts of grounds. He meant by that, not, as the scholastics do,
the vegetative, animal, and intellectual souls, nor, as the fanatics
do, the three parts of man, but something very like,--his _humorous_,
_sentimental_, and _philosophical_ souls. Whoever should take away from
him one of these, he said, might as well strip him of the remaining
ones. Nay, sometimes, when the humorous soul happened at the moment to
be sitting uppermost on the revolving cross-bench, he carried his
levity so far as to express the wish that a joke might be made even in
Abraham's bosom, and that he might with his three souls sit down at
once on the twelve thrones.
His afternoons he gave up now to a streaming humor which did not even
find its proper hearers,--now to the people of the parsonage,--now to
all the school-going youth of St. Luna, whose stomachs (to the vexation
of every good schoolmaster) he provisioned more than their heads,
because he thought that, in the short years when the bib expands to a
napkin, enjoyment must find its way over the children's _serviette_,
and had no other entrance than the mouth. He never went out without a
whole military-chest full of small change in his waistcoat pocket. "I
scatter it without thinking," said he; "but if from this metallic seed
sowed broadcast whole evenings of joy spring up for the poor devils,
and if just the innocent ones so seldom have them, why shall not one do
something for the saved virtue and for pleasure at once?"
He said he had heard moral lectures, and desired for his extra-judicial
donations and merciful endowments nothing but forgiveness. His Flamin,
who pronounced him a careless sowing-machine on rocks, spent his little
holidays before approaching the session-table in ardent hopes of being
serviceable there, and in preparations for being able to be so; often,
when the higher patriotism, with saintly halo and Moses'-glory, broke
out on the beloved Flamin's face, tears of friendly gladness stood in
Victor's eyes, and in the moment of a lyric philanthropy both swore on
their hearts for the future a mutual support in well-doing and joint
sacrifices for mankind. The difference between them was merely
reciprocal exaggeration,--Flamin treated vice too intolerantly, Victor
too tolerantly; the former, as administrative counsellor, rejected,
like the Anabaptists, all festivals, and, like the first Christians,
all flowers (in every sense); the latter, like the Greeks, loved both
too much;--the former would have sacrificed to honor human victims; the
latter knew no robber of honor but his own heart: he overleaped at the
tea-table the paper half-nobility of our miserable points of honor,
and, mocking at mockery, submitted himself only to the high nobility of
virtue....
Victor sucked, with the feet of a green-frog, on every flower-leaf of
joy,--at children, animals, village-Lupercalia, lessons; but dearest of
all to him was Saturday. Then he made excursions through the glad
unrest of the village, along by servant-men, hammering at their
scythes, not to magnetize, but to sharpen them, and before the
shop-door of the schoolmaster, at which his eye, like a Swiss, often
stood for half an hour. For he could very well study the state of St.
Luna's commerce in the little great-adventure-trade of the
schoolmaster, who knew no smaller merchants' exchange than the one in
his breeches' pocket. From this East India House he saw at a late hour
people procuring the cheap pleasures of Sunday,--the wholesale dealer
(the schoolmaster is meant), supported by his negro slaves, made the
Sunday morning of St. Luna sweet with his syrup and hot with his
coffee; and as well by the tobacco-culture of Germany was this
tradesman enabled with spiral cables of pigtail to furnish the heads of
the pipes, as through the silk culture the daughter's heads with
Sabbath-streamers out of his Auerbach's court.... Our hero all knew.
From every kennel a dog came wagging his tail to meet him to whom he
had thrown in bread; from every window children screamed after him,
whom he had bantered; and many boys, whom he passed, counted themselves
happy if they had a cap on,--for then they could take it off before
their master. For his first growing up in St. Luna was the history of
St. Luna, which must have been drawn from the oral blue-books of the
historic persons, and from the Imperial Postilion, the Parson's wife.
This last, as a Mrs. Plutarch, always held up two characters, like
pieces of cloth, side by side; and her husband read to him according to
the best of his science and conscience upon the Church- and
Reformation-history of his diocese. Victor devoted himself to this
microcosmic world-history from two motives: first, in order--which is
the object of professional students with the larger history--to dismiss
it again clean from memory; secondly, in order to be as much at home in
the village as the constable or the midwife, whence he hoped to derive
the advantage of being grieved if a St. Lunite should die, and glad if
he had previously married.
Now the story strides forward again, from one day to another, as if on
the stones of the stream of time.
So sweetly then had the spring passed along before him with Sabbatical
weeks, with Whitsuntides, with white blossoms, which fell gradually,
like butterflies' wings, from the flying season. Victor had postponed
the visit to Le Baut, thinking, "I shall have, at all events, to budge
soon enough down out of the soft lap of Nature, and up to the court
wire-bench and the object-holder (the throne) of the court-microscope";--he
had, to be sure, daily exhorted himself, now, soon, before Clotilda's
arrival, to start so as not to draw any suspicion upon his intentions,
but always in vain, ... when suddenly (for the day before it was the
13th of July) the 14th appeared, and with it Clotilda's luggage without
her. Now he actually (according to the official dog-reports) crossed on
the 15th the Brook of St. Luna,[90] passed the Alps of the Chamberlain's
steps, and pitched his Cæsar's tent on Le Baut's sofa. He knew that
to-day no one was there, not even Mat.
"Heaven keep our politeness safe and sound," said he; "without it there
were not only no holding out among a set of knaves, but it pays also
minute-tributes of pleasure, whereas benevolence pays only quarterly
assessments and exchequer-instalments, and charitable contributions."
Mr. and Mrs. Le Baut were as courteous as never before (I could swear,
they had nosed out something of Victor's court-doctor's hat and
Doctor's crown); only they knew not what sort of a mouth-piece they
should screw on to such a whimsically twisted instrument as Victor was.
Like all study-inhabiting crustacea, he would rather talk of things
than of persons; Flamin, however, the reverse. For the married pair,
there was nothing in any Messiad more sublime than that now, on St.
John's day, the Italian Princess would be coming: of that no mortal
could talk enough, especially in the village. I know not to what slip
of Victor's it was owing, that he led most women into the notion that
he loved them. Suffice it, the Chamberlain's wife, who at her years
demanded no longer _love_, but the _show_ of love, thought, "Perhaps!"
Let no one mistake her, she, to be sure, always spent the first hour
with a man on the _watch-tower_ of observation; but the second, then,
only on the _hunting-screen_, if the first had been fortunate, and she
was cool enough not to hope more than she saw: she even made a jest of
every one who, in view of her vanity--a womanly vanity, however--of too
easily presuming upon conquests, should think to flatter her otherwise
than openly. Suffice it, she judged our Victor to-day too favorably, in
her sense, or too unfavorably in ours; as, in general, mere courtiers
can see through only mere courtiers. Of Clotilda not a word was said,
not even of the time of her return.
In fact, the Le Baut had a monstrous pride in herself to contend with
towards her step-daughter,--of which my correspondent should have
informed me what it rested upon, whether on relations or on merits; for
of both there was an ample supply, inasmuch as the Chamberlain's wife
had been the w----, that is, the mistress, of the present Prince's
deceased father. I and a clever man have considered the question _pro_
and _con_, whether she resembled Cæsar in love or in ambition. The
clever man says, "In love," because a woman never forgets love, when a
prince has been her teacher therein. The illustrious deceased father's
heart had adored two beauties in her particularly, which aforetime the
Scots[91] used to be so fond of eating, namely, the bosom and the rump.
The great have their peculiar _grossièretés_, which the little dream
not of. I would not print it, but it was known to the whole court, and
therefore to many of my readers also. Well, the Devil brought along
Time, who whetted his scythe and mowed away all of each of these charms
which _hung over_ in his territory. Now with women at courts--or in the
courtyard[92] of a school, or a warehouse, or in a cow-yard--vanity, so
soon as old Saturn (i. e. Time) attacks it with his scythe-chariot and
with the small shot from his hour-glass, makes one of the most skilful
retreats that I know of. Vanity lets itself be driven from one work or
member after another; but at last it throws itself out of the weak
parts into _strongholds_, e. g. into finger-nails, foreheads, feet,
&c., and from there the Devil himself cannot dislodge it. The
Chamberlain's wife had first to make herself such a part, namely, a
_gorge de Paris_ and a _cul de Paris_; these four _boundary hills_ of
her kingdom had daily to be restored, and raised, out of respect for
property, against the shifting of boundaries produced by years. From
this, now, my clever man concludes that her soul is always writing
letters of marque to her body.
I am precisely the antipode of the clever man, and contend that Cupid
is only her serving-brother, not the master of the lodge,--her
adjutant, not her generalissimo; and this for the reason that she is
still always applying either her own or Le Baut's hand to the
restoration of the Solomon's Temple wherein she used to be adored as a
goddess, side by side with the god,--because in marrying him she
married nothing but the Chamberlain's key and his _assemblées_ and his
hopes of future influence,--because her hostility to Clotilda relates
not to the face, but to the brain,--because her love is now without
jealousy. That is to say, she stood in a certain amatory relation with
the Evangelist Matthieu, which (according to our feeling as common
citizens) differs from hatred in nothing but--duration. Persiflages of
love were their declarations of love; their glances were epigrams; his
hours of assignation he seasoned with comic accounts of his
corresponding hours in other places; and at the time of day when a holy
man usually prays off his psalm,[93] both were ironical. Such an
_erotic_ connection is nothing but the subdivision of a _political_....
But to return to the story.
The Chamberlain proposed now to show his guest something of more
interest to a doctor and a scholar. To the chamber wherein the
something was, they passed through the Chamberlain's wife's, and
through Clotilda's. As they made a day of rest[94] in the former,
Victor's eyes were fixed dreamily on Clotilda's profile, which Matthieu
had lately cut out of nothing, and which the Chamberlain's wife, out of
flattery to the profile-cutter, had hung up here under glass.
Singularly--i. e. accidentally--the glass at this moment flew to pieces
over the fair face, and Victor and the father were startled; for the
latter was, like most great folk, for want of time, at once
superstitious and sceptical; and it is well known that superstition
regards the flying to pieces of a portrait-glass as a forerunner of the
death of the original. The distressed father reproached himself with
the permission he had given Clotilda to stay so long in Maienthal,
since she would certainly injure her health there by unprofitable,
youthful enthusiasms. He meant her mourning for her buried Giulia; for
it was merely from sorrow for her, that, on the first of May, she had
hurried hither without any baggage; and even the clothes of the beloved
friend she had to-day sent among her own. He broke off in a cheerful
tone, for Matthieu came, the brother of this Giulia, who only wanted to
show and excuse himself, because, like several of the court church of
half-brothers, he was going to meet the Princess.
Victor grew stiller and sadder; his bosom became at once a swelling
flood of invisible tears, whose source he could not trace to his heart.
And when next they had to pass through Clotilda's still and vacant
chamber, where order and simplicity too intensely reminded him of the
fair soul of the proprietor, his sudden and touching dumbness struck
others also. He tore his eyes hurriedly away from some flower-drawings
by her own hand, from her white inkstand, and from the beautiful
landscape of the oil-tapestry, and stepped up hastily to that which Le
Baut was unlocking. It was not any noble heart which the latter, with
his golden key, although bored like a cannon, could fasten,[95]--the
Titular Chamberlains in Vienna apply only an hermetically sealed
one,--but what he opened was his _Cabinet d'histoire naturelle_. The
cabinet contained rare copies and some _curiosa_;--a calculus taken
from the bladder of a child, two seventeenths of an inch long and two
seventeenths of an inch broad, or the reverse; the hardened _vena cava_
of an old Minister; a pair of American feather-trousers; tolerable
Fungites, and better specimens of _Strombi_ (e. g. a staircase-shell,
_not genuine_); the model of a midwife's chair and of a sowing-machine;
species of gray marble from Hof in Voigtland; and a petrified
bird's-nest,--duplicates not included.... Meanwhile I and the reader
prefer to all this dead trumpery the living ape who was the cabinet's
sole ornament and--owner. Camper should cut off from this living
specimen the Chamberlain's head, and dissect it, if only to see how
near the monkey borders upon man.
A great person has always some branch or other of science which he
cares nothing about, and to which, therefore, he particularly devotes
himself. To Le Baut's soul, hungering for knowledge, it was all one
whether it were set in a cabinet of seals or of gems or of pistoles.
Were I a great person, I would with the greatest zeal make buttons--or
deliveries--or books--or Nuremberg wares--or wars--or right good
institutions, merely from cursed ennui, that _mother of vinegar_ to all
vices and virtues which peep forth under ermine and stars of orders.
Nothing is a greater proof of the general growth of refinement than the
general growth of ennui. Even the ladies, out of mere flat ennui, a
hundred times contrive pastimes for themselves; and the cleverest man
utters his greatest number of platitudes, and the best his greatest
number of slanders, merely to a circle that knows how to adequately
bore him.
The court-page was the cicerone of the cabinet, perhaps for the sake of
going about. Victor wronged him by the medical supposition that he
affected a certain loose, unsteady, slouchy gait common to debauchees
in high life; for he really had it, and for the reason that he, on
quite other grounds than Victor's fine ones, never loved to--sit. But
to proceed: Unless the Chamberlain's wife meant to tear aside the
curtain from before Victor's soul, and spy out therein his sentiments
toward herself and Clotilda by the fright which I am about to relate,
then it can have been nothing but a very bad spirit which led the hand
of the said Chamberlain's wife to a silver ingot. Behind the ingot lay,
perhaps killed by crumbs of arsenic, a mouse. A female reader, who in
similar dangers has suffered as a patient, can imagine how the
Chamberlain's wife felt when she grasped, with the hard substance,
something soft, and drew it forth, and then saw what it was. A _real_
fainting-fit was inevitable. I confess I should myself hold her swoon
merely as a feint, were the occasion less; e. g. had it been, not her
senses, but her honor, that was assailed: but a mouse is a very
different matter. In fact, before such malicious spectators as her
husband and her Cicisbeo, she must long since have banished from her
stage, as the French from theirs, this Fifth Act Murder; nay, I do not
believe she could in any way have rendered herself so ridiculous in the
eyes of a triumphant enemy of her virtue (except by a real swoon) as by
a fictitious one. Terror at the trance[96] deprived the Evangelist of
the use of his reason, and left him only the use of his wickedness and
his hands, with which he instantly tore open the whole blind- and
fence-work of her bosom, in short, the whole optical breast, to get air
enough for the true one, on whose board he had a piece,[97] namely, her
heart. But Victor pushed him away, and, sprinkling her with a few drops
of ice-water, out of tender respect for her charms and her life, soon
raised her up again. However, she forgave the page all that she
guessed, and thanked the court-physician for all in which she was
mistaken....
... Let me look away a moment from this black cobweb, and refresh
myself with surveying the fairer world around me on my island, where
there is no enemy,--and the flashing play of fishes and children on the
shore,--and the playing mother who flings to them flowers and watchful
glances,--and the great maple-trees which, softly murmuring with a
thousand leaves and flies, bend downward to meet the foliage that
glimmers in mimic dance under the waves,--and how the warm earth and
the warm sky rest on each other in slumbering love, and bear one
century after another....
Victor, before the end of his rural day, went sadly home. Saturday (the
16th of June[98]) sped softly by, and in its flight shook out a whole
flower-head of winged seed for new flowers of joy.
The stars glided lightly over its night. A friendly, blue Sunday
morning hung floating over the village in its finery, and held its
breath lest it should snatch off a ripe, linden-blossom, or the down of
a marsh-marigold. Victor could hear the forte-pianissimo sounding down
from the palace over the reposing village, and must needs sigh with the
asthma of blissful longing, "Ah, when shall I have to cease swimming
upon this still, shining sea, over this fair anchorage of life?" ...
When Fate answered, "To-day!" For this very day, on Sunday, there came
from the residence-city of Flachsenfingen a light-headed fool (in fact,
two) in a no less light-bodied Berlin, and took out of his package a
letter to him from his Lordship.
"On the 21st of June (Thursday), the Italian Princess makes her entry
into Kussewitz. On Wednesday, I leave here, and present thee in St.
Luna to the Prince, who accompanies me to that place. I pray thee,
however, to repair on the Saturday following to the _Island of
Union_,[99] because the little which, for want of opportunity, I cannot
say to thee in St. Luna, I shall reserve for the island. Thou wilt find
me there. The bearer of this is our respected court-apothecary
_Zeusel_, in whose house thou wilt, as court-physician, have thy future
residence. Farewell!" H.
"Zeusel?" asks the reader, and ponders the matter. "I know not the
Zeusels." No more do I; but I say to myself, Is not this carrying
things too far? And is it not a regular imposition, that the
correspondent of this work cannot, by all the representations made to
him by me through the dog, be induced even to arrange things in this
history in as orderly a manner as they are, indeed, in every wretched
romance, and even in--a house of correction, where every new
correctioner rehearses neatly to the old ones, in the very first hour,
his total _Fata_, even to the introductory cudgelling on entering, from
which the historian has freshly arrived. By Heaven! people actually
rush and leap into my work, as into a passengers' room, and neither
reader nor Devil knows who their dogs and cats are.
"I wish..." said Victor, and made six circumflexes upon it as
apostrophes of the same number of omitted curses. For he was now to
pass over from the Idyl of country life into the travestied Æneid of
city life, and no road is surely more wretchedly paved than that from
the study into the court smelting-houses and _chambres ardentes_,[100]
from peace to turmoil. Besides, Emanuel had not yet written. Clotilda,
the _Hesper_ of those two fair evenings, was like the Hesperus in the
sky, not to be seen over St. Luna. As we said, it was a wretched state
for him. And now, in addition to all this, that Zeusel, his future
landlord, the Court Apothecary, was, so to speak, a fool, full as
light as his Berlin, or as the court-fourier, with whom he came, but
fifty-three years older than the carriage, that is to say, fifty-four
years old, and, taken for all in all, a human diminutive and
vinegar-eel in body and soul, _peaked_ in all respects, in chin, nose,
wit, head, lips, and shoulder. This fine vinegar-eel--for the eel
contends that he understands a certain refinement, which never could
belong to any Roturier,[101] and he does not deny that his great
ancestors wrote themselves, not Zeusels, but _Von Swobodas_--was
travelling with the court-fourier, who administered the
quartermastership in Kussewitz for the princely bride, toward that
place, in order to remain there just so long as he was not wanted.
Zeusel meant absolutely to have influence on the Flachsenfingen court
by something beside his clyster-hydraulics, and to work upon the court
household with something more than senna-leaves; therefore he bought up
at a high price all private intelligence (he improved it forthwith into
public) which he could collect of new meteorological phenomena in the
court-atmosphere, and then, when certain people turned somersets down
from the steps of the throne, he smiled finely enough, and remarked
that he hoped such persons had regarded him as their friend, and not
noticed the leg which he had thrust out of his shop-door by way of
giving them a sly lift. He was, in spite of some good-heartedness, a
liar from the beginning, not because he wanted to be malicious, but
refined; and he evaporated his sound understanding, that it might drop
in wit.
Towards Victor, as future courtier and patron, he knew not, for all
that, how to assume the upright court-dignity which respects at once
itself and others; but towards the people of the parsonage he amply
observed the regular courtly contempt, and showed them well enough how
little, without designs upon the Lord's son, he should have thought of
even _looking_ over their garden-wall or window-sill, to say nothing of
_coming_ over. Victor never hated anything else in his neighbor but
hatred of other neighbors; and his respect for all classes, his
contempt for all _eminent_ fools, his disgust at ceremonies, and his
inclination as a humorist for the little theatres of life, formed the
greatest contrast to the pharmaceutic infusorium, and to its disgust
with men and deference for grandees.
Victor gave his landlord thirty greetings to carry with him to the
Italian _Tostato_ in Kussewitz, who had travelled with him, laughing
and dancing, a day and a half out of Göttingen. The Apothecary, at his
departure, left behind in Victor an annoying, sour sediment; even at
the organ-blower, who brought up the coffee every Sunday, he could not
laugh as usual. I will explain why he used to laugh at him.
On that day the coachman was shaved, and, in fact, at first
hand,--namely, by his own. Now the chin of this lazy box-incumbent had
thrown up more mole-hills--so I euphoniously name warts--than are
necessary for shaving and mowing. Among these the old man hacked and
planed on Sunday morning,--for then it is that the common people put
off at once the old Adam and the old shirt, and leave sins and beard to
grow only on working-days,--boldly slipping his knife up and down among
the warty _chagrin_ and cutting away. Now the man would have looked
pitifully, with his ploughed-up facial foreground,--so that one must
needs have wept blood at that which ran in red lines down over the chin
of this stone river-god,--if the Prosector, like a Roman, had, out of
stupidity, exhibited his wounds. But he showed nothing,--he had more
sense than that; he picked tobacco-spunk into small caps, and put the
headpieces upon the sore warts, and so made his appearance.
"Let a Spener, a Cato the younger," said Victor, "just come into my
study, and not laugh when a bellows-blower follows with coffee-cups,
and with sixteen scalped warts and his chin bound up in spunk, looking
like a garden-rockery overgrown with beautifully distributed moss,--let
a Spener, I say, help laughing, if he can."
To-day he could help it himself. Weary of the day, he went out into the
peaceful evening, and laid himself on his back on the summit of a steep
hill; and when the sun, dissolved into a cloud of gold, tremulously
flowed away over the liquid gloss of the flowers, and swam down on the
grassy sea of the mountains, and as he lay nearer to the warm,
throbbing heart of Nature, sunk down upon the soft earth as if in the
repose of death, drawing down the clouds into him with sighs, fanned by
winds coming from afar, lulled by bees and larks,--then did
remembrance, that after-summer of human joy, steal into his soul, and a
tear into his eye, and longing into his breast, and he wished that
Emanuel might not reject him.--Suddenly slight steps drew nigh to his
reclining ears; he started up, alarmed and causing alarm. A heavy
travelling carriage came staggering lazily up the hill; behind, instead
of servants, three pale foot-soldiers had thrust their hands into the
footmen's straps, who had only a single leg among them which was of
flesh, while they footed it on five wooden stilt-legs or boot-makers'
signs, which, with something still longer, made of wood,--namely, three
well-wrought beggar's staffs,--they had taken from the enemy; a
coachman walked beside the carriage, and a gentlewoman, and close by
Victor, as he sprang up, stood--Clotilda.
She came from Maienthal. This sudden illumination eclipsed all the
tables of the law hung up in his soul, and he could not at once read
the tables. She looked upon him with softer rays than ever, and the sun
lent some too. With a smile, as if she anticipated his first questions,
she gave him a--letter from Emanuel. A shrinking "Ah!" was his answer;
and before he could accommodate himself to two ecstasies,[102] the
carriage was already at the top of the hill, and she in it, and all had
gone off.
He hesitated with trembling to gaze, absorbed, into the still, blue
paradise of the fairest soul that ever overflowed. At last he looked
upon the traces of a beloved human hand which he had not as yet
touched, and read:--
"Horion!
"Man climbs a mountain, as the child does a chair, in order to stand
nearer the face of the infinite Mother, and to reach her with his puny
embrace. Around my height the earth lies sleeping, with all its eyes of
flowers under the soft mist; but the heavens already lift themselves up
with the sun under the eyelid; under the paled Arcturus mists begin to
glow, and colors extricate themselves from colors; the globe of earth
rolls, vast and full, to rapture, of blossoms and living creatures,
into the burning lap of morning.
"So soon as the sun comes, I look into it, and my heart lifts itself up
and swears to thee that it loves thee, Horion!... Glow, Aurora, through
the human heart as through thy field of cloud, illuminate the human eye
like thy dew-drops, and send up into the dark breast, as into thy
heaven, a sun!...
"I have now sworn to thee, I give thee my whole soul and my little
life, and the sun is the seal on the bond betwixt me and thee.
"I know thee, beloved; but knowest thou whose hand thou hast taken into
thine? Lo, this hand has closed in Asia eight noble eyes,--no friend
survives me,--in Europe I veil myself,--my sad history lies near the
ashes of my parents, in the waters of the Ganges, and on the 24th of
June of the coming year I go out of the world.... O Eternal One, I go;
on the longest day the happy spirit wings its way out of this temple of
the sun, and the green earth opens and closes with its flowers over my
sinking chrysalis, and covers the heart that is gone with roses....
"Waft greater waves upon me, morning-air! Draw me into thy broad floods
that stand over our lawns and woods, and bear me in clouds of blossoms
over sparkling gardens and over glimmering streams; and dizzied between
flying blossoms and butterflies, melting away under the sun with
outspread arms, faintly floating over the earth, let me die, and let
the bloody garment, dissolved into a red morning-vapor, like the ichor
of the butterfly[103] just released, fall into the flowers, and let a
hot sunbeam absorb the azure-bright spirit out of the rose-chalice of
the heart up into the next world.... Ah, ye beloved, ye departed, are
ye indeed departed? are ye, then, moving along as dark waves[104] in
the quivering blue of heaven? even, now, in that abyss, full of veiled
worlds, do your ethereal garments billow around the hidden suns? Ah,
come back, sweep hitherward; in a year I melt and flow into your heart!
"--And thou, my friend, seek me soon! No one on earth can love thee so
truly as a man who must soon die. Thou good heart, which these mild
days press into my hands, even at this last moment, for a farewell, I
will love and warm thee inexpressibly. During this year in which I am
not yet taken away, I will stay with thee entirely; and when Death
comes and demands my heart, he shall find it only on thy breast.
"I know my friend, his life and his future. In thy coming years stand
open dark chambers of martyrdom; and when I die, and thou art with me,
I shall sigh, Why can I not take him with me, before he sheds his
tears?
"Ah, Horion! there lies in man a black Dead Sea, out of which only when
it is agitated the blessed island of the next world lifts itself up
with its clouds. But my lips will already lie under the earthly clod
when the cold hour comes to thee in which thou wilt no longer see any
God,--in which Death shall lie on his throne, and mow around him, and
fling even to the domain of nothingness his frosty shadows and the
lightnings of his scythe. O beloved, my grave-mound will then be
already standing when thy _inner_ midnight comes on; with anguish thou
wilt mount upon it, and look sternly into the soft wreaths of the
constellations, and cry:[105] 'Where is he whose heart crumbles beneath
me? Where is eternity, the mask of time? Where is the Infinite One? The
veiled self grasps after itself on all sides, and strikes against its
cold form.... Gleam not upon me, broad starry field; thou art only the
conglomerate _picture_, formed of colored earths, on an infinite
_churchyard-gate_, that stands before the desert of a life buried under
space.... Laugh me not to scorn, ye shapes on higher stars, for, if I
melt away, ye melt away also. One, one thing, which man cannot name,
glows forever in the immeasurable smoke, and a centre without limit
calcines a circumference without limit.--Still I exist; the Vesuvius of
death yet smokes above me, and its ashes envelop me; its flying rocks
bore through suns, its lava-torrents move dissolved worlds, and in its
crater the former world lies stretched out, and it sends up nothing but
graves.... O Hope, where abidest thou?' ...
"Float enraptured around me, animated gold-dust, with thy thin
wings,--I will not crush thy short flower-life; swell upward, giddy
zephyr, and waft me down into thy blossom-cups. O thou immeasurable
flood of radiance, fall from the sun over this narrow earth, and bear
up on thy waves of splendor the heavy heart before the highest throne,
that the eternal and infinite Heart may take the little ones which are
nigh to ashes, and heal and warm them!
"Is, then, a poor son of this earth so unhappy that he can quail in the
midst of the splendor of morning, so near to God on the hot steps of
his throne?
"Fly not from me, my dear one, because a shadow always encompasses me,
which daily grows darker, until at last it shall wall me in as a little
night. I see the heavens and thee through the shadow, in the midnight I
smile, and in the night-wind my breath goes forth full and warm. For, O
man, my soul has stood erect toward the stars; man is an asthmatic, who
suffocates if he lies down and does not lift up his breast.--But darest
thou despise the earth, that forecourt of heaven, which the Eternal has
thought worthy to move along as one in the bright host of his worlds?
The great, the godlike, which thou hast in thy soul and lovest in
another's,--seek it not in any sun-crater, on any planet-floor; the
whole next world, the whole of Elysium, God himself, appear to thee in
no other place than in the midst of thee. Be great enough to despise
the earth; be greater, so as to respect it. To the mouth which is bent
down to it, it seems a rich, flowery plain; to man in his _perigee_, a
dark world; to man in his _apogee_, a glimmering moon. Then, and not
till then, will the holy element, which from unknown heights is sent
down into man, flow from the soul, mix itself with the earthly life,
and quicken all that surrounds thee. So must the water, shed from
heaven and its clouds, first run under the earth, and well up from it
again, before it is purified into a fresh, clear draught. The whole
earth is trembling now for rapture, till all rings and sings and
shouts, as bells sound of themselves during an earthquake. And the soul
of man is made greater and greater by its nearness to the Invisible....
"I love thee exceedingly!
"EMANUEL."
Horion read through swimming eyes. "Ah," he wished, "were I only, this
very day, near thee, with my disordered heart, thou glorified one!" and
now, for the first time, occurred to him the nearness of St. John's
day, and he proposed to himself on that day to see him. The sun had
already vanished; the evening red fell like a ripe apple-blossom; he
felt not the hot drops on his face, nor the icy dew of twilight on his
hands; and with a bosom illuminated by dreams, and a heart
tranquillized and reconciled to earth, he wandered back....
--By the way! is it, then, necessary that I should elaborate an apology
for Emanuel as stylist and as _stylite_ (in the higher sense)? And if
such is necessary, need I therein bring forward anything more than
this,--that his soul is still the echo of his Indian palms and the
River Ganges; that the walk of the better sort of unfettered men, just
as in dream, is always a flight; that he does not manure his life, like
Europeans, with the blood of other animals, nor hatch it out of dead
flesh, and this abstinence in eating (quite another effect than that of
excess in drinking) makes the wings of fancy lighter and broader; that
a few ideas, to which he guides with partial hand all the mental sap
and nutriment (and this distinguishes not only madmen, but also
extraordinary men; from ordinary ones), must in him obtain a
disproportionate weight, because the fruits of a tree become so much
thicker and sweeter when the rest have been plucked; and more of the
same sort? For, to speak candidly, those readers who desire an apology,
themselves need one, and Emanuel deserves something better than
a--criminal defence.--
At this moment the consolation leaped up within my hero like a
fountain, that he was to begin on Thursday his metempsychosis through
nature,--his journey. "Deuse take it!" said he, skipping up; "what
needs a Christian to coin money for the present distress,[106] and put
on mourning-cloaks, when he can journey on Thursday to Kussewitz to see
the handing-over of the Italian Princess, and on Saturday to the _Isle
of Union_, and, what is more, on the same day, which is _one_ day
before St. John's, to Maienthal, to his dear one, his angel?"
O Heavens! I would that he and I were already about the
journey,--really it may perhaps, unless all hopes deceive me, be quite
tolerable!--
During the week-day prayer-hour of Wednesday, two carriages rolled
along. Out of the full one stepped his Lordship and the Prince; out of
the empty one, nobody. Old Appel had dressed herself up splendidly, and
locked herself into the pantry. The Chaplain was happier,--he taught in
the Temple. Seldom does one make a clever face when one is presented,
or a stupid one when one presents. His Lordship led his son to the
Prince's hand and heart, as a collateral security for his future
loyalty, but with a dignity which won as much reverence as it showed.
My good hero behaved himself like a--fool; he had far more wit than our
deference for higher persons, or theirs towards us, allows. A talent
which expresses itself outside the limits of feudal service may be
regarded as high-treason.
His wit was only a covered embarrassment, into which he was thrown by
two faces and a third cause. First, the Prince's....
--If the reading world complains that so gradually, as they observe,
one new name and actor after another steals into this star Venus, and
makes it so full, that, at last, the historical picture-gallery becomes
a regular gallery of vocables, in which they must wander round with a
directory in their hands, they have really only too much ground for the
complaint, and I have myself already complained the most bitterly of
the same thing; for, after all, the greatest load remains on my
shoulders, inasmuch as every fresh ninny is a new organ-stop drawn out,
which I have to take into my performance, and which makes the pressing
down upon the keys more disagreeable to me; but my correspondent
forwards to me in the gourd-flask, without leave asked, all these
people to be quartered on me, and the rogue actually writes me I have
only to tell the world, _There are still more people coming_.--
The Prince's face threw our hero into embarrassment, not from anything
imposing about it, but because everything of that kind was discharged
from it. It was a week-day and _current_ face, that belonged on coins,
but not on prize-medals,--with arabesque lines, which mean neither good
nor evil,--tinged with a little dead gold of court-life,--anointed with
a soft oil, which might stifle the strongest waves,--a sort of sweet
wine, more drinkable for women than men. Of the finest turns, which
Victor had intended to reciprocate, there was nothing to be heard or
seen; but of apt and easy ones so much the more. Victor was embarrassed
by the conflict and interchange of politeness and truth. Social
embarrassments arise not from the uncertainty and impracticableness of
the path, but from the crossways of choice and the perplexity of the
scholastic ass between his two bundles of hay. Victor, whose politeness
always sprang from philanthropy, must to-day let it spring from
self-interest; but this was precisely what he could not get into him.
Beside the paternal face, before which, with most children, the whole
wheelwork of a free behavior grates and sticks, a third cause made him
disconcerted and witty,--namely, that he was after something. I can
tell by the look of every one,--except a courtier, whose life, like a
Christian's, is a constant prayer for something,--the moment he enters
the door, whether he calls as an alms-beggar and saint-by-works, or as
merely a member of the joy-club.
Long before the people left the church, Victor already conceived a
hearty love for the Prince,--the reason was, he was determined to love
him, though the Devil himself stood before him there incarnate. He
often said, Give me two days, or _one_ night, and I will fall in love
with whomsoever you propose. He was delighted to find on January's face
no second-hands, no minute-hands, of those assignation-hours with which
a good Cæsar generally seeks gladly to interleave, as with honeymoons,
the tedious years of wedlock; but on his face nothing was displayed but
continence, and Victor would rather swear by the face than by the
reputation. He misses the mark; for on the male face--although it is
made of mere printed characters of physiognomy, as certain pictures are
of written letters--Nature has, nevertheless, written the _matres
lectionis_[107] and signs of sensuality very small, but upon the female
larger, which is really lucky for the former and stronger and less
chaste sex. In fact, adultery is, with princes of the January stamp,
nothing but a milder sort of ruling and conquering. And yet honest
regents always return--with pleasure the wives, so soon as they have
conquered them, to their former lords. This, however, is only the same
greatness which led the Romans to deprive the greatest kings of their
realms, in order afterward to present them with them again.
As princes are not, like jurists, bad Christians, but prefer to be none
at all, January prepossessed our Victor by sundry sparks of religion,
and by some hatred of the French Encyclopedists; although he saw that
for a prince religion has indeed its good, but also its bad side, since
only a crowned Atheist, but no Theist, possesses the invaluable
_privilegium de non appellando_, which consists in this, that the
accused party is not permitted (_per saltus_ or by a _salto mortale_)
to appeal to the highest jurisdiction beyond the pale of earth.
The conversation was indifferent and empty, as in such cases it always
is. In fact, men deserve, for their conversation, to be dumb; their
thoughts are always better than their talk; and it is a pity that one
could not apply to good heads some barometrograph, or compositor's
harpsichord, which should write off outwardly what is thought within. I
would bet that every great head goes to the grave with a whole library
of unprinted thoughts, and lets only some few book-shelves of printed
ones go out to the world.
Victor submitted to the Prince the usual medical interrogatories, not
merely as physician-in-ordinary, but also as a man, for the sake of
loving him. Although people from the great world and the greatest have,
like the sub-man, the orang-outang, lived out and died out in
their twenty-fifth year,--for which reason, perhaps, in many
countries kings are placed under guardianship as early as their
fourteenth,--nevertheless January had not ante-dated his life so far,
and was really older than many a youth. The Prince won the good, warm
heart of Sebastian most by the unpretending simplicity which served
neither vanity nor pride, and whose ingenuousness differed from the
usual sort only in refinement. Victor had seen vassals stand in such a
manner beside the mouth[108] of their liege-lord; that the latter
looked like a shark carrying a man crosswise in his jaws; but January
resembled a Peter-fish, which holds forth in _its_ jaws a fine
_stater_.
The Court-Chaplain, when he arrived, in his astonishment at a crowned
guest, found it impossible to stir lip or foot; he remained immovable
in the broad water-spout of the priestly frock, which was thrown around
him like a sheet of royal paper round marchpane. The only thing in
which he indulged, and on which he ventured, was--not to put away the
Bible (the mouse-trap), but--to send his eyes secretly round the room,
to spy out whether _it_ had been properly stitched, folded, and
superscribed by the registresses of rooms.
The Prince proceeded at once on his journey with his Lordship, who had
to reserve his leave-taking of his son and his farewell sermons till
the solitary day they were to spend on the Isle of Union. The son
contracted a liking for the company of the Prince, when he thought over
his demeanor towards his father; he had a double joy, a filial and a
human, as that father transformed his own happiness into the happiness
of the poor country, and only for the sake of doing good made
foot-tracks for himself in the rock of the throne, as in Italy the
footsteps of angels who have appeared and left a blessing are shown
in the rocks. Other favorites resemble the executioner who hollows
out for himself foot-holes in the sand, so as to stand steadier when
he--beheads.
When the room was emptied, the first of Eymann's members to wake
up--he still stood in the sentry-box of the priest's frock--was the
index-finger, which stretched itself out, and pointed out to the
family-circle the bed. "It would have been more satisfactory and
serviceable to me," said he, "to have been strangled to death with that
rag, than to have had his _Serenissimus_ spy it out." He meant,
however, his own soiled cravat, which he himself had thrown upon the
nuptial bed,--that art-chamber and wareroom of his linen. Whenever one
contradicted any tormenting notion of his, he argued it so long that at
last he believed it himself; but if one admitted it, then he conjured
up certain scruples, and adopted a different opinion. "His Highness
must inevitably have seen the tattered thing through the bed-curtains,"
he replied. Finally he travelled over all the places where January had
stood, and took observations at the torn neck-tie, and investigated its
parallax. "We must adhere to the _blinding_ of the windows, if we want
to have any _peace_," he concluded, and--
So do I.
P. S. I shall always remark after an eighth chapter (because I get
ready exactly two Dog-post-days in a week), that I have again worked
for the space of a month. I therefore report that to-morrow June comes
on.
FIRST INTERCALARY DAY.
Must Treaties be kept, or is it enough that they are made?
The latter.--To-day the mining-superintendent exercises, for the first
time, on the reader's ground and soil the right (_servitus oneris
ferendi_, or I may say _servitus projiciendi_) which, according to the
contract of May 4, he actually possesses. The main question now is,
whether a dog-contract between two such great powers--inasmuch as the
reader has all the quarters of the world, and I, in turn, have the
reader--must, after being concluded, also be kept.
Frederick, the Antimachiavellist, answers us, and backs himself by
Machiavelli: Certainly every one of us must keep his word so long as
it--is for his advantage. So true is this, that such treaties would
never be broken, if they were not once--concluded; and the Swiss, who,
as late as 1715, swore one with France, might quite as well in all the
Cantons have lifted their fingers and taken an oath they would every
day regularly--make water.
But so soon as the advantage of contracts ceases, then is a regent
entitled to break them in two cases,--those which he makes with
other regents, and those he makes with his own step-children of the
country,--his subjects.
While I was already at work in the cabinet, (not later than six
o'clock, with the goose-wing, dusting the session-table, not with the
pen,) I had under the latter a clever fugitive paper, wherein I
proposed to show that the _ouverture_ of treaties (_au nom de la Sainte
Trinité_ or _in nomine Sanctissimæ et individuæ Trinitatis_) was the
cipher which ambassadors sometimes place over their reports, meaning
that the opposite is to be understood. Nothing, however, came of the
fugitive paper but a--manuscript. In this I was simple enough, and
proposed first to advise princes, that, in regard to lies of necessity
and truths of necessity, they must have, for every latitude and
hour, _declinations_ and _inclinations_. I proposed to whistle the
state-chanceries to myself into a corner, and whisper in their ears, I
would never suffer it, and, though I had only nine regiments in pay and
starvation, that my hands and feet should be glued together with the
sealing-wax of contracts, and my wings clogged with ink. That
would I for the first time introduce into state-praxis; but the
state-chanceries laughed at me, afar off in my foolish corner, and
said, The whistler may believe, himself,--we do the thing otherwise.
In the works of Herr _Herkommen_[109]--the best German publicist, who,
however, writes no _acta sanctorum_ it is proved that a reigning prince
need not observe at all any treaties, privileges, and concessions
granted by his predecessor to his subjects; hence it follows that he is
far less bound to keep his _own_ covenants with them, since the
enjoyment of the benefit of these covenants, which consists in nothing
but the keeping or breaking, manifestly vests in him as proprietor. Mr.
Herkommen says the same on every page, and absolutely swears to it.
Nay, can there be a dean or rector magnificus who exercises so little
reason--considering that, according to a general assumption, a king
never dies, and consequently predecessors and successors grow together
into one man--as not to draw from this the conclusion that the
successor may regard his own covenants as those of his predecessor, and
accordingly, since the two make only one man, may break them just as
much as if they were transmitted ones?
Whoso chose to discourse philosophically about this might prove that,
in fact, _no man whatever_ needs keep his word, not merely no prince.
According to physiology, the old body of a king (a reader, a
superintendent of mines) in _three_ years makes way for a new one. Hume
carries it still farther with the soul, inasmuch as he considers that
as a fleeting (not frozen) stream of phenomena. How much soever, then,
the king (reader, author) may, at the moment of making a promise, be
bound to keep it, still he cannot possibly be held thereto the next
minute after, when he has already become his own successor and heir; so
that, in fact, of us two contracting parties of the 4th of May, nothing
more is extant than our mere _posthumi_ and successors,--namely,
ourselves. As now, fortunately, promising and fulfilling never enter
into one and the same moment, herefrom may follow the conclusion,
pleasant to all of us, that, in fact, no one at all is bound to keep
his word, whether he is the top of a throne or only a chip thereof. Nor
will courtiers (the corner-clips of the throne) oppose this
proposition.
The public is requested to consider the Preface as the Second
Intercalary Day, for the sake of symmetry.
9. DOG-POST-DAY.
A Heavenly Morning; a Heavenly Afternoon.--A House
without Walls; a Bed without a House.
Ah, the poor miner, the delver in rock-salt pits, and the island-negro
have in their calendar no such day as is here described or repeated!
Sebastian stood on Thursday, as early as three o'clock, on the
flying-board of his bee-hive, in order in one day to land in _Great
Kussewitz_ and be off again before people were up. A reader who
has an atlas on the floor at his feet cannot possibly confound this
market-town, where the presentation of the Princess takes place, with a
namesake of a town, which the city of Rostock has annexed to its
immovable property. Unfortunately, the whole house loved him so that it
had already, for half an hour earlier, been out of the morning feathers
of which the greatest wings of dream are made. Amidst the din of
carriage-chains, dogs, and cockerels, he tore his tender heart away
from eyes that were all love, and, as the beating of the former and the
melting of the latter annoyed him, all grew still worse; for external
noise stills the inner tumult of the soul.
Out of doors all the grass-pastures and grain-fields were bathing
in the _shower-bath_ of the dew and in the cold _air-bath_ of the
morning-wind. He hardened in it, like hot iron; a morning-land full of
immeasurable hopes encircled him; he stripped his breast, threw himself
all aglow into the dripping grass, washed (but not with any higher
purpose than girls have) his firm face with liquid June-snow, and;
strung with tenser fibres, stepped back from the shower-bath to his
toilet,--only hair and breast he confined in no imprisonment.
He would certainly have started earlier, but he wanted to avoid the
moon, whom he could no more marry to the sun than he could their
respective children to each other,--namely, night-thoughts and
morning-thoughts. For when the morning-clouds envelop man in their dew,
when the loving birds dart noisily through the gleaming mist, when the
sun looms forth out of the hazy glow, then does man, quickened in
spirit, press his foot more deeply into the earth, and cling with new
ivy-twigs of life more firmly to his planet.
Slowly he waded through a low avenue of hazel-bushes, and reluctantly
swept off their chilled chafers; he held himself in, and stopped at
last, in order to make himself late, that he might not reach the
neighboring thicket just when the sun was entering his theatre. Already
he heard the musical _mêlée_ in the thicket; rosy clouds were spread
like flowers in the sun's pathway; the watch-tower of the parsonage and
village, that high altar whereon his first lovely evening had glowed,
kindled again; the singing world of the air hung exulting in the hues
of morning and the heavenly blue; sparks of clouds darted up from gold
bars along the horizon; at last the flames of the sun streamed in over
the earth....
Truly, were I every evening to depict sunrise, and every morning to see
it, still I should cry, like the children, Once more, once more!
With benumbed nerves of vision, and with flakes of color swimming
before him, he passed on slowly into the wood, as into a dark minster,
and his heart swelled even to devotion....
--I will not assume that my reader has such a prosaic feeling in regard
to morning as to deem this poetic one irreconcilable with Victor's
character; nay, I venture to presume that his knowledge of human nature
will find little trouble in discovering the _key-note_ between two such
distant tones in Victor as humor and sensibility. I will therefore
commit myself unconcernedly to the happy contemplations of his feeling
soul, and to my assurance of having all hearts in unison with mine.
The planet Venus and a grove show most beautifully in the morning and
the evening; on both, at these hours, more rays of the sun fall than at
any other. Hence our Victor felt, in the thicket, as if he went through
the gate of a new life, as on this fiery morning he sauntered onward
with the sun, which darted beside him from twig to twig, through the
murmuring wood, away along under symphonious branches, which were so
many music-barrels set in motion, over moss that lay in green sun-fire,
and under evergreen bathed in heavenly blue. And this morning renewed
in his heart the painful likeness of _four_ things,--life, a day, a
year, a journey, which resemble each other in their fresh, exultant
beginning, in the oppressive interlude, in the weary, sated close.--
Outside in the copse, in the background of the woodland, Nature
unrolled before him her altar-piece, miles long, with its chains of
hills, with its dazzling country-houses, which had decked themselves
with gardens as with festoons, and with the miniature-colors of the
flowerets which played on the silver line of beauty traced by the
brooks. And a cloud of enraptured, sporting, buzzing little creatures
of silk-dust swept or hovered over the undulating picture.--What way
should Victor take in the labyrinth of beauty?--All the sixty-four
radii of the compass stretched themselves out as so many fingerposts,
and he had sense enough not to propose to himself any particular hour
of arriving. He therefore slipped off everywhere, to the right and to
the left; he climbed over into every vale that hid itself behind a
hill; he visited the pierced shadow-projection of every row of trees;
he laid himself down at the feet of a more than commonly beautiful
flower, and refreshed himself with pure love by its spirit, without
breaking its body; he was the travelling-companion of the powdered
butterfly, and observed his burying himself in his flower, and the
hedge-sparrow he followed through the bushes to her brooding-cell and
nursery; he let himself be spell-bound in the circle which a bee drew
around him, and quietly suffered himself to be immured in the shaft of
his own nosegay; he exercised upon every village which the motley
landscape held up to him the right of way, and loved best to meet the
children, whose days played even like his hours--
But men he avoided....
And yet there leaped from his heart a high fountain of love, which
penetrated even to the remotest brother; and yet was he so entirely
free from egotism, from that _sensitive_ intolerance, which has its
degree and source in common with the _Moravian_.---The reason, however,
was this: the first day of a journey was wholly different from the
second, third, eightieth; for on the second, third, eightieth, he was
prosaic, humoristic, social,--i. e. his heart adhered everywhere like
hooked seed, and sent the roots of its happiness into every other
being's lot. But on the first day came veiled spirits from all hours
into his soul, who vanished if a third spoke,--a soft intoxication,
which the atmosphere of nature, like that of a wine-store, communicated
to him, spread itself, like an enchanted solitude, around his soul....
But why shall I depict the first day before I depict him?
In the first hours of the journey, he was to-day fresh, glad, happy,
but not blissful; he drank as yet, only he was not drunken. But when he
had thus for some hours wandered on, with drinking eye and absorbing
heart, through pearl-strings of bedewed web-work, through humming
vales, over singing hills, and when the violet-blue sky peacefully
joined itself to the smoking heights and to the dark woods, rising like
garden-walls behind each other,--when Nature opened all the pipes of
the stream of life, and when all her fountains leaped up, and,
flashing, played into each other, painted over by the sun,--then was
Victor, who went through these flying streams with a rising and thirsty
heart, lifted and softened by them; then did his heart swim, trembling
like the sun's image in the infinite ocean, as the salient point of the
wheel-animal[110] swims in the fluttering water-globule of the mountain
stream.--
Then did flower, meadow, and grove dissolve into a dim immensity, and
the color-grains of Nature melted away into a single broad flood, and
_over_ the glimmering flood stood the Infinite One as a sun, and _in_
it, as a reflected sun, the human heart.--
All was one; all hearts grew to one greatest heart; a single life
throbbed; the blooming pictures, the growing statues, the dusty clod of
earth, and the infinite blue vault became the beholding face of an
immeasurable soul.--
He might shut his eyes as much as he pleased, still there lingered in
his dark breast this blooming immensity.
Ah, if he could have plunged up into the clouds, so as to sweep thereon
through the undulating heavens over the boundless earth!--ah, if he
could have floated with the flower-fragrance over the flowers,--could
have streamed with the wind over the summits, through the woods!--O now
would he rather have fallen on the heart of a great man, and sunk,
enraptured and weeping, into his bosom, to stammer out, "How happy is
man!"
He must needs weep, without knowing why; he sang words without sense,
but their tone went to his heart--he ran, he stopped--he dipped his
glowing face into the cloud of blossoming bushes, and would fain lose
himself in the humming world between the leaves; he pressed the
scratched face into the deep, cooling grass, and hung delirious on the
breast of the immortal mother of Spring.
Whoever saw him from a distance took him for a madman; perhaps many a
one does so still, who has never himself experienced how, through the
cleared-up, blissful breast, as through the serenest sky, storm-winds
may sweep, which in both dissolve in rain.
In this hour of his regeneration-day, his genius gave his heart the
fiery baptism of a love, which clasped all men and all creatures into
its flames. There are certain precious minutes of rapture--ah, why not
years?--when an inexpressible love towards all human creatures flows
through thy whole life, and opens thy arms softly to every brother. The
least that Victor could do, whose heart was on the sunny side of love,
was, if any one met him near a mountain, to turn out for him toward the
steep side,--not to pass by any one who was fishing, for fear of
throwing a frightening shadow on the water,--to wander slowly through a
flock of sheep, and, if a child was shy of him, to make a long circuit
aside. Nothing could surpass the soft voice with which he wished every
pilgrim more than _this_ good morning; nothing the look of anticipating
emotion with which in every village he sought to spy out any poor body
whose calluses and scars and gashes required a sponge or pain-killing
drops. "Ah, I know as well as an amanuensis[111] to a Professor of
Morals," he said to himself, "that it is no virtue, but only a luxury,
to take away the crown of thorns from a lacerated brow, the prickly
girdle from sore nerves; but this innocent pleasure will still be
begrudged me, and when on so many roads mangled men are lying, why on
mine does no one stretch out his hand that I might place in it some
compensation for this undeserved heaven in my breast?"
He would fain carry his joy to another's heart to be tasted, as the bee
delivers its mouthful of honey to the lips of another bee. At length
two children came puffing along, one of whom was tackled as pulling
beast of burden to a wheelbarrow, and the other harnessed on in front
as pushing driver. The barrow was freighted with six porous bags full
of pine-cones which the poor span were hauling to feed a consumptive
fire. The two frequently exchanged places, so as to hold out; and the
driver always wanted presently to be the horse again. "My good
children! can't your father push, then?"--"The tree has broken
both his legs short off."--"Then certainly your big brother could go to
the wood?"--"He has to plough over yonder."--Victor stood on the
fallow-field beside a waistcoat with full as many colors as holes, and
near a dirty bread-sack, both which belonged to the brother, who at a
distance was ploughing on the stage of this scene with half a post-team
of lean cows. The emptying of a full hand into the lap of misery
lightened Victor's heavy soul, as did the outgushing, which followed,
of the full eye; his conscience, not his selfishness, was his objector
to the _greatness_ of his gift--he gave it, however, but in coins of
small denominations--the children left their merchandise, and while one
of them ran across the field to the plough, the other ran down to the
village to his mother. The ploughman in the distance pulled off his
hat--would fain have uttered loud thanks, but could only blow his
nose--went on ploughing without his hat; but when at length he called
out his thanks after the youth, the latter had already escaped far
beyond earshot....
Do not, dear reader, wish this or the succeeding interlude of human
sorrow left out of the great scenes of happy nature; and may thy heart,
like Victor, by giving deserve to receive!
In his good-hearted haste he soon overtook a journeyman blacksmith sick
with fever, whose travelling-trunk or portmanteau was a filled
handkerchief; he also carried on a stick a wretched, faded pair of
boots, which he had to spare, because the other which he dragged along
on other sticks, namely, on his legs, was still wretcheder and less
without color than without soles. When he had tenderly greeted the
feverish man and made him a present, he looked into his pale, livid
face, and he could not deny him some smart-money.... Ah, the whole
smart-money for this life is not paid out till we reach a higher! When
he had civilly questioned him and informed himself about his hungry
journeyings, about his correction-house fare, about his flights from
one country to another, and about his thin viaticum which the mistress
denied him when the master was out,--then was he ashamed, before the
All-gracious One, of his flower-field of rapture, which he no more
deserved "than that poor devil there," and he made him an additional
present; and when he again waited for him to speak, and learned that he
was fifty years old without any prospects, and when the distress
overmastered him which he always felt at the sight of _old_ but
_undeveloped_ men, gray apprentices, old clerks, old dispensers, old
amanuenses, then was he somewhat excusable for running back again and
silently giving the astonished old man the new signs of his
overflowing, benignant soul; and when, at this renewed parting, he felt
his heart, which was dissolved into love, and only floated, as it were,
round his soul, thirst more and more for doing good, and felt an
incomprehensible inclination for fresh giving, and a longing to pour
out upon somebody to-day everything, everything, then for the first
time did he perceive that he was now too tender and too happy and too
giddy and too weak.
So soon as the people in the village had in hand the certain
intelligence of this transit-toll of generosity, in the afternoon about
fifteen children stationed themselves on different posts along the way,
manned the narrow passes, and distributed sentries and _enfans perdus_
to prevent evasion of the revenue-laws....
A man who, like Victor, construed three straight leagues into seven
crooked ones, is often hungry, but certainly more so than he;--he took
merely a Leibnitz's monad-meal out of his pocket, biscuit and wine, and
appeased therewith the stomach which hung and drew upon his spirit, in
order not to darken and foul, by throwing in any pieces of flesh, the
clear lake of his inner being, with its reflected arch of heavenly blue
and heavenly red. In fact, he hated gormandizers as men of too gross
selfishness, as well as all living larders, where layers of fat crush
in the spirit, as masses of snow do a house. The soul, he said, takes
an odor from the contents of the body, just as wine does from the fruit
which is near it in the cellar, and in the mephitic vapor in which the
souls of the Flachsenfingenites bob up and down over the brew-kettles
which seethe their potatoes and beer, the poor birds must surely fall
down tipsy and stifled into this dead sea.
He broke his biscuit not in any house, but in the skeleton, i. e.
framework of a house, which had just come from the hands and axes of
the carpenters into the sight of the village. As he looked through all
the divisions and subdivisions of this architectural skeleton, and saw
at once through sitting-room, kitchen, stable, and loft, he thought to
himself: "Another play-house for a poor, little human troupe, who are
here to play out their benefit comedy, their Gay's Beggars'-opera, with
no voice to cry from the stage-box, _Encore!_ Ah! before these beams
have blackened to ebony by the winter smoke, many an eye-socket will
have grown red with grief; many a northwester of life will blow through
the window upon trembling hearts, and into these nooks, which are yet
to be darkly walled up, will many a back, sore with bruises from the
warfare of common life, creep away to wipe off sweat or blood. But joy
(he went on soliloquizing as he looked at the place for stove and
table) will also set a gilliflower-tree or two before the window for
your inmates, and drive up before your house-door, which is yet to be
hung, and unload its freight of the three holy feasts, and the church
fair, and the child's baptism.--Heavens! how foolish that I should
prefer thinking all this in the mere ribs of a house to seeing it
yonder in the walled-up houses of the village!"
During this table-talk and house-warming-oration, whereat, however, no
drinking-glass was shivered, the white breast of a swallow swooped low
across the road, and her bill took up a load of slacked lime for her
little garret. The wasp shaved off from the joist-work paper-shavings
for the layers of her bulbous sphere. The spider had already knit her
spider's house into the larger one. All creatures played the carpenter
and mason in building up for themselves their little islands in the
infinite sea; but grovelling man looks not over his shoulder, and sees
not that all is like him.
Sebastian quitted his wooden inn, his skeleton of a Frankfort Red
House, more intoxicated with happiness than he could have gone from a
fully-built one. In certain men a dark melancholy diffuses itself,--a
shadow of the soul all the greater when the shadows around them are the
smallest: I mean about one o'clock of a summer afternoon. When in the
afternoon the lawns lie more intensely perfumed, and the woods with
drooping leaves stand, more softly sighing and sleeping beneath the
brooding sun, and the birds sit on the trees as dumb figurants or
supernumeraries,--then in the Eden that lay sweltering under the cloud
of blossoms an oppressive yearning seized upon his heart,--then was he
wafted by his fancies under the eternally blue sky of the East, and
under the wine-palms of Hindustan,--then did he rest himself in those
still lands, where, without stinging necessities or scorching passions,
he sank dissolved into the dreamy tranquillity of the Brahmin, and
where the soul in its elevation holds itself steady and no longer
trembles with the trembling earth, like the fixed stars whose gleam
trembles not, seen on mountains,--then was he too happy for a German
colonist, too poetic for a European, too luxurious for a neighbor of
the North Pole.... Every summer morning he feared that in the summer
afternoon he should fantasy too effeminately.
Fasting, wine, heaven, and earth had to-day so lavishly filled the
chambers of his heart with the sleep-potion of rapture, that they must
needs, when anything more was poured in, overflow through the eyes.
These now gushed forth; and behind his dimmed eyes, in the overshadowed
inner chamber, lined with the green of nature, and darkened, as it
were, with curtains of evening redness, a colored night came on,
wherein all the little shapes of his childhood rose cloudily before
him,--the earliest playthings of life were laid out,--his first May
months played like little angels on an evening cloud, and they could
not in their wing-clothes fly round the great cloud, and the sun did
not scorch them.
Ah! what he had long forgotten,--long lost,--long loved,--songs without
sense and tones without words, nameless plays,--buried nurses,--dead
servants,--all these came to life again; but before all, and greatest
of all, moved the form of his first, his dearest teacher, Dahore, in
England, who said to his melted soul, "We were once side by side."--O
this eternally loved spirit, who even then saw in our Victor the wings
that lift themselves toward the next world,--who even then was more the
friend than the master of his so tender, tempestuous, loving, aspiring
heart,--this never-to-be-forgotten spirit would not leave him; his form
pushed aside the shroud, began to shine and to say, "Horion, my Horion,
did I not hold thee by the hand, wast thou not in my heart? But it is
long since we loved each other, and my voice is no longer recognizable
to thee, scarcely my face; ah, the seasons of life roll not back, but
onward, downward, forever." He leaned against a tree and kept drying
his eye, which could no longer find the road, and his sight was fixed
calmly on the woods which stretch toward St. Luna, and on the hazy
hills that separate him from Maienthal and from his second teacher....
Kussewitz burst upon him. But too soon; his soul in its emotion was not
ready to go among strangers. He was glad to come upon an overturned
trough, out of which sheep were licking salt, and a hedge-pen, which
folded them at night, and the hut on two wheels wherein their keeper
slept. He had a peculiar curiosity and predilection for little copies
of houses; he always walked into or up to every collier's hut, every
hunter's and fowler's house, for the sake of saddening and comforting
himself with his own confinement, and with the parodies of our little
life and with the ground-floor of poverty. He never went blindly by
anything small, over which the world's man and business man stalk so
scornfully; just as, on the other hand, he never stopped before any
pomp of citizenly life. He opened, therefore, a little door to the
travelling bed of the shepherd: it looked so poverty-stricken in
there, and the straw, which took the place of eider-down and silk
pillow-cases, was so lowly and rumpled, that he felt an indescribable
longing to enter; he needed now a diving-bell that should separate him
from the rushing, crushing, sublime sea around him. I wish one could
conceal the fact from the European cabinets, the Imperial Diet, and the
Chief Commissary, that he actually laid himself down therein. But now
the excitement of his senses, into which the door of his bedchamber
admitted only a small section of the blue sky, soon passed over into
the exhaustion of slumber, and over the hot eye the lid closed.
10. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.
Since the last Post-day our hero has been sleeping. The German
_Reviewers_ should do me the favor to start him up.
But they are knaves, these headsmen and partners of the censors; they
wake up neither readers nor princes, but only Homeric sleepers. The sun
already hangs low, and peers horizontally into his Dr. Graham's-bed,
and he still lies there glowing in the face of it....
The sheep had to do it with their bleating and bells. When the
belfry-bell of Great Kussewitz, with the accompaniment of sheep-bells,
wafted into his opening ears an evening prayer set to music,--when into
his opening eyes the red outline of the departed sun which had
illuminated his to-day's paradises entered, and the evening glow, whose
gold leaves the evening wind breathed upon the clouds,--when the air,
bedewed like his nosegay, refreshed his bosom,--then was to-day's
sultry afternoon rolled back a whole week; Victor had dropped upon a
new island of the blest; new-born and rejoicing, he crept back out of
his piece of travelling property. "O mad me!" he said; "but I do not
rejoice extraordinarily in the fact that half an ounce of grains of
sleep can eat away clean out of man a whole glowing world, and that the
turning over of the body is the sinking of his paradise and his hell."
On the high road two sedan-bearers went jogging off at a short gallop
between the supporting poles of their leather die.[112] He made after
them,--their load, he thought, must be far lighter to them than a whole
country and its sceptre, both which, however, a regent knows how to
balance, as a juggler does a sword, dancing, on the nose, on the teeth,
everywhere. They bore, however, the heaviest thing in the world,
beneath which cities, thrones, and continents have often broken down.
"What are you moving round with at such a rate?" he asked. "With our
most gracious Lord!" It was January,--it is, however, quite in
accordance with the æsthetic and artistic tricks wherewith an author so
extraordinarily excites the expectation of his readers, that I do not
divulge what it was of January that sat in the bounding litter, until I
utter the next word.
It was his image. The bust always travelled ahead before the bride, in
order to arrive in season at her bedchamber, and hang itself up by a
nail to the wall. On the whole _sentimental journey_ the _cubic
contents_ of the bride had slept only in chambers, on which the
_superficial area_ of the bridegroom hung down like a garden-spider all
night long....
As I do not mean in any manner to cut myself of, by the barrier-treaty
which I have concluded with my cousin the reader, from the right of
making, beside the Intercalary Days, extra-leaves, extra-leaflets, and
pseudo-extra-leaves, inasmuch as I have, the rather, by certain secret
and separate articles, which I have made merely in my own head, as the
Pope does certain cardinals, reserved to myself the privilege, I will
now exercise the right which my self-made By-Recess offers me on the
spot.
EXTRA LEAFLET UPON THE ABOVE BUST-PIECES.
"I maintain," said I, in the billiard-room at Scheerau, at a moment
when I was not striking, "that dukes, margraves, and other graves, and
many of high nobility, would be stupid, if in our day,--or, in fact,
in future days,--when the crown grows bald before the chin gets a
beard,--when many a face wants no requisite for spectacles except the
bridge,--when particularly the man of rank is glad to be, instead of a
_cast_, at least an _outline_, of a man,--they would not be wise, I
recapitulate, if they celebrated no better marriage than a true
one,--that is, no pictured--one; if their busts were stamped on
nothing better--that is, on no breast--than on the pewter covers of
beer-pitchers, so that they could _intoxicate_ people in no other way
than this latter; and if they, who uniformly act by plenipotentiaries,
on imperial benches, in session-chairs, in bridal beds (marrying by
ambassadors), should conceive that in the last-mentioned case there
were any truer and more innocent chief commissary than their own
picture on an ell of canvas." ... As we just then played in mass, and I
happened to be king, and in my fiery state went on to say, "What the
Devil! we kings understand how to substitute skilfully enough, for the
_plastic_ arts in virtue and in marriage, the _delineative_ arts; and
_not merely_ in billiards does a king stand quite idle with his
sceptre-cue!"--then the fire of my speech might well seem far from
strange.
_End of the Extra Leaflet on the above Bust-pieces_.
At the house of the Count of O---- (so was called also a famous officer
in the Seven Years' War, and by Shakespeare the world, and the whole
territory of an old lady; and, according to Bruce, with the Hebrews
this vowel was a particular favorite; but this is, after all,
unprofitable learning here) the Princess and the painted bridegroom
alighted. Victor would not, with his to-day's dress and his to-day's
heart, mingle in the tumult of the world; and yet he would gladly have
seen all.
As he approached Kussewitz, a little red and white house peered forth
to meet him,--red as a squirrel-cage, and smiling as a summer-house. He
stepped up to it and to its gleaming windows, but immediately stepped
back again; he would not hinder an old human couple, for whom the bell
had been the organ, from finishing their prayer. When he entered, with
his face exalted by the reflection of to-day's transfiguration, an old
man turned a silver head, which stood like a mild moon over the evening
of his life, and a face of smiling wrinkles, toward the guest. Only a
hypocrite--that stockjobber of virtue--is not, after praying, more
gentle and complacent. The old woman was the first to lay aside the
look of devotion. Victor, with his victorious simplicity, asked a
night's lodging. To grant it to him was what only such contented people
as these could do; to request it was what none could do, except one
who, like him, shunned landlords, because their cold, selfish sympathy
and love, coming and going with every guest, was too repulsive to his
warm soul. Secondly, he was attracted by the cleanliness which even the
slut loves in _strangers'_ houses, and which, in them, is a proof of
contentment and of--childlessness. Thirdly, he wanted to remain to-day
incognito, and out of the thronged streets, with his soul so
consecrated by Nature.
He soon felt himself at home; even before the supper was washed and
picked and ready, he found out, or, rather, took it in, that the gentle
old man, named _Lind_, was a bee-keeper. The latter I believe; for
otherwise he would not have been so mild, as, in fact, in most cases,
animal society is less corrupting than human. Hence Plato assigns the
Lange's colloquies of man with the animals as the best thing left of
Saturn's golden reign. It is not all one whether one is a dog-keeper, a
lion-keeper, or a bee-keeper; for our menagerie in the lower viscera,
according to the Platonic allegory, barks and bleats in unison with the
external one.--When Victor actually went with the old man round the
house and among the bee-hives, then he came back into the supper-room
with the face of a man who claimed already a seat in the Kussewitz
Church and a page in the church-book. Did he not already know that the
bee-father had followed three parsons and five squires in Kussewitz to
the grave; that he had celebrated his first marriage with his "mother"
(so he called his wife) at the age in which the silver wedding usually
falls; that his head had still memory and hair; that he expected to
carry black eyebrows under the coffin-lid; that he, Lind, had not the
least need, like old _Gobel_ and even the beadle _Stenz_, for the
sake of his eyes, to take his place near the church-window, but
could read his verse anywhere; and that he once every year went to
Maienthal to church, and thrust a sovereign[113] into the church
billiard-pocket,[114] because the churchyard there covered all his
relations on the father's side?
O, this contentment with the evening-clouds of life refreshes the
hypochondriacal hearer and spectator, whose melancholy strings in an
old man's presence begin so easily to tremble like a death-watch; and
an ardent old man seems to us an immortal being, hardened against the
scythe of death, and a finger-post pointing to the next world! Victor
especially saw, with heavy thoughts, in an old man, an organized past,
a bent incarnation of years, the plaster cast of his own mummy standing
before him. Every childish, forgetful, petrified old man reminded him
of the masters of forges, who in their old age, like the human soul,
have to undergo a crab-like promotion, and on account of their usual
loss of sight become casters again,--then head smiths,--then foundery
apprentices. The good Newton,[115] Linnæus, Swift, went back to be
foundery-apprentices of learning. But so singularly timid is man, that,
while he regards his soul, in its greatest _advantageous_ dependence
upon his organs, still as a _vowel_,--and justly,--nevertheless, in the
case of an _injurious_ dependence upon the same, fears it may be merely
a _consonant_ of the body,--and _that_ unjustly.
As a walk about a strange place gives a traveller the best
naturalization act, and as Victor was incapable of being anywhere a
stranger, he went--out a little way. There are many nights when it is
not night. He saw outside, not far from the garden-fence of the senior
(not the seignior of nobility, but the senior parson), a very beautiful
girl sitting, buried in a Latin Whitsuntide programme, and praying from
it with folded hands. A case of beauty and craziness united he never
could resist; he greeted her, and would not let her roll up and put up
her Latin prayer-book. The good soul, having lost her prayer-book and
paternoster, had easily despatched her devotions out of the Whitsuntide
programme _De Chalifis literarum studiosis_, as she neither understood
Latin nor how to read, and looked upon the folding of the hands as a
Masonic finger-speech, which would be readily understood in the _higher
places_. She unrolled from a paper a sixth finger which had been cut
off, and said the cloister of Mary in Flachsenfingen, on whose mother
of God her father had wished to hang it as a thank-offering, would not
accept it, because it was not made of silver. As Buffon ascribes to
man's fingers the clearness of his ideas, so that the thoughts may be
dissected at the same time with the hand, it follows that one who has a
_sext_[116] of fingers, must think 1/6 or 1/11 the more clearly; and
such a one, with such a supernumerary writing-finger, could do more in
the sciences than we with the whole hand.
She related that her father would not marry her till after two years,
and that his son could get her sister, if she were not only just
six years old,--and they two had been adopted as children by the
six-finger,--and that he had his bijouterie shop wherewith he wandered
from one ducal palace to another; just now in that of the Count of
O----, together with board and lodging, and that he was an Italian,
named _Tostato_. Heavens! Victor knew him full well. Without further
question--for he loved besides to go a Sabbath-day's journey or two
with any girl or any Pomeranian dog, and used to say he never would
make the least distinction between a new face and a pretty one, even if
he were obliged to--he marched off with her straight toward the Count's
to see her father. He peeled off more and more of the hull of his
little maid of honor: she was not only uncommonly beautiful, but
equally--stupid.
But now she ran away from him; the Flachsenfingen Court came travelling
along, and she must needs see the ladies alight. He kept close to the
tail of the whole corps, which was still trailing along the street,
while half the rump was already in the palace. The draggling tail was
somewhat short and thin, consisting of the Court-apothecary Zeusel, who
from vanity was on hand with his fifty-four years and his youthful
clothes and his bumping coach to take part in the affair. The smallest
man in the world, in the biggest carriage in the world, could so little
be looked upon as an _entity_, that I count his coach as an empty
ceremonial coach, in which the coachman shook him about like a dry
kernel in a walnut.
I will describe more copiously how the coachman winnowed and bolted
him, and will make it up by being shorter in matters of less
consequence.
Of course, if I should lay such an imputation upon the coachman as to
say that he knew how by speed and stones to give the coach-body that
hard pulsation, which made Zeusel sit more on the air than on the
coach-cushion,--then would Kästner in Göttingen reply to me, and prove
that the apothecary himself, by the counteraction which he produced
upon the cushion by his posteriors, was to blame for the repulsion of
the homologous pole; but we have, I trust, less to do here with the
truth than with the apothecary. Victor, as Court-doctor, took a
_distant_ interest in the apothecary; nay, he would gladly have begged
the favor of being allowed to get in and sit by his side, that he might
see more distinctly how the skilful Vetturino sent the ball, Zeusel,
into the air. But to the weak nerves of Victor comic scenes, by the
physical suffering which they in reality brought with them, were too
hard and sharp,--and he contented himself with following behind the
bouncing box, and merely conceiving how the thing inside rose like a
barometer to indicate the pleasant weather of the drunken coachman,--he
merely pictured it out to himself (therefore I need not) how the good
little courtier at a climax, to which the fellow brought him (who ended
every lift with a higher one), would thrust his left hand, not into his
waistcoat pocket, but merely into the coach-strap, while in his right
he would be obliged to warm and squeeze for an hour a pinch of snuff,
which for want of a quiet moment he could not raise to his empty nose
till the rascal of a coachman cried, Brrr!
Come along! said the stupid girl to Victor, and drew him to her
father's. The Italian made his windmill gesture, and placed himself
against Victor's ear and whispered into it, _Dio vi salvi!_[117] and
the latter thanked him in a still lower voice in Italian, _Gran
mercè!_[118] Thereupon Tostato breathed three or four uncommonly
soft-voiced curses into Victor's ear-cell. He had not lost his wits,
but only his voice, and that only by a cold. He cursed and condoled
about it, that to-morrow, of all days, he should have to be dumb as a
haddock, precisely when so much was to be cut. Victor congratulated
him sincerely on that very account, and begged him to accept him till
to-morrow, not only as Doctor, but also as partner and spokesman; he
would talk for him in the shop to-morrow, in order the better and
incognito to see all that went on. "If you will tell me to-day,"
replied Tostato, "one more funny story." And now when he actually
produced the adventure of Zeusel with an Italian systole and diastole
of the hands, and when Tostato grew foolish with laughing at the
joke,--(the Italian and Frenchman laugh with the whole body, the
Englishman only in the brain,)--then was it no wonder that he took him
into partnership at once. His doctorship he began by pulling off the
patient's stocking and binding it round the untuned throat, for a warm
stocking is worn with equal medicinal benefit on foot and neck; with a
garter it would be different.
Now the beauty and stupidity of the programme-pray-er appeared greater
than ever in his eyes; he would gladly have kissed her, but it was
impracticable: the Bijoutier followed him about everywhere, eager for
his witty overflowings, and held both ears under to catch the drops.
He took this occasion, as he thought of the German indifference
to wit and the fine arts, to lay down the fundamentally false
proposition,--The Englishman, the Frenchman, and the Italian are _men_;
the Germans are _citizens_. The latter _earn_ life; the former _enjoy_
it. And the Dutch are a cheaper edition of the Germans on mere printing
paper and without engravings.
He was on the point of going back to bee-keeper Lind's: when at this
late hour of the night--so late that the Court-courier had set down the
appearance of this comet a whole hour too soon in his astronomical
tables--the Princess with her attendant atmosphere arrived. As he had
talked of her so long, he needed nothing more to make him love her,
than to hear the rolling of her chariot and the silk-rustle of her
walk. "A princely bride," he said, "can be much better endured than
another; show me any other difference between a Crown-princess, a
crowned bride, and a crowned wife, than that which the state-almanac
assigns." Whoever shall further consider, that he knew her personal
disinclination towards the Prince, who at his first marriage had
postponed her for her sister,--and whoever reads now what I here
mention that Tostato told him she had a handkerchief in her hand on
alighting from her carriage,--such a one will already be wise enough
not to be angry at his saying: "I would that these crown-beasts, who
are suffered to snap off the fair white hands of such a beautiful
child, as swine eat off the tender ones of children--I would... but my
wares, of course, will be near enough to her to-morrow to admit my
seeing the handkerchief, Mr. Partner."
At the Bee-father's, to whom he went home again, there was a more
tranquil world, and his house stood in the green, silent as a cloister
of sleep around a holy place of dreams. Victor pushed his little bed on
the attic floor towards an opening through which the moon streamed in,
and thus, overhung with hushed swallows' and wasps' nests, he saw peace
in the form of Luna float down to his own nest; but she smiled upon him
so potently that at length he sank away dissolved into guileless
dreams. Good man! thou deservest the bright flower-pieces of dreams,
and a fresh nosegay of head and breast on waking; thou hast never yet
tormented any man, never yet supplanted any one, overcome no female
honor, nor ever bartered away thy own; and thou art merely a little too
volatile, too effeminate, too gay, too human.
11. DOG-POST-DAY.
Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre
à Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
Voltaire, who never could write a good comedy, would not have been
competent to create this Eleventh Dog-post-day.
In regard to the Eleventh Dog-post-day I remark, to be sure, that
Nature has created plants with all variety of numbers of stamens, only
none with eleven, and seldom also men with eleven fingers.
Meanwhile life, like shell-fish, tastes best in the months without R.
In reply to this, some say that the pen of an author goes, like a
watch, the faster, the longer it has been going; but I reverse it, and
say rather, men who write much make fast writers.
And yet people cannot well bear men who are the fifth wheel of a coach;
but every baggage-wagon has a fifth wheel strapped on behind it, and in
case of accident this is a true _wheel of fortune_. Reinhold read
Kant's Critique through _five times_ before he understood it. I pledge
myself to be more intelligible to him, and require to be read only half
as often.
To speak out freely, I cherish some contempt for a head full of elastic
ideas, which jump with their spring-feet from one cerebral chamber to
another; for I find no difference between them and the elastic worms in
the intestines, which Götze saw, before a light, leap to the height of
three inches.
Of course the following thought does not rightly hang together with the
foregoing chain of conclusions and flowers; namely, that I am afraid of
finding imitators, and so much the more as I am, here, myself, one of a
certain class of witty authors. In Germany no great author can light a
new torch, and hold it out into the world till he is tired and throws
away the fag-end of it, without the little ones immediately pouncing
upon it, and running round and shining round for half-years longer with
the little end of a light. Thus have I (and others) in Ratisbon been
run after a thousand times by the boys, who held in their hands
remnants of wax-torches which the ambassadorial retinue had thrown
away, and offered to light me to my landlord's for a few kreutzers ...
_Stultis sat!_[119]
In the morning Victor hastened to the palace. He got a tradesman's
dress and the shop. At ten o'clock came on the "transfer" of the
Princess. The three apartments in which it was to take place stood,
with their folding doors, opposite to his shop. He had never yet seen
the Princess--except all night in his dreams, and he can hardly wait
for it all....
Nor the reader either: does he not even now snuff his candle and his
nose,--fill up pipe and glass,--change his position, if he rides
upon a so-called _reading-ass_,[120]--press the book smoothly open, and
say with uncommon delight, "I am somewhat sharp-set for that
description!"--I verily, am not at all; I feel as if I were to be shot
with arquebuses. Positively! an infantry-soldier who in midwinter
storms a hostile wall of the thickest paper, in the opera, has his
heaven on earth, compared with a mining-superintendent of my stamp.
For one who drinks coffee and sets out to make a description of any
school-act of the Court,--e. g. of a Court-day, of a marriage, (in
fact, of the preliminaries thereof,) of a Transfer,--such a drinker
pledges himself to reproduce scenes, whose dignity is so extremely fine
and fugitive that the smallest false by-stroke and half-shadow makes
them perfectly ridiculous,--hence even spectators, on account of such
accidental touches, laugh at them _in naturâ_;[121]--he pledges
himself, I say, so to reproduce such scenes, bordering on the comic,
that the reader shall remark the dignity, and be as little able to
laugh at them as if he himself were one of the performers. It is true I
may presume to count upon myself somewhat, or rather upon the fact,
that I myself have been at Courts and acted the part of master of the
Harpsichord (whether this was a mask of higher honors or not, I leave
here undecided); from a privilege, then, which has fallen to me alone
of almost the whole scribbling Hansa, and to which I actually and
gladly own my indebtedness for that preponderance which has (by some)
been detected in me over the so inferior crew of authors in the
_Scientiâ media_[122] of courts,--therefrom, I say, one should promise
one's self almost extraordinary things. I fear, however, we shall come
off slimly; for I was not even able to rehearse to my pupil Gustav the
crown-suit in Frankfort seriously enough to make him leave off
laughing. So, too, Yorick never could scold in such a way as to drive
his people off, but they always took it as a joke.
It would have been my misfortune if I had depicted the transfer of the
Princess (I thought at first, to be sure, there would then be more
dignity in it) under the figure of the transfer of a house to creditors
sealed with a chip of the door, or as a transfer of a fief by
_investitura per zonam_, or _per annulum_, or _per baculum
secularem_.[123] But I have luckily hit upon the thought of portraying
the transfer, under the poetic garb of a historical benefit-comedy,
with that dignity which theatres give. I have, for that purpose,
as much and more unity of place--(three chambers)--of time--(a
forenoon)--and of interest--(the whole joke)--in my hands, as I need.
And if an author reads through beforehand, into the bargain, as I do,
the saddest serious works, Young's Night Thoughts, the uncatholic
_gravamina_ of the Lutherans, the third volume of Siegwart, and his own
love-letters; if, further, he has never yet trusted himself, without
first laying before him and running through Home's and Beattie's
excellent observations on the source of the comic, in order to know at
once what comic sources he was to avoid;--such an author can safely,
without fear of vainglory, make and fulfil the promise to his readers,
that, thus comically guarding himself against the comic, he may perhaps
be able, not wholly without touches of sublimity, to deliver and depict
the following
HISTORICAL BENEFIT-COMEDY OF THE TRANSFER OF THE PRINCESS.
IN FIVE ACTS.
The half-word Benefit signifies merely the profit which I myself gain
from it.
Act First.--Of three chambers, the middle one is the scene of the play,
the trading-mart where they exhibit, the hall of _correlation_
(Ratisbonically speaking) where all matters of importance are referred
and matured. On the other hand, in the first adjoining chamber is
stowed the Italian, and in the second the Flachsenfingen court, each
calmly awaiting the beginning of a part for which Nature has formed it.
These two apartments I regard only as the sacristies of the central
one.
The middle chamber, i. e. its curtain, which consists of two
folding-doors, at last rises and shows to partner Sebastian, who is
peeping out from his shop beside the catarrhal half of the firm, a
great deal. There appears at the door of coulisse No. 1 a red-velvet
chair; again, at the door of coulisse No. 2, another, a brother and
relative of the first; these duplicates are the seats whereon the
Princess sits in the course of the action, not because weariness, but
because her rank, expressly desires it. One discovers now (caught in
the Act it may be said to be) a long fringed table, dividing the middle
chamber (which is itself a hyphen to the two coulisses) into two
halves. One would not expect that this session-table, in its turn,
would be again halved by something which a stupid person hardly sees.
But let a man step into Victor's shop; then will he have a view of a
strip of silk-cord, which, beginning under the pier-table, streaming
across the agate floor and under the partition-table, ends in front
on the threshold; and thus a mere silk-band easily divides the
dividing-table and thereby the dividing-chamber, and finally
the divided company of performers, into two of the most equal
halves,--whence let us learn that at court everything is cut up, and
even the prorector, in his time and turn, is stretched out on the
dissecting-table. Of this silk-lace, wherewith the grand seignior
divides his favorites from above downwards, but into fractions, we
cannot and must not say any more in the First Act, because--it is
over....
I found it uncommonly easy to draw up this scene in a serious manner;
for as, according to Plattner, the ridiculous attaches only to man, the
sublime, which in my performance assumes the place of the comic, was
easy to be had in an act where nothing living played, not even cattle.
Act Second.--The stage grows now more alive, and upon it enters now the
Princess, handed in by the Italian Minister from coulisse No. 1; both
act at first, like nature, silently on this parade-ground, which on
paper is already two pages long....
Just one look from the stage into the stage-box! Victor is playing also
on his own account, in the fact that he picks out from the lorgnettes
which he has to sell the most concave, and gets therewith a view
of the heroine of my benefit-comedy.... He saw the confession- and
praying-stool on which she had to-day already knelt. "I wish," he said
to Tostato, "I had been her father confessor to-day; I would have
pardoned her her sins, but not her virtues." She had, in fact, that
regular statuesque and Madonna's-face, which covers quite as often
hollow as well-filled female heads; her courtly _début_ concealed, it
is true, every wave and every gleam of wit and expression under the icy
crust of decorum; but a soft, childlike eye, which makes us eager for
her voice, a patience, which remembers rather her sex than her rank, a
weary soul which yearned for a twofold repose, perhaps for her maternal
fields, even an unnoticeable line around the eyes, drawn by pain in
those organs, or perhaps by still deeper ones,--all these charms, which
grew into sparks, cast into the dry tinder of the partner behind the
eye-glass, made him in his box regularly half-crazy at the fate of such
charms. And how could it do otherwise than make one's head hot,
especially when the heart is already so, to think that these innocent
victims, like the Moravian women, must see alps and oceans rise between
their cradle and bridal-bed, and that cabinets export them like
silkworm-seed in the cornucopia of despatches?... We turn again to our
Second Act, wherein one proposes nothing more than to--arrive.
Coulisses Nos. 1 and 2 are still choke-full of actors and actresses,
who must now come out. This is the day on which two courts, like two
armies, are halted over against each other in two rooms, composedly
preparing themselves for the minute when they are to march out and
stand face to face, until at last it actually comes to that point, to
which after such preparations and in such nearness to each other it
very naturally must come, that of going away. The cubic contents of No.
1 stream after the Princess, consisting of Italians;--at the same
moment, also, the court-retinue from coulisse No. 2 takes up its line
of march towards head-quarters; it consists of Flachsenfingenites. At
this moment two countries--properly only their abstracted and
evaporated spirits--stand quite near each other, and now all depends
upon the silken strings beginning to operate which I stretched
across the room in the first Act; for the boundary shiftings and
population-mixings of two so contiguous lands as Germany and
Italy would be in one room almost as inevitable as in a _Papal
brain-chamber_, had we not the string; but _that_ we have, and this
keeps two populations, threatening to run into each other, so
effectually apart, that it is only a pity and a shame--honesty feels
the greatest--that the German Cabinets have not drawn some such cordon
between themselves and the Italian; and did it not, then, depend upon
them, where they would apply the cord,--to the floor, or to Italian
hands or to Italian necks?
When the English General History of the world and its German abridgment
shall once have so nearly come up with the times as to take in hand and
relate the year of this transfer, and among other things are able to
remark that the Princess, after her entrance, seated herself in the
velvet chair,--then should the Universal History quote the author from
whom it borrows, namely, myself.... That was the second Act, and it was
a very good one, and not so much comic as sublime.
Third Act.--In this there is nothing but talking. A court is the
parlor or talking-room of the country; the ministers and envoys are
_listening-brethren_.[124] The Flachsenfingen Secretary read at a
distance an Instrument, or the emption-bill of her marriage. Thereupon
speeches were whispered,--two by the Italian minister,--two, also, by
the Flachsenfingen minister (Schleunes),--none by the bride, which was
a shorter way of saying nothing than that of the ministers was.
Since, now, this sublime Act were verily ended, if _I_ should say
nothing: it will, I trust, be allowed me for once, after many weeks, to
obtain by begging and to append a little _extra-leaf_, and therein to
say something.
AN EXTRA-LEAF (BY GRACIOUS PERMISSION) UPON THE
GREATER FREEDOM ENJOYED IN DESPOTISMS.
Not only in Gymnasia and republics, but even (as may be seen on the
former page) in monarchies, speeches enough are made,--not to the
people, but still to their _curatores absentes_.[125] Even so is there
in monarchies freedom enough, although in despotisms there may be still
more of it than in them or in republics. A true despotic state has,
like a frozen cask of wine, not lost its _spirit_ (of freedom), but
only compressed it from the watery circumference into a fiery point; in
such a happy state freedom is distributed merely among the few who are
_ripe_ for it, the Sultan and his Bashaws, and that goddess (who is
pictured still oftener than the bird Ph[oe]nix) holds herself
indemnified, and more and better than that, for the reduced _number_ of
her worshippers, by their _worth_ and _ardor_, since her few
_epopts_[126] or _initiates_--the Bashaws--enjoy her influence in a
measure of which a whole people is never capable. Freedom, like an
inheritance, is lessened by the multitude of heirs; and I am convinced
that he would be most free who should be free alone. A democracy and an
oil-painting are to be put only on a canvas without _knots_
(inequalities), but a despotism is a piece of _relieved_ work,--or
something still more rare: despotic freedom lives, like canary-birds,
only in _high_ cages; republican liberty, like yellow-hammers, only in
_long_ ones.
A despot is the _practical reason_ of a whole country; the subjects are
just so many impulses contending therewith, which must be overcome. The
legislative power, therefore, belongs to him alone (the executive to
his favorites);--even mere talented men (like Solon and Lycurgus) held
the law-giving power in themselves alone, and were the _magnetic
needle_ which _guided_ the ship of state; a despot consists, as their
throne-successor, of almost nothing but laws, his own and others at
once, and is the magnetic mountain, which draws the ship of state to
itself. "To be one's own slave is the hardest slavery," said an old
man, at least an ancient and a Latin; but the despot demands of others
only the easier kind, and takes upon himself the harder. Another says
_Parere scire, par imperio gloria est_;[127] a negro slave, therefore,
wins glory and honor as much as a negro king. _Servi pro nullis
habentur_;[128] hence it is that political nullities feel so little the
pressure of the court atmosphere; whereas despotic realities earn their
freedom by the very fact that they know so well how to feel and prize
its worth. A republican in the nobler sense, e. g. the Emperor of
Persia, whose liberty-cap is a turban and his liberty-tree a throne,
fights for freedom behind his military Propaganda and behind his
Sans-culottes with an ardor such as the ancient authors demand and
depict in the Gymnasia. Nay, we are never justified in denying such
enthroned republicans a Brutus's greatness of soul, before we have put
them to the proof; and if in history good were delineated more than
evil, one would have even now the means of showing, among so many
Shahs, Khans, Rajahs, and Califs, many a Harmodius, Aristogeiton,
Brutus, &c. who was able to pay for _his_ freedom (slaves contend for
another's) even with the death of otherwise _good_ men and friends.
_End of the graciously allowed Extra-leaf upon the greater Freedom
enjoyed in Despotisms_.
The extra-leaf and the Third Act are ended, but the latter was shorter
and more serious than the former has been.
Fourth Act.--By the act of dropping the curtain and raising it again, I
have carried the world over from the shortest Act into the longest. To
the Princess who now, as the German Imperial History announces, is
sitting--came her compatriots in a body, who neither looked very
honest nor very stupid, the chief-governess, the Court-confessor, the
Court-Æsculapius, ladies and servants and all. This court-train does
not say its farewell,--that has already been said privately,--but
merely recapitulates it by a silent bow. The next step of the united
Italians was from the middle chamber to--Italy.
The Italians passed along before Sebastian's warehouse, and wiped off
from their faces, whose hard parts were _en haut-relief_,--the German
were _en bas-relief_, a nobler glimmer than that which courts
communicate: Victor saw among so many accentuated eye-sockets the
multiplied signs of the melancholy with which he himself was oppressed
as he thought of the willing stranger-heart which remained behind alone
under the frosty canopy of the German throne and clouds, torn away from
her loved ways and scenes, brought before microscopic eyes, whose focal
point scorches into tender feelings, and bound to a breast of ice....
When he thought of all this, and saw the compatriots, how they pocketed
their feelings and packed themselves off, because they were not
permitted to exchange another word with the Princess; and when he
looked upon the mute, submissive form within there, who was not allowed
to show any other _pearls_ than Oriental ones, (although the dream and
the possession of the latter signifies Western ones, or of the evening
land,--tears, I mean,) then did he wish, "Ah, that I could only, thou
good creature, draw a treble veil over thy eye long enough for it to
shed a tear!--might I only kiss that hand, so rudely set up at auction,
as thy court-ladies are now doing, so as to inscribe with my tears upon
the sold hand the nearness of a sympathizing heart." ...
Be tender and expand not your hatred of princes into hatred of
princesses! Shall a bowed-down female head not touch our hearts with
pity, because it leans on a mahogany table? and shall great tears not
move us, because they fall upon silk? "It is too hard," Victor said,
when in Hanover, "that poets and _magistri legentes_, when they pass by
a chateau, make, with an envious, malicious pleasure, the remark, In
there as much bread of sorrow is baked, perhaps, as in fishermen's
huts. O yes, doubtless greater and harder loaves! But is the eye, out
of which in the badger's kennel of a Scotchman nothing extorts a tear
but the smoke of the room, worthy of a greater compassion than the
tender one which, like that of an Albino, smarts at the very rays of
joy, and which the spirit fills with spiritual tears? Ah, down in the
valleys only the skin is punctured, but up on the high places of rank,
the heart; and the index-hand of the village clock moves merely around
the hours of hunger and sweat, but the second-hand, set with
brilliants, flies round dreary, despairing, bloody minutes."
But fortunately never is rehearsed to us the passion-history of those
womanly victims, whose hearts are tossed to the mint, and, like other
jewels, cast among the throne-insignia,--who, as flowers with souls,
hung upon an ermine-clad dead man's heart, fall to pieces, unenjoyed,
on the bed of state, mourned by no one, save by a distant, tender soul,
which finds no place in the Court-almanac....
This Act consists of nothing but _goings_: in fact, this whole comedy
resembles the life of a child. In the first Act, there was _providing
of household furniture_ for the coming existence; in the second, the
_arrival_; in the third, _talking_; in the fourth, _learning to walk_,
&c.
When Germany had delivered discourses enough to Italy, and Italy to
Germany, then Germany, or rather Flachsenfingen, or properly a piece of
it, the Minister Schleunes, took the Princess by the hand and led her
out of the torrid zone into the frigid; I mean, not from the bridal bed
to the wedded bed, but--from the Italian territory of the apartment
into the Flachsenfingenite, away over the silken Rubicon. The
Flachsenfingen court stands over yonder as right wing, and has not yet
gone into the fight. So soon as she had passed the silken line, then it
was well that the first thing she did in her new land should be
something memorable; and in fact she did, before the eyes of her new
court, take 4½ paces and--sit down in the Flachsenfingen chair, which I
set out vacant for that purpose in the very first Act. Now, at last,
the right wing marched into fire, for the kissing of hands and sleeves.
Each one in the right wing--the left not at all--felt the dignity of
what he entered upon, and this feeling which melted into one with
personal pride came--as according to Plattner pride is akin to the
sublime--quite _apropos_ to my Benefit-farce, in which I cannot succeed
in being sublime enough. Great and silent, embarked in silken bow-nets,
buried in a gulf of robes, the court-dames sail up with their lips to
the still hand which is fastened with conjugal manacles to a
stranger's. Less stately, but still stately, is urged on, also, the
Adamitish portion of the _Dramatis Personæ_, among whom, unfortunately,
I see the apothecary Zeusel.
We know no one among them but the minister, his son Mat, who does not
observe anything whatever of our hero, the Physician in ordinary to the
Princess, Culpepper, who, transformed by fat and his doctor's beaver
into a heavy Lot's-pillar-of-salt, pushes himself like a turtle into
the presence of the Regent and Patient.
No mortal knows how Zeusel torments me. Contrary to all order of
precedence, I prefer to present, sooner than I do him, the fat
livery-servants, swollen into knavish stupidity, whose coats consist
less of threads than of laces, and who bend themselves like yellow
ribbon-preparations before weary eyes, wont to look on fairer forms.
Victor regarded, through his English opera-glass, the Italian glazed
court-faces as at least picturesquely beautiful; on the contrary, he
found the German parade-masks so worn out and yet so starched, so
languid and yet so on the stretch, their looks so evaporated and
yet so brimstone-smoked!... I still keep Zeusel back by means of some
Easter-lambs or _agnus Dei's_ of pages' faces, soft and white as mites;
a nurse would like to lay them with their nipple-glass-mouths to her
breast.
Zeusel was no longer to be restrained; he has broken through and has
the Princess by the wing--the whole joke of this play, I mean the whole
serious meaning of it, is now once for all spoiled. This gray fool has
in his old days--his nights are still older--buttoned himself into a
complete historical copper-plate, that is to say, into a zoölogical
fashionable waistcoat, wherein, with his four variegated rings, too, he
looks for all the world like a green game-wagon, on which the animal
pieces of the whole chase are painted, and four rings for the ringing
of the swine's snouts are there _in naturâ_.[129] I must now see and
suffer it,--as he does everything in the past,--while he, fuddled with
vanity and hardly able to distinguish watch-chains from gala-coats,
runs up and catches at some silken stuff to kiss it. It was easy to
foresee that the man would spoil my whole altar-piece with his
historical figure; I would absolutely have suppressed the ninny and
covered him up behind the frame of the picture, had he not with his
flappers and skippers stood out too prominently and made too much of a
chattering; and then, too, my correspondent has expressly introduced
and designated him among the benefit-confederates. It hardly pays for
the trouble to write--
Act Fifth; since all is now thrown into pickle and the reading world is
in a grin. In the Fifth Act, which I make without any gusto, there
still continued to be nothing done,--whereas Tragedy-makers and
Christians turn over the conversion and all important matter into the
last Act, as, according to Bacon, a courtier thrust his petitions into
the Postscript,--nothing, I say, except that the Princess let her new
maids of honor do their first example in arithmetic and subtraction;
namely, the problem of disrobing.... And as undressing concludes the
fifth Acts of Tragedies, where Death does it,--and of Comedies, where
Love does it,--so, too, would this Benefit-Comedy, which, like our
life, wavers between Comedy and Tragedy, wearily end with an
undressing.
_End of the Benefit-Comedy_.
I was too much excited yesterday. To be sure the Apothecary is the Dog
and Cat, in my picture, biting each other under the table of the Holy
Supper; but, upon the whole, the very farce is sublime. Let one just
consider that all is carried on in a monarchical form of government,
which, according to Beattie, more than the republican form, helps out
the comic,--that, according to Addison and Sulzer, precisely the most
waggish men are the gravest, and that, consequently, the same thing
must hold in regard to the stuff they work;--one must then see at once,
from the comic element which my Acts contain, that they are serious....
My hero delivered in the shop a vehement Father Merz's controversial
sermon _against_ something which imperial cities and towns preach in
favor of: "That men can act so without brains, the white or the gray,
and without a particle of taste, as not to be ashamed sinfully and like
dogs to fritter away the two or three years in which Pain has them not
yet in his game-ticket, nor Death on his night-list,--not in doing
absolutely nothing, or in the half bar-rests of chancery-holidays or
the whole bar-rests of comitial holidays, or with the whimsicalities of
joy,--what were more laudable?--but with the whimsicalities of torture,
with twelve Herculean labors to do nothing, in the correction-houses of
antechambers, on the _tratto di corda_ of tight-strung ceremonials....
My dear seneschal, my fairest chief-governess, I approve all; but
life is so _short_ that it does not repay the trouble to make one's
self a _long_ queue[130] therein.--Could we not shake out our hair,
and leap over all entrance-halls (or -hells), over all ushers and
dancing-masters, away into the very midst of the May-flowers of our
days, and into their flower-cups?... I will not express myself
abstractly and scholastically; if I did, I should have to say, Like
dogs, ceremonies grow mad with age; like dancing-gloves, each serves
only for once, and must then be thrown away; but man is such a curséd
ceremonious creature, that one must swear he knows no greater or longer
day than the diet[131] of Ratisbon."
While Victor was at his meal, Tostato was not present, but in the shop.
Now he had already, the evening before, been unable to get out of his
head a design of kissing the pretty dunce. "If I can kiss a saint who
is stupid as a cow but _once_, then I have peace for the rest of my
life." But, unluckily, the so-called _smallest_ (the sister), whose
understanding and nose were too great, had to float round the dunce, as
bob to the angle; and the bob would instantly have twitched, had he so
much as put a lip to the bait. However, he was cunning, at least: he
took our _smallest_ on his knee, and danced her up as Zeusel's coachman
did him, and called this _clever_ one sweet names over her head, all of
which he dedicated with his eyes to the _stupid_ one (at court he will
dedicate with reversed dissimulation). He covered up twice in joke the
spying eyes of the _smallest_, merely in order to do it a third time in
earnest, when he drew the dunce to himself, and with his right hand
brought her into a position, where he could,--especially as she allowed
it, because girls do not like to refuse a trick, often from the mere
pleasure of guessing it,--amidst his court-services to the blind one,
offer the other the hasty kiss, for which he had already contrived so
many _avant-propos_ and lines of march. Now was he satisfied and well;
if he had been compelled to lie in wait two evenings longer for the
kiss, he would have fallen deeply in love.
He was again sitting at his masthead when the Princess dined. It took
place with open doors. She stirred up his wild-fire of love with the
gold spoon as often as she pressed it to her small lips; she scattered
the fire apart again with the two toothpicks (sweet and sour) as often
as she resorted to them. Tostato & Co. disposed to-day of the most
costly articles. No man knew the _& Co_.,--only Zeusel looked more
sharply into Victor's face, and thought, "I must have seen you before."
Towards half past two in the afternoon, good luck would have it that
the Princess herself came to the shop, to look up Italian flowers for a
little girl with whom she had fallen in love. In all masquerades, as
every one knows, one takes masquerade liberties, and in every journey
the freedom of a fair. Victor, who in disguises and on journeys was
almost too bold, undertook to speak in the mother-tongue of the
Princess, and, in fact, with wit. "The Devil," thought he, "cannot
surely catch me for that." He remarked, therefore, with the tenderest
complacency toward this fair child in Moloch's arms, simply this in
regard to the silk-flowers: "The flowers of joy, too, are unhappily,
for the most part, made of velvet and iron wire, and with the
_shaping-iron_." It was only a miracle that he was polite enough to
leave out the circumstance that it was just the Italian nobility who
elaborated the Italian Flora. She looked, however, at his goods, and
bought, instead of flowers, a _montre à régulateur_,[132] which she
requested to have brought over to her.
He delivered the watch to her with his own hand; but, unfortunately, no
less with his own hand--the reader will be frightened, but at first he
himself was frightened, and yet thought over the conceit till at last
he approved it--had he previously stuck on, above the _Imperator_ of
the watch, a delicate strip of paper, wherein, with his own hand, he
had written, in pearl type: "_Rome cacha le nom de son dieu et elle eut
tort; moi je cache celui de ma déesse et j'ai raison_."[133]
"I know this people well enough," thought he; "they never open or wind
up a watch in their life!" Ha, Sebastian! what will my reader or _thy_
lady reader think?
She started this very evening for the country she had obtained by
marriage, the future string-floor of her sceptre. Our Victor felt
almost as if he had transferred another heart than the metal one with
the billet, and thought with pleasure of the Flachsenfingen court.
Before her ran her copied bridegroom or his litter, from which he
alighted on the wall of the bedchamber. As he was her god, I can
compare him or his image with the images of the ancient gods, who were
carried round on a peculiar _vis-à-vis_, called a _thensa_,[134]--or in
a portrait-box, called [Greek: naos],[135]--or in a cage, called
[Greek: kadiskon].[136]
Thereupon Victor went with his commercial consul round behind the
coulisses of the benefit theatre. He untied the silken demarcation-line
and barring-chain,--drew it up like a disgusting hair,--felt of
it,--held it first far from his eye, then near to it,--and pulled it
apart, before he said: "The power may lie where it will,--a silk ribbon
may insulate bodies politic as well as electrical, or it may be with
princes as with cocks, who never can get a step farther, if one takes
chalk and draws therewith a straight line from their bill to the
ground,--nevertheless this much you see, partner,--if an Alexander
should displace the boundary-stones, such a string would be, in
opposition thereto, the best epitome of the natural law and a
_barrière-alliance_ of the same nature." He went into her bedroom, to
the empty sepulchre,--that is, to the bed of the risen bride,--into
which the _sponsus_ could look down as he lay at anchor on the wall.
Whole divisions of conceits marched mutely through his head, which,
thus full, he pressed sidewise with his cheek against a silken pillow,
as large as a lap-dog's, or the side-cushion of a carriage. Thus
reclining and kneeling, he said, speaking half into the feathers:[137]
"Would that on the other pillow also there lay a face looking into
mine! Dear Heaven! two human faces opposite each other,--each drawing
the other into its eyes,--listening to each other's sighs,--breathing
away from each other the soft, transparent words,--that were what you
and I absolutely could not stand, partner!"--He sprang up, gently
patted down his hare's form smooth again, and said, "Lay thyself softly
around the heavy head which sinks upon thee; smother not its dreams;
betray not its tears." Had even the Count of O----, with his fine,
ironical look, come in at this moment, he would not have minded this.
It is unfortunate for us Germans that we alone--while to the Englishman
even a world's-man sets down his hare's leaps, caprioles, and gambols
as so many elegant _pas_, _forward capers_ and _backward capers_ and
_side-capers_--cannot possibly march along with sufficient gravity and
composure.
At evening he ran in again to the harbor of his beekeeper; and his
tossing heart threw out its anchor into the tranquil, blooming nature
around him. The old man had meanwhile mustered up all his old papers,
baptismal and marriage-certificates, and private documents of reference
for the Nuremberg Bee-father's case, and said, "Let the gentleman read
them!" He wanted himself to hear it all over again. He showed also his
"Trinity-ring" from Nuremberg, in which was inscribed:
"Here, by this ring, you see,
Father, Son, Spirit, three,
Make one sole Deity."
The Bee-father went on to make no secret of it, that he formerly,
before he procured this ring in Nuremberg on a court-day, had not been
able to believe in the Trinity; "but now one must be a beast, if he
could not comprehend it."--The morning before his departure, Victor
was in a double embarrassment,--he was very desirous of having a
present; secondly, of making one. What he wanted to have was a plump
hour-watch,[138] won at a raffle where the ticket was twenty kreutzers.
This piece of work, whose thick hand had measured off the thread of the
old man's life on the dirty dial-plate in nothing but gay, joyous
bee-hours, he wanted as a Laurence's-box,[139] an amulet, an
Ignatius's-plate,[140] against hours of Saul. "A manual laborer," said
he, "needs really only a little sun, to go warmly and contentedly
through life; but we, with our fantasy, are often as badly off on the
sunny side as on the stormy side,--man stands more firmly in mud than
on ether and morning-redness." He wanted to press upon the acceptance
of the happy veteran of life, as purchase-money for the hour-watch and
prize-medal for his lodgings, his own watch that told the seconds.
Lind had not the heart for it, but grew red. At last Victor represented
to him that the second-watch was a good fire-ball[141] for the
Trinity-ring, a thesis-image of that article of faith, for the
_threefold_ hands made, after all, only _one_ hour.--Lind _swapped_.
Victor could neither be the mocker nor the Bunclish[142] reformer of
such an erring soul, and his sympathetic whimsicality is nothing but a
doubting sigh over the human brain, which has its seventy _normal
years_, and over life, which is an interim of faith, and over the
theological doctors'-rings, which are just such Trinity-rings, and over
the theological lecture-rooms and recitation-rooms, wherein just such
second-telling watches indicate and strike.
--At last he leaves Kussewitz at six o'clock in the morning. A very
beautiful daughter of the Count of O---- did not come back until seven
o'clock; that is fortunate for us all, for otherwise he would be still
sitting there.
The Dog-post-day is run out. I know not whether I should make an
extra-leaf or not. The Intercalary Day is at the door; I will therefore
let it be, and only insert a Pseudo-extra-leaf, which, as is well
known, differs from a canonical merely in this,--that in the apocryphal
I do not give notice by any superscription, but only slip off from the
history in an underhand way to mere irrelevant things.
I take up my historical thread again, and ask the reader what he
thinks of Sebastian's flirtations. And how does he explain them to
himself?--He replies, and philosophically indeed: "Through Clotilda;
she, by her magnetizing, has put him _en rapport_ with the whole female
world; she has knocked at this swarm of bees, and now there is no more
peace.--A man may sit for twenty-six years cold and sighless in his
book-dust; but when he has once breathed the ether of love, then is the
oval hole of the heart forever shut, and he must go forth into the air
of heaven and be continually gasping at it, as I see by the coming
dog-post-days plainly enough." The reader has accustomed himself to a
quaint philosophical style, but what he says is true; hence a maiden
never sues so eagerly for a second lover for her stage as after
the decease of the first, and after her vows to throw away her
recruiting-license.
But how could the reader fail to hit upon still weightier
reasons,[143]--1. General love, and 2. Victor's maternal marks?
1. General love is too little understood. There is as yet no
description of it extant but mine,--namely, in our days,
reading-cabinets, dancing-halls, concert-halls, vineyards,
coffee-tables, and tea-tables are the forcing-houses of our hearts and
the wire-mills of our nerves; the former are too big, the latter too
fine. Now when, in these marriage-seeking and marriageless times, a
young man, who still watches like a Jew for his female Messiah, and
still is without the highest object of the heart, accidentally reads
with a dancing-partner, with a lady member of his club, or an
_associée_, or sister in office, or other collaboratress, a hundred
pages in the "Elective Affinities" or in the Dog-post-days,--or
exchanges from three to four letters with her upon the culture of silk
or clover, or on Kant's _Prolegomena_,--or scrapes the powder from her
forehead some five times with the powder-knife,--or with her, and by
her side, ties up the intensely fragrant kidney-beans,--or actually at
the ghostly hour (which becomes full as often the sentimental hour)
quarrels with her on the first principle of morals;--then is this much
certain,--that the aforesaid youth (provided _refinement_, _feeling_,
and _reflection_ hold a mutual balance within him) must needs behave a
little madly, and feel towards the aforesaid collaboratress (that is,
if she does not by some higglings of head or heart offend against his
feelers) something which is too warm for friendship and too _unripe_
for love,--which borders on the former, because it includes several
objects, and on the latter, because of this it dies. And this is, in
fact, neither more nor less than my general love, which I have
otherwise called simultaneous and Tutti-[144]love. Examples are odious;
else I would adduce mine. This universal love is a glove without
fingers (or mitten), into which, because no partitions separate the
four fingers, any hand easily slips; into the partial love, or the
glove proper, only a single and particular hand can squeeze itself. As
I was the first to discover this fact and island, I can give it the
name wherewith others will have to name and call it. It shall be
christened henceforward collective or simultaneous love, though
I might also, if I and Kolbe chose, let it be named preluding
love,--confederate-tenderness,--general warmth,--the fidelity of
adopted childhood.
To please the theologians and humor their fiddle-faddle about final
causes, I throw in here the following fixed principle: I should like to
see the man who, without this general love, could in our times, when
paired love is, by the demands of a greater _metallic_ and _moral_
capital, made more rare, hold out three years.
2. The second cause of Victor's so easily falling in love with women
was his maternal mark,--i. e. a resemblance to his own and every
mother. Besides, he asserted that his ideas had exactly the pace--that
is, the leap--of woman's, and that he had, in fact, a great deal of
woman in him; at least, women resemble him in this,--that their love
springs up through talking and intercourse. Their love, it may safely
be said, has not much oftener begun than ended in hatred and coldness.
An imposed and hated bridegroom makes often a loved husband. "I will,"
he used to say in Hanover, "get into her heart's ears, if not into her
heart. Could Nature, then, have built into the female bosom two such
spacious heart-chambers--one can turn round therein--and two such neat
heart's-alcoves--the heart's treasure-bag I have not yet touched
upon--merely for this purpose, that a man's soul should hire these four
apartments all alone without a mother's son beside, as a female soul
inhabits the four cerebral chambers of the head's female suite? Quite
impossible! and in fact they do no such thing: but (but whoever is
afraid of immoderate wit, let him now step out of my track) in the two
wings of this rotunda and in the side-buildings everything takes up its
quarters that goes in, i. e. more than comes out--as in a toll-house or
pigeon-house there is a constant coming and going--one cannot count, if
one is there to see--it is a beautiful _temple_ in which there is
_right of thoroughfare_.--Such regard not the few who so shut
themselves up as to give the chief box of the heart to only a single
lover, and merely the two side boxes to a thousand friends."
Nevertheless Jean Paul never could succeed--though there might be ever
so much surplus room--even so far as to get into the heart's ears,
which, to be sure, is the very least thing. Because his face looks too
meagre, his complexion too sallow, his head is much fuller than his
pocket, and his income that of a titular-mining-superintendency: so
they quarter the good rogue merely in the _coldest_ place away up under
the eaves of the _head_ not far from the hair-pins,[145]--and there he
is still sitting now and laughing out (in writing) his Eleventh
Chapter....
12. DOG-POST-DAY.
Polar Fantasies.--The singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.
We are living now in the dark middle-ages of this Biography, and
reading on toward the enlightened eighteenth century or Dog's-day.
Still, even in this twelfth, as in the night before a fair day, great
sparks fly. "Spitz," said I, "eat me out of what thou wilt, only
enlighten the world."
Sebastian hastened on Saturday with joyful soul under an overclouded
heaven to the island of Union. He could arrive there, if he did not
delay, before the cloudiness was absorbed. Under a blue heaven, like
Schickaneder[146] he brought out the Tragedies, but under an ashen-gray
one the comedies, of his inner man. When it rained, he absolutely
laughed out. Rousseau built up in his brain an _emotional_ stage,
because he cared neither to go out of the coulisse nor into a box of
actual life; but Victor had in his pay between the bony walls of his
head a _comic_ theatre of the Germans, merely for the sake of not
ridiculing _actual_ men; his humor was as ideal as the virtue and
sensibility of other people. In this mood he delivered (like a
ventriloquist) purely internal discourses to all Potentates;--he posted
himself on the bench of Knights with church-visitation-discourses,--on
the bench of the cities with funeral-discourses,--in the Papal chair he
held forth in straw-wreath[147]-discourses to the _virgin_ Europe and
the Ecclesiastical _bride_. The potentates had all, to answer him
again, but one may imagine _how_--when he, like a minister from his
prompter's hole put everything into their mouths;--and then, to be
sure, he went his way and made fun of every one of them.
Mandeville says in his Travels, that at the North Pole in the
winter-half of the year every word freezes, but in the summer-half
thaws out again and is audible. This intelligence Victor pictured out
to himself on the way to the island; we will lay our ears to his head
and listen to the inner buzzing.
"Mandeville and I are not at all obliged to explain why at the North
Pole words, as well as spittle, turn to ice as they fall, just as
quicksilver does there; but we are obliged to reason from the
phenomenon. If a laughing heir wishes there long years to his testator:
the good man does not hear the wish sooner than the following spring,
which may already have laid him dead. The best Christmas sermons do not
edify good souls before haying-time. Vainly does the Polar court lay
its New-Year's wishes before _Serenissimo_; he hears them not, till
warm weather, and by that time half of them have already miscarried.
They ought, however, to place a _circular stove_ as speaking-trumpet in
the antechamber, so that one might hear in the _warmth_ the court
speaker. An oratorical brother, without a stove-heater, would there be
a defeated man. The faro-player, to be sure, vents his curses on St.
Thomas's day; but not until St. John's day, when he has already won
again, do they begin to travel;[148] and one might make summer-concerts
out of the winter ones without any instruments: all one has to do is to
seat one's self in the hall. From what other cause can it arise that
the Polar wars are often carried on half-years before the declaration
of war, except from this, that the declaration issued in winter does
not make itself heard till _good weather_?--And so, too, one cannot
hear anything of the winter-campaigns of the Polar armies till during
the summer-campaigns. I, for my part, should prefer to travel to the
Pole so as to be there only in winter, merely for the sake of uttering
real insults to the people's, particularly the court-retinue's, face;
by the time they came at last to hear them, the defamer would be snugly
ensconced again at Flachsenfingen.--Their winter-amusements are not to
blame for it, if the Northern administration fails to propose and
decide a multitude of the weightiest things: but only during the
canicular holidays is the voting to be heard; and then, too, can the
decisions of the chamber upon matters of grace and _forest-law_ take
shape in speech. But, O ye saints, if I at the Pole--while the sun was
in Capricorn and my heart in the sign of the Crab--should fall down
before the fairest woman, and in the longest night make to her
declarations of love all night long, which, however, in a third of
a third[149] assumed the form of ice and reached her in a frozen
state,--i. e. did not reach her ears at all,--what should I do in
summer, when I had already grown cold and already possessed her, if at
the very hour in which I was hoping to have a good quarrel with her,
now, in the midst of the scolding, my Capricorn-love-declarations
should begin to thaw out and to utter themselves? I could do nothing
with any composure, but to make the rule, Let any one be tender at the
Pole, but only in Aries or Cancer. And if, finally, the transfer of a
Princess should take place at the Pole, and, in fact, at that point
where the earth does not move, which is best suited to the twofold
inactivity of a Princess and a lady, and if the transfer should
actually occur in a hall, where every one, particularly Zeusel, had in
the long winter evenings slandered her; then, when the air in the hall
began to repeat the slanders, and Zeusel in his distress sought to
escape,--then would I pat his shoulder in a friendly manner and say,
Whither away, my friend?"--
"To Grosskussewitz, I help in the catching department," replied the
veritable beadle of St. Luna, who behind some masonry had with one hand
unclasped a book and with the other buttoned up a wallet. Victor felt a
happy pressure upon his heart at an antique from St. Luna. He asked him
about everything with an eagerness that seemed as if he had been away
for an eternity _a parte ante_.[150] The reader who buttoned up his
wallet became an author, and drew up at sight for the gentleman the
year-books, i. e. hour-books of what had since occurred in the village.
Into twenty questions Victor involved the one he had to put about
Clotilda, and learned that she had been hitherto every day at the
Parson's. This vexed him. "As if," thought he, "I had not strength of
soul enough to look upon a friend's love,--and then too, as if----." In
fact, he thought, at such a distance, he was the more at liberty to
think of her.
The reading constable was a reader under my jurisdiction: the book
which he carried about on his poaching-expeditions after thieves was
the _Invisible Lodge_.[151] Victor requested the First Part to be
handed to him: the Beadle was in the Second, just at the Pyramid, at
the moment of the first kiss. Our hero made more and more rapid strides
in reading and in walking, and ended book and walk together.
The island stood before him!--Here, on this island, my reader, open
both eyes and ears!... Not that any memorable things presented
themselves,--for these would of themselves make their way into
half-open ears and pupils,--but for the very reason that only everyday
matters are to be recorded.
His Lordship stood alone on the shore of the sea which flowed round the
island, and awaited and received him with a seriousness which veiled
his friendliness, and with an emotion which still wrestled with his
wonted coldness. He was going now to cross over to the island, and yet
Victor saw no means of transportation. There was no boat there; nor
would it have been practicable to get one off, because iron spikes
stood under the water in such numbers and direction that no boat could
move. The guard that had hitherto been stationed on the shore to
protect the island against the destructive curiosity of the populace
was to-day removed. The father went with his son slowly around the
shore, and dislodged out of their beds, one after another, twenty-seven
stones which lay at equal distances from each other. The island had
been constructed _before_ his Lordship's blindness, and _then_ was
not yet prohibited to strangers; but during that affliction he
had caused its interior to be completed and concealed by unknown
nocturnal workmen. During the tour round the island Victor saw its
fruit-espaliers of high tree-stems, which seemed to direct their
shadows and voices toward the interior of the island, and whose
foliage-work the tossing waves sprinkled with their broken suns and
stars; bean-trefoils clasped the pine-trees, and round the cones
ringlets of purple blossoms played their antics; the silver-poplar
bowed down under the enthroned oak; fiery bushes of Arabian beans
blazed from farther in out of leafy curtains; trees, grafted by
approach, on double stems latticed up the avenues from the eye; and by
the side of a fir, which overtopped all the summits, was a taller one,
which had been bent down by storms half over the water, and which
rocked itself above its grave. White columns lifted up in the middle of
the island a Grecian temple, immovable above all the wavering
treetops.--Sometimes a stray tone seemed to run through the green Holy
of Holies. A tall, black gate reached to the tops of the pines, and,
painted with a white sun-disk, looked toward the east, and seemed to
say to man, Pass through me; not only thy Creator, but thy brother, has
worked, here!--
Opposite to this gate lay the twenty-seventh stone. Victor's father
displaced it, took out a magnet, bent down, and held its _south_ pole
to the gap. Suddenly machines began to gnar, and the waves to whirl,
and an iron bridge rose out of the water. Victor's soul was overfilled
with dreams and expectations. Shuddering, he followed his father, and
set foot upon the magic island. Here his father touched a thin stone
with the _north_ end of the magnet, and the iron bridge sank down
again. Before they stepped up to the elevated gate a key turned itself
from within, and unlocked, and the gate flew open. His Lordship was
silent. On his face a higher soul had risen like a sun: one no longer
knew him; he seemed to be transformed into the genius of this magic
island.
What a scene! So soon as the gate was opened there ran to and fro
through all twigs an harmonious murmur; breezes flew in through the
gate, and absorbed the sounds into themselves, and floated on with
them, trembling, and reposed only on bended blossoms.--Every step
opened farther a great, sombre stage.--Round about the scene lay marble
fragments, on which the blacksmiths' coals had drawn forms of
Raphael's, sunken Sphinxes, map-stones, whereon dim Nature had etched
little ruins and effaced cities, and deep openings in the earth, which
were not so much graves as moulds for bells that had been cast therein.
Thirty poisonous trees stood twined round with roses, as if they were
signs of the thirty years of man's passionate madness. Three-and-twenty
weeping birches had bent themselves down to form a low bush-work, and
were crowded into each other; into this bush ran all the paths of the
island. Behind the bushes ninefold crape-veils, in waves that mutually
swallowed each other, obscured the sight of the high temple; through
the veils five lightning-rods rose into the heavens, and a rainbow,
formed of two shoots of water that leaped up and arched over into each
other, hovered glittering over the twigs, and evermore the two streams
arched themselves aloft, and evermore they shivered each other to
pieces overhead by their contact.
As Horion led his son, whose heart was grasped, affrighted, oppressed,
kindled, chilled, by invisible hands, into the low birch thicket, the
stammering dead-man's-tongue of an organ-trill began to speak, through
the lone silence, to the sigh of man, and the tremulous tone sank too
deeply into a soft heart.--There stood the two on a grave darkly built
over with bush-work; on the grave lay a black marble, on which were
chiselled a bloodless white heart, with a veil over it, and the pale
words, "_It is at rest_." "Here," said his Lordship, "my second eye
became blind; _Mary's_[152] coffin lies in this grave; when that
arrived at the island from England, the diseased eye was too severely
inflamed, and never saw again."--Never did Victor shudder so; never did
he see on a face such a chaotic, shifting world of flying, coming,
conflicting, vanishing emotions; never did such an ice of brow and
eyes congeal upon convulsive lips;--and so a father looked, and a son
felt every sensation repeated in himself.
"I am unhappy," said his father, slowly; a more bitter, biting tear
burned on the pupil of his eye; he hesitated a little, and placed his
five open fingers upon his heart, as if he would grasp and pluck it
out, and looked upon the pale stone one as if he would say, Why is not
mine resting too? The good, dying Victor, crushed with the anguish of
affection, melting into pity, longed to--fall upon the dear, desolated
bosom, and to say more than the sigh, "O God, my good father!" But his
Lordship gently repelled him, and the tear of gall, unshed, was stifled
by the eyelids. His Lordship resumed, but more coldly: "Think not that
I am specially affected; think not that I desire a joy or deprecate a
sorrow: I live now without hope, and without hope I die."
His voice came cutting over ice-fields; his glance was made sharp by
frost.
He continued: "When I have, perhaps, made _seven_ human beings happy,
then must it be inscribed on _my_ black marble, _It rests_.... Why dost
thou wonder so? Art thou even _now_ at peace?"--The father stared at
the white heart, and then stared more fixedly straight before him, as
if a shape had risen out of the grave,--the freezing eye laid and
turned itself about on a rising tear, as if to smother it. Suddenly he
drew back a veil from a mirror, and said, "Look in, but embrace me
immediately after!" ... Victor gazed into the mirror, and saw, with a
shudder, an eternally loved face appear therein,--the face of his
teacher _Dahore_; his knees smote together, but still he did not look
over, his shoulder, and embraced that father who was without hope.
"Thou tremblest far too violently," said his Lordship; "but ask me not,
my dear boy, why all is so. At a certain stage of years one opens no
more the old breast, full as it may be."
Ah, I pity thee! For _those_ wounds which can be disclosed are not
deep; _that_ grief which a humane eye can discover, a soft hand
alleviate, is but small; but the woe which a friend must not see,
because he cannot take it away,--that woe which sometimes rises into
the eye in the midst of blessedness in the form of a sudden trickle
which the averted face smothers,--_this_ hangs in secret more and more
heavily on the heart, and at last breaks it, and goes down with it
under the healing sod. So are iron balls tied to man when he dies on
the sea, and they sink with him more quickly into his vast grave.--
He continued: "I am going to tell thee something; but swear, here upon
these precious ashes, never to divulge it. It concerns thy Flamin, and
from him thou must conceal it."
Victor, so hurled from one wave to another, started at this. He
remembered that Flamin had wrung from him on the watch-tower the
promise, that, if ever they should have offended each other too sorely,
they would die together. He hesitated to take the oath; at last he
said, "But shortly before my death may I tell it to him?"
"Canst thou know when that will be?" said his father.
"But in case--?"
"Then!" said his father, coldly and curtly.--
Victor swore, and trembled at the future import of the oath.
He also had to promise not to visit this dark island before his
Lordship's return.
They passed out of the leafy mausoleum, and sat down on an overturned
stalactite. At times, during the conversation, a strange harmonica-tone
fell from leaf to leaf, and, at a great distance, the four rivers of
Paradise seemed to go sounding away under a zephyr that trembled with
it.
The father began: "Flamin is Clotilda's brother, and the Prince's
son."--
Only such a lightning-flash of thought could now have penetrated into
Victor's already dazzled soul; a new world now started up within him,
and snatched him away from the great one before his senses.--
"Furthermore," continued Horion, "January's three other children still
live in England,--only the fourth, on the Seven Islands, is invisible."
Victor comprehended nothing; his Lordship rent away all veils from the
past, and introduced him to a new outlook into the life immediately
before him, and into that which had flown away. I shall, in the sequel,
communicate all his Lordship's disclosures and secrets to the reader;
at present I will first relate the leave-taking of father and son.
While his Lordship accompanied his son into the dusky, subterranean
passages of former times, and told him all that he concealed from the
world, tears started from Victor's eyes at many a trifle which could
not deserve any; but the stream of these soft eyes,--it was not the
narrative, but the returning contemplation of his unhappy father
and the neighborhood of the buried and mouldering fair form and of
the funereal marble, that wrung it out of the incessantly weeping
heart.--At last all tones on the island ceased,--the black gate seemed
to shut to,--all was still,--his Lordship came to an end with his
revelations, and said, "Fulfil thy purpose of going to-day to
Maienthal, and be cautious and happy!"--But although he took his leave
with that refined reserve which in his rank guides and governs the
hands and arms of even parents and children, still Victor pressed his
childish bosom, so big with sighs and emotions, to his father's, with
such an intensity as if he would fain crush in two his impoverished
heart for the sake of the tears which he was compelled to let rise to
sight ever hotter and larger. Ah, the forsaken one! When the bridge
which clove asunder the father's and the son's days had risen up,
Victor went over it alone, staggering and speechless; and when it had
sunk into the water again, and the father had disappeared into the
island, pity weighed him down to the ground; and when he had drawn all
his tears, like arrows, out of his suffering heart, slowly and dreamily
he quitted the still region of riddles and sorrows, and the dark
funeral garden of a dead mother and a gloomy father, and his whole
agitated soul cried incessantly, "Ah, good father! hope at least, and
come back again, and forsake me not!"--
And now all that in the foregoing part of the story has created
obscurities, all that his Lordship exposed to his son, we will explain
to ourselves also. It will still be remembered that, at the time when
he set out for France to fetch away the Prince's children,--the
so-called Welshman, Brazilian, and Asturian, and the _Monsieur_,--the
dark intelligence of their abduction came to hand. This abduction,
however, he had (as he now confessed) himself arranged,--only the
disappearance of the _Monsieur_ on the Seven Islands had occurred
without his knowledge, and he could therefore with his untruth mix some
truth, as mouth-glue. These three children he caused secretly to be
taken to England, and educated at Eton for scholars, and in London
for civilians,[153] in order to give them back to their father as
blood-related assistants of his tottering administration. Hence he had
helped the so-called Infante (Flamin) become an administrative
councillor. So soon as he once gets the whole infant colony together,
he means to surprise and bless the father with the delightful
apparition. The (at present) invisible son of the Chaplain, who before
the embarkation took the small-pox and blindness, he therefore keeps in
the dark, because otherwise it would be too easily guessed to whom
Flamin properly belonged.
Victor asked him how he would convince the Prince of a relationship to
four or five strangers. "By my word," was Horion's first reply; then he
subjoined the remaining evidences,--in Flamin's case, the testimony of
his mother (the niece), who would come with him; in the case of the
others; their resemblance to their pictures, which he still possessed,
and finally the maternal mark of a Stettin apple.
Victor had already often heard from the Parson's wife that all
January's sons had a certain mother's or father's mark on the left
shoulder-blade, which looked like nothing, except in autumn, when the
Stettins ripen; then it also grew red, and resembled the original. The
reader himself must remember, in the annals of the curious and learned
societies, whole fruit-basketfuls of cherries, whose red pencilling was
only faint on children, and heightened in redness not until the
ripening of the prototypes on the twigs. If I could believe a
fellow-bather of mine, I myself should have such a Stettin fruit-piece
hanging on my shoulder; the thing is not probable nor important;
meanwhile next autumn,--for I have proposed it to myself several
autumns, but now Knef, through his dog, reminds me of it,--so soon as
the Stettins mature, I might, to be sure, take a looking-glass and
examine myself behind.--And on the same ground this Stettin festoon
puts off the return of his Lordship, at least the transfer and
recognition of the children, till the autumnal season of its
reddening.--
I make no scruple of communicating here a satirical note from my
correspondent. "Make believe," he writes, "in regard to this
intelligence, as if you did it at my behest, and, when you have once
related his Lordship's _exposé_ and revelation, very quietly relate it
over to your reader a second time; so that he may not forget, or get it
confused. One cannot cheat readers enough, and a clever author will be
fond of leading them into marten-traps, wolf-pits, and deer-nets." I
confess, for such tricks I always had a poor talent; and, in fact, will
it not be more creditable, both to me and to the reader, if he fixes it
at once in his mind, at first hearing, that Flamin is January's natural
and Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
apparent,--that three or four other children of January's, from the
Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow;--more creditable, I say,
than if I should now have to chew it over for him a second time, (in
fact, it would be a third time,) that Flamin is January's natural and
Le Baut's assumed son,--that the Parson's is blind, and not yet
apparent,--and that three or four other children of January's, from the
Gallic seaboard towns, are still to follow?
The reason why his Lordship required of his son the oath of silence
towards Flamin was, that the latter, by his native honesty, kept all
secrets, but in a heat of passion betrayed all; because in such a case
he would make his birth tell, merely for the sake of backing himself in
a quarrel with an adversary; because he might the very next day, on
account of this revelation, become, instead of a fencing-master with
the sword of Themis, a fencing-scholar with the war-blade; and because,
in fact, a secret, like love, fares still better between two partners
than among three. His Lordship thought, too, that out of a man to whom
you gave money in order that he might become something, more would be
made than out of one who should be something because he had money, and
who looked upon the coins as his hereditary arms, and not as the
prize-medals laid out for his future redemption of them.
After all these developments, his Lordship made to our Victor still one
more, and a weighty one, upon which he was always to look back on the
icy career of his future court-life as to a warning-tablet.
When his Lordship was struck blind before the house that held the ashes
of his beloved, his whole correspondence with England, with the niece
and with the tutors of the princely children, was embarrassed, or at
least changed. He was obliged to have the letters received by him read
to him by a friend whom he could trust: but he could trust no one. Only
one female friend he found out who deserved the distinguished
preference of his confidence, and that was none else than Clotilda. He
who did not, like a youth, squander his secrets, could nevertheless
venture to put Clotilda in possession of his greatest, and to make
her book-keeper and reader to him of the letters of her mother, the
so-called niece. In fact, he held women's power of keeping a secret to
be greater than ours,--at least in weighty matters and in the concerns
of men whom they love.--But just hear what the Devil did last winter:
to me it is memorable.
His Lordship received a letter from Flamin's mother, in which she
renewed her old entreaties for a speedier promotion of the beloved
child, and her inquiries after his fortunes at the Parsonage. Luckily
just then Clotilda was making a visit at St. Luna, and saved him the
journey to Maienthal. He visited the Chamberlain, to hear the letter
from the mouth of his reader. He had great difficulty in securing in
Clotilda's chamber an hour free from eavesdroppers. When he at last got
it, and Clotilda began to read to him the letter, the latter was called
away from the reading by her step-mother. He hears her immediately come
back again, read the letter over in a sort of darkly murmuring tone,
and say softly that she was going away again, but would come back in a
moment. After some minutes Clotilda appears, and when his Lordship asks
why she went out the second time, she denies a second leaving,--his
Lordship insists,--she likewise persists,--finally Clotilda falls upon
the bitter conjecture whether Matthieu may not have been there, and
with his theatrical art and throat, which contained all human voices,
himself have mocked and travestied her, in order under her credentials
to read the important letter. Ah, there was too much in favor of the
conjecture and too little against it! To be sure Matthieu could not now
undertake upon Flamin, whose academic career had just expired, the
October-test of the shoulder-device; but he stuck (so it afterward
seemed to Clotilda and his Lordship) with his green-frog-feet to that
good soul, and, under the cloak of love for Agatha and for his friend,
hung out his threads, let the wind swing and stretch them across
between the princely palace and the Parsonage-house,--kept on spinning
one after another, until at last his father, the minister Schleunes,
should have woven the right web for the entangling of the prey.... I
confess, this conjecture throws light for me on a thousand things.--
Victor was even more astounded than we are, and proposed to his
Lordship whether he might not, without injury to his oath, reveal to
Clotilda his induction into these mysteries, as he had two reasons for
it: first, her delicacy would be spared embarrassment at the appearance
which her sisterly love must otherwise, in her opinion, have in his
eyes;[154] secondly, one keeps a secret better, if only _one_ more
person helps him hold his tongue about it, as is well known from the
case of Midas's barber and the reeds; the third reason was, that he had
several reasons. His Lordship naturally did not refuse.
For the rest, he introduced his Victor with no pedantic rules of march
to the ice-course and tilt-yard of the court. He merely advised him
neither intentionally to seek nor to shun any one, particularly the
house of Schleunes,--to unbridle his friend Flamin, who was in
Matthieu's leading-strings, and to guide him, instead of by the bit,
rather with a friendly hand,--and himself to covet the rank of a
doctor, and nothing more. He said, rules before experience were like
geometry before the operation for the cataract. Even after the harvest
of experience Gratian's _homme de cour_ and Rochefoucauld's Maxims were
not so good as the memoirs and history of courts, i. e. the experiences
of others. Finally he appealed to his own example, and said, it was
only within a few years that he had understood the following rules of
_his_ father's.
The greatest hatred, like the greatest virtue and the worst dogs, is
quiet.--Women have more _flow_, and fewer _overflows_, of emotion than
we.--There is nothing one hates so much in another as a _new_ fault,
which he does not show till after some years.--One commits the most
follies among people who are of no account.--It is the most common and
pernicious delusion, that one always takes one's self to be the only
one who remarks certain things.--Women and soft-hearted people are
timid only in their own dangers, and courageous in those of others,
where they have to save them.--Trust no one (and though it were a
saint) who in the smallest trifle leaves his honor in the lurch; and a
woman of that kind still less.--Most persons confound their vanity with
their sense of honor, and allege wounds inflicted on the one as wounds
inflicted on the other, and the reverse.--What we undertake from
humanity, we should always accomplish, if we mixed in no selfishness
with our motive.--The warmth of a man is by nothing more easily
misunderstood than by the warmth of a young man.
The last observation, which perhaps had a nearer reference, he had made
while he was already on the shore of the island in the attitude of
leave-taking, which he did with that considerate courtesy which in his
rank guides the hands and arms of even parents and children.[155]
THIRD INTERCALARY DAY.
Meteorological Observations upon Man.
When, in the former chapter, I wrote down his Lordship's pithy sayings,
I found that some came into my own head, which might be serviceable for
the Intercalary Day. I have never made one observation alone, but
always twenty, thirty, in succession, and this very first one is a
proof of it!
*
When any one remains modest, not after praise, but after censure, then
he is really so.
*
The talk of the people, and still more the letters of maidens, have a
peculiar euphony, arising from a constant interchange of long and short
syllables (Trochees or Iambuses).
*
The two things which a maiden most easily forgets are, first, how she
looks (hence mirrors were invented); and, secondly, wherein the pronoun
_that_ differs from the conjunction _that_. I fear, however, that they
will from to-day forward observe the distinction, merely for the sake
of upsetting my assertion. And _then_ one of my two touchstones is
lost[156] with which I have hitherto tested learned ladies; the second,
which I retain, is the left thumb-nail, which the penknife has
sometimes notched full of red marks, but seldom, however, because they
drive the quill more easily than they make the pen.
*
One who has received many benefits ceases to _count_, and begins to
_weigh_ them, as if they were votes.
*
The transporting one's self into good characters does more harm to a
poet or player, who retains his own, than entering into bad ones. A
clergyman who, besides, is free to take only the first of these steps,
is more exposed to moral _atony_[157] than the maker of verses and
parts, who is able to make up again for a holy part by an unholy one.
*
Passion makes the best observations and the wretchedest conclusions. It
is a telescope whose field is so much the brighter, as it is narrower.
*
Men require of a new Prince, Bishop, Domestic Tutor, Nursery Tutor,
Capon-Stuffer, Town-Musician, or Town-Recorder _only in the first week_
very special merits which were wanting in his predecessor; for in the
second they have forgotten what they required and what they missed.
*
Such sentences please women most and stay by them longest.
*
Therefore, by way of reward, I will manufacture more than one upon
themselves.--They regard others only as younger, not as fairer, than
themselves.
*
They are even ten times more artful and false towards each other than
towards us; but we are almost more honest to each other than to them.
*
They look to it only that one _does_ justify himself with them, no
matter _how_.
*
They forgive a loved man more stains than we do a loved woman. Hence
the romance-writers let the heroes of their quill guzzle, storm, duel,
and stay overnight anywhere and everywhere, without the least prejudice
to the hero.--The heroine, on the contrary, must sit at home by her
mother and be a little angel.
*
On the whole, they are so delicate, so mild, so sympathetic, so
refined, so loving and love-thirsty, that I cannot get it into my head
why it is that they cannot really like each other, unless it is for
some such reason as this, that they are too courteous to each other to
be formally reconciled or formally at variance with each other. You
dear ones! you sometimes love a man because he has a friend and is one.
O how beautifully would a friend of your own sex _fit_[158] you!
*
One learns taciturnity best among people who have none, and loquacity
among the taciturn.
*
If self-knowledge is the road to virtue, so is virtue still more the
road to self-knowledge. An amended and purified soul is darkened by the
least moral poison, as certain precious stones are by every other, and
now after the amendment one observes for the first time how many
impurities still lurk in all corners.
*
I will close with some rules for improvement. Never, when the bosom has
to fear that thorn in the side, anger, eloquently represent to any one
his faults; for in the very act of convincing him of his guilt thou
persuadest thyself of it, and so becomest exasperated. Picture to
thyself every morning the possible situations and passions into which
during the day thou mayst fall; then thou wilt deport thyself better,
for one seldom behaves badly, in a repeated case, the second time.--Is
thy friend angry with thee, then provide him an opportunity of showing
thee a great favor. Over that his heart must needs melt, and he will
love thee again.--No resolves are great save those which one has more
than once to execute. Hence _forbearing_ is harder than _undertaking_;
for the former has to be kept up longer, and the latter is also linked
with the sense of a double expression of power, a psychological and a
moral.--Only despair not at a single failing; and let thy whole
repentance be--a nobler action.--Only make thyself (by stoicism, or in
ally way thou canst) _tranquil_, then wilt thou have little trouble in
making thyself _virtuous_ also.--Begin the culture of thy heart, not
with the rearing of noble motives, but with the extirpation of bad
ones. When the weeds are once withered or uprooted, then will the
nobler flowerage spontaneously and vigorously spring up.--The virtuous
heart, like the body, grows sound and strong more by _work_ than by
good _food_.
Therefore I can stop.
13. DOG-POST-DAY.
Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of
Eden.--Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
In regard to his Lordship I have three words to say, that is, three
opinions to state.
The first is wholly improbable; it is, that, like all men of the
world and of business, he regards mankind as an apparatus for
experiments, as so much hunting-gear, war-material, knitting-work:
such men look upon heaven only as the key-board to earth, and the soul
as orderly-sergeant of the body; they carry on wars, not for the sake
of winning crowns of oak-leaves, but to secure the oak soil and acorns;
they prefer the successful man to the deserving one; they break oaths
and hearts to serve the state; they respect poetry, philosophy, and
religion, but as means; they respect riches, statistics of national
prosperity, and health, as objects; all they honor about pure
Mathesis[159] and pure female virtue is the transmutation of each into
impure for manufactures and armies; in the higher astronomy all they
care for is the transformation of suns into odometers[160] and
way-marks for pepper-fleets, and in the most exalted _magister
legens_[161] they seek only an alluring tavern-sign for poor
universities.
The second opinion is at least the opposite of the first, and an
improvement upon it: it is, that to his Lordship, as to other
great men, the race-course is the goal and the steps taken the
garlands.--Fortune and misfortune differ, with him, not in _worth_, but
in _manner_; both are, in his view, two converging race-tracks toward
the eternity's ring of inner promotion; all accidents of this life are
to him mere arithmetical examples in _unknown_ terms, which he solves,
not however as a merchant, but as an indifferentialist[162] and
algebraist, to whom products and multiplicands are of equal interest,
and to whom it is all one whether he reckons by letters or by
hundredweights.
Verily, a man has almost as much to reproach himself with, if he is
discontented, as if he had committed a crime; and inasmuch as it
depends upon his ocean of thoughts, whether he will raise out of it as
an island an Otaheite-Arcadia or the lowest hell, he deserves all that
he creates....
Nevertheless, the third opinion is the true one, and at the same time
it is mine: his Lordship, how much soever he may seem to be an
indeclinable man, who has no object, but is a verb in _mi_, has
nevertheless the following paradigm (and so inversely we find in the
most ordinary man a short plan for the most singular one): he is one of
the unhappy great ones who have too much genius, too much wealth, and
too little repose and knowledge, to be habitually happy; they hunt
pleasure instead of virtue, and miss both, and cry out at last
over every bitter drop which is given them in a sugar-loaf; like
silver-plate, precisely at the point of melting in the fire of pleasure
are they the most inclined to overspread themselves with a dark skin;
their ambition; which otherwise hides with plans the emptiness of high
life, is not strong enough for their heart, which in this emptiness
withers; they do good from pride, but without the love of doing it;
they play with the empty shell of life as with a ringlet, and deem it
not even worth the while to shorten it; and yet they do deem it worth
the while, when they, who stand through this night-frost of the soul,
outwardly smiling and cold, inwardly all in a fever, without hope,
fear, or faith, renouncing all, making light of everything, and shut up
in themselves,--when they feel a stroke of death, a great sorrow clutch
at their unhappy hearts.----Ah the poor lord! can thy heart then find
no rest till it finds it under the lid of black marble?
"Ah the poor lord!" his son incessantly repeated, as with oppressed
soul he went toward Maienthal. The outward heaven around him was still;
a great cloud completely overspread it, but rested on a blue rim along
the whole circle of the horizon. In Victor's breast, on the contrary,
streams of air rushed against each other and whirled together into a
hurricane, drinking up brooks and tearing up trees. His father's image
hung pale in this tempest. Victor's future days were hurled to and
fro.--His future life was compressed into a narrow, veiled image, and
it distressed him just as much to think that he _must_ live it as _how_
he must.
What saddened him most was the mere external and trifling circumstance
that his father had remained alone and concealed in the depths of the
island. Once the conjecture came over him, whether the greater part of
what he had witnessed had not been mere dramatic machinery which his
father (who in his youth had been a tragic poet) had employed to give
more firmness to his vow of silence; but he was immediately disgusted
at his own heart. Why are the purest souls tormented with a multitude
of disgusting, poisonous thoughts, which like spiders crawl up on the
shining walls, and which they only have the trouble of crushing to
death? Ah, our _victories_ are not wholly distinguishable from our
_defeats_!
It is singular that the _perspective_ thought of Clotilda's
blood-relationship to Flamin was the one which he followed out least of
all.
When man can obtain from reason no balsamic relief, he begs it at the
hands of Hope and Illusion; and they two then willingly share his
sorrow. Just as the blue sky of to-day by little and little peered
through light seams in the clouds, and the sea of mist collected into
hanging lakes, so also did the dark thoughts break asunder in Victor's
soul.--And when the swollen masses of cloud in the broad blue passed
into fleece, till at last the blue sea swallowed up all banks of vapor,
and bore nothing on its infinite expanse but the blazing sun, then did
Victor's soul also cleanse itself from vapors, and the sun-image of
Emanuel, whom he was to-day to reach, shone soft and warm and cloudless
into all his wounds.... The form of his loved Dahore, the form of his
loved father, the form of his hidden mother, and all beloved images,
reposed like moons in a mournful group over his head; and this sadness,
and the sacred oath to keep himself virtuous and obey all his father's
wishes, breathed upon his inflamed bosom some solace in regard to his
father's fate.
He could even to-day see the sun go down behind the church-tower of
Maienthal.
The broad cleared-up sky made him more tender, the thought of falling
to-day upon the heart of a noble man, whose soul dwelt above this blue
atmosphere, made him more exalted, the hope of being consoled by this
man for his whole life made him more tranquil.--
He hastened, and, his haste drew out the saddest lute-stop of his soul.
For he seemed not to be going over the summer fields, but they seemed
rather to be hurrying along before him; landscape after landscape,
theatres of woods, theatres of grain-fields, flew by; new hills rose
with other lights, and lifted up their woods, and others with theirs
dropped down; long, shadowy steppes ran backward before the flood of
yellow sunlight; now valleys full of flowers billowed around him, now
bare, hot hill-shores carried him upward; the stream murmured close to
his ear, and suddenly its windings glistened from far away across
poppy-fields; white roads and green paths met him, and fled from him,
and led round the broad earth; full villages, with gleaming windows,
swept by, and gardens with undressed children; the declining sun was
now lifted up, now lost again, and now withdrawn to the summits of the
hills.--
This fleeting of Nature's dissolving views bedimmed his moistened eye,
and brightened the inner world; but the steady abiding of an incessant
music, the constant choir of larks above him, whose contending cries
melted to one in his soul, this distant hum from air and woods and
bushes, this harmonica of Nature, moved him to say to himself: "Why do
I in this solitude hold back every drop that would fall? No; besides, I
am too sensitive to-day, and I will exhaust myself before I see the
beloved man."
At last he ascended the broad mountain that stations itself with its
scattered columns of trees and gray cubes of rock before Maienthal,
which lies in greenness at its foot.... Then the earth, tuned by the
Creator, rang with a thousand strings; the same harmony stirred the
stream, divided into gold and gloom, the humming flower-cup, the
peopled air, and the waving bush; the reddened east and the reddened
west stood stretched out like the two rose-taffeta wings of a
harpsichord, and a tremulous sea gushed from the open heavens and the
open earth....
He burst into a mingling flood of tears at once of joy and sorrow, and
the past and the future simultaneously stirred his heart. The sun with
ever-increasing swiftness dropped down the heavens, and the more
swiftly did he climb the mountain, the quicker to follow its flight
with his eye. And there he looked down into the village of Maienthal,
that glimmered among moist shadows....
At his feet, and on this mountain, lay, stretched like a crowned giant,
like a transplanted spring-island, an English park. This mountain
toward the south and one toward the north met and formed a cradle in
which the peaceful village rested, and over which the morning and the
evening sun spun and spread out their golden veil. In five gleaming
ponds trembled five duskier evening heavens, and every wave that leaped
up painted itself to a ruby in the hovering fire of the sun. Two brooks
waded, in shifting distances, darkened by roses and willows, over the
long meadow-land, and a watering fire-wheel,[163] like a pulsating
heart, forced the sunset-reddened water through all the green
flower-vases. Everywhere nodded flowers, those butterflies of the
vegetable world, on every moss-grown brook-stone, from every tender
stalk, round every window, a flower rocked in its fragrance, and
scarlet lupines traced their blue and red veins over a garden without a
hedge. A transparent wood of gold-green birches climbed, in the high
grass over there, the sides of the northern mountain, on whose summit
five tall fir-trees, as ruins of a prostrated forest, held their eyrie.
Emanuel's small house stood at the end of the village, in a tangled
growth of honeysuckle, and in the embrace of a linden-tree which grew
through it.--His heart gushed up within him: "Blessings on thee, quiet
haven! hallowed by a soul which here looks up to heaven, and waits to
launch into the sea of eternity!"--Suddenly the windows of the
abbey where Clotilda had been educated flung upon him the flames
of the evening-redness,--and the sun went, softly as a Penn, toward
America,--and the thin night spread itself over nature,--and the green
hermitage of Emanuel wrapped itself in obscurity.... Then he knelt
there alone on the mountain, on that throne-step, and looked into the
glowing west, and over the whole still earth, and into the heavens,
and expanded his spirit to think on God.... As he knelt, all was so
sublime and so mild,--worlds and suns came up from the east, and the
little insect, with his play of colors, nestled down into his mealy
flower-cup,--the evening-wind flapped its immeasurable wing, and the
little naked lark rested warmly under the soft-feathered breast of the
mother,--a man stood on the mountain-ridge, and a golden-chafer on the
stamens; ... and the Eternal loved his whole world.
His spirit was now made up to take in a great man, and he yearned for
the voice of a brother.
He staggered, without following any path, down into the village, with
the pewit in its great circles, and the may-chafer in its little ones,
sweeping around him. At the foot of the mountain the hybrid day grew
darker,--in the starry heaven the curtain rose,--the vapor of evening,
which had gone up hot, fell cold, as men do, back to the earth: one
more loud lark went circling upward, as the last echo of day, over the
mountain.
At last he neared Emanuel's linden. He would rather have embraced him
under the great heavens than under the close ceiling of a room. Through
the window he saw an uncommonly beautiful youth standing and playing on
a flute. The player drew out of its heavenly gates a fugitive and
floating elysium. Victor listened to him for a long time, in order to
still his beating heart; at last, with tearful eyes, he went round the
house, and would fain have fallen speechlessly and blindly on the necks
of the youth and of Emanuel. As he passed along before the window, the
youth did not return his greeting; as he opened the house-door, a soft
chime of bells began to make music. Then the youth came out
immediately, and asked him, in a friendly tone, who was there; for he
was blind. Victor stepped into a Holy of Holies when he entered the
apartment lined with linden-leaves, which was the nest of the winged
man, who at this moment was out of it, under the great night of God.
Emanuel was to return toward midnight. The room was open and clean;
some leaves of fruits which had been eaten lay on the table; flowers
glowed around all the windows; a telescope leaned against the wall;
remains of an Oriental wardrobe bespoke the East Indian....
The voice of the beautiful youth had in his ear something inexpressibly
touching, because it seemed like one he knew; it went deep into his
heart, like the melody of a song that sounds up from childhood. He
could rest freely with the steady gaze of love upon that face, that
looked out into an eternal night; he wanted to kiss those childish lips
full of melodies, and still he hesitated. But as he went out of the
house again in quest of Emanuel, and when the bells began to chime
again,--for they sounded whenever the door opened, to announce to the
blind one every arrival,--then he could no longer restrain himself
amidst the lovely music, but he touched the mouth of the blind one, as
he leaned at the open window, with a kiss as soft as a breath. "Ah,
angel! art thou, then, come down again from heaven?" said the blind
one, confounding him with some well-known being or other.
How good was it to be out of doors! The evening-bell of the village
sounded its call over the slumbering fields, and a distant soul was
inclining its ear, perhaps, to catch the dying echoes of its broken
tones. The evening wind, rustling through twigs full of green fruits,
joined in. The evening star--the moon of our twilight--rested kindly on
the road of the sun and of the moon, and sent its solace in the
interval during the absence of both.--"Where mayst thou be at this
moment, my Emanuel? Art thou resting, perhaps, in the sight of the
evening-red,--or gazing into the starry sea?--art thou in the ecstasy
we call a prayer,--or ..."
At this moment, all at once the thought flashed up in him, that, as
to-night St. John's day began, his Emanuel might have expired in the
enjoyment of the evening.... The more eagerly did he seek after him
with his eyes under every tree, in every deeper shadow; he looked up to
the hills, as if he might see him there, and to the stars, as if even
there he might venture to seek him.--He went round the village, whose
circular wall was a festoon of cherry-trees which silvered the green
circumference with a milky-way of blossoms long since fallen, and
hurried over the ruins of the houses which the children had built
during the day, towards the fading windows of the abbey, which rose on
the southern mountain down whose slope he had entered the village; for
the blind one had told him that this mountain was Emanuel's
observatory, and that he went thither every night. The green stairway,
which made its successive landings of terraces and moss-banks, and on
which a balustrade of bush-work ran upward, led him to a mountain which
terminated sublimely in the ether with a tall weeping-birch. With every
grass-plot, as from a bath, new limbs of dark Nature lifted themselves;
he went on, as if from one planet to another. Across the ascending,
darkling fields streamed the night-wind, and lonesomely swept on from
wood to wood, and its ruffling fingers played with the plumage of the
sleeping bird and the down of the whirring night-butterfly. Victor
looked over toward the evening-red which Night had taken as a rose to
wear on the bosom whereon suns repose. The sea of eternity lay in the
form of night on the silver-sand of worlds and suns, and from the
bottom of that sea the grains of sand glistened far up through the
deep.
Around the weeping-birch swelled an unaccountable melodious murmur,
which he had this very day heard on the island. At length he stood up
there under the birch, and the music, like that of an harmonica which
has just stolen over paradises and through hedges of flowers, was loud
around him; but he saw nothing further, save a high grassy altar (the
birthplace of Emanuel's letter) and a low grassy bench. From what
invisible hand, he thought with awe, can these tones issue, which seem
to glide off from angels, as they fly over the next world, from
mingling souls, when a too great bliss breathes itself out into a
sigh, and the sigh dissipates itself into distant dying sound? It must
be forgiven him, if on such a day, which threw his soul into growing
agitations, in this awful hour of night, under this melodious
mourning-tree, on this Holy of Holies of the invisible Emanuel, he at
last came to believe that _he_ had this evening taken his flight from
life, and that his soul, full of love, was still floating around him in
these echoes and yearnings for the first and last embrace. He lost
himself more and more in the tones and in the silence round about
them,--his soul grew to a dream within him, and the whole nocturnal
landscape grew to a cloud made of the sleep in which this light dream
hung,--the fountain of endless life, flung up by the Eternal, flew far
above the earth in the immeasurable arch with the spraying silver-sparks
of suns over immensity; gleaming it encircled the whole vault of night,
and the reflection of the Infinite overspread the dark eternity.
O Eternal One, if we saw not thy starry heaven, how much would our
heart, sunk into the mire of earth, know of thee and of immortality?--
Suddenly in the east the night grew lighter, because the floating
glimmer of the moon darted up on the Alpine ridges that hid the orb,
and all at once the unaccountable tones and the leaves and the
night-wind grew louder. Then Victor awoke as out of a dream and out of
life, and clasped the harmonious, fleeting airs to his languishing bosom,
and, amidst the gushing tears which, like a rain-cloud, veiled from him
the whole landscape, he cried out, beside himself: "Ah, Emanuel,
come!--Ah, I thirst for thee--Float no more in sound, thou blessed one;
take thy deposed human face, and appear to me, and slay me by a
shudder, and keep me in thy arms!" ...
Lo! while the dim tear-drop still stood in his eye, and the moon still
lingered behind the Alps, there came up the mountain a white form with
closed eyes,--smiling, transfigured, blissful,--turning toward
Sirius....
"Emanuel, dost thou appear to me?" cried Horion, trembling, and melted
into a new flood of tears. The form opened its eyes,--it spread out its
arms. Victor saw not,--heard not; he glowed and trembled. The form flew
to meet him, and he gave himself up, saying, "Take me!" They touched
each other,--they embraced each other,--the night-wind swept through
them,--the strange music sounded nearer,--a star shot down,--the moon
flew up over the Alps....
And when with its Eden-light it suffused the cheeks of the unknown
apparition, Victor recognized that it was his dear teacher, _Dahore_,
who had to-day cast his image into the mirror on the island. And Dahore
said: "Beloved son, dost thou still know thy teacher? I am Emanuel and
Dahore." Then the embrace grew closer. Horion would fain have
compressed his gratitude for a whole childhood into one kiss, and lay
dissolved in the arms of the teacher and in the arms of loving ecstasy.
Twine around each other tightly, ye blessed ones; press your full
hearts to each other even till you press tears out of them; forget
heaven and earth, and prolong the sublime embrace!--Ah! so soon as it
is dissolved, then has this frail life henceforward nothing firmer
wherewith to knit you together than the beginning of the--second....
At last Emanuel drew himself out of the attitude of love, and, bending
aside, gazed like a sun, with large and open look, into Horion's face,
and confronted with rapture the ennobled spirit and countenance of his
blooming favorite. The latter sank before the look of love
involuntarily on his knee, and said, with uplifted face: "O my teacher,
my father! O thou angel! dost thou, then, still love me so
exceedingly?"--But he wept too much for utterance, and his words were
unintelligible, and died in his heart....
Without answering, Emanuel laid his hand on the head of the kneeling
pupil, and turned his glorified eye toward the glittering heavens, and
said, with solemn voice: "This head, thou Eternal One, dedicates itself
now to thee in this great night. Let only thy second world fill this
head and this heart, and may the little, dark earth never satisfy
them!--O my Horion! here on this mountain, on which, after a year, I go
up from the earth, I conjure thee, by the great second world above us,
by all the great thoughts wherewith the Eternal at this moment appears
in thee,--I conjure thee to be still good, even when I shall have long
been dead."
Emanuel knelt down to him, held up the exhausted youth, and bent
towards his paling face, and said, in a low and prayerful tone, "My
beloved! my beloved! when we both are dead, in the second world may God
never part us,--never part me and thee!"--He wept not, and yet could
say no more; their two hearts, knit together, rested on each other, and
night veiled silently their mute love and their great thoughts.
14. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
Confessions.
I have only two things to explain before going further,--the mysterious
music and the shutting of the eyes. The former proceeded from an Æolian
harp laid on the weeping-birch. As often as Emanuel came hither by
night he let these breathed-out tones intermingle like blossoms with
the whispering leaves, in order to exalt himself when he looked alone
upon the exalted night. His eyes he often closed before the sun and the
moon, whenever his inner man, winged like a cherub, had leave to bury
itself in soft fantasies; into the streaming, many-colored waves of
light which crowd through the eyelids he would then plunge, as into a
zephyr, for a delicious swim, and in this light-bath the higher
light-magnet within him drew heavenly light out of earthly light. As
there are but few souls that know how far the harmony of outward nature
with our own reaches, and in how very great a degree the whole creation
is but an Æolian harp, with longer and shorter strings, with slower and
swifter vibrations, passive before a divine breath,[164]--I demand not
that every one should forgive this Emanuel.--
After this finding of each other again, which threw a far gleam over a
whole life, the two came home to the blind youth; and his flute carried
the heart softly over in dream from the tossings of fevered blood into
the tranquil ether of heaven.
As I love so to be about Emanuel, the reader will not begrudge me the
pleasure of turning over the leaves of all the hours which we are
permitted to spend in his house, and to go along regularly, step by
step.
The morning for the first time disclosed to the pupil of Emanuel, as it
does to children, what a Christmas present the night had provided for
his heart. What a form came before him in the morning-radiance, when
the still, childlike, composed face of the teacher, over which storms
had once passed, as on the soft, white moon volcanoes have flamed,
smiled upon him in such wise that his inner being melted into mute
bliss! Especially when beheld in _profile_ did this lofty form appear
to stand on the brink of earth, and to look down into the _second_
hemisphere of the heavens, which is hid from us by the gravestone and
the rich pasture-ground of this life. His countenance was transfigured
when he lifted it to heaven, when he named God or Eternity, when he
spoke of the longest day; in its light the leaf-gold of the present
paled to the dead-gold of the past, and his spirit hung hovering over
the body, as genii bloom out of flowers in arabesques. Never did Victor
so easily attune himself, when coming out of a dream, to the new day,
as he did this morning with Emanuel's voice, which was, so to speak,
the music of the spheres to the blue heaven of his eyes, from which,
as from that of Egypt, never a drop fell; from incapacity of the
tear-glands, he could never weep; nor did this life any longer agitate
his soul.
The pure morning-apartment seemed to make the soul pure and still. He
was the greatest bodily Purist; he washed his body quite as often as
his clothes; and the uncleanness of medical language, even to the very
words,--as, e. g. toothpicks, &c.,--was avoided by his stainless
tongue. Even so did his heart remain unsoiled by so much as the images
of great sins, and this unconscious innocence, as well as an
unacquaintedness with our artful manners, made him, in the eyes of
three different classes, either a child--or a maiden--or an angel.
The breakfast of fruits and water, which, in fact, made up his whole
bill of fare, called up reprovingly before our Victor the wine and
coffee-grounds wherewith he had sometimes had to manure, like earthly
ones, the flowers of his spirit. Flower-pots were Dahore's snuff-boxes,
and glowed under the linden-green, which, with two tame, and yet
free, ground-sparrows skipping through it, was the live, growing
ceiling-piece of the apartment. His soul seemed also, like a Brahmin,
to live on poetical flowers, and his speech was often, like his
manners, Indian,--i. e. poetic. So was there throughout, as with divers
magnates of men, a striking pre-established harmony between outward
nature and his heart; he readily found in the corporeal the physiognomy
of the spiritual, and _vice versâ_; he said matter, considered as
thought, was just as noble and spiritual as any other thought, and that
we represented to ourselves in it, after all, only the Divine
conceptions of it. For example, during breakfast he lost himself in the
glimmering dew-drop on a stock-gillyflower, and, by moving his eye to
and fro, played through the gamut of its harpsichord of colors. "There
must," said he, "be some harmony or other of accordant sounds between
this minute particle of water and my spirit, as between virtue and me,
because otherwise neither could so ravish me. And is, then, this accord
which man makes with the whole creation (only in different octaves) a
mere play of the Eternal, and no resonance of a nearer, greater
harmony?" In the same way he would often gaze at a glimmering coal,
till in his eyes it had expanded to a flaming meadow, on which,
illumined by tender fancies, he roamed up and down....
Have patience, reader, with this flowery soul; we will both think that
men can more easily have one religion than one philosophy, and that
every system presupposes its peculiar weaving in the heart, and that
the heart is the bud of the head.
The only circumstance that pained the blessed Victor this morning was,
that he could not embrace the fair blind youth, and ask, "Have we not
already once lived together, and is not my voice as familiar to thee as
thine is to me?" For he looked upon him (as I do too), for several
reasons, as the concealed son of Pastor Eymann. But as Dahore kept
silent on the subject,--into whose clear, bright heaven one could
otherwise look down even to the least nebulous star,--he feared before
these holy ears he should be speaking too near to the verge of his oath
of silence, though he should only disclose his inquiring conjectures
about the blind one. This Julius seemed to have only two root-fibres in
his nature, of which the one went to his flute, and the other to his
teacher. On his white face, whereon the rapture of the musical genius
and the abstractedness of the blind dreamer were blended with an almost
womanly beauty, lay the reflection of his teacher, and its fibres had,
like lute-strings, stirred only to harmonious movements. The poor blind
one, who looked upon his Dahore as his father, was turned about, like
down, by his lightest breath. Victor often drew the head of the dear
blind one close to his face, in order to inspect the disordered eyes,
and judge whether they might be restored. But though he saw with pain
that the unhappy one must remain incurable on the full, radiant earth,
nevertheless he kept on repeating his minute investigation, merely for
the sake of having the dear, enchanting form nearer to his eye and his
soul.
In the morning Emanuel, as cicerone of Nature, led his guest through
the ruins and antiques of the earth: for every tree is an eternal
antique. How different is a walk with a religious[165] man from one
with a vulgar, worldly soul! The earth appeared to him holy, just
fallen from the hands of the Creator; it was to him as if he were
walking in a planet hanging over us and clothed with flowers. Emanuel
showed him God and love everywhere mirrored, but everywhere
transformed,--in the light, in--colors, in the scale of living
creatures, in the blossom and in human beauty, in the pleasures of
animals, in the thoughts of men and in the circles of worlds; for
either everything or nothing is his shadow. So the sun paints its image
on all creatures,--great in the ocean, many-colored in the dew-drop,
small on the human retina, as mock-sun on the cloud, red on the apple,
silvery on the stream, seven-colored in the falling rain, and gleaming
over the whole moon and over all its other worlds.
Victor felt to-day, for the first time, the enlargement and
transfiguration of his conscious being before a spirit which, _like_
his, but _excelling_ his, like a spherical concave mirror reflected all
the features of his nobler part in colossal size. The whole vulgar
portion of his nature crept away when the higher, painted by Dahore on
a large scale, erected itself above the low impulses. A man whom the
perihelion of a great man does not set on fire and beside himself is
nothing worth. He was hardly willing to speak, so that he might only
hear _him_ all the time, although he had it in mind to stay here a good
many days. As before a higher being and before the woman of his love,
in whose presence one will neither show his head nor his tongue, so had
he, renouncing self, sunk into pure truth and love. All the varnish of
the little relations of place and citizenly respectability had cracked
so clean off, and they all stood before him there so moss-grown, that
he would not so much as name the names of Göttingen, of Flachsenfingen,
or empty incidents of life, or strange personalities. In fact, Victor
had a slight contempt for men who care more for the directions to the
bookbinder than for the book, and more for the review of an author than
for his system, and to whom the earth is no deciphering chancery of the
book of nature, but a parlor (a talking-room), a news-office of
wretched personalities, which they care neither to profit by, nor to
retain, nor to estimate, but merely to tell; and he was disgusted with
the German societies, in which there is so little philosophizing.--Oh,
how blest he was, for once to think a whole day in company with
another, and, what is still finer, to be permitted to poetize with him!
His doubts upon the greatest matters which can weigh down our minds and
lift up our hearts grew to-day to questions; the questions, to hopes;
the hopes, to presentiments. There are truths of which one hopes that
great men will be more strongly convinced than one can be one's self;
and one will therefore by their conviction confirm and complete his
own. Dahore held the two great truths (God and immortality) which, like
two pillars, bear up the universe, firmly to his heart; but, like the
rarer men to whom the truth is not merely the _shew-bread_ of vanity
and the dessert of the head, but a _holy supper_ and _love-feast_ full
of the _spirit of life_ for their weary heart, he cared little, if he
could make no proselytes. Victor felt that _he_ understood handling the
artillery-train and the electric pistols and batteries of the art of
disputation better than Emanuel; he would have abhorred his own tongue
if he had directed its readiness against this fair soul. He was silent
for two reasons. "Undertake," said he, "to give a molten image, an
altar-piece, of a great, shining truth that embraces thy whole
being,--to do this on the flying second-hand whereon one stands in
transient conversation, with the few dry paints wherewith human ideas
are to be colored, and with the clumsy human tongue wherewith you must
daub on these grains of color,--I tell you, a _silhouette_, a
transparent asterism, will be all you can produce." The light heaven of
certain simple-hearted men of deep feeling veils, like the outer one,
all its suns, except the warmest, under the sheen of a void blue; but
the unclean heaven of others full of wit and logic is bedizened with
_mock-suns_, bows, northern lights, clouds, and redness.
The second, better reason why he scorned the honor of opposition was
his heart, which contained in itself more than the head could throw
light upon. Certain views cannot be detached so easily as wall-pictures
in Italy, and transferred from one head into another. The _light_
which another can give thee _shows_, but _constructs_ not, the
house-furniture of thy interior, and what the light really _creates_
with some is meteorological appearance, optical illusion, but no
substance.[166]--Hence all turns not upon the showing and seeing of a
truth, i. e. of an object, but upon the effects which it works through
thy whole inner being. For how is it that there are men who, as
Socrates did Aristides, make us better merely by our being with
them?--How do great authors bring it about, that their invisible
spirit in their works seizes and holds us fast, without our being
able to quote the words and passages whereby they do it, as a thickly
leaved forest always murmurs, though not a single branch stirs?--Why
did Emanuel overmaster his beloved Horion--more than by broad
thesis-formulas, _rationes decidendi_ and _sententiæ magistrales_--merely
by the transfiguration in his countenance, by the low echo-tone of his
voice, by the radiance of his look, and by the devotion in his breast,
when he spoke solemnly truths which were old to speech and new to the
heart, like the following?--
Man goes, like the earth, from _west_ to _east_; but it seems to him as
if he went, with it, from east to west, from life to the grave.
What is highest and noblest in man conceals itself, and is without use
for the practical world, (as the highest mountains bear no herbage,)
and out of the chain of fine _thoughts_ only some members can be
detached as actions.[167]
Our aimless activity, our clutchings at the air, must appear to higher
beings like the clutching of dying men at the bed-clothes.
The spirit awakes and will awake when the light of the senses goes out,
just as sleepers awake when the night-light is extinguished.
* * * * *
Why did these thoughts linger like things of awe in the soul?--Because
Horion felt something higher than language, which is invented only for
every-day sensations, can ever represent; because, even in his
childhood, he hated systems which thrust out of sight all that is
inexplicable; and because the human spirit feels itself as much
oppressed in the explicable and finite as it is in a mine, or in the
thought of the heavenly space overhead being somewhere or other boarded
up.
How should he have had the heart or the occasion on such a day to ask
Emanuel about his dying-day, or about Clotilda? Victor had that poetry
of fellow-feeling which easily puts itself into the place of the most
unlike persons, of women and philosophers. In the evening Dahore went
to the abbey to teach astronomy, his most beloved science. During the
astronomical school-hour the open face of Julius became an open heaven;
he told his Victor everything, as if he were a second father. Now he
related to him frankly that the year before an angel had again and
again come to him, who grasped his hand, gave him flowers, spoke to him
kindly, and at last vanished from him into heaven, but had left him a
letter, which he was permitted to have read to him a year after, at
Whitsuntide, by Clotilda,--yes, and that this good angel had yesterday
flown by him with a kiss. Victor smiled with delight, but concealed his
conjecture that _he_ looked upon the angel to be a shy, loving maiden
from the boarding-school.--"But yesterday," said Victor, "I only was
the angel that kissed thee _thus_!" and repeated it. Julius knew
no fairer gift to make to those he loved than the picture of his
father,--the portraiture of his exalted love, which forgot no human
being, because it was based, not upon the superiorities, but upon the
necessities, of men,--further, of his indulgence, of his
disinterestedness, since a long virtue spared him the battle against
his heart, and now he did nothing but what he wished to, and since the
next world, hanging low down before him, preached a peculiar
independence upon necessities. Five hundred thousand fixed stars of the
first magnitude, according to Lambert, hardly give a light equal to
that of the nearer full moon,--and so the present always outshines our
inner world; but soar nearer to the fixed star of the next world, then
does it grow to a sun, which transforms the moon of time and of the
present into a petty nebula.--As to this Emanuel, all Maienthalers
loved him (even the Parson, although he was a non-Catholic,
non-Lutheran, and non-Calvinist); and he loved to be dependent on
something, on others' love.[168]--During this description Victor
yearned for him again with as much emotion as if they had been
separated a year; accordingly, in the flush of evening he laid himself
down under the birch-leaves opposite the school, in order immediately,
with ardent arms, to take him prisoner.
And as Victor lifted his soul on the tall, white columns of the park
planned by his Lordship, on the sublime sculpture which wrote out a
great thought that looked like a tempest, and just as he had carried a
bee that had dropped down, his wings being glued up with honey, to the
beehive sill,--just then Dahore, with a friendly manner, came up. The
latter entered, himself,--for Victor would have held the covert
starting of a subject as a sin,--on that of Clotilda, and said this
used to be her favorite spot, and the resting-bench of her quiet soul.
The place was not grand, but, what is more, it was opposite to
something grand (even physical greatness, e. g. a mountain, needs
distance as a pedestal); it lay in the deepest part of the dell,
encircled with Emanuel's flower-chains, which he often laid out
without enclosure, because all Maienthalers respected his little
joys,--breathed upon by great clover-fields,--overspread by the moon,
which in spring, only after reaching the mountain-top, beamed down this
deep valley with a mournful medley of birch-shadows, water-glistenings,
and bright spots,--and, finally, adorned with a grassy bench, which I
should not have mentioned had it not been planted at both ends with
great, drooping flowers, which, with a tender feeling, no one crushed
who sat down between them. How was Victor surprised or enraptured when
Emanuel asked about this Clotilda! Like jewels of dew, like tears of
joy, all the words of his teacher fell into his languishing heart,
because they were eulogies upon her tender soul, which leads its own
tears only into those of _others_, and hides them before dry hearts;
upon her fine ambition, which men's criticism misconstrues into
_coldness_ and women's into _pride_; and on her warmth of love, which
one would not have looked for in a heart like hers, fast closed as a
bud, which now confounds inanimate with animated nature, in order by
the former to learn to love the latter. It touched Victor even to tears
when Emanuel so warmly praised his pupil, now withdrawn from this Eden;
and when he actually went on to beg, in all simplicity, that he would
be the friend of _his_ friend, and now especially because he was going
to die, and because she would never come back again,--for she had been
here the last time merely for the purpose--on Whitsuntide, where her
parents could not smile at it--of publicly taking the sacrament with
the boarding-school girls,--that he would now take _his_ place towards
this starward-soaring eye, this heart aspiring to eternity,--then could
he have fallen at the feet of his friend and _his_ maiden friend for
emotion and love.... From such lips praise bestowed upon its object
always gives to love an extraordinary growth, because that sentiment
always seems a pretext,[169] and ripens at once, so soon as it has
found it.
If thy heart, my friend, does not beat quickly and intensely enough for
another's,--although, in my opinion, it already pulsates at the
fever-point, namely, a hundred and eleven times in a minute,--then just
go, in order to transform thy cold fever into a warm one, thy quartan
ague into a quotidian, to other particularly respected people, and
let them praise her, the good soul, or only name her often before
thee,--mortally sick, and provided with thy good hundred and forty
pulsations to the minute, thou wilt go thy way, and have the desired
fever.
The innocent Emanuel, who did not guess Victor's warmth, thought he
must do still more by way of giving him the sevenfold consecration as
priest of friendship for Clotilda, and gave him a--letter from her.
_Thou_ couldst do it, East Indian, since thou art here a child that has
been made into an angel in the _limbus infantum_ (the children's
heaven), since thou hast no mysteries, excepting the mystery of the
three children (hence his Lordship did not make thee the reader of his
letters), and since thou dost not at all dream that the giving away of
another's letter is anything wrong. Still thy scholar should not have
read it.
But he did read it. He cannot defend himself by anything except by my
reader, who here holds in his hand this very same letter of another who
never wrote it for him, and nevertheless reads it through word for word
in his chair. I, for my part, read nothing, but only copy off what the
dog brings me.--It is a beautiful coincidence that this letter should
have been written by her on that very same raining, melodious night of
the garden-feast when he wrote his first to Emanuel.
"St. Luna, May 4, 179*.
"You will not, perhaps, expect any excuse from me, revered teacher,
that, when I have hardly left Maienthal, I come back in the form of a
letter. In fact, I meant to write it even while on the road, then the
second day, and finally yesterday. This Maienthal will spoil for me
many other valleys; all music will sound to me like an Alpine horn,
making me sad, and bringing to my heart the remembrance of the Alpine
life under the weeping-birch tree.
"In this mood I should not have been able to deny my heart the pleasure
of opening itself and pouring itself out before yours in the warmest
thanks for the most beautiful and instructive days of my life, had I
not formed the resolve after some days to be in Maienthal again; after
my second return home, my heart must have its will, and way.
"In our house I found nothing changed,[170] nor anything in our
neighbor's; and I found in all souls the same old love with which we
had parted from each other,--only my Agatha, to be sure, is merry, but
yet less so than she used to be. The only change in Herr Eymann's house
is a guest whom every one calls by a different name,--Victor, Horion,
Sebastian, young Lord, Doctor. This last name he fully deserves by his
first action and first joy in St. Luna, which was the healing of the
blind Lord Horion. What a piece of happiness for the saved and for his
saviour!--May this youth one day only pass through your Eden, and meet
with your good Julius, so as to repeat upon him the beautiful art--Oh!
as often as I think upon it, that the male sex is blest with the means
of the greatest, godlike benefactions,--that they, like a god, can
distribute eyes, life, justice, science,--whereas my sex must confine
its heart, so yearning to do good, to lesser services,--to the drying
away of a tear for another, to the concealing of its own, to the
exercise of a secret patience with happy and unhappy;--then the wish
rises, O that that sex which has the highest benefits in its hands
would vouchsafe to us the greatest,--that of imitating itself, and
getting into our hands good things which should bless us by our
distribution of them!---At present, a woman can have nothing in her
soul to make her great, except only wishes.
"I have just come in out of the open air from a little garden-feast at
my Agatha's; and never is any fair bit of deep-blue sky exactly right
to me, if it does not stand over your weeping-birch, where your eye
counts up all its treasures and suns, and shows my heart all the tokens
of Infinite Power and Love. To-day, in the garden, I thought with
almost too sad a longing on your Maienthal; Herr Sebastian reminded me
of it still oftener, because he seems to have had a teacher who
resembled mine.[171] He talked very well to-day, and seemed to be made
up of two halves,--a British and a French. Some of his fine
observations have not gone from me,--e. g., 'Sorrows are like
thunder-clouds: in the distance they look black, over our heads hardly
gray.--As sad dreams betoken a glad future, so may it be with the
so-often-tormenting dream of life when it is over.--All our strong
feelings, like ghosts, hold sway only up to a certain hour; and if a
man would always say to himself, This passion, this grief, this
rapture, will in three days certainly be gone from this soul,--then
would he become more and more tranquil and composed.' I report all this
to you so exactly, in order, as it were, to punish myself for a too
hasty judgment which I passed some days since (though within myself) on
his propensity to satire.--Satire, also, seems to be merely for the
stronger sex; I have never yet found one of my own who had found in the
works of Swift or Cervantes or Tristram anything to her taste.--
"_Two days later_.--I and my letter are still here; but to-day it
starts four days in advance of me. I cannot help thinking, This last
time every flower in Maienthal, and every word my best teacher says to
me, will give me still greater and deeper joy than ever, because I
journey thither right from the turmoil of visiting, and with such a
melancholy heart. The morning after that lovely night of the
church-going festival I sat alone in an arbor near the great pond, and
made myself sadder with all that I saw and thought; for during that
whole morning, by reason of a dream I had had, my faded friend[172]
stood before my soul,--her grave lay transparent above her, and I looked
down through it, and saw that lily of heaven lying within there pale and
still,--I reflected, indeed, as the gardener buried flowers with their
pots in the earth, that the body in which we are planted must, in like
manner, go down into the earth for future blooming, but, nevertheless,
I could no longer control my tears.--In vain did I look upon the
sparkling spring, which draws every day new colors, new insects, new
flowers out of the earth,--I only grew sadder, since it rejuvenates
everything, but not man.[173]--And when I saw Herr von Schleunes with a
frog-bow approaching the pond, I was obliged, as he could see my eyes
at a great distance as he passed by, to make believe asleep, in order
not to betray them.... But before my dearest teacher I would have
opened them as now, because he forgives me my weaknesses.
"CLOTILDA v. L. B."
Victor had kept his left hand, with which he held the letter, too near
to his heart, and his arm and letter began to tremble with the thumping
heart, and he could hardly read and comprehend it for emotion. "Such a
teacher! such a pupil!"--beyond that his looks could say nothing more.
There was a struggle within him whether he should tell his friend his
love for Clotilda. In _favor_ of the confession was Emanuel's request
to seek her society,--that eye of his beholding, as if out of fixed
stars, all trifles of earth,--Victor's grateful desire to repay one
secret with another, and, most of all, oh! this love for his teacher,
this love of his teacher for him.... And this, too, conquered, however
much there was otherwise to be said _per contra_. For if Victor's whole
nature glowed in the fire of friendship, so did his heart mount higher
and higher, and burn to lay itself open,--he still wrestled with it,
and still it was silent,--it loved boundlessly,--it lifted itself up as
if by an invisible power,--at last it burst asunder,--his bosom opened
wide as before God,--and now, beloved, look in, but forgive him all!
He was still in this inward conflict, when the moon, which had gone up
behind their backs, projected their two shadowy knee-pieces before
them.--He was reminded, by Emanuel's outstretched shadow, of a passage
in his letter,[174] and of his sickly life and early passing away....
This clove open his inner being; he gently turned his Emanuel round
toward the moon, now pouring down its radiance, and told him and showed
him everything,--not merely his love, however, but his whole history,
his whole soul, all his faults, all his follies,--everything; he was,
at this moment, as eloquent as an angel, and full as great; his heart
undulated in the melting glow of love; and the more he said, the more
he wanted to have to say.
No sublimer and more blessed hour strikes on this earth than that in
which a man erects himself, exalted by virtue, softened by love, and
despises all dangers, and shows a friend how it is with his heart. This
trembling, this dissolving, this exaltation, is more precious than the
itching of vanity to disguise itself in idle refinings. But perfect
sincerity comports only with virtue. Let the man in whom suspicion and
darkness dwell by all means apply to his bosom night-screws and
night-bolts,--let the bad man spare us his opening of coffins,--and
whoso has no heaven's door about him to open, let him keep the
hell-gate shut!
Emanuel felt the divine or motherly joy which a friend experiences at
the virtue and improvement of a friend, and forgot in his joy the
different occasions of it.
Reluctantly do I tear myself away for a night from this virtuous pair.
May I get many more days of Maienthal to paint, and may Victor spend
there many days more!
15. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Parting.
Ah, he goes this very day! The emotions and conversations which we have
described had shattered too severely the tender casing which enclosed,
as a tulip does the bee, Emanuel's fair spirit; he rose pale and
languid; and the blind one was the happiest, who saw neither this
paleness nor the white handkerchief which he, during the night, instead
of staining with tears, had stained with blood. He himself had still
the pale evening red of yesterday's joy on his face; but this very
indifference to the gradual extinguishing of his days, this growing
feebleness and faintness of tone in his conversation, caused Victor to
turn away his eyes from him whenever they had for some time rested upon
him. Emanuel looked down calm as an eternal sun on the autumn of his
bodily life; nay, the more the sand fell from his life's hourglass, so
much the more clearly did he look through the empty glass. And yet the
earth was to him a beloved place, a fair meadow for our earliest plays
of childhood; and he still hung upon this mother of our first life with
the love wherewith the bride spends the evening full of childish
remembrances on the bosom of her beloved mother, before on the morrow
she goes to meet the bridegroom of her heart.
Victor reproached himself with every drop of blood shed by Emanuel, and
resolved to go to-day, because this Psyche, with her great wings, could
no longer stir herself in her web without tearing it. In Emanuel's eyes
there shone an inexpressible love for his sympathizing scholar. He
began of himself to speak of his dying-day, in order to comfort him,
and represented to him that he could not go hence till after a year. He
based his enthusiastic prediction on two grounds;--first, that most of
his male relatives had died on the selfsame day and in the selfsame
climacteric[175] of life; secondly, that several consumptive patients
before him had read in their diseased breast, as in a magic mirror,
their last day. Victor disputed him; he showed that the foretelling of
one's last appearance, as if the hectic man could easily feel
beforehand, from the regular and gradual failing of the vital energy,
the last step or freezing-point, was false, because feelings of the
future in the present were contradictions (_in adjecto_), and because
in the midst of life we could as little have a presentiment of the
arrival of death as in our waking hours we can (notwithstanding a
parallel gradation of steps in this case also) that of sleep. Victor
represented all this to him; and yet he did not fairly believe it
himself; he was overmastered by the lofty man who could announce his
entrance into the shadow of death as calmly and confidently as an
entrance of the moon into the shadow of the earth.... We will forgive
the sick man, and not hold ourselves wiser than he is, because he is
more enthusiastic than we.--Victor was most consoled by Emanuel's
notion that his deceased father would appear to him for the first time
just before his death.
Victor lingered, and tried not to linger; forbade, as physician,
Emanuel's talking, in order to make the excuse to himself of a harmless
postponement, and became more and more troubled, for the very reason
that he cared little to speak himself.--How canst thou, good Victor,
this very day hurry away from him, from this angel, who will perhaps
disappear over the next grave?--It must be a sore thing for thee, since
it is already so hard to quit a Maienthal full of blossoms, a blind one
full of soft tones; painful is here the last pressure of hands, Victor,
and sweet every delay!
He resolved to take leave at night, because a parting in the morning
begets too long a sadness, and the place in the heart from which the
beloved object was torn away continues bleeding all day long. Emanuel
would of course, at evening, have betaken himself to the seminary, as
he did yesterday; then would Victor, before the blind one, whom he
would beg for the saddest melody in the world, be able to let his full
eyelids, with which he always had to go out in order to relieve the
anguish, stream down to his heart's content.
When at evening he had eaten his last meal, and the evening-bell began,
his heart felt as if the breast had been lifted away from it, and
needle-points of ice were blown upon it.[176] Full of love, he clasped
the blind youth, whom he was not permitted to recognize as the playmate
of his childhood, and who with his tones had given more raptures than
he had in this night of his blindness received in return; and he let
tears have their way, whose twofold, perhaps threefold, source Emanuel
did not guess; for the sight of these eyes, which were nevermore to be
opened, awoke in him now, since Clotilda's wish for their healing, much
more sorrow. Emanuel he still begged, with a voice that hurried away
over the incidental meaning, to accompany him a short distance, till
Maienthal should be out of sight.
Out in the darkling and still country, all his sorrows lingered in his
breast beside their sighs. "When the moon glimmers in upon this valley
of blossoms," thought he, "I shall have left it for a long time." Only
the altar-lights, the stars, burned in the great temple. He proposed to
himself to part with his teacher on the mountain where their union had
taken place; but he went up by circuitous ways,--Emanuel gladly
following whithersoever he led,--in order during the circuit to
overmaster his taciturnity and his tears.
But they arrived at the foot of the weeping-birch, and grief still held
possession of his eye and his voice. "Ah!" thought he, "how great and
glad was the first night here, and how painful is this!" They reclined
on the earth beside each other on the grassy bank, solitary, silent,
sad, before the darkly glimmering universe. Victor could hear the
labored breathing of the diseased breast, and the future grave on this
mountain seemed to open at his side. Oh! if it is bitter to stand by
the bed wherein a loved and fading countenance lies with the hues of
death, far more bitter is it, in the midst of the scenes of health,
behind the erect form of the dear one, to hear the grave-digger Death
softly at his work, and to think, as often as the loved face looks
joyful, "Ah, be still more joyful! in a short time he will have gnawed
round the roots of thy life, and thou wilt have passed away with thy
joys and with mine!"--But ah! there is indeed no friend, man or woman,
with whom we should not be obliged to think the same!--
He knew not why Dahore was so long silent.--He foresaw not that the
moon would illumine the mountain sooner than the valley. The moon, that
Pharos on the coast of the second world, now encircled men with pale
fields, taken from dreams, with wan, gleaming meadows born of a
super-terrestrial perspective, and the Alps and woods it resolved into
immovable mists; _above_ the hemisphere of earth stood deep the
Lethe-flood of slumber, _below_ the green crust stood the dead sea, and
two loving men lived between the wide domains of sleep and death.... At
this moment Victor thought to himself, indeed, still more keenly,
"Here, beside this birch-tree, under this cold sod, will _his_
crumbling breast be forever hidden, and his heart will bleed no more;
but ah! it will beat no more." He thought, indeed, upon gloomy
resemblances, as the _immovable_ stars appeared to go _up_ and _down_,
merely because the playing _earth_ turned itself about them, now
_showing_ and now _hiding_ them; he turned, indeed, his melancholy
glance away from the _ignes fatui_, that, gliding over valleys, danced
only on the solemn darkness and on the graves, and which described
round a solitary powder-house their deceptive circles.----
But still he was silent, and thought, "Ah, well! we have each other
yet."
But then it was too much for his bleeding heart when the flute-wails of
the blind one stole out from the solitary house into the night, and
passed over the mountain and over the future grave.--Then were voices
given to the sighs and death-bells to the future, and his sadness grew
too oppressive, as he thought, amidst the flute-murmurs, how this
unique, this irreplaceable man, who cherished so much love for him in
his great heart, was going hence never to reappear.--Ah! and when,
besides, just at this moment, Emanuel, who had been lying beside him
silently lost in gazing on the heavens and like a departed one, changed
his position on account of his painful and oppressed breathing, but
with a countenance whose serenity was undisturbed by the pains in his
breast, then a cold hand glided into Victor's swollen heart and turned
itself about therein, and his blood curdled on it, and he said, without
the power of looking upon him, in faint, supplicating, broken accents,
"Do not die in a year, my dear Emanuel,--do not wish to die!"
The genius of night had stood till now, invisibly, before Emanuel, and
poured high raptures into his bosom, but no passions; and he said: "We
are not alone,--my soul feels the passing by of its kindred, and lifts
itself up,--_under_ the earth is sleep, _above_ the earth is dream, but
between sleep and dream I see luminous eyes move along like stars,--a
cool breath comes from the sea of eternity over the glowing earth,--my
heart mounts up, and will break away from life,--all around me is
as great as if God passed through the night.--Spirits! grasp my
spirit,--it climbs to your embrace,--and bear it up yonder...."
Victor turned round and looked imploringly into the beautiful, joyous,
tearless countenance: "Thou _wilt_ die?"
Emanuel's ecstasy soared above life: "The dark streak in the next
world is only a meadow of flowers,[177]--suns shine to light us
onward,--flying heavens come to meet us with spring-breezes. With only
empty graves the earth flies round the sun; for her dead stand remote
on brighter suns."--
"Emanuel?" said Victor, in a questioning tone, weeping aloud, and with
a voice of the most fervent yearning,--and the flute-notes sank
sorrowfully into the broad night,--"Emanuel?"
Emanuel, returning to himself, looked on him, and said, calmly: "Yes,
my beloved!--I can no more accustom myself to the earth; the water-drop
of life has become flat and shallow,--I can no longer move round
therein,--and my heart yearns to be among the great men who have left
this drop behind them.--O beloved, listen, I pray,"--and here he
pressed to soreness the heart of his Victor,--"and hear this heavy
breath going. See, I pray, this shattered body, this thick casing,--how
it wraps round my spirit, and obstructs its passage.--
"See, here my spirit and thine cleave frozen to the ice-cake, and
yonder the night opens all her heavens, reposing one behind the other;
yonder in the blue, glimmering abyss dwells all the greatness which has
disrobed itself on the earth, all the truth that we guess, all the
goodness that we love.--
"See, how still is all up there in immensity,--how softly the worlds
move, how silently the suns glow! The great Eternal reposes as a
fountain, with his overflowing, infinite love, in the midst of them,
refreshing and tranquillizing all; and around God lies no grave."
Here Emanuel, as if raised by an infinite blessedness, stood up and
looked lovingly toward Arcturus, who still hung under the zenith of
heaven, and said, directing his words toward the broad deep of
brilliancy: "Ah, how inexpressibly do I yearn to come up to you! Ah,
break in pieces, old heart, and hold me not so long in these bonds!"
"Die, then, great soul," said Victor, "and take thy way up yonder; but
break with thy death my little heart also, and keep by thee the poor
one who cannot forsake thee nor do without thee."
The flute had ceased; the two friends had sunk into each other's arms
to end their farewell. "Dear, beloved, never-to-be-forgotten one," said
Emanuel, "thou movest me too deeply; but when, a year hence, I go up
from this mountain, then shalt thou stand by me, and see how man is
released from his bonds. Thy tears will be my last earthly pangs; but I
shall say, what I say now, We part by night, but we meet again by day."
And so he went.
Victor had gently disengaged himself from the childlike lips,--he
sought not to follow him on his night-track,--slowly he went along by
one vast sleep.--Often he turned round and followed with eyes full of
falling tears the falling stars over Maienthal; and at four of the
morning he arrived with a heavenly soul at St. Luna, and entered the
garden full of old scenes, and laid down in the familiar arbor his
glowing head and his subdued heart in the dew of the morning for a
cooling repose.
O rest thou, rest thou!--ah! sleep only, either on the earth or under
the earth, can still the ever-agitated bosom of man....[178]
16. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Potato-form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The Thistle
of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.
One would certainly want to sleep in one's clothes, like old Fritz, so
soon as ever one came to understand that in his shirt he is beset and
attacked, as Victor and I sometimes are, by the vampires of midnight
melancholy. They stay away when one sits up and has all his clothes on;
especially do boots and hat retain for us the feeling of day in the
greatest degree.--
A warm hand lifted up Victor's bedewed head from the
sleeping-board,[179] and directed it towards the whole surging flood of
morning-light. His eyes opened (as always) with indescribable mildness,
and without night-clouds, before Agatha, and beamed on her with full
radiance. But she hurried him away with his radiance out of the leafy
bedchamber; for he must look himself up a dressing-comb and a
morning-blessing, and, secondly, the table-couch was to be a tea-table
for Clotilda, who liked to take _warm_ drinks in _cool_ places.
--And so he stands out there between parsonage and palace in
mid-morning. All seemed to him to have been just built and painted
during his journey; for all that dwelt therein seemed to have changed
and made him melancholy. "The parents in there," he said to himself,
"have no son, my friend has no sweetheart, and I--no tranquil heart."
And now, when at last he entered the house, and became once more a
bright triumphal arch of the loving family-circle,--when he was
compelled to contemplate with sympathetic and yet enlightened eyes the
tender illusions of the parents, the groundless hopes of his friend,
and the coming up of stormy days,--then stood one fixed tear for the
future in his eye; and it grew not less when his adoptive mother would
justify it by tender glances.... Partly, however, this veil was wafted
over his soul merely from the preceding night, whose glimmering scenes
were separated from him only by a short interval of sleep; for a night
spent in the watches of emotion always ends with a melancholy forenoon.
The Chaplain was just making butter-vignettes; I mean, he was cutting,
with no other etching-tool than a penknife, and into no other
copperplate except potatoes, printers' tail-pieces and quadrats, which
were to be stamped on the July butter by way of ornament. One might
have supposed that Victor would have helped himself out greatly by
having wit enough to remark that the _old printed things_ were, to be
sure, quite worthy of long books upon them, and long universal German
literary reviews of the books, but of no human thought, and were ten
times more unenjoyable than these _newest_ butter-_incunabula_;[180]
for, if there could be anything wretcheder than the world's history
(i. e. the history of rulers), whose contents consisted of wars, as the
theatre-journal of _other_ puppets does of cudgellings, it could only
be the history of _littérateurs_ and printers.[181] This, too, must
have stood him in stead,--that he was, finally, philosophical, and
demanded that man should be called neither a _laughing_ nor a
_reasoning_, but a _prinking_ animal; to which remark the Chaplain's
lady added nothing, except the application of it to her daughters.
But in men of his sort, sadness, satire, and philosophy have place
beside each other. To the potato-medal-coiner and the Chaplainess, who
reckoned all women on earth among her daughters, and pronounced similar
castigatory sermons against them all, he described his journey with as
many satires and rasures as were needful for both parties; but when he
heard the wishes of the family expressed that his Lordship might have a
happy journey back with the beloved son of the Prince, and the
intelligence that the Regency-Counsellor had already everything packed
up to start for the city any hour that he might choose, then had Victor
nothing to do but to take the secretive tear-ducts in his eye-sockets
out of the way.
But whither? Into the garden! That was not well-considered. Flamin
followed, and they arrived together at the embowered closet in the
presence of the tea-drinkers. Never did its branches overshadow a more
embarrassed face, softer eyes, fuller looks, and livelier or lovelier
dreams than Victor carried with him beneath them. He thought of
Clotilda as now a wholly new being, and thought, therefore,--as he knew
not whether she loved him,--very stupidly. Man, when he has climbed
over the mountain, always regards the coming hill as nothing; Flamin
had been his mountain, and Clotilda was his hill.--In all the shallows
of conversation, where one is already half stranding or sinking, there
is no grander ship's-pump than a story which one has to tell. Give me
embarrassment, and the largest circle, and only _one_ disaster,--that
is, the anecdote of it, which no one knows but myself,--and I will soon
save myself. Victor therefore brought out his, life-preserver,--that
is, his log-book,--from which he made for the bower a practical
extract. I confess, a newspaper-writer might have falsified more, might
have been guilty of more sins of _commission_, but hardly of more sins
of _omission_.
He gave himself, I fancy, a lift again with the Chaplainess, and
injured himself unquestionably with Clotilda,--however much, out of
good-will towards his hearers, and too strong a hatred of the court, he
offended against Clotilda's satire-embargo in her letter,--when,
without reflecting, too, that maidens love only the jest, not the
jesters, he represented the benefit-drama of the Princess, not on the
sublime side, as I did, but on the comic side. Clotilda smiled, and
Agatha laughed.
But when he named the name of Emanuel, and his house, and his mountain,
then did friendship and memory diffuse over the fairest eye above which
an eyebrow-arch, drawn by a line of beauty, ever yet flowed, a soft
glimmer which wanted, every moment, to grow to a tear of joy. But it
had to become one of another nature, when, in answer to the question
about his health which Clotilda hopefully put to him as an adept in
science, Victor was compelled to give the (faintly paraphrased) history
of his nocturnal bleeding. He could not conceal the pang of sympathy,
nor could Clotilda conquer it. O ye two good souls! what sore wounds
will your hearts yet receive from your great friend!
Whither could she now turn her loving and sorrowing eye, but to her
good brother Flamin, towards whom her demeanor, in consequence of the
double constraint which her silence and his interpretations imposed
upon her, had been hitherto so indescribably mild?--As, now, Victor saw
all this with such wholly different eyes,--as he stood before his poor
friend, who with his present happiness was perhaps accumulating the
poisonous nourishment of his future jealousy, and gazed openly and
fixedly into the firm countenance which some time bitter days might
rend with agony,--and as, generally, _past_ or _future_ sorrows of
another took a stronger hold of him than _present_ ones, because fancy
had him more in its power than the senses,--in this state of things, he
could not for a moment assert the mastery over his eyes, but they bent
their look, encircled with compassionate tears, tenderly on his friend.
Clotilda was embarrassed about the resting-place of his look; so was he
too, because man is less ashamed of the most vehement signs of hatred
than of the smallest signs of love. Clotilda understood not the
coquettish double art of throwing others into embarrassment or drawing
them out of it; and the good Agatha always confounded the latter with
the former.... "Ask him what ails him, brother!" said Agatha to
Flamin....
The latter led him out with like good intention behind the nearest
gooseberry-bushes, and asked him in his firm way, which always held an
assertion as a question,--
"Something has happened to thee?"
"Just come this way!" said Victor, and pulled him along behind some
higher Spanish walls[182] of foliage.
"Nothing has happened to me," he began, at last, with brimming
eye-sockets and smiling features,--"nothing more than that I have been
a fool for some twenty-six years" (that was his age). "I know thou art
unfortunately a jurist, and perhaps a worse oculist than I myself am,
and hast, perhaps, read very little in Herr Janin.[183]--Am I right?"
Flamin's shaking of his head meant something more than No.
"Very naturally; but if thou hadst, thou couldst have it from himself,
or from the translation by Selle, very finely shown, that not merely
the lachrymal gland secretes our tear-drops, but also the crystalline
body,[184] the Meibomian[185] glands, the lachrymal caruncle,[186]
and--our afflicted heart, I add to the rest.--Nevertheless, of these
aqueous globules, which are made for the sorrows of poor, poor mortals,
not more than (if things go rightly) four ounces are filtered in
twenty-four hours.... But, my dear one, the fact is just this,--that
things do not go rightly, especially with me; and it vexes me to-day,
not that thou hast never peeped into Herr Janin, but that thou dost not
observe my confounded, cursed, stupid way."
"What one?"
"Yes, indeed,--what one? but I mean this of to-day,--namely, that
my eyes--thou mayst boldly ascribe it merely to a too feeble
_tear-siphon_, under which head Petit comprehends all absorbing
tear-ducts--run over, when, e. g., any one does me an injustice, or
when I merely desire anything too strongly, or imagine to myself an
approaching pleasure, or only, in fact, a strong sensation, or human
life, or the mere weeping itself." ...
His good-natured eye stood full of water as he said it, and justified
all.
"Dear Flamin, I wish I had been a lady, or a Moravian, or a
player;--truly, if I wanted to make the spectators believe I was going
about it (namely, weeping), it would be actually a fact, too, on the
spot."--
And here he fell softly and fondly, with tears which had an excuse for
flowing, upon the beloved breast.... But for the viper-cure and
iron-cure of his manliness he needed nothing but a "Hm!" and a shrug of
the whole body; thereupon the youths went back as men to the arbor.
There was nothing left there: the girls had stolen away to the meadows,
where nothing was to be avoided, except high grass and bedewed shadows.
The empty arbor was the best absorbing tear-siphon for his eyes; nay, I
gather from reports of the epistolary Spitz that he was vexed. As the
sister came back by-and-by alone, his companion was vexed too. In fact,
if somehow or other my hero--which would be a misfortune for me and
him--should in time fall in love with Clotilda, then will the heroine
make us both warm enough,--him in acting, me in copying,--for the very
reason that she herself will _not_ be warm, because she has neither
superfluous warmth nor superfluous coldness, but always the alternating
temperature which changes with the subject of conversation, but not
with the speaker; because she takes away from a tenderly disposed
fellow-man all pleasure in praising her, as she pays out no tithe
thereof, or at least in offending her, as she issues no letters of
indulgence; and because one really, in his agony, assumes at last that
one can commit no other sins against her except such as are sins
against the Holy Ghost. Jean Paul, who has been in such cases, and has
often stood for whole years in one spot before such mountain-fortresses
with his storming-ladders and labarums and trumpeters, and, instead of
the garrisons, taken _himself_ off by an honorable retreat,--this Paul,
I say, can form a conception of what an amount of parchment, time, and
printer's ink may have to be used up in the case of Sebastian _contra_
Clotilda, before we get things even to a _war-footing_. In fact, with a
perfectly _rational_ woman a man never feels himself quite well; and
only with a merely fine, fanciful, ardent, capricious one is he truly
at home. One like Clotilda can make the best man, from mere distress
and respect, frosty, stupid, and enraptured; and in most cases there
comes in the additional misfortune, that the poor, worn-out, fond fool,
by whom such an earthly angel absolutely will not let herself be
worshipped, as the Apocalyptic one would not by the disciple John, can
still seldom muster courage to say to the angel,--somewhat as one might
to an angel of an opposite nature with the kingdoms of the world,
demanding to be worshipped,--"Take thyself out of my sight!" Paul
always in such cases takes himself away.----
Victor did not do this; he absolutely now could not get away from the
house, i. e. from the village. The summer days seemed to him to rest in
St. Luna, softly breathing, fragrant, blissful; and he was going to be
cast out of this softly straying gondola into the slave-ship of the
Court,--out of the milk-house of the Parsonage into the princely
arsenic-house,--out of the _kindergarten_ of household love into the
ice-field of court love. That was a sore thing to him here in the
arbor,--and so sweet a thing in Tostato's shop!--When man's wishes and
situations exchange places, he accuses the situations, not the wishes.
He could laugh at himself for it, he said, but he had a hundred reasons
for lingering in St. Luna from one day to another: he was so much
disgusted now with his intention of pleasing a man (the Prince) from
any other motive than love; it was still more improbable that he should
himself please than that he should be pleased; he would rather humor
his own whims than those of crownéd heads, and he knew for certain that
in the first month he should tell the Minister von Schleunes satirical
things to his very face, and in the second even the Prince; and, in
fact, now in midsummer he should just be fit to act the complete
court-knave, whereas in winter, &c.
Beside these hundred reasons, he had still weaker ones which he did not
at all mention,--for instance, some such as these: He would gladly be
about Clotilda, because he must necessarily, as it were, to justify his
conduct,--but which, then, my dear, thy past or thy future?--disclose
to her his knowledge about her consanguinity to his friend. To this
disclosure there was wanting, what in Paris is dearest, _place_,--and
then, too, the exordium. Clotilda was nowhere to be met alone.
Connoisseurs say that every secret one tells to one of the fair sex is
a sticking-plaster which attaches him to her, and often begets a second
secret: was it for some such reason that Victor was so eager to
contrive a way of showing to Clotilda his acquaintance with her
sisterly relation?--
He stayed day after day, as, besides, the butter-week[187] of the
marriage must go by first. He had already marriage-medals in his
pocket. But he never could see Clotilda except a second at a time;
and, according to Bonnet, one needs half a second for a clear
idea,--according to Hooke, a whole one, in fact. Therefore, before he
could form a complete conception of this still goddess, she was always
gone.
At last more serious arrangements were made, not for departure, but for
forming the purpose of it.... The sweetest minutes of a visit are those
which once more postpone its close; the sweetest of all, those in which
one already has cane or fan in hand, and yet does not go. Such minutes
now encircled our Fabius of love; softer eyes said to him, "Hurry not!"
warmer hands drew him back, and the mother's tear asked him, "Wilt thou
rob me of my Flamin so soon as to-morrow?"
"By no means," he answered, and kept his seat. Did not, I ask, the
Chaplainess thrust for his sake her lingual executioner's sword into
its sheath, because there was nothing he so hated as loud or silent
defamations of a sex which, more unhappy than ours, sees itself
maltreated by two sexes at once? For he often took maidens by the hand,
and said: "Woman's faults, particularly _evil_ reports, moodiness, and
sensitiveness, are _knot-holes_, which in the _green_ tree please us
even into the honeymoon[188] as fine marble-veined _circles_, but
which, in the _dry_, in the marriage-furniture, when the plug has
shrunk and fallen out, gape open as ugly holes." Agatha now screwed her
sewing-cushion to his writing-table and kissed him, whether he chose to
look pleasant or sullen; Even the Chaplain sought to sweeten for him,
if not the last days, which he dreamed away at his house, yet at least
the last _nights_, for which purpose he needed nothing but a drum and a
foot. The most fiery nocturnal witch-dances of the mice the Chaplain
interdicted with his heel, that they might not wake up his guest; that
is to say, he kept up against the foot-board of the bed from time to
time a moderate cannonading, which knelled into the ear-trumpets of the
dancers the more in proportion as it startled the ears of humanity.
Against the Euler's knight's-moves of the rats he took the field with
only a mallet, wherewith, breaking in like a day of judgment on their
pleasure-parties and hunting-parties, he merely thumped once or twice
on a drum, extemporized out of the bed-quilt.
Matthieu was invisible, and, as courtiers mimic princes in everything,
was parodying the nuptial days of his prince at least by little nuptial
_hours_ of his own. The powder which issued out of cannons and the
cornucopias of the firework-makers, the _vivat_ which was prayed from
pulpits and shouted from taverns, and the expenses one incurred for all
this, were, I think, so considerable, that the greatest prince need not
have been ashamed to illustrate therewith his marriage and his--ennui.
Coldness has forever a _speaking-trumpet_, and sensitiveness an
_ear-trumpet_. The arrival of an unloved princely corpse or bride is
heard of at the polar circles; on the contrary, when we inferiors fill
our graves or our arms with loved beings, there fall only a few,
unheard tears, disconsolate or blissful.
Flamin pined for the session-table, whose labors were now soon to
begin, and he could not comprehend this delay.... At last, for once,
and with all seriousness, the day of departure was fixed, the 10th of
August; and I am sure Victor would not have been on the 14th still in
St. Luna, had not the Devil on the 8th brought along a Tyrolese.
It is the same fellow who day before yesterday made his entry among us
at Scheerau, with a wax retinue which he had got together, half from
the imperial states and half from among the literati, and with the wax
hands of these twin brothers of man took money from our purse. It is
stupid, that Spitz did not bring me the present dog's-day the day
before yesterday; I could myself have asked the churl, who embossed, in
St. Luna, Victor and the Chaplain in wax, what was the real name of
Victor, and of Eymann, and of St. Luna itself. The result is, that I am
still, with an allowable and biographical curiosity about this
carpenter of men, who surrounds us with awful reflections of our little
being, following on his heels.
Victor must, therefore, again tarry; for he had himself and the
Chaplain baked in wax, in order to give, in the first place, to the
latter, who had a childish fondness for all casts, dolls, and puppets,
and, secondly, to the family, who longed to quarter the waxen
mock-Victor in his vacated chamber, a greater pleasure than to himself.
For he had a horror of these flesh-colored shadows of himself. Even in
childhood, among all ghost-stories, those of people who had seen
themselves crept with the coldest hand over his heart. Often at
evening, before going to bed, he surveyed his trembling body so long,
that at last he detached it from himself, and saw it standing thus
alone beside his self and gesticulating as a strange form; then he
would lay himself down, quaking, with this strange form, in the grave
of sleep, and the darkling soul felt itself like a Hamadryad, grown
over by the pliant fleshy bark. Hence he felt deeply the difference and
the long interval between his self and its bark, when he looked for
some time on another's body, and still more deeply when he contemplated
his own.
He sat opposite the embossing-stool and the embossing-tools, but fixed
his eyes on a book again, so as not to see the corporeal form, in which
he carried himself round, distant and duplicated. The reason why he
nevertheless could endure the reduplication of his face in the glass
can only be, that he regarded the supernumerary in the glass either
merely as a superficial portrait without cubic contents, or as the only
archetype with which we compare other duplicates of our person.... Upon
these points I can never speak, myself, without a certain tremor....
The wax-copy of Victor, to express his majority, was arrayed in a _toga
virilis_, an overcoat which the original had cast off; likewise the
chamber which the living one vacated was cleared out. The Chaplain
proposed to himself to place this cheap edition of Horion in the window
when the better one was gone, in such a manner that all the school
youth, who learned from the chorister manners and _mores_, should doff
their hats to it when they came tearing out of the school-house.
Now at last!--For Mat came. The wrung-out cheeks of the latter, and his
whole body, which had been under the lemon-squeezers of night-feasts,
gave evidence that he did not lie when he said the princely bridegroom
looked even eight times wretcheder, and was prostrate with the gout. He
added in his bitter way, which Victor little liked, that these pale
great people had in fact no blood except the little they cupped from
their subjects or what stuck to their hands, as insects carry no red
blood about with them, save what they have sucked from other creatures.
This reminded Victor of his medical duties to this prince. Either Mat's
wasted form,--for immoral night-life makes features and complexion
still more repulsive than the longest confinement to the sick-bed,--or
the recollection of his Lordship's warnings, or both, made him
quite as odious to our court-physician as the latter through his
court-doctorship had become to him: this secret poison of Matthieu's,
however, manifested itself, not by an abated, but by an increased,
almost ironical courteousness. On the contrary, Mat and Flamin seemed
to be more familiar with one another than ever.
In the forenoon, after shaving, Victor jumped up without washing
himself again, and immediately packed up his boot-jack, and burst the
suspenders of his pantaloons, and bespoke additional hands to discharge
his life-ballast, (on account of his miserable packing,) and then stow
it again. For he always gave over the whole trusteeship of the lumber
of our petty life's furniture to strange hands, and that with such a
contempt for the trumpery and such a recklessness of expenditure,--I
never mean, indeed, to calumniate my hero, but, notwithstanding,
it is proved by Spitz that he never collated the current money of a
gold-piece when he changed it into silver, nor ever beat down in trade
a Jew, Roman, or Moravian,--to such a degree, I say, did he carry this,
that the whole female Hanse in St. Luna cried, "What a fool!" and that
the Chaplainess always in the market-square slipped herself into his
place. But he was incorrigible, because he made the journey of life,
and therefore the luggage of the journey, look so diminutive through
his philosophic eyes, and because nothing made him blush like the least
appearance of self-interest: he ran off from all arrangements,
outriders, and stage-rehearsals, when they appeared on his account; he
was ashamed of every pleasure which was not to be divided, at least
into two bites, one for a fellow-eater; he said, the forehead of a
Hospodar[189] must have assumed the hardness of his crown, for
otherwise such a man could not possibly endure what often, merely on
his behalf, was done by a whole county,--the music, the triumphal
arches, the odes, the cries of joy in prose, and the frightful
cannonades.
He had now nothing more to discharge in St. Luna than a mere flat
civility; for thus much may I well assert without vanity, that
a hero whom I have chosen for mine will have, I trust, sufficient
good-breeding to go to the Chamberlain Le Baut and say, "_Au revoir!_"
Besides, to such state visits he must now accustom himself.
Mat, too, was over there, that image of a Cupid with bristly, plucked,
drooping wings, tossed to the Chamberlain's lady: the latter joked with
him about those vacant looks, which betrayed the intermittent pulse of
his love. Le Baut was playing chess with Mat,--Clotilda sat at her
little work-table full of silk-flowers, in the midst of this noble
trio.... Ye poor daughters! what people have you not often to welcome
and hear through! To Clotilda, however, this family friend was nothing
but a stuffed-out mummy, and she knew not whether he came or went.
Sebastian, as adoptive son of Fortune, as heir of the paternal post of
favorite, was to-day received at the Chamberlain's with uncommon
civility. Verily, if the courtier shuns unfortunates because sympathy
for their sufferings comes over him too heavily, so does he gladly seek
the society of the fortunate, because he loves to participate in their
joy. The Chamberlain, who even continued to bow before one who, in his
fall from a throne, hung midway in the air, naturally bent himself
still lower before one who was in the act of making the opposite
passage.
Victor joined the women, but with an eye that strayed away to the
chess-board, in order, if he should be embarrassed, immediately to have
at hand a pretext for changing his attention or taking his leave. It
was ingenious: for every word which he or the women said was a move at
chess; he was obliged to conceal his coldness toward the Le Baut, that
is, toward the stepmother,--how much did she know that nothing graces a
mother more than a perfect daughter?--and his _warmth_ toward the
stepdaughter. The reader must not ask: "What warmth, then, could the
old stepmother desire?" For in the higher ranks claims are not altered
by blood-relationship or age; merely in the lower is this the case;
hence I always fear that what I address to the daughter may weary the
mother, and I always cast about, and rightly, when she comes, for a
better thread of discourse. Victor easily concealed his _coldness_ by
virtue of humanity, which, with him, so often degenerated into a
good-natured flattery of immoral hopes; and when a woman wanted to have
him fall in love with her, he would say: "I cannot really tell the good
little lamb, 'I would rather not.'" His _warmth_ toward Clotilda he
concealed--badly, not because it was too strong, but precisely because
it was not yet enough so. It is natural: a young man of education can,
if he will, conceal and bury in silence his _reciprocated_ love,
without making a pulpit announcement, but an _unreturned_ love, one
which he himself calls nothing more than mere regard, he lets blaze out
from him without cover. For the rest, I beg the world to sit down and
consider, that my hero has not the Devil in his skin or sixteen years
over his head, but that he cannot possibly feel a love for a person who
hangs a Moses' veil over her sentiments and over her charms. Love
begins and rises, throughout, only on reciprocal love, and with the
lovers' mutual finding-out of each other. He has merely regard, but a
very great, a growing and anxious regard; in short, his regard is that
cold pulsating point in the yolk of the heart--the metaphor is drawn
from an egg--to which the least outward warmth, often after years,
imparts growing life and Cupid's wings.
He now at the work-table investigated Clotilda's warmth with the
pyrometer; but I cannot go beside myself for joy, that he found, on a
scale subdivided into the minutest parts, her warmth to have risen
1/111 of a line. For he is off the track: I would sooner rely on
Lavater's forehead-measurer than on the heart- and warmth-measurer of a
love-seeking man, who confounds his interpretations with his
observations, and accidents with intentions. His pyrometer may,
however, be right; for towards good men one is, when bad ones are by,
(consider only Mat,) warmer than usual.
Let no one blame Herr Le Baut and Frau Le Baut for congratulating my
hero on the good fortune of going to such a court, to see such a
prince,--the greatest in Germany, said _he_,--to such a princess,--the
loveliest in Germany, said _she_. Mat smiled between Yes and No. The
old man went on with his chess, the old woman with her praise. Victor
saw with contempt how little possible it would be, in the case of two
such souls, who held the steps of the throne for a scale of being, and
the glacier of the throne for an Olympus and an Empyræum, and knew not
where, except on this eminence, to find their happiness,--to give them
better ideas of happiness, and worse ones of the eminence.
Nevertheless, he was obliged to confess to Clotilda, who had on her
face more than a No to the _eulogy_, that he negatived the whole of it
as nobly as she. He therefore kneaded praise and blame together,
according to an Horatian mixture, in order to make neither satirical
nor flattering allusions to two dismissed court-people.
"It is painful to me," said he, "that there are only pleasures there,
and no occupations,--mere baskets of confectionery, and not a single
work-bag, not to say no work-table like this one."
"Do you think," asked Clotilda, with striking earnestness, "that all
court-feasts pay for a single court-service?"
"No," said he, "for one ought to be paid for the feasts themselves. I
maintain there is nothing but drudgery there, and no enjoyment: all
their amusements are only the illumination, the interlude, and the
decorations, which please the player, who is thinking of his part, less
than the spectator."
"It is, at all events, good _to have been there_," said the old woman.
"Certainly," said he; "for it is good not always to stay there."
"But there are persons," said Clotilda, "who cannot make themselves
happy there, simply because they do not love to be there."
That was very fine and forbearing, but intelligible only to Victor's
heart.
"I would advise a fine enthusiast" (said he, and made no account, as
usual, of the apparent contradiction between Victor's _life_ and
Victor's _opinions_) "or a fiery poet to stay at home,--the _flights_
of either, instead of _pas_, would be in court-life what an hexameter
is in prose, which the critics cannot bear,--and to the soul with the
softest sensibilities I would say, Be off with them! the _heart_ is
there treated as a superfluous member, as in the six-fingered family in
Anjou the sixth _finger_ is." ...
The old woman shook her head quickly to the left.
"And yet," he continued, "I would take all three for a month to court
and make them unhappy, in order to make them wise."
The Chamberlain's family could not accommodate themselves to Victor's
style so well as my reader, who to my exceeding delight so cleverly
distinguishes humor and the talent of looking at all sides of a thing
from flattery and skepticism. Clotilda had slowly shaken her head at
the last proposition. In fact, all battled to-day _for_ and _against_
him, in that partial tone which women and relatives always assume
towards a stranger, when an hour before they had carried on the same
suit, but with a practical application, with their own kin.
Victor, who had long been fearing: that he should become disconcerted,
went off at last to where he had been so often looking,--to the
chess-table, where they were playing with the greatest desire to--lose.
The Chamberlain,--we all know how it was with him; he wrote nothing but
commendatory letters for the whole world, and the sacramental cup would
have been more to his taste, could he have drunk from it a _toast_ to
some important man's health,--that personage only promoted as well as
he could with the dry chess-statues another's success at the expense of
his own; he was glad to lose, provided only Matthieu won. And then,
too, he resembled those shamefaced souls who love to bestow their
benefits secretly, and he could not find it in his heart to tell his
adversary that he was securing him the victory; he took almost greater
pains to conceal himself as a courtier than to _conquer himself_ as a
Christian. Such a love ought, it would seem, to have been more warmly
requited than by open malice; but Mat had the same object in view, and
declined the victory which the other threw into his hands, like a real
sharper. In vain did Le Baut devise the best moves for checkmating
one's self. Mat matched him with still better ones, and threatened
every minute to be checkmated too. And every one pities the poor
Chamberlain, hunted about on the chess-board, and fearing, like a
coquette, that he shall _not_ be conquered. It became at length, for a
soft-souled eye, which certainly forgives the weak one sooner than the
wicked one, no longer endurable; Victor, with a thousand excuses to the
weak one and full of malice toward the malicious one, entered into the
steeple-chase, and obliged the Page to accept his advice and his
charitable subsidies, and to lay hold of military operations which he
proposed of such worth, that the man with the office of Chamberlain's
key, at last, in spite of his fears and in spite of the worst
prospects,--lost the game. All present saw through all present, as
princes do through each other in their public--playbills.
He got at last his farewell audience, but very small solace. The fair
form, beneath which all his ideals of beauty stood only as heraldic
bearers and caryatides, was even colder than at the reception, and
persisted in being only the echo of the parental courtesy. The only
thing which still kept him up was a--thistle: namely, an optical one
which had been sowed on the mosaic floor. That is to say, he took
notice that Clotilda during the farewell avoided with her foot this
flower-piece (which she certainly must have known) as if it were the
original. In the evening he drew his chains of inferences, as they are
taught in the universities; he engrafted upon this mock-thistle all the
roses of his destiny. "She was certainly _distrait_, and why? I ask,"
he said, speaking into his pillow; "for, besides, they have not yet
detected my feelings over yonder," he asserted, as he laid himself on
the second pillow. "O thou sweet eye that went down on the thistle,
rise again in my sleep, and be the moon of my dreams!" said he, when he
was already half-way into both. It was merely out of modesty that he
thought he was not discovered, because he did not look on himself as
remarkable enough to be observed.
The 20th of August, 179-, was the great day when he took up his march
to Flachsenfingen. Flamin had already trotted off at four o'clock in
the afternoon, in order to avoid a leave-taking which he hated. But our
Victor loved to bid farewell, and loved to tremble in the last silences
of parting. "O ye poor, egoistic mortals!" he said,--"besides; this
polar life is but so bald and cold; besides, we stand weeks and years
near each other without stirring with the heart anything better than
our blood,--only two or three glowing moments hiss and go out on the
glaciers of life,--why do you still avoid everything that draws you out
of your commonplace, and that reminds you how man loves? No! and if I
went to the bottom, and if I could thenceforward no longer console
myself, I would still, with bare heart and with all my wounds bleeding,
dissolved and sinking, I would still press to my bosom the beloved
being who must leave me, and would still say, It does me good!" Cold,
self-seeking, comfortable persons avoid leave-taking, just as unpoetic
ones of too intense sensibilities do; women, on the contrary, who
alleviate all their sorrows by talking, and people of poetic
temperament, who relieve all theirs by fantasying, court it.
At six o'clock in the evening,--for it was only a skip to
Flachsenfingen,--when the cattle came home, he sallied forth,
accompanied by the whole family. On his more fortunate arm--mine has to
bestir itself only for the good of science--hung the Britoness, and on
his left Agatha; to the sister the poor house-poodle (Apollonia) had
buckled herself, who thought, nevertheless, she might touch and enjoy,
despite the sisterly interpolation and mediating spirit, the dear
Doctor. So do the sparks of love, like the electric and magnetic
element, dart through a medium of twenty interposed bodies. A
philosopher, who sits down and considers that our fingers come not, in
fact, a thumb nearer to the beloved soul, whether only the globe of the
brain or that of the earth lie between them and it, will of course say,
"All very natural!" Hence this sedentary philosopher explains why
maidens half-love at the same time the male acquaintances of their
beloved,--why the cane-chair of Shakspeare, the clothes-drawer
of Frederick II., the bob-wig of Rousseau, content our yearning
hearts.----
But no one, except the queen-bee of this streaming swarm, wanted to go
back again. "Only just as far as the six trees," said Agatha. When they
had arrived at these frontier posts and boundary-trees of to-day's
pleasure, there were seven of them, and there was a general agreement
that _they_ were not meant, and they must go farther. The one who is
escorted grows generally more and more nervous, and the escort more and
more delighted, the longer it lasts. "Do let us go as far as that
ploughman!" said the sharp-sighted Britoness. But at last our hero
observed, that this Pillar of Hercules of their journey was itself a
moving column, and that the ploughman was only a wayfarer. "The best
thing is," said he, and turned about, "for me to go back, and not start
till to-morrow." The Chaplain said: "As far as the old palace" (i. e.
there was still _one_ wall of it remaining); "besides, I usually go
there evenings!" But beyond this frontier fort of the loveliest of
evenings the chattering column deceptively extended its march, and the
eyes were forgotten for the ears. As, consequently, in these boundary
disputes, one main article after another was broken by separate
articles, there was really nothing further to be done, except to make
the following attempt. "Only so far did I mean to have you go," said
Victor;--"now you must keep on with me and spend the night at the
apothecary's." "In fact," said the Chaplain's wife, coolly, "we'll go
along together till sundown; we surely are not going to turn our backs
upon this lovely sun." And certainly the evening had kindled nothing
but _feux-de-joie_ in the sun, in the clouds, on the earth, and on the
water.
On the hill they saw already the spires of the city; the sun, that
chosen turnstile of the escort, poured out of his deep hiding-place his
gold-trailing purple streams over the beds of shadow. There, on the
hill, as the sun vanished, Victor folded his arms round the married
couple, and said, "O, make yourselves as happy as you do me, and return
to your home in gladness!"--and then he took the sisters to his
enraptured heart, and said, "Good, good night! I love you!"--and then
he saw them all going back with their hidden sighs and tears; and then
he called out, "Truly, I shall soon come back; it is really only a jump
from one place to the other"; and then he cried after them, "I shall be
a poor devil, if we are separated!"--and then his heavy eye followed
them through all branches and hollows, and only when the loving company
had sunk into the last valley, as into a grave, did he close his eyes
and think on the ceaseless separations of man....
At last he opened his eyes toward the outspread, obscured city, and
thought: "Amidst that raised-work, in which men nestle with their
little life, thy little days, too, are shut in,--this is the veiled
birthplace of thy future tears, thy future raptures;--ah! with what
eyes shall I look down again, years hence, over this misty
environment,--and ... I am a fool! are, then, 2,300 houses standing
only on my account?"
_Postscript_. This sixteenth post-day the Mining-Superintendent has
concluded in regular order at the end of June.
FOURTH INTERCALARY DAY,
AND
PREFACE TO THE SECOND PART.
I am going to weld Intercalary Day and Preface together. Therefore,
unless there is to be mere trifling with the matter of the Preface, the
Second Part must be here, in some measure at least, touched upon. It
deserves to be noticed by critics, that an author who in the beginning
has before him for his domain eight pages of white paper--just as,
according to Strabo, the territory of Rome was eight leagues
broad--gets on by degrees so far, and peoples the scribbled paper
with so many Greek colonists,--for such our German characters
are,[190]--that at last he has often marched through and settled a
whole alphabet. This puts him into a condition to begin the Second
Part. My second is, as I know for certain, much better than the first,
although it is, to be sure, ten times worse than the third. I shall be
amply rewarded, if my work is the occasion of one review more being
made in the world; nor can I conceive of anything, unless it be this
very thought, that books must be written, so that the learned notices
of them may go on, which could keep an author up to the unspeakable
labor of standing all day at the inkstand, and dyeing whole pounds
of paper-rags _Berlin-blue_.... And now let this cool, serious,
_hocus-pocus_ of a Preface--an expression which Tillotson maintains to
be an abridgment of the Catholic formula, _hoc est corpus_--suffice for
good reviewers and universities.
I return to that which I properly meant by this whole episode. I have
conceived the idea, namely, of not only announcing my intention to give
the extra leaflets and side-shoots wherewith the Intercalary Days are
to be filled up, in alphabetical order,--for disorder is the death of
me,--but also to make a beginning here on the spot, and continue as far
as the letter I.
INTERCALARY--AND SIDE-SHOOTS, ALPHABETICALLY ARRANGED.
A.
Age of Women.--Lombardus (L. 4. Sent. dist. 4) and Saint Augustin (l.
22. de Civit. c. 15) prove that we all rise from the dead at that age
at which Christ rose, namely, in the thirty-second year and third
month. Accordingly, as in the whole of heaven there is no
quadragenarian to be found, a child will be as old there as Nestor,
namely, thirty-two years and three months. Knowing this, any one will
highly esteem the fine modesty of women, who after the thirtieth year
give themselves out (like relics) to be older than they are; for it
would be enough, if a quadragenarian, or one of eight-and-forty years,
should make herself out as old as good Rhine wine, or, at most, as old
as Methuselah; but she thinks it is being more modest, if she ascribes
to herself at once, however much her face contradicts it, the extreme
old age which she can have only when her face has lain some thousands
of years in the earth, namely, thirty-two years and three months. The
merest dunce can see that she means only her future resurrection-age,
and not any earthly age,--because she does not deviate from that
standing year, which in eternity, indeed, when no human being can grow
an hour older, is a matter of course. This unity of time they introduce
into the _Intrigue drama_ of their life already in the thirtieth year,
for the reason that after that time in Paris no woman can any longer
dance in public, and (according to Helvetius) no genius can any longer
write in a masterly style. This last fact they perhaps took into
account in old times in Jerusalem, where any one after his thirtieth
year, but no sooner, could get an office as teacher.
B.
Basedow's School System.--Basedow proposes in his _Philalethia_ to
hedge up thirty uneducated children in a garden, to leave them to their
own development, and to assign them only mute attendants, who should
not even wear human clothing, and then to publish in a protocol the
results of the experiment. Philosophers are so preoccupied with
possibility that they do not see reality; otherwise Basedow must have
observed that our country-schools are just such gardens, in which
Philosophy would try the experiment of what will at last come of human
creatures, if they are absolutely deprived of all culture. I confess,
however, that all these attempts must continue uncertain and imperfect
so long as the schoolmasters cannot refrain from imparting to these
little probationers some instruction, though it were the least
possible; and the thing would work better with wholly dumb teachers, as
there are deaf and dumb pupils.
C (_vide_ K).
D.
Divine Poet.--The Poet, although he paints the passions, nevertheless
will hit them best at that period of life when his own, have
slackened,--just as convex mirrors, precisely in those summers when the
sun burned the faintest, have acted the most intensely, and in the hot
ones the least so. The flowers of poesy are like other flowers, which
(according to Ingenhouse) thrive best in a dim, hazy sunlight.
E.
Emotion (Sentimental).--Sentimentality often imparts to the inner man,
as apoplexy to the outer, greater sensibility and yet paralysis.
F (_see_ Ph)
G.
Goddess.-As the Romans would rather recognize their monarchs as gods
than as masters, so do men like to call the directress of their heart
_goddess_ rather than mistress,--because it is easier to adore than to
obey.
H.
H.--I have often seen people who had the wherewithal of living and knew
how to live,--which are not two different things,--first, flutter about
the best and most superior women and suck from the honey-cup of their
hearts; and, secondly, I have seen them on the same day fold their
wings and light on a miserable ninny, that the ninny might inherit
their--heirs. But never have I compared these butterflies to anything
but butterflies, which all day long visit and rifle flowers, and yet
spawn their eggs on a dirty cabbage-stump.
H.
Holbein's Leg.--I prefer repeating the H in the place of I, because
under the Rubric of the I would come the _Invalides_, of whom I had
meant to assert, that, as people who have had limbs taken off become
full-blooded, so they have the less bread handed to them the more limbs
they have had shot or cut off, and that this is called the Physiology
and Dietetics of the military chest.--But I have pitied these (half)
poor devils too much to do it.
The famous legs of Holbein afford a better joke than legs that have
been taken off. That is to say, this painter used his brush in Basle
only upon Basle itself; and the self-same circumstance that drove his
genius to this architectural dyeing-business compelled it often to hold
recess-hours therein,--namely, he guzzled terribly. A house owner,
whose name is wanting in history, often came to the house-door, and
swore up at the scaffolding, when the house-stainer's legs--for that
was all of the painter that could be seen--were standing or staggering
in the neighboring wine-cellar. Then when Holbein by-and-by came
stalking along with them across the street, a quarrel came to meet him
and went with him up the scaffold. This irritated the painter, who made
a study even of his cups, and he proposed to himself to reform the
owner. That is to say, as he owed his misfortune wholly to his legs,
whose festoons the man wanted to see under the scaffolding, he resolved
to make a second edition of his legs, and paint them on the house in a
hanging posture, so that the man, when he looked up from the house-door
below, should get the idea that the two legs and their boots were
painting away up there busily. And the owner took this idea, too; but,
as he observed at last that the counterfeit foot-works hung all day in
one spot and never moved along, he wanted to see what kept the master
so long improving and retouching at one part, and so up he went. Up
there in the vacuum he easily saw that the painter ceased where the
knee-pieces began, at the knee, and that the trunk, which was wanting,
was again guzzling in an _alibi_.
I do not blame the owner for not at once on the scaffolding drawing a
moral from the leg-works; he was too furious.
I meant to have appended a further history of the princely portraits
which hang there behind the President in the Session-Chambers instead
of the originals, by way of casting-votes,--but I should disturb the
connection; here, too, was formerly the end of the First Part.
17. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
When I was in Breslau, I said, "I wish I were the Fetzpopel!"[191] just
as I was devouring the portrait of that personage. The Fetzpopel is a
silly woman whose face is stamped on the Breslau ginger-cookies. I say
what follows not merely on my own account, for the sake of getting my
own head on to such gingerbread paste, but also for the sake of other
literati, whom Germany honors with monuments as little as it does
me,--for instance, Lessing and Leibnitz. As one must always feel so
disagreeably in the German circles, until half a rod of stones, at
least, are got together for the monument of a Lessing or other magnate,
(the most that we have as yet is what few stones good reviewers throw
at a literary man, as the ancients did upon graves,)--accordingly, I
expressed myself freely in the Breslau market-place before I had bitten
into the Fetzpopel: "Either the temple of fame and the bed of honor for
German authors are on this gingerbread here, or else there is no fame
at all. When will it be the time, if it is not now, to expect of the
Germans that they shall take the faces of their greatest men and emboss
them upon eatables? because, certainly, the stomach is the most
important German member. If the Greek lived only among statues of great
men, and thereby became great himself, then surely would the Viennese,
if he had the greatest heads always before his eyes and on his plate,
fall into enthusiasm and an emulous desire to promote himself and his
face also on to gingerbread, and other cakes, pies, and cracknels.
Meusel's learned Germany might be copied in baker's-work,--one might
emboss great heroes upon army-biscuit, in order to set on fire the
common soldiery and make them hunger for glory,--great poets I would
sketch on bridal-cakes in inlaid sculpture, and heraldic geniuses on
oatmeal bread,--of authors for women sweet box-pictures might be
designed for sugar-work. If this were done, then would heads like
Hamann or Liskov meet more generally the German _taste_ in such dress;
and many a scholar who had not a loaf of bread to eat would at least
ornament one; and we should have, beside the paper nobility, a baked
one also." As regards myself, who up to this time never saw my face
anywhere except in the shaving-glass, they shall mould me (for I am
least known in Westphalia) on Westphalia rye-bread.
Now to the story again. A tall, curly-haired man stands in the night
before the many-colored house of the apothecary Zeusel, peeps up at the
lighted third story, which he is about to occupy, and at last opens,
instead of the wooden door, the glass one of the apothecary's shop. O
my good Sebastian! a blessing on thy entry! May a good angel give thee
his hand, to lift thee over boggy roads and man-traps; and when thou
hast fallen into a snare and been wounded, then may he fan the wound
with his wing, and a kind man cover it with his heart!
In the apothecary's shop, which blazed like a ballroom, one of the
fattest court-lackeys was begging of one of the leanest dispensers a
maniple more and a little pugillus[192] of moxa[193] for his Highness.
But the lean man took behind his scales a half-open handful of moxa,
and four finger-tipfuls more (for in fact a little pugillus amounts to
only three finger-tips), and sent it all to the feet of the Prince.
"When we have burnt all this," said he, pointing to the moxa, "his
Highness will soon have a podagra as good as can be found in the
country."
The reason why the dispenser gave more than the recipe said was that he
also wished to have his pew in the Temple of Fame; therefore he would
first think over a recipe that was handed to him until he approved it,
and then he always weighed out 1/11 or 1/17 of a scruple too much or
too little, in order to take off from the doctor's head the civic crown
of the recovery and put it on his own. "Only with such gifts can I work
my cures," said he. Victor did not begrudge him the illusion. "A
dispenser," said he, "who leads the whole column of convalescents, and
turns over to the doctor merely the rearguard of corpses, has already
laurels enough for this short life _under_ his brain-pan."
The apothecary Zeusel has good breeding enough not to bore his tenant
by forcing upon him a reception-dinner, and merely gave him _this_
newspaper article from his oral _Morning Chronicle_ of the city, that
the Prince had not so much got the gout as that he was trying to get it
and settle it. He also gave him the Italian servant whom his Lordship
had hired for him, and his chamber.
--And therein Sebastian is now sitting alone on the window-seat, and
seriously considering, without glancing at the beauties of the room or
the prospect, what he properly shall have to do here to-morrow, and day
after tomorrow, and longer. "To-morrow, I blaze away at once," said he,
and twirled the tassel of the curtain-cord; "I and the gout must settle
ourselves down with the Prince. It is hard when a man has to use the
gouty matter of a Regent for water to turn his mill: a polypus in the
_heart_ or dropsy on the _brain_ would annoy me less as a courtier;
either would be respectable _means of grace_ and fins for swimming
upward. No, I will stand straight and firm, entirely upright; from the
very first I will not yield an inch, so that they shall always find me
the same. Not so much as quartering and anchoring in antechambers is to
be thought of." (Indeed, his Lordship had already stipulated to the
soliloquist an exemption from the annoyance of court etiquette.) "Ah,
ye fair spring-years! Ye are now flown away over my head, and with you
peace and mirth and studies and sincerity, and none but good, genial
hearts!" (He suddenly twirled the curtain-tassel up shorter.) "But,
thou good father, thou hast not even had such good years,--thou roamest
over the earth and givest up thy days to the welfare of men! No, thy
son shall not spoil nor embitter for thee thy sacrifices,--he shall
conduct himself here discreetly enough,--and then, when thou comest
back again and findest here at court an obedient, favored, and yet
uncorrupted son..." When the son actually thought to himself, that, if
he should thus culminate in a right ascension at court, he might win
the heart of the Chaplaincy, the heart of Le Baut, that of his father,
those of his whole kindred, and (provided he thought of _that_)
even the heart of Clotilda,--by that time he had twisted off the
curtain-tassel and held it like a tuberose in his hand, ... and so he
thought best to lay himself quietly down in his bed.
--Get up, my hero! The morning sun already reddens thy balcony,--jump
up amidst the ringing of the bells for the week-day sermon, and amidst
the din of this market-day, and look round on thy bright chamber! Thy
father, of whom thou hast been dreaming all night, has furnished it
full of musical and artistic instruments and apparatus, and thou wilt
think of him the whole morning; and yet the balcony offers thee still
more,--the sight of a green strip of fields, and, toward the west, of
the heights of Maienthal, the whole market-place, the private residence
of the senior parson of the city opposite, into all the rooms of which,
that he lets to thy Flamin, thou canst look!
Flamin, however, is not in there just now: for it was he who had
already laid hold of my hero, and accosted him in those words of mine,
"Get up!" A new situation is a spring-cure for our hearts, and takes
away from them the oppressive feeling of our transitoriness; and
beneath such a cheerful sky of life my Victor to-day dances with
everything and everybody,--with the forenoon hours,--with the
Regency-Counsellor,--with the apothecary,--out through the apothecary's
shop right before the dispenser, on his way up to the palace to make a
few passages with the gouty Januarius.
--He has hardly been at the Prince's half an hour, when Zeusel sees him
running back again into his medicinal warehouse.... "Heigh! heigh!"
thinks the apothecary.
But it was quite different from what he thought. Through an abatis of
uniforms--for the entrances to princes' apartments are almost like
lanes of tents, and rulers cause themselves to be guarded as anxiously
as if they feared they might be the _first_ or the _last_--Victor made
his way into the sick-chamber. Before a patient who lies in a
horizontal position one can keep a perpendicular one more easily. Great
folk often confound the effect of their apartment and furniture with
their own: if the _savant_ could come upon them on a common, in a wood,
in a cabbage-field, he would know how to deport himself. Victor,
however, had himself been brought up in apartments that were
embroidered, and furnished with gold corner-clips. So when he found his
father's friend in pain and with his legs packed up, he exchanged his
English composure for the professional, and, instead of awaiting
haughty princely questions, began to propose medical ones. When the
doctor's medical confessional session was at an end, he laid his hand,
instead of on the head of the penitent, on the Bible which lay by it,
and was going to swear, but gave that up because a better idea had
occurred to him, and he opened--this was what had come into his
head--the gospel of the paralytic: "For the podagra in this case is not
to be thought of," said he. He showed him that his whole complaint
was--wind (figuratively and literally speaking),--that it lodged itself
in the relaxed vessels of the system, and insinuated itself, like the
Jesuits, under every different form, through all the members,--even his
pain in the calf was nothing more than that displaced human or
intestinal ether. The physician in ordinary, Culpepper, is to be
excused for his error in regard to the Prince; for every physician must
make his selection of some universal malady, into which he resolves all
others, which he treats _con amore_, in which, as the theologue does in
Adam's sin, or the philosopher in his first principle, he detects all
the rest. It rested, therefore, with the free will of Culpepper,
whether to pick out for himself as the radical malady, to be the
nest-egg and mother-bulb of his pathology, the podagra in the case of
men, with women the flux, or not. When he has once made his choice,
then he is obliged to endeavor to fix it upon his Highness, like pastel
or quicksilver. January had never, even from his chapel, heard anything
more agreeable than Victor's assertion, which set him free from the
prostration, dosing, and starving which he had had to go through.
Victor, in his joy at the lightness of the malady, hurried away to give
his recipe for it, after he had asserted, by way of consolation, that
"an _ethereal_ body was still to be taken along with him, and would
serve the soul, not indeed for a heavenly Graham's-bed,[194] but still
for an air-bed, which made itself up. Only poor women's-souls--if one
rightly regarded their bodies--might be said to lie on thorny straw
sacks, smooth hussars'-saddles, and sharp sausage-sledges[195]; whereas
shaven and tattooed spirits (monks and savages) wrapped themselves up
with such fine bodies stuffed with whalebone shavings."[196]
Away he flew; and I have already reported that the apothecary presently
thought to himself: "Heigh! heigh!" In the apothecary's shop Victor
said to the dispenser, at whom he flew like saltpetre: "Sir colleague,
what think you about it, if we should have nothing to cure in the case
of his Highness but wind? You must advise me. For my part, I should
prescribe:--
_Pulv. Rhei Orient_.
_Sem. Anisi Stellati_
----_F[oe]niculi_
_Cort. Aurant. immat_.
_Sal. Tart. [=a][=a] dr. I_.
_Fol. Senn. Alexandr. sine Stipit. dr. II_.
_Sacchar. alb. unc. sem_.--
"If you agree with me, I have nothing more to say, except, _C. C. M. f.
p. Subt. D. ad Scatulam, S_. Colic-powders, one teaspoonful as often as
occasion requires."[197]
As the dispenser looked at him seriously, he looked at him still more
seriously; and the medicine was prepared without a change in the dose.
When he had gone, the dispenser said to his two startled pages: "You
couple of stupid epiglottises, don't you suppose he has sense enough to
ask?"
The biographer has no need whatever to justify the circumstance--since
the powder and the hero justify it--that January got upon his legs the
very same day.
As princes feel no pressure of the atmosphere, except that of the air
which is in their bodies, January's gratitude for his deliverance from
this pressure, was so unbounded that for the whole day he would not let
the Doctor go from his side. He must dine,--sup,--ride,--play with him.
In the palace it was tolerable; it was not like Nero's, a city within a
city, a Flachsenfingen in Flachsenfingen, but merely barracks and a
kitchen full of soldiers and cooks. For before every mouldy archive,
before every room where lay genuine diamonds, before every door-lock,
and before every stairway a bayonet was planted, with the protector and
patron who was attached to it. The numerous crew of kitchen-servants
lived and fired up in the palace, because his Highness was continually
eating. By this continual eating he would make his fasting easier for
him; for at the three ritual mealtimes of men he touched--because
Culpepper would so have it--desperately little, and could not wholly
contradict the courtiers who praised his strict diet. A watchmaker from
London had done the most to help him out in this moderation by
contriving for him a servant's bell, and a spring-work whose index
stood upon a great dial-plate in the servants' apartment; the margin of
the dial-plate was encircled, instead of the hours and the days of the
month, with the names of viands and wines. January had only to ring the
bell and press the spring, and the household immediately knew whether
the tongue and the victual-index pointed to pastry or to Burgundy. In
this way, by tinkling like a mill when his inner man had nothing more
to grind, he was most easily enabled to observe a stricter diet than
physicians and moralists could well demand, and he shamed more than one
grandee, whom, after eviscerating in death, they were obliged to lay
out upon the bed of state with the hungry stomach under one arm and the
thirsty liver under the other, as they give to capons also their two
viscera as a body-guard between their two wings.
Victor was as much at home in the palace as in the parsonage; for the
court proper, the proper courtly worms'-nest and frog-spawn, was
resident merely in the palace of the actual minister, Von Schleunes,
because he had to do the _honneurs_ of the throne, to invite
ambassadors, strangers, &c. The Princess resided in the large old
palace, which was called the Paullinum. Thus, then, did January spend
his days without pomp, but with comfort and convenience, in the true
solitude of a philosopher, and passed them away in eating, drinking,
and sleeping; hence could the Flachsenfingen Prorector compare him,
without flattery, to the greatest of the old Romans, in whom we admire
a similar hatred of show and state. January had, in fact, no court, but
went himself to the court of his actual minister; with extreme
reluctance, however: he could not love anything there,--neither the
Princess, who was always there, nor Schleunes's unmarried daughters,
which would have been against his London vow.
About twelve o'clock at night Zeusel would have been glad to find out
how all was going on, and brought to the physician in ordinary his
niece _Marie_, whom he offered to him as a female lackey. The
physician, who could not play the fool with any fool in the world,
especially under four eyes, thrust before the slender pike a crateful
of the food of truth, which the latter greedily devoured as if it were
pine-apple. Marie was a relative and a Catholic, impoverished by a
lawsuit, and disappointed in love, who, in the cold, hollow family of
the apothecary, received and expected nothing but thrust-wounds of
words and shot-wounds of looks; her broken and crushed soul resembled
the marsh-willow, of which one can strip down backward all the twigs
with the mere hand. She felt no longer pained at any humiliation; she
seemed before others to crawl, but in truth she lay continually
prostrate on the ground. When the gentle Victor saw this meek, averted
form, over which so many tears had flowed, and this once beautiful
face, on which, not the sorrows of fancy had laid their charming
painter's-touches, but physical pangs had emptied their poison-bags,
then did the fate of mortals bring sadness to his heart, and, with the
softest of courtesy towards Marie's station, sex, and sorrow, he
declined her services. The apothecary would have despised himself if he
had taken this politeness for anything else than fine raillery and good
breeding. But Victor threw her off once more; and the poor girl
withdrew in silence, and, like a maidservant, without spirit enough for
courtesy.
Nevertheless, in the morning the rejected one brought him his breakfast
with downcast eyes and painfully smiling lips; he had heard in his bed
how the apothecary and his hard sprouts of daughters had twitted Marie
with her "doleful whining air," and therefrom inferred a "_refusal_
from the jesting gentleman" overhead. His soul bled within him, and at
last he accepted Marie;--he made his eye and his voice so soft and
sympathetic that he could have lent either to the most tender maiden;
but Marie took nothing of it to herself.
January could hardly wait for him to come again.
The third day also it was just so.
And so, too, the next week.
--But I could wish my readers had all ridden in a body, at this time,
through the Flachsenfingen gate, and that this learned company had
scattered itself through the city in order to institute inquiries
about our hero. The reading scouts sent by me to the coffee-houses
would learn that the new English doctor had already unseated the
old one,--helped the parson's son at St. Luna to the post of
Regency-Counsellor,--and that great changes in all departments were at
hand. The division which I distributed among the butlers, butchers,
fishery-masters, castellans, and valets of the court, would bring me
word that the Prince had patted the Doctor, not on the fingers, but on
the shoulder,--that he had day before yesterday showed him with his own
hand his picture-cabinet, and sent him the best piece out of it,--that
in the theatre he had looked out with him from the stage-box,--that he
had presented to him a snuff-box rich with jewels (the usual civic
crown of rulers, and their calumet, as if we were Greenlanders, who
never love to receive any other present so much as snuff),--and that
they would travel together. Two of the very finest and most dignified
readers whom I had detached from these columns, and of whom I had
despatched the one to the Paullinum to the Princess, the other to the
actual Minister, would at least report to me the news that Prince and
Doctor had called together upon both, and that both had looked upon my
hero as a singular, shy, taciturn Englishman, who owed everything to
his father.
But the last piece of news which the readers have related to me they
cannot, I am sure, possibly know; and I will myself tell it to them.
--Before I deliver this, let me first simply explain in three words how
it was that Victor rose so rapidly. There may be Evangelist-Matthieus
among my readers who take this sudden rise, like that of the barometer,
as the sign of a speedy fall,--who will say that laurels and salad,
which have been forced to ripen in twenty-four hours by spirit on a
cloth, wither again just as soon,--nay, who will even joke about the
matter, and give out that the Prince's intestines, with their ether,
are a fish's swimming-bladder to my hero, who only by its inflation
mounts upward. Mining-superintendents laugh at such readers, and inform
them that men, particularly the occupants of thrones, look upon a new
physician as a new specific,--that they are always most ready to obey a
new one,--that Sebastian always deported himself towards every one the
first time in the finest manner, whereas with old acquaintances he
never said unnecessarily anything witty,--that January loved every one
whom he could see through, and that he fortunately recognized in my
hero merely a gay fellow fond of life, and did not remark around his
head any of Bose's Beatifications,[198] which smell of phosphorus and
emit painful sparks,--that Victor was not, like Le Baut, a _pot-plant_
in a crown, but a hyacinth hanging in the open air high above it,--that
he was cheery, and made every one else so,--and that another
mining-superintendent would not have made so much ceremony with his
readers as I: _he_ would merely have told them the main circumstance,
that in Victor, in his waggery and behavior generally, the Prince had
found and fallen in love with an enchanting resemblance to his fifth
son, the _Monsieur_ (lost on the Seven Islands), and that he had made
this observation even in London, although Victor was five years younger
than the latter.
January chose, himself, to present his favorite to everybody, and
so to the Princess too. The philosophers have it to explain why
Sebastian never once remembered, until he sat beside the princely
bridegroom on the coach-cushion, the mad, enamored little strip of
paper which, in Kussewitz, he had pasted above the Imperator of the
_montre-à-regulateur_, and thrown into the Princess's bargain. He
started, and held it to be impossible that he should have been such a
fool. But such a thing is easy for a man. His fancy flung back upon
every scene, upon every idea, so many focus-lights from a thousand
mirrors, and spread around the future, which stretched out beyond, so
many colored shadows and so much blue mist, that he was really
frightened when a foolish action came into his head; for he knew, that,
when he should have rejected it ten times and then thought it over
thirty times more, then, after all, he should go and do it.--When the
two appeared before the Princess, Victor was in that agreeable frame,
which is nothing new to tutors and young scholars, which stiffens the
limbs to bone, and sends the heart up into the mouth, and petrifies the
tongue;--it was not the certainty that _Agnola_ (that was the name of
the Princess) had read the aforesaid advertisement on the watch, which
so disconcerted him, but the uncertainty whether she had or not. In his
agony he never thought of _this_,--that she, of course, did not even
know his handwriting or the authorship of the little slip; and even if
one does think of that in his agony, still it does not leave him.
--But all was, at once, above, below, and contrary to his expectation.
The Princess had laid aside the face of sensibility with her
travelling-dress, and had put on instead a fine, firm gala-face. The
crowned bridegroom January was received by her with as much warm
decorum as if he were his own ambassador of the first rank. For
January, the disk of whose heart charged itself full of sparks on the
electrizing-cushion of a fair cheek or a bosom-handkerchief, had for
that very reason towards Agnola, with whom merely from policy he had
concluded the concordats of marriage, all the warmth of the month after
which he was named. Towards Victor, the son of her hereditary foe, the
successor to the house-thief of princely favor, she cherished, as is
easy to guess, true tenderness. Our poor hero, surprised at January's
coldness, which seemed to promise on the part of the wife no special
warmth toward himself, demeaned himself as gravely as the elder and
younger Cato at once. He thanked God (and so do I) that he came away.
But all the way back he kept thinking: "If I could only have got my
missive out of the watch-case! Ah, then I would have done everything,
poor Agnola, to reconcile thee to thy fate and thy husband!--Ah, St.
Luna," he added, as they passed along before the city parson's house,
"thou peaceful spot, full of flowers and of love! The masters of the
hunt send thy Bastian from one baiting-house to another!"
For he must also, for politeness' sake, go at least to the actual
Minister's, and January took him along with him. Thither he went with
gusto, as if into a sea-fight, or into a quarantine hospital, or into
the Russian ice-palace.
Furniture and persons in the house of Schleunes were in the finest
taste. Victor found there, from the wabble-headed figures[199] and
court-people, even to the basaltic busts of old philosophers, and to
the dolls in the shape of Schleunes's daughters, from the polished
floor to the polished faces, from the powdering cabinet to the reading
cabinet,--both of which painted the head in the mere passage through
them,--in short, everywhere he found all that the sumptuary laws have
ever forbidden. His first embarrassment with the Princess gave him the
pitch for a second. It was no longer the old Victor at all. I see
beforehand that the worthy schoolmasters at the Marianum in Scheerau
will be hard upon him for it,--especially the rector,--that he should
have so little knowledge of the world as to be, while in this company,
witty without vivacity, constrainedly free without complaisance, too
constantly in motion with his eyes, too immovable in his other members.
But one must suggest to these courtly and scholarly people, that he
could not help it. The rector himself would have been embarrassed as
well as Victor before the _bel-esprit_ of a minister's lady, whom,
though, to be sure, Meusel has not introduced her into his, the court
has into _its_ Learned Germany,--before her quizzing daughters,
especially the handsomest, who was named Joachime,--before a number of
strangers,--before so many people who hated him on his father's
account, and who watched him in order to explain and verify his
relations with the Prince,--before the Princess herself, whom the Devil
had also brought hither,--before Matthieu, who here was in his element,
and in his leading character and bravura air,--and before the
Minister,--especially before this last. Victor found in him a man full
of dignity, from whom business did not take away politeness, nor
thinking wit; and whom a little irony and coldness only the more
exalted, but who seemed to despise feeling, scholars, and mankind.
Victor generally imagined to himself a minister--e. g. Pitt--as a Swiss
glacier, on which the clouds and dew that nourish it freeze overhead,
which oppresses the low places, and, in its alternation between melting
and congealing, sends out great torrents down below, and out of whose
clefts corpses are drifted.
January himself was not quite comfortable among them: what availed him
the finest dishes, if they were embittered by the finest conceits? The
card-table was, therefore, especially upon the peaceful arrival of his
spouse, his quiet place of anchorage; and his Victor was for this once
also glad to anchor beside him. My correspondent thinks that the
tuning-key to this over-fine, demi-semi-_tone_ was turned by the
Minister's lady merely, who had all sciences in her head, and to
be sure at-her tongue's end, and for that reason held a weekly
_bureau-d'esprit_. In this ridiculous position, Sebastian played away
his evening and gobbled down his _souper_; he could tell a good story,
but he had no story to tell,--in the few _contes_ which stayed by him
all was anonymous, and to the circle about him the names were precisely
the things of the first importance; nor could he make use of his humor
either, because a humor like his places the possessor himself in a mild
comic light, and because, therefore, only among good friends whose
respect one cannot lose, but not among bad friends whose respect
one must hold by defiance, can it venture out in its sock and
harlequin's-collar,--he did not even enjoy the happiness of inwardly
laughing at them all, because he had no time for it, and because he
never found people ridiculous till their backs were turned.
He was confoundedly badly off. "You'll not catch me here again very
soon," he thought to himself; and when, through the two tall glass
doors of the balcony, which looked out upon the garden, the moon stole
in with its dreamy light, which out there fell upon stiller dwellings,
fairer prospects, and calmer hearts,--then he stole out upon the
balcony (as his partnership at the card-table was broken up by the
Prince after supper), and the night that glistened on the earth and in
the heavens exalted his bosom with greater scenes. With what love
thought he then of his father, whose philosophic coldness was like the
January snow, which covers the seed from the frost, whereas that of the
court resembles the snow of March, which devours the buds! How sorely
did he reproach himself for every discontented thought about his honest
Flamin's slight want of refinement! O, how his inner man erected itself
like a fallen and forgiven angel, when he imagined to himself Emanuel
leading Clotilda by the hand, and rapturously asking him, "Where hast
thou found to-day an image of this my friend?" At this moment he
yearned inexpressibly to be back again in his St. Luna....
His quickening heart-beats were all at once checked by _Joachime_, who
came out with a burst of laughter directed toward the parlor. As it was
a burden to her to sit for a single hour, (I wonder how she could lie
in bed a whole night,) she extricated herself as often as she could
from the curb-bit of the card-table. The Princess released her this
time, who suspended this _night-work_ of great people on account of the
weakness of her eyes. Joachime was no Clotilda, but still she had two
eyes polished like two rose-diamonds, two lips like painted ones, two
hands like casts, and, in fact, all the duplicate members were very
pretty.... And with these a court-physician can keep house well enough,
though the single ones (heart, head, nose, forehead) are not those of a
Clotilda. As now under the open heaven he recovered his spirits, and
on the balcony, which for him was always a parlor, the use of his
tongue,--as Joachime's tone attuned him again to his own,--as she
assailed the taciturnity of the English, and he defended the
exceptions,--as he could now run, like a spider, up and down along the
thread of the conversation, and was no more to be disturbed by the
Princess, who had followed after to cool off in the night-air her
inflamed eyes,--and as one complains of feeling ennui only when one
himself inflicts it,--and as I transcribe all this, I do enough (I
think) for a reviewer, who stands up behind the coach-body of the
Prince, and reflects and wonders what he shall have to hold on to
(except the footmen's straps), in case Victor, sitting before him in
the carriage, does not during the ride home wish the Minister's house
at the Devil, but thinks more contentedly,--Well, it's tolerable
enough![200]
Victor's society agreed so well with the Prince, that he fancied he
could as little do without him as a canoness out of the house can think
of taking the badge of her order off her person. He always plunged into
the sacred cup and welcome of the warm spring of a new friendship as
immoderately as a guest at Carlsbad does into his. When he felt ennui,
the Medicus was besought to come and drive it away; when he experienced
an inward jubilee, that person was again entreated to appear, that he
might participate in the jubilation. Only those times at which January
felt neither ennui nor the contrary were left to his friend to spend
entirely at his own pleasure. Victor had sworn beforehand to make an
easy matter of refusing, and had broken out upon people of easy
consent; now, however, he said, "The Devil may say, No! Just let a man
find _himself_ in the same situation first!" ... And so must our poor
Victor describe nothing but empty, dizzying gyres in the court-circle
of the throne, among people for whose tone he could more easily have an
_ear_ than a _tongue_, and whom he could read, but could not win.
A youth in whose breast hang the night-pieces of Maienthal and St.
Luna,--or one who has just arrived from a watering-village,--or one who
has it in mind to fall in love,--or one who, in great cities or in
their great circles, must be an _idle_ spectator,--every such one is
also, for that very reason, a _dissatisfied_ spectator therein, and
blows into his critical pipe against the trifling company, till he
himself is drawn in. But when all these causes actually meet in one and
the same man, then can he find no relief against his gall-bladder nor
any biliary duct, except to take some fine paper and send off to the
Eymanns in St. Luna a confounded satirical letter upon what he has
seen.
My hero despatched the following to the Parson:--
"MY DEAR SIR AND ADOPTED FATHER:"--
"I have not had hitherto spare time enough to lift my eyes up and see
what moon we have. Verily, a court wants time for virtue. The Prince
carries me about with him everywhere, like a smelling-bottle, and shows
up his foolish Doctor. Erelong they will not be able to endure me: not
because I am good for anything,--on the contrary, I am convinced they
could bear the most virtuous man in the world quite as well as the
worst, and that merely because he would be an Anglicism, an _homme de
fantaisie_,[201] a _lusus naturæ_,--but because I do not talk enough.
Business-people never trouble themselves about any conversational or
epistolary style; but with court-people the tongue is the artery of
their withered life, the spiral-spring and flag-feather of their souls;
they are all born critics, who look at nothing but fine turns,
expression, fire, and speech. This comes of their having nothing to do;
their good works are _bon mots_,[202] their exchange business consists
in visiting-cards, their housekeeping is a card-party, and their
agriculture a hunting-party, and the _minor service_ a physiognomy.
Hence they must have other people's faults all day long in their ears
as an antidote to tedious leisure, as the physicians inoculate with the
itch to counteract stupidity; a court-establishment is the regular
penny post-office of the smallest items of news, even about you
commoners, when you happen to have done anything really ridiculous. It
were to be wished that we had festivals, or card-parties, or plays, or
assemblies, or _soupers_, or something good to eat, or some amusement
or other; but that is not to be thought of. We have, to be sure, all
these things, but only their names; the President of the Exchequer
would shrug his shoulders, if we should undertake to be, four times in
a year, so brilliantly happy as you are four times a month. As our week
consists of seven Sundays, it follows that our amusements are only
signs in the calendar, epochs of time, to which no one pays heed; and a
festival is nothing but a play-room for the plans which every one has
in his head, the boards on which he is to act his leading part, and the
season for continuing the intrigue against victims of love and of
ambition. Here there is, every minute, a stinging mosquito, and the
thistle-seed of beautifully painted trouble flies round far and wide.
"There are many women here who are good, and disciples of Linnæus, and
their eyes classify men botanically, according to his fine and simple
_sexual_-system; they make a great distinction between virtuous and
vicious love,--namely, that of _degree_, or at least of time; and the
_best_ often speaks on the subject like the _worst_, and the worst like
the best. Meanwhile we have here female virtue and manly fidelity, in
their way,--but no idea of them can be communicated to a parson; for
these two jellies are so soft and delicate, that, if I should undertake
to carry them down over all the steps of the throne to the parsonage,
they would arrive there in such a spoiled and ruined state, that one
would give them down below there the two opposite names,--for which,
however, we ourselves have up here our special and corresponding
objects. Your commoners would find our elderly men ridiculous in
matters of love, as _they_ would your daughters. But what often
embitters for me this happy court-life is the universal want of
dissimulation. For no one believes here what he hears, and no one
thinks how he looks; all must, according to the regular laws of the
game, like cards, have the upper side uniform, and put on an external
stillness of face as a cover to the internal fire, as the lightning
destroys only the sword and not the scabbard. Consequently, as a
universal dissimulation is none at all, and as every one gives every
other credit for poison, no one can _deceive_ another, but only
_outwit_ him; only the understanding, not the heart, is taken in.
Meanwhile, to speak the truth, that is not truth; for every one has two
masks,--the general and the individual. For the rest, the colors which
are used upon the scientific, refined, and philanthropic painting of
the outer man are necessarily scraped off from the inner man, but
advantageously, since there is not much on the inner man, and the study
of appearance lessens reality: so have I often seen hares lying in the
woods that had not an ounce of flesh or a drop of fat on their bodies,
because all had been absorbed by the monstrous fur which had continued
to grow after their death.
"If one compares the substantial value of the throne and that of the
low ground of the commonalty, the physical and moral exaltation of
men appears to bear an inverse relation to that of their soil,
just as the inhabitants of marshy lands are larger than mountaineers.
But, nevertheless, those elevated people bear the state easily on
butterfly-wings, survey its wheel-work with the hundred-eyed papilio's
eye, and with a walking-cane defend the people from lions, or chase
therewith the lions among the people, as in Africa the children of the
herdsmen scare away with a whip the real lions of Natural History from
the grazing cattle.... Dear Mr. Court-Chaplain, this satire began to
pain me already on the former page; but here one is malicious, just as
he is vain, without knowing when: the former, because one is obliged to
take too much notice of others; the latter, because he is compelled to
think too much of himself. No! Your garden, your sitting-room, are
pleasanter; there, is no stony breast on which one _crucifies_ the arms
and veins of friendship like a tree trained on an espalier; there, one
is not obliged, as I am, to be twice a day under the barber's hands,
and three times a day under the hair-dresser's; there, one has leave
at least to put on his polished boot. Write soon to your adopted son,
for I still deny myself the festival of a visit to you. Are there
many baptisms and burials? What is _Fox_[203] doing, and the deaf
bellows-blower? At this very moment I hear the mortar, instead of your
rat-drum, pounding down below. Farewell.
"And now at last I greet you, beloved mother! My hand is warm, and in
my heart a pair of souls are beating; for now your face, full of
motherly warmth, shines on all my satirical ice-peaks, and melts them
into warm blood, which will throb for you and for you flow. How good it
feels to love again! Your second son, Flamin, is well, but too busy,
and at present in St. Luna.[204] Greet my sisters and all that love
you.
"Sebastian."
He reserved the letter in order to despatch the Regency-Counsellor, who
wanted to take his person along with him, with a freight at least.
Meanwhile his and January's joint visits, with their stage
entanglements, grew to quite other ones, even a ganglion of friendship
between January and himself,--and at the same time gave this friendship
increased notoriety. In St. Luna, in Le Baut's house, three times as
much was made out of it as there was in it,--in the parsonage, nine
times. To this was added a trifle, namely, a scuffle,--properly, two. I
have the incident from Spitz,--Victor got it from Flamin,--he from
Matthieu,--in whose noble historical style it can here be handed
over to posterity. The Evangelist was never ashamed of a commoner,
provided he could make a fool of him. Therefore he visited the
court-apothecary without scruple. To the latter, who cordially hated
the barrack-physician, Culpepper, on account of his coarse arrogance,
and on account of the reason given in the note[205] below, Matthieu had
long since promised to upset the Doctor. As the latter and the podagra
had actually been banished by Victor from January's feet, the
Evangelist gave the apothecary to understand that he himself would,
without _his_ hint and wishes, have contributed far less to the fall of
Culpepper than he had done. Zeusel, especially as he had the successor
of the barrack-physician in his house, came after some days to the
billiard-table with the certain conviction that he, from his
apothecary's-shop, had thrust under Culpepper's posteriors the
invisible leg, and hurled him down from the steps of the throne. There
were present, unfortunately, the barrack-physician himself, and the
noble Mat. Zeusel came upon this stage with the festoons of three
watch-chains, with a pair of breeches on whose knees some Arabesques
were printed, with a double waistcoat and double neck-tie, and with
double signs of exclamation in his face at the barrack-physician;--his
money-purse lay exactly under the _os sacrum_, because he, like some
Englishmen, had caused his breeches-pocket to be concealed in the
region of the breeches buckle. He had with him as his chamber-moor his
long, lean dispenser, who in the adjoining drinking-room encountered
the very short dispenser of the second apothecary's-shop, or shop of
the _canaille_. The short dispenser, out of malice, followed the tall
one about everywhere, merely to vex him; but this time he had just come
back from the country with some hens'-eggs which he had collected as
fees from convalescent patients.
Matthieu, after an exegetic hint to Zeusel, took the liberty of
being of Culpepper's opinion in regard to the Prince's gout. Culpepper,
who would fain be an old German,--such old Germans can never
dissemble when they are angry, though they can very well do so from
self-interest,--fired away and said the English doctor was a complete
ignoramus. Zeusel displayed with a broad smile, as with a printer's
vignette, his contempt for the coarse man. The Medicus looked like the
Equator, the apothecary like Spitzbergen. Now the tourney went on
merely upon the subject of the gout. The second and umpire, Matthieu,
gave it to be understood, that "Zeusel, to be sure, loved his prince
and lord, but still he could wish that this love had had the best means
and the wholesomest influences. "In bawdy-houses," said Culpepper,
"_that fellow there may_ have influence." When the apothecary, at these
words, proudly and contemptuously straightened himself up, the Doctor
slowly jammed him down on the chair and on his money-purse, and,
bringing down his fist upon his shoulder, nailed the little coxcomb
with his purse to the seat.
This pinning-down vexed the tailor-bird most of all, and he replied,
trying to get up, that "he would this very day, if he were consulted,
advise his Highness to adhere to his present better choice." The
barrack-physician might perhaps have too hurriedly withdrawn his hand
from the shoulder which it covered; for he grazed with it, as with a
cannon, the nose of his adversary, whereupon the latter, like Saint
Januarius, discharged some blood. The Evangelist was personally grieved
"that two such sensible men could not fall out and fight with each
other without personal hatred and heat, since they _might_, like
princes who go to war, attack each other without either,--but the
bleeding too well attested Zeusel's ebullition." ... Zeusel cried out
to the Doctor, "You lout!" The latter, in his fury, actually took
Matthieu's opinion, that the former bled only from fury, and compared
him to those corpses which in old times bled, indeed, at the approach
of the murderer, but from none other than quite natural causes. The
Medicus, therefore, looked for his cane, which like a prince was
gold-headed, and took his leave with the crowned stick, drawing it a
few times, as with magnetic passes, across Zeusel's fingers; but I
would call the staff, if I were in the place of other people, neither
an ear-trumpet for Zeusel, which the physician applied to him, as they
often do to persons hard of hearing, that the latter might hear better,
nor yet a door-knocker, which he stretched out before the truth, that
it might the more easily get admission into the apothecary. What he
wanted was merely to oblige him to let his handkerchief drop, in order
that he might look him in the face as he bade farewell, which he
clothed in the following forbearing and neatly turned remark: "You tell
your Doctor that he and you there are the two greatest blockheads in
town."
Under these last words both dispensers kept themselves still enough in
other respects, though not with their tongues, indeed; for the tall
dispenser saluted, as second chorus, the short one with the same
war-song, and was a genuine Anti-Podagrist. Whoso considers that the
tall one loved my hero on account of his politeness, and could not bear
the short one, because Culpepper sent all his prescriptions to _his_
shop,--such a one cannot expect anything less of the couple than a
reflection of the scene in the billiard-room; but the tall dispenser
was composed, and never, like Portugal, propagated edifying truths with
blood, but--the moment the barrack-doctor called the court-physician a
blockhead--he quietly took the hat of the short dispenser, who had
deposited his income of eggs therein to guard them from being broken,
and coolly, without the least resentment, placed the aforesaid hatful
of eggs on the head of the professional brother; and by a slight
squeeze fitted the Doctor's hat, which sat half an ell too high, upon
the head of his friend,--with all the more propriety, as Castor and
Pollux also had on egg-shells,[206]--and having effected this
promotion, he went his way, without exactly caring to have much thanks
for the felt-stuffing and the streaming face-poultice.
Fisticuffs spread abroad lesser truths, as wars do great truths. The
Court-Chaplain Eymann sent a long letter of congratulation to Victor,
and called him "January's kidney-keeper," and begged for his promised
visit. A travelling[207]-advocate knocked at his door as at that of a
superior court, and begged him for a princely injunction against the
Regency-College. The apothecary, with his application about the
_lavement_,[208] still holds back.
Victor still laid up for himself his first visit to St. Luna like a
ripening fruit, and thereby vexed the Regency-Counsellor, who wanted to
persuade him into it. But he said: "Those who are left behind in a
place long indescribably for him who has gone from it, until he has
made his first visit; and so, too, with him. After the first, both
parties wait quite coolly and composedly for the second."--What he
neither said nor thought, but felt and feared, was this: that his
demigoddess, Clotilda, who inhabited the most holy place in his breast,
and who by her invisibleness had become dearer, more indispensable, and
for that very reason more sure to his soul, would, perhaps, at her
appearance, take away at once all hopes out of his heart.
It was on the evening of the day when he received Eymann's letter, that
he thus fantasied: "Ah, if January would only continue so well! He must
have exercise, but of an unusual kind,--the rider must walk, the
pedestrian must drive. We ought to travel together on foot through the
country, in disguise. Ah, I might, perhaps, be of service to many a
poor devil! We would steal homeward through St. Luna,--No, no, no!" ...
He started back himself, affrighted at a certain idea,--for he feared
he should, when he had once had it, even execute it; hence he said to
it three times, No. The idea was this,--to persuade the Prince to visit
Clotilda's parents. But it was of no use; he remembered that his father
had held too strict a court of cognizance over the Chamberlain and the
Minister. "And yet, what harm can Le Baut do to me? If I should only
draw three sun-glances from January upon the poor fool! The wisest
thing for me is, not to think any more about it to-day."
The dog will bring us the answer; I, for my part, make a bet--a fine
connoisseur of human nature on my island bets the contrary--that he
does not carry out this joke.
18. DOG-POST-DAY.
Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors of
the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
Flachsenfingeners.
To be sure he did--carry out the joke; but still at bottom I do not
lose my bet. For it happened in this way. From the day when Doctor
Culpepper had made that pass with his coarse hand, as with an
electrical discharger, before the full-blooded nose of Zeusel, the man
with three watches pressed his company upon my hero, who carried only
one, and that, too, the clumsy one of the Bee-father. Zeusel always
thanked God, if only a court-courier got drunk at his house, or the
court-dentist over-ate himself. He always brought with him, when he
came, certain secret items of intelligence, which were to be published.
He kept nothing to himself, not though one had threatened to hang him
in the cellar of his shop. He told our hero that the Minister was
making interest in behalf of his Joachime for the place of second
maid-of-honor to the Princess, who could select only the female part of
her service for herself,--but that he could not fairly do it, because
he, or his son Matthieu, had promised the Chamberlain Le Baut to
procure the same place for Clotilda; he therefore begged my hero, who,
as he saw, he said, was Matthieu's friend, to spare him the
embarrassment, and induce the Prince (which would cost only _one_ word)
himself to intercede with the Princess in behalf of Joachime; the
Princess, who, besides, patronized the Minister, would, on more than
one ground, do it with pleasure, and then the Minister could not help
it, if the Chamberlain, the enemy of his Lordship, went away empty.
The simpleton, as one can see, had guessed out, merely from the two
accounts, which he had got hold of, of the two office-seekers, the
whole of the remaining case; and the very circumstance, which Matthieu
disclosed to him, that the Minister was vacating a quarter of a wing of
his palace, for a companion of his deceased daughter Giulia, had only
strengthened his conviction. To such a degree does malice supply the
place, not only of years, but also of information and insight!
My hero could say nothing to him except that--he did not believe a word
of it. But after three minutes of private reflection he believed it
all: for that was the reason, he saw, why the dear Clotilda had to come
back from the seminary just at the arrival of the Princess,--that was
the reason why Le Baut built around the Minister's son so many altars
of incense and thank-offerings,--that was the reason why the old
lady (in the Sixteenth Dog-Post-Day) serenaded, and so loudly,
court-life,--in fact, as he further saw, two such outlawed, captive
Court-Jews in Babylon must have the live Devil in them, until they are
reinstated in the old holy city, and if they happen to have a handsome
daughter, they will use her as the relay of their journey, and the
Montgolfier of their balloon-ascension....
"O, only come, Clotilda!" he cried, glowingly;--"the court-pool will
then be to me an Italian cellar, a flowery parterre. If thou art only
once settled at the Minister's, then I shall have spirits enough and
sparkle properly. What will my father say, when he sees us stand with
two leading-strings, with one of which thou holdest the Princess, and
I, with the other, the husband?" ... At this moment, Clotilda's recent
objections to court-life fell like ice-flakes into his boiling blood;
but he thought to himself: "Women, however, are a little mite more
pleased with the court-residence of splendor than they themselves
suspect or say, and far more than men are. Cannot he, too, bear, then,
with a like soul-edifying position? She, as step-daughter of the
Prince, is only half-miserable, compared with him,--and does she know,
then, whether she may not some time be recalled from her _field-état_
to the court-garrison by an accident?" By this _accident_ he meant a
marriage with Sebastian. Finally, he tranquillized himself with
something which I also believe,--namely, that she had at that time,
merely out of politeness, made a show of a certain coldness towards her
new separation from her parents, and therefore towards the new place
also; and then, too, pleasure at such a prospect might have been
taken for warmth toward _somebody_ or other at court, e. g. toward
her--_brother_, he thought to himself.
And now yesterday's idea, upon which I have lost my wager, came forth
again, having shot up astonishingly in _one_ night,--namely, that, if
he could persuade the Prince to make the journey and the visit to the
Chamberlain, and while they were still on the road, could plead with
him for a good word to the Princess in behalf of Clotilda,--then was
it, in the first place, impossible for the stepfather to refuse a
prayer for the most beautiful stepdaughter,--and, secondly, impossible
for the Princess, when her spouse should exercise the privilege of the
first petition, not to draw all possible advantage from the first
opportunity of laying him under obligations to her.
--Eight days after, just at dusk,--in the autumn days night comes
sooner,--the Court--Chaplain Eymann was standing on the observatory and
peering at the sun, not for its own sake, but in reference to the
evening-redness and the weather, because he wanted to sow the next
morning,--when suddenly and with alarm he sprang down from the
watch-tower into his house, and delivered the Job's tidings, that the
Consistorial Messenger would be there in a moment, together with a
French emigrant, and for the one there was not a farthing, and for the
other not a bed in the house....
No soul came.
I can easily comprehend it; for the Consistorial Messenger reconnoitred
around the parsonage, and so soon as he saw the court-physician,
Victor, in wax, sitting up at the window, he marched instanter out of
the village, straight back to Flachsenfingen. The emigrant had turned
in at his professional cousin's, Le Baut's.
The two travellers were named January and Victor, and were returning
this very day from their facetious flying tour.
That is to say, seven days ago, the Prince, who loved mask-dances and
incognito-journeys and the ways of the commonalty, and who wished only
the Minister's mental masks and incognito _further_, had started off on
foot, with Victor, behind a fellow who had sallied forth in advance on
horseback with the masquerade dresses and masquerade refreshments.
January carried a sword in his hand, which was contained, not in any
sheath, but in a walking-cane,--an emblem of court-weapons! He gave
himself out in the market-town for the new Regency-Counsellor, Flamin.
My hero, who at the outset had passed himself through the mint, and
come out stamped as a travelling dentist, recoined himself in the third
village into a Consistorial Messenger, simply because the couple met
the true Messenger. This financial collector of the Consistory was made
to hand over to the physician for this week--it cost the Prince only a
princely resolution and an indulgence--his receipt-book and his
ecclesiastical robe of office, together with the tin-plate sewed
thereto. These plates are attached to Messengers, and the silver stars
to coats of distinction, as the leaden ones are to bales of cloth, that
one may know what the trumpery is worth.
For Büsching such a Rekahn's journey would be a windfall,--to me it is
a true torment; for my manuscript is, besides, so large already, that
my sister sits on it when she plays the piano-forte, because the seat
is not high enough without the addition of the Dog-Post-Days.
What did January see, and what Victor? The Regency-Counsellor, January,
saw among the public servants nothing but crooked backs, crooked ways,
crooked fingers, crooked souls. "But a bow is crooked, and the bow is a
sector of the circle, that emblem of all perfection," said the
Consistorial Messenger, Victor. But what vexed January most was, that
the officials respected him so exceedingly, when after all he gave
himself out only for a regency-counsellor, and not for a regent. Victor
replied: "Man knows only two neighbors: the neighbor at his head is his
master, the one at his feet is his slave; what lies out beyond either
of these two is to him God or beast."
What did January see still further? Untaxed knaves he saw, who enriched
themselves at the expense of taxed poor men,--honest advocates he
heard, who did not, like his courtiers or the English highwaymen, steal
under the mask of virtue, but without any mask, and to whom a certain
remoteness from enlightenment and philosophy and taste will not after
death be prejudicial, because they can then in their own defence set up
against God the exception of their ignorance, and represent to Him,
"that no other laws but those of their own sovereign and of Rome can
bind them, and that neither is God Justinian, nor is Kant
Tribonian."[209] He saw hanging from the heads of his country-justices
bread-baskets, and from those of their subjects muzzle-baskets; he saw,
that, if (according to Howard) it takes two men to support one
prisoner, here there must be given twenty incarcerated ones, that one
city-magistrate may live.
He saw cursed stuff. But, on the other hand, as an offset, he saw on
pleasant nights the cattle in fair groups feeding in the fields,--I
mean the republican ones, namely, stags and wild boars. The
Consistorial Messenger, Victor, said to him, that he had to thank the
masters of the chase for this romantic spectacle, whose tender hearts
had been as little able to execute the princely order of shooting wild
game as were the Egyptian midwives to execute that of slaughtering the
Jewish male children. Nay, the Financial Messenger at an alehouse had
some yellow ink and black paper brought to him, and there,--while the
slater drummed away on the roof to get some more slates brought to him,
and the guests knocked on the pitchers to get them replenished, and the
tavern-boy _tooted_ in at the window through a beer-siphon,--amidst
this Babylonian din the Consistorial Tithingman drew up one of the best
petitions that the noble gentlemen of the chase ever yet despatched to
the Prince.
A PLAIN RELATION, FROM THE PETITION OF THE
CHIEF MASTERS OF THE CHASE.
"That, as the wild game could neither read nor write, it was the
bounden duty of the masters of the chase, who could, to write for them,
and on conscience report that all the wild game of Flachsenfingen was
pining under the tyranny of the peasant, as well the red game as the
black.[210] That it made a chief-forester's heart bleed, to stand out
of doors at night and see how the country-folk, out of an incredible
ill-will to the deer, all night long, in the coldest weather, kept up
on the borders of the fields a noise and fire, whistling, singing,
shooting, so that the poor game might not be able to eat. To such hard
hearts it was not given to reflect, that, if one should station around
their potato-tables, as they do around their potato-fields, just such
shooters and pipers, who should shoot away every potatoe from their
mouths, that then they would necessarily grow lean. From just this
cause the game was so haggard, because it could but slowly accustom
itself to such treatment, as cavalry-horses learn to eat their oats
from a beaten drum. The deer had often to go miles away, like one who,
in Paris, picks up his breakfast at the inns,--in order, at last, to
dash into a cabbage-field, which was beset by no such coast-guards
and adversaries of the wild game, and there get a good bellyful. The
dog-boys, therefore, said justly, that they trampled down in _one_
stag-hunt more grain than the game got to eat the whole week. These,
and none other, were the reasons which had moved the chief masters of
the chase to appear before his Highness with the humble prayer--
"That your Highness would be pleased to enjoin it upon the
country-people to stay at night in their warm beds, as thousands of
good Christians do, and as the game itself does by day.
"Thereby--the majors of the chase were emboldened to promise--a lift
would be given at once to the country-folk and the stags, the latter
could then graze the fields in peace, like the day-cattle, and would
certainly leave the countryman the gleanings, while they contented
themselves with the first-fruits. The country-folk would be happily
freed from the ailments which come of night-vigils, from chills and
exhaustions. But the greatest advantage would be this,--that, whereas
hitherto peasants had grumbled at the hunting-socages (and not wholly
without justice), because they delayed the time of the harvest, that
then the deer in their place would undertake the harvest in the night,
as the young men in Switzerland took upon themselves to cut the grain
over night in the place of their sweethearts, so that the latter, when
they came to their work in the morning, should find none there,--and
thus would the hunting-socages no longer disturb any one in the matter
of the harvest, except at most--the game," &c.
But what have we to tell of the Consistorial Fee-Messenger, Victor?
That ecclesiastical collecting-servant astonished all parsons by his
drollery, and all parsons' wives by his readiness, and nothing but his
tin and his papers could adequately certify the genuineness of such a
specimen of a Messenger. He collected all that the Consistorial
Secretary had liquidated, and excused himself by the plea that it
became neither him nor the Secretary in this case to be conscientious.
In his brief administration, he bagged without shame all back-standing
marriage-pledges of the smallest value, ("We in the College," said he,
"are greedy for a half-bats,"[211])--moneys, when parties were
divorced,--moneys, when marriages were concluded by councils, whether
by indulgences for mourning-time, for blood-relationship, or for want
of parental consent,--moneys, when the moneys were only once (_or
twice_) paid, but not yet for the second (or third) time, although the
Consistory always required this after-ring or resonance of the money in
the single case where people had lost the receipt,--moneys which the
parsons had to pay down merely for decrees wherein they were _exempted_
from payment.----
Thereupon he emptied his bag before the Prince, and flattened down the
billow of money, and began:--
"Your Highness!
"The Devil is in the Consistory: it might be a Lutheran _Penitentiaria_
for all the Commandments, and is so only for the sixth. What an honest
Consistorial administration has been able to scrape together lies there
on the table. The pile might be as broad again, if the Consistory had
sense enough to say, 'Who buys? fresh, new letters of indulgence for
everything!'--It has shown, that, beyond certain degrees of
relationship, it can grant bulls of dispensation as well as the Pope:
why will it not, then, apply its indulgence to any nearer degrees? It
would be able to dispense from great as well as from small, if it
really set about it, and just as well from fast-day penances as from
mourning, and thrice publishing, that erotic fast-time. By Heaven!
if a single man, like the Pope, can be the spiritual washing-machine
of whole continents, and can clean souls in bundles in the year
of jubilee, then surely we all in the College may serve for the
washing-machine of a single country. If that is not done, then we
take--for we mean to live--sin-money and perquisites for the few things
which we have graciously to wink at; and if in Sparta the _judges_
worshipped the goddess of Fear, so with us the _parties_ revere this
fair _ens_.[212]--Had we only, at least, power to absolve from five or
six great sins,--only, e. g., from a murder,--then could we allow
divorces and expeditings of marriages, (these wholly opposite
operations we perform successfully, just as the Karlsbad water at the
same time dissolves the stone in the bladder and petrifies what is
dipped into the well,) and do it for half the money."
Then, after a long pause,--"Your Excellency, it is, after all,
impracticable, because the Devil has the secular counsellors mixed in
among the ghostly; a half-_profane session-table_ cannot by any
cabinet-making process be made over into a _holy chair_; there is,
therefore, nothing to be wished--except a good digestion[213]--but a
spirit of concord, that clerical and secular counsellors may properly
feed upon the parties around which they sit, saving a couple of bones,
that shall fall to us scribes and messengers. So have I often seen on
the carcass of a dead horse starlings and ravens at once, in a motley
row, sitting amicably together, and pecking away and devouring."----
My correspondent assures me that by these addresses the Court-Physician
effected more with January than the Court-Chaplain by his. Many parties
got their money, and some judges a most gracious letter, from the
Prince's own hand.
Before I arrive with our disguised span in the suburbs of St. Luna,
one or two things are still to be mentioned. To January's soul more
knee-pedals were attached than to a pianoforte, which the favorite's
knee, while it seemed to bend itself, moved at its pleasure. He was
always the son of the present moment, and the reflection of his
company. If he read in Sully, then he did not neglect for a week at a
time the Regency-College, and sent for the President of Finance. If he
read in Frederick II., then he was for furnishing the imperial
contingent and himself commanding it, and went forenoons to the parade.
He contemplated with pleasure the ideal of a good government, whether
in print or in a speech, and often attempted approximations to it,
reformations, investigations, and compensations, for whole weeks,--with
the exception of _retrenchments_, which, after all, are the only merit
a prince can earn without the help of others. During the whole crusade
he was a true Philosopher Antoninus, and stood ready everywhere to
reward and to punish and to enact; he felt, too, that he could make it
practicable, if one only did not absolutely require him to _labor_ and
to _abstain_; under _that_ the other part also went to the Devil.
In the beginning, he was pleased with the sentimental journey; when it
was over, he was so again; but in the midst of it, all that was pressed
out after the first runnings grew more and more bitter, and he wished
for himself, instead of the country bill-of-fare, his dietetic
dial-plate. Then, too, he had accustomed himself so much to valor,
that, for want of it,--i. e. of his body-guard,--he was, so to speak,
timid; hence, on one occasion, in the dark, at the tavern, he was while
in bed, about to run through a young weaver with his cane-sword,
because the weaver had confounded at night the princely bed with one of
more peaceful contents. For the rest, all the rays of his favor now
converged to a focus upon the single man of rank, the only courageous
and confidential friend whom he had,--his Victor.
But my hero had everywhere something to enjoy,--at least, the thought
of St. Luna; everywhere something to eat,--at least, when they came to
a fruit-tree; everywhere something to read,--and though it were only
charms against fires on the house-doors, old calendars on the walls,
exhortations to charity on the alms-boxes; everywhere something to
think of,--of the travelling pair, of the four acts of Nature's
seasons, which are annually given over again, of the thousand acts in
man, which never return; and everywhere something to love and to dream
of,--for this was the very road which Clotilda had so often gone over
on her journeys between Maienthal and St. Luna, and the friend of her
rich heart found on this classic avenue nothing but great remembrances,
magic passages, and a long, quiet, homelike bliss....
"St. Luna!" cried January, delighted at the mere thought of seeing once
more a man of the world,--Le Baut. The mask of an emigrant was a
thought he had himself hit upon, the better to draw out the
Chamberlain, with whom he meant finally to give himself out as an
hereditary foe of the Prince. Had there been in Le Baut's soul a higher
nobility than the heraldic, or had Victor but known that the
Chamberlain would recognize the Prince at the first glance, and that he
would be able to do so for the very reason that the genuine suspended
Consistorial Messenger had probably before this whispered the whole
secret in the ear of the city of Flachsenfingen, he would have
dissuaded him from the _noble masque_.
Sebastian, as we have mentioned, stayed back and in the open air,
probably out of shame at his part, and evidently from a longing to look
upon Clotilda's sunny face, which for so long a time had not risen upon
him, in a scene more convenient and congenial to his heart. "And the
parents will be glad to see me again," he thought beside, "when they
have something to thank me for,"--namely, Clotilda's place at court.
More than once did he start, as he stood watching there behind the
blanket of the dark, to hear his name called out of the Parsonage, and,
in fact, with such love and such longings for his answer that he could
almost have given one. But it was only the people of the Parsonage
talking with his little godson, and saying to him, "Dearest good
Sebastian! Just see here: what have I got for you?" How the veiled
paradise of to-day's spring lay in old relics around him! How he envied
the shadowy heads in the palace, which he saw moving about the lights,
and the old Parson's pug-dog, who would fain wag him in to the
Parsonage-inmates, and who continued in there to perform his part on
the stage of so sweet a past! But when some thistles round the palace
reminded him of the mosaic ones on the floor within-doors, then was the
envier to be envied, and, with the fairest dreams that were ever traced
over the ground of his dark life, he went back to the Apothecary's.
The next day January followed, delighted with the parents, enraptured
with the daughter, because they were so fine and she so fair. It cost
my hero nothing but a word to move the step-father to the intercession
for the appointment of the step-daughter, which our hero and the father
had so often longed to see; and it cost the step-father, too, only a
word with the Princess to get his and their petition granted....
Clotilda became maid-of-honor.
Immediately upon that, the Minister von Schleunes, in a congratulatory
letter, pressed upon Clotilda's parents the quarter-wing of his house,
and was happy, in the epistle, "that a higher petition had _repeated_
his own with such effect." I set up this nobleman as a model to all
people of the world; although, at present, all writes itself _noble_ in
the _moral_, as the Viennese do in the _heraldic_ sense.
Victor, who with his soul's eyes was peeping all day long into the
Chamberlain's window, could hardly wait to see Clotilda, first in St.
Luna, and next at court. He put off the visit from day to day, and
night after night made it in dream. Not even his visiting-card--his
letter to the Parson--had he sent off; he wanted, not only to carry it,
but actually to supersede it, himself. But this, last thought--of
suppressing the letter, for fear Clotilda might possibly get hold of
this malicious conduct-list of courts, and therefrom contract a
repugnance to the new office--he hurled forthwith out of his soul, as
Paul did the viper from his hand. Woe to the heart that is not sincere
towards a sincere one, is not great towards a great one, and warm
towards a warm one, when it should be all this even towards one that is
nothing of it all!
For the rest, he needed such a visit, and such a reciprocal visit,
every day more and more; for he was not happy; and for this there were,
besides himself, to blame, first, the Prince, secondly, Flamin,
thirdly, nine thousand and thirty-seven persons. The Prince could not
well help it; he poured out the whole cornucopia of his love on the
Doctor, and took away from him all the freedom which the latter had
been minded in the beginning so sacredly to maintain. Victor shook his
head as often as he wrote in his journal, or log-book of his voyage of
life, (at his father's behest,) and saw by his chart that he had passed
over quite other seas and degrees of latitude and longitude than he or
his father had desired. "However, I shall land right, at least," said
he.--
But his Flamin brought still more sadness to his soul, which everywhere
at once sought and bestowed love. He wanted to impart to the
Counsellor, with the news of Clotilda's appointment, a joy like
his own; but his friend received it as coldly as he did its bearer.
The dust of law-papers lay thick on the organ-pipes of his
spirits.--Chained to the session- and writing-tables, he was now, like
chained dogs, wilder than he had been before when unfettered.--The
efforts of his colleagues to dislocate the body politic into an anagram
did not get from him the approbation which they deserved.--Then, too,
there lodged itself in his soul the leaven of the jealousy of
friendship, which could not feel it right that his Victor should see
him seldomer and others oftener.[214]--But most was he affronted by
Victor's refusal, when he besought his company to St. Luna.... In a
word, he was vexed.
The nine thousand and thirty-seven men who were to my hero nine
thousand and thirty-seven tormenting spirits are the gentlemen of
Flachsenfingen jointly and severally, by means of their absurd
character, which deserves not to be sketched here, but in an extra
flyleaf.
EXTRA FLY-LEAF,
_Wherein is sketched the Ridiculous Character of the People of
Flachsenfingen,--or Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
Little Vienna is the name many give to my Flachsenfingen, just as we
have a Little Leipsic, Little Paris,[215] &c. There can hardly,
however, be two cities wider apart in manners than Flachsenfingen,
where one gluts and drowns his life and his soul, and Vienna, where
one, perhaps, does not sufficiently shun the opposite fault of a
Spartan asceticism. The Little-Viennese, or Flachsenfingeners, open
their hearts to the enjoyment of Nature far less than the orifice of
the stomach.--Pastures are the kitchen-pieces of their cattle, and
gardens those of the owners thereof; the Milky Way does not chain and
satisfy their spirits half so much (though it is longer) as the
Königsberg sausage of 1583 would have done, which was five hundred and
ninety-six ells long, and four times as heavy as the learned man
himself who has portrayed it to posterity,--Herr Wagenseil.[216]--Are
these the traits upon which carriers ground the name of Little Vienna?
I have often been in Great Vienna, and am personally acquainted with
the grand crosses, little crosses, and commanders of the Order of
Temperance, which is there so common. I can certainly, therefore,
represent a valid witness, and must be believed, when I say, that,
while in Little Vienna they guzzle extraordinarily, of Great Vienna,
and emphatically of its cloister-people, I can and must maintain
something very different: they have not only all the time the greatest
thirst,--which certainly must needs be gone, if they quenched it,--but
they also make use, against drunkenness, of a fine method of Plato's.
That ancient advises us, in case of drunkenness, to look into a glass,
in order, by the distorted figure therein which reminds us of our
desecration, to be forever warned away from the vice. Hence whole
chapters, the dean, the sub-senior, the junior canons, &c., often set
vessels full of wine or beer before them, and lift them to their eyes,
and in this _metamorphotic_ or caricaturing glass, which, by shaking,
distorts still more the distorted features, contemplate themselves,
according to the philosopher's advice, a good long while. I ask whether
people who peer so deeply into the glass can love drinking?--
It does not, however, follow from this, that I deny the Great-Viennese
a resemblance to the Flachsenfingeners, in such traits as do honor.
Thus, for example, I must gladly allow a similarity of the former to
the latter in this respect, that they, neither of them, are ever down
with the disease of poetry or enthusiasm or sentimentalism,--which are
all one. Victor would make this eulogy sound in his language somewhat
thus: "The Viennese authors (even the best of them, only Denis and
hardly three others excepted) give the reader no wings to bear him up
over the whole world of the actual by that nobility of soul, by that
contempt of the earth, by that reverence for old virtue and freedom and
the higher love, wherein other German geniuses shine as in holy
rays."[217] And he would refer for proof to the "Vienna Sketches," to
"Faustin,"[218] to Blumauer,[219] and to the "Vienna Almanac of the
Muses." This reproach even a Viennese would accept and turn to
his credit, by asking us whether we have to show (like him) a
"Musen-Almanach," with a sediment of filth, whereupon one might write,
"With approbation of the brothel."--This feeling of literary difference
compelled even a Nicolai,--otherwise no special _amoroso_ of the Vienna
authors,--in his "Universal German Library," to build up for them a
separate side-box, although he throws writers of all other German
circles together into _one parterre_, or pit. In like manner have I
seen in Bavaria, on the gallows, beside the usual post for the three
Christian fellow-confessors, a special schismatic cross-beam attached,
to which only the Jew tribe were strung up.
The Flachsenfingener knows that there is nothing in poets; and in
books, where rills of verse run through the prose, he skips clean over
the rills, just as certain people come late to church in order to
escape the singing. He is a true servant of the state, who knows of
what use the poetic golden vein is in the revision-, commission-,
relation-, and enrolling-systems,--none at all; meanwhile, although he
cannot appreciate a Klopstock or a Goethe, nevertheless he will not, in
his leisure hours, despise a doggerel verse or crambo-rhyme. A soul of
such a fortunate, robust nature, wherein one aims less to exalt his
spirit than his income, makes it, to be sure, comprehensible how there
may be a kine-pox, by means of which the Flachsenfingener has been
able, like Socrates, to wander round alone in the plague of
sentimentalism without being infected. The full moon produced with them
full crabs, but no full hearts; and what they planted under it, that it
might favor the growth, was not love, but--turnips. The genuine
Little-Viennese shoots at much nearer targets than that white one over
yonder. They marry there with true gusto, without having first shot
themselves or sighed themselves to death,--they know no obstacles to
love but ecclesiastical,--female virtue is a belt-buckle, which must
hold as long as the surname of the daughter,--the hearts of daughters
are there like letter-envelopes, which, when they have once been
superscribed to one lord, can easily be turned so as to be addressed to
another man,--the girls love there, not from coquetry, but from
simplicity, any devil, except poor devils....
In short, my correspondent, from whom I have all this, is almost
prepossessed in favor of Little Vienna, and therefore contradicts
vehemently the author of the "Travelling Frenchman," who is said to
have said somewhere--if I had him in the house, I should know how
Little Vienna is properly named--that the Flachsenfingener has not
energy enough to be at least a highwayman. Knef says, however, he will
not give up the hope that they have been thieves, and backs himself by
the cases of those that have been hung.
_End of the Extra Fly-Leaf, wherein was sketched the Ridiculous
Character of the People of Flachsenfingen,--or of the
Perspective Plan of the City of Little Vienna_.
But among such people my hero, with all his toleration, could not take
any comfort whatever,--he who so hated all selfishness, especially in
the sensual form, and who would gladly have attended Dr. Graham's
lectures, wherein he taught men to live without eating,--he who so
gladly opened his heart to the seed of truth winged by poesy,--who
bore an Emanuel in his heart, and held the want of poetic feeling
even as a sign that the _moral_ man had not yet laid aside all
caterpillar-skins,--he who looked upon this whole life and the whole
body politic as the hull in which the kernel of the next life
ripens,--O, whoever thinks this is too lonely among them that think
otherwise!--
So it stood with the world around him, when he got a line from the good
wife of the Parson:--
"The general talk here is that you are dead. But I express my mind
against people, that, as you let so little be heard from you, and have
forgotten all the world, you must, for that very reason, be still
alive. Do confirm my proposition! We all have a fond and foolish
longing for you, and I should like to beg you to come on the
twenty-first (if the wedding at the senior Parson's hinders you no more
than it does my Flamin). We have nothing to offer you here, but the
birthday of our Clotilda. O good my Lord, and my beloved Lordship, how
has it been possible for you hitherto to remain so long mute and
invisible? A true friend, who has nothing at all of the ladies of your
court about her, not even their fickleness, wishes heartily to have you
before her eyes and beside her ears,--and that lady is myself,--and
when I see you come, I shall certainly weep for joy, let me laugh or
pout the while as I will.
"E."
When did he receive this letter, so full of soul? And what answer did
his make to it?--
It was on the loveliest evening, which announced the coming of the
loveliest Sunday morning and of the magic after-summer,--he looked at
the evening red under which lay Maienthal's mountains, and his heart
beat heavily within him,--he looked toward the dawning red of the full
moon which kindled over St. Luna, and his yearning thitherward became
inexpressible,--he thought of Clotilda, whose birthday fell upon
to-morrow,--and so, very naturally, as to-day closed, he went--to bed.
19. DOG--POST-DAY.
The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in
Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by
Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without
Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.
The October Sunday with which I fill up this Dog-Post-Day was,
even at nine and a half o'clock in the morning, such a glad,
glistening day in St. Luna, that the whole Parsonage thought of the
Court-Physician.--"Ah, he ought to come to the concert this evening!"
The _virtuoso_ Stamitz was to give one in Le Baut's garden.--"O, better
earlier, even to dinner!"--"And to my forenoon sermon, if he will not
come to the children's catechizing." Eymann, as he said this, had, more
than anything else, his newly dressed peruke in his head, which Herr
Meuseler had to-day placed _on_ it. This clever peruke-maker visited
those of his diocesans (the parsons) who wore no hair of their own,
often and with greater benefit to their heads than the Superintendent
himself, that _Commander of the Faithful_, to whom most chaplains said,
Your Excellency! If he could only have weaned himself from singing,
lying, and drinking too much,--the _friseur_,--most of the clergy would
have ordered their toupees--those artistic cock's-combs--of him; but as
it was, they did not.
As the Chaplain loved to make the _confitures_ of Fate, among which
false hair is to be reckoned, bitter in some way, and to give them, as
it were, an infusion of hops, he naturally sought to embitter to-day's
peruke (for whose false curls he gave, in place of payment, genuine
hair cut off from his people's heads) by the misgivings which he
conjured up about the long staying away of Victor. He bethought
himself: "We must have affronted him in some way,--he does not even
write,--he has, perhaps, fallen out with my son,--something has
occurred,--and then, too; the old Lord no longer gives us a
side-glance,--our rats, also, had a hand (or a foot) in helping drive
him away."
By such elegies he threw at first himself, and at last even his
hearers, into agony. He was not to be refuted in any way, except by
one's bringing out some new subject of distress. The breaking-away spot
in his cloud, or his _little book for help in distress_, was this time
a literal book, the "Anecdotes for Preachers," by Teller, of Zeitz,
which he to-day received through the peruke-maker from the clerical
reading-circle. Clergymen, especially country clergymen, carry
everything out with a minute, punctilious solicitude, into which they
are partly scared by their reigning bugbear and dragon of a Consistory.
Now in this book-club there was a law current--commentators and editors
keep it--that every member who should find a grease-spot or ink-stain
or rent in the book he was reading should enter it on the fly-leaf in
an index and inventory of spots, together with the number of the page
"where." Very naturally, every one who was even half-way an honest
Lutheran would deny the _immaculate re_-(or _con_-)_ception_ of it, and
the freckles were therefore all regularly registered, but nobody fined.
Only the conscientious Court-Chaplain took upon himself, as scapegoat,
the punishment of other people's sins; for he never could sleep a wink
the whole night, when he found in a book more blots than in the
sin-register, because he clearly saw that he should be made adoptive
father of the anonymous smutch and buyer of the book.--Now Teller's
Anecdotes for Black-Coats was a complete pile of linen for the wash,
black with dirt. Was there not one dog's-ear upon another,--compound
dog's-ears,--blot upon blot? were not the leaves regular
_proof-sheets_,--and, in fact, speaking _without metaphor_? Eymann
began, "And if money should come flying in to me through the
window"....
Just then Victor's letter flew in at the window, and its--author
through the door.
But, of course, the case was this:--Victor, before pleasant weather,
had pleasant dreams; before bad weather, Satan and his kin appeared to
him. The beautiful weather of Saturday, and the thought of Clotilda's
birthday and of the after-summer, gave him a morning dream, which, in
turn, gave him a stage on which only her sweet image played. A person
whom he had seen behind the veil of dream stood before him all the next
day in a magic reflection. With him dreams,--those night-moths of the
spirit,--like the real moths, strayed out beyond the bounds of night
and sleep; at least for the forenoon, he went on loving, awake, every
person whom he had begun to love in dream. This time, by an exactly
reverse process, waking love flowed on into dreaming love, and the
actual Clotilda coincided with the ideal to form one saintly image, so
radiant that any one who knows his dream will easily enter into the
rest. Therefore must the dream be given to the readers, the poetic ones
especially: for others I should be glad to prepare an expurgated
edition of the Dog-Post-Days, in which it should be left out; for
unpoetic souls that have no dreams themselves should not read any.
But to you, ye good, seldom requited female souls,--ye who have
a second conscience of your own, beside the first, for pure
manners,--whose single virtue, when one looks at it nearly, is seen to
bloom up into one wreath made of all the virtues, as nebulous stars,
seen through glasses, fall into millions,--ye who, so changeable in all
purposes, so unchangeable in the noblest one, go from the earth with
unrecognized wishes, with forgotten worth, with eyes full of tears and
love, with hearts full of virtue and grief,--to you, dear ones, I
gladly tell the little dream and my long story!...
"A hand which Horion did not see laid hold of him; lips which he saw
not spake to him, 'Let thy heart now be clean and holy, for the genius
of female virtue resides in this region.'--Lo! there stood Horion on a
field clothed with forget-me-nots, over which the sky like a blue
shadow fell; for all the stars had been withdrawn from it, only the
_evening star_ stood gleaming alone up in the place of the sun. White
ice-pyramids, streaked with down-trickling lines of evening redness,
closed in, as with a wall of gold and silver ore, the whole dark
horizon.----Therein Clotilda passed by, sublime as one dead, serene as
a human being in the next world, conducted now by winged children, now
by a veiled nun, now by an earnest angel, but she passed forever by
before Horion; she smiled upon him in blissful lovingness while thus
passing, but she passed by.--Flowery hillocks, almost like graves, rose
and sank, for every one was stirred by the breathing of a bosom
slumbering beneath it; a white rose stood over the heart that lay
veiled below; two red ones grew over the cheeks, where tender blushes
hid themselves in the earth; and overhead in the night-blue of heaven
the white and red reflections of the hill-flowers glided fitfully into
each other as often as the roses of the heart and the cheeks swayed
with the hillock.--Dying echoes, awakened, however, by unheard voices,
gave answer to each other behind the mountains; each echo lifted the
little hills of slumber still higher, as if a deep sigh or a bosom full
of rapture heaved them; and Clotilda smiled more blissfully, sinking at
every resonance more deeply into the flowery earth.--The tones were too
full of ecstasy, and the dissolved heart of man was fain to die
therein. Clotilda sank now into the graves up to her heart; only her
silent head still smiled above the meadow; the forget-me-nots at last
reached up to the sunken eyes that were full of blissful tears, and
bloomed over them.--Then suddenly a hill of slumber crept over the
saint, and from beneath the flowers her words came up, 'Rest thou, too,
Horion!'--But the sounds, growing more distant, transformed themselves
during the burial into dim harmonica-tones.... And lo! as they sank
into silence, there came up a great shadow like Emanuel, and stood
before him like a short night, and covered the unknown moment as with a
hand from a higher world. But when the moment and the shadow had passed
away, then had all the hills sunk.--Then the reflections of the
flowers, flowing together, gilded over the undulating heavens.--Then
were seen _white_ butterflies, _white_ doves, _white_ swans, climbing
up to the purple peaks of the ice-mountains with outstretched wings as
with arms, and behind the mountains, as if by an uncontainable
transport, blossoms were flung up, and stars and garlands.--And there
on the highest ice-mountain, as it rose tranquil in clear radiance and
purple blaze, stood Clotilda, glorified, consecrated, radiant with
supernatural rapture, and on her heart fluttered a nebulous globe,
which consisted of little vaporized tears, and on which Horion's pallid
form was delineated, and Clotilda spread wide her arms."----
But to embrace? or to soar away? or to pray?... Ah! he awoke too soon,
and his eyes streamed down in greater tears than the nebulous ones, and
a sinking voice cried incessantly all around him, "Rest thou, too!"
O thou soul of woman,--thou that goest, weary and unrewarded, wounded
and bleeding, but great and unspotted, up from the smoking battle-field
of life,--thou angel, whom the heart of man, reared by storms, soiled
by the world's dealings, can respect and love, but cannot reward or
reach,--how does my soul at this moment bow down before thee! how do I
wish thee now the soothing balm of Heaven, the requiting goodness of
the Eternal! And thou, Philippina, precious soul, glide away into a
secret cell, and, amidst the tears which thou hast already so often
shed, lay thy hand upon thy soft, rich heart, and swear, "Forever shalt
thou continue consecrated to God and virtue, even if not to repose!" To
thyself swear it,--not to me, for I believe it without an oath.----
What a parade-night, full of stars and dreams, was that! and what a
gala-day of Nature followed upon it! In Victor's brain stood nothing
but St. Luna, veiled in blue, bespangled with silver dew-drops, and
graced by the loveliest angel, who to-day raised moist, glad eyes to
the friendly heaven, and thought, "How beautiful art thou to-day, just
upon my birthday festival!"--Even the Senior Pastor and his daughter,
who both made a wedding,--the former an anniversary second wedding with
his Senioress, the latter a first one with the preacher of the Orphan
Asylum,--slipped themselves into the procession of his joyous thoughts
as two new couples.
He did not mean to go to St. Luna, but he said; "I will dress myself up
just for a little walk."--
"It is all one where I go to-day," he said, when he was out of doors;
and so he took the St. Luna road.--
"I can turn round at any time," he said, when he had gone half-way.--
"But it would be something still more ridiculously funny, if I should
be at once correspondent and postman, and deliver my own letter," said
he, and drew it out.--
"And answer my good mother's orally by the same opportunity," he
continued, half in dream, and full of greater love towards her who had
sent him the sweet nocturnal one by the intelligence of the birthday.--
----But when he heard the first bells of St. Luna ringing for church,
then he sprang up, and said, "Now I will no longer embitter the way by
further scruples, but will march boldly and decidedly into the
village."
And so, taking the hand of Fortune, with all Nature smiling after him,
with dreams in his heart, with innocent hope in his freshly blooming
countenance, he entered into the Eden of his soul.
Flamin he had not asked to go with him, in order not to rob the Senior
Pastor of his wedding-guest, and because he did not know, himself, that
he should reach St. Luna, and perhaps, too, because he did not want to
have his fantasying attention to the sparkling morning disturbed by any
news about juristic cases. In fact, he would rather take a walk with a
woman than with a man. Men are almost ashamed, beside one another, of
any except silent emotions; but womanly souls love to unfold to each
other their bashful sensibilities; for they cover up the naked heart
with maternal warmth, that it may not become chilled during the
unveiling.
As Victor passed round the Parsonage below, he saw himself up at the
window, in his _second edition for a few good friends_; but the wax
Victor had forthwith to be banished behind a false partition, that it
might not frighten the fleshly one. The reception of the latter, and
the feast of jubilee thereupon, need not be described by me in a more
lively manner than by my saying that the pug-dog was almost crushed
underfoot, the bulfinch hopped round in vain for his breakfast, nor did
the Parson's wife offer any to the guest, in her joy at staring at him,
and church did not begin till after the double usance of half an hour;
so that this time more parishioners went to church drunk than usual.
Victor, too, went thither intoxicated, but with joy. There is nothing
more agreeable than to be a parson's wife, and to say to one's husband,
while putting on his clerical bands, "Make the service a little longer
to-day, else the mutton will not be quite roasted through."--Domestic
trifles gratified my hero full as much as courtly ones provoked him.
He went with the Parson and with the Parson's wife, who abridged all
the processes of kitchen and toilet in a summary and manlike way. His
toleration for the faults of the clerical order had nothing in common
with that of the distinguished people who are fit for high dignities
and dinners, which arises from supreme contempt, and which can endure a
Christian priest as easily as an Egyptian; but it grew out of his
opinion that the churches are still the only Sunday-Schools and Spartan
school-gates for the poor commoners, who cannot hear their _cours de
morale_ from the _state_. Besides, he loved, as a youth, the favorites
of his childhood.
Many preachers try to combine the rule of Quintilian, who requires that
_bad_ arguments should be put forward in the earlier part of the
discourse, with that of Cicero, who is for keeping them back till the
latter part, by posting them in _both_ places; but Eymann held good
feelings to be better than bad reasons, and wound around the peasants
chains, not of reasoning, but of flowers.
The _friseur_ above-mentioned, at first, would not go to church,
because it was beneath his dignity, but afterward he could not do
otherwise; for, on account of the court stranger present to-day,
church-music was to be made.
It is the only fault of the peruke-maker Meuseler, that he loves to
sing too well, and is too fond of intruding his natural pipes into all
church-music that is made in his perukial diocese, especially on Holy
Whitsuntide. The St. Luna chorister could never bear this; but how to
cheat him and feast a thousand ears? Simply thus: He frizzled out
to-day what was still to be frizzled, (not to-day alone, but it was
always so,) and merely glided up the choir-steps. Here he leaned and
watched, till the chorister, seated on the musical sausage-sledge,
struck with his finger the first note of the church-music. Then, like a
sunbeam, he darted up into the choir, and filched away from the young
counter-tenor his part, and sang it into the ears of the congregation,
but with much whining and puffing, as if he were chanting his
manuscript to the reviewers. For one must now, once for all, make it
known to the world, that the enraged musician at the clavichord had,
with a sharp-cornered triangle of elbows, furiously thrust back at the
frizzling counter-tenor, in order to push the strange singing-bird out
of the bird-house of the choir. But as the singer made his right arm
the firm note-desk of his text, and the other a war-club,--like the
Jews, who built up Jerusalem with one hand full of building-tools and
the other full of weapons,--one sees that the peruke-maker, even
amidst this continuance of fighting and fa-sol-la-ing, could do his
very best, and execute somewhat during the musical truce of God. But
so soon as the music had drawn its last breath, then the harmonious
bird-of-passage and stormy-petrel skipped nimbly out across the choir,
accompanied by the memory of a thousand ears and a single elbow. The
chorister could not catch him, nor get scent of him.
If, on the contrary, he had the good fortune to be passing with his
bandboxes through a village just as parson and schoolmaster and
pedagogic frog-spawn were quacking and croaking[220] round a deaf
corpse,--all which many name, more concisely, a dirge,--then could the
_virtuoso_, without the counter-prop of elbows, spring gayly with both
feet into the motet,[221] work out the funeral serenade given to the
dead man by his heirs, throw in gratis some final cadences to the
funeral procession, and yet have time to offer in the village to the
bailiff an entirely new bag-wig.--
To our hero the music in country churches gave the greatest satirical
pleasure. But little should we get by it, had I not the forethought to
beg leave just for one poor little extra-syllable--one shall hardly see
it--upon church-music.
POOR LITTLE EXTRA-SYLLABLE ON CHURCH-MUSIC.
It always gives me pleasure to see the people keep their seats during
church-music, because it is a proof that no one is bitten by the
tarantula; for, if they should run out, one would see that they could
not endure any discords, and so had been bitten. I, as profane
music-master, compose for few churches,--that is to say, only
the consecration-noise for new ones, or old ones that have been
repaired,--and therefore, in truth, I understand nothing of the matter
whereupon, in passing, I purpose to express myself; but thus much let
me still be allowed to assert, that the Lutheran church-music is good
for something,--in the country, not in the capitals, where, perhaps,
the fewest discords are correctly delivered. Verily, a miserable,
sottish, blue chorister, who in bravura-airs sings himself brown
and beats others brown,--there are, therefore, two kinds of
_bravura_-airs,--is able, with a few mechanics who on Sundays work at
the fiddle, with a trumpeter who might blow down without an instrument
the walls of Jericho, with a smith who lays about him with the sticks
of the kettle-drums, with a few spasmodic youngsters that do not yet
even understand singing, and still resemble a female singer, who
labors, not, like the fine arts, for _ear_ and _eye_ alone, but also
(only in a worse acceptation than the youngsters) for a third sense,
and with the little wind which he draws from the lungs of the organ and
his own lungs,--such a thumper, I say, is able, with so extraordinarily
little musical rubbish, nevertheless, to get up a much louder
thundering and fiddle-rosin-lightning around the pulpit Sinai--I mean,
to draw a far more vehement and discordant church-music out of his
choir--than many much better sustained theatre-orchestras and
chapels, with whose harmonies temples are so often desecrated. Hence
such a noisy man is pained afterward, when people misunderstand and
falsely judge his church scraping and squeaking and groaning. Shall,
then, the soft, low Moravian music steal into all our provincial
churches?--Fortunately, however, there are still city choristers who
are working against this, and who know wherein pure choral tone and
discord are to be distinguished from court-tone.
I expect, not readers, but organists, to know why mere dissonances--for
consonances are to be endured only among the voices of the
instruments--belong to the choir. Dissonances--according to Euler and
Sulzer--are relations of tones which are expressed in high numbers;
they displease us, therefore, not on account of their incongruity, but
on account of our inability to reduce them rapidly to an equation.
Higher minds would find the near relations of our harmonies too easy
and monotonous,--the larger ones of our discords, on the contrary,
charming and not above their comprehension. Now, as divine service is
held more in honor of higher beings than for the profit of men, the
church style must insist upon this, that a music shall be made,
suitable for higher beings,--namely, of discords,--and that precisely
that which is the most abominable to our ears shall be chosen as most
appropriate for the temple.
If we once open the church-doors to the instrumental music of the
Moravians, then we shall at last be infected with their singing, and by
degrees all that vocal bleating and bellowing will be lost which makes
our churches so lively, and which to castrated ears is such a
disagreeable hammer of the law, but for us so good a proof that we
resemble the swine, which the Abbé de Baigne, at the command of Louis
XI., arranged according to the scale, goaded with jacks, and set to
squealing.--These are my thoughts on church-music, or modern German
battle-song.
_End of the Extra-Syllable on Church-Music_.
I should not have let the hair-dresser sing and strut so long, if my
hero had been available for anything else, all this Sunday, than
a supernumerary; but he did nothing of consequence the whole day,
except, that, out of a sort of humanity, by unpacking, himself; her
chests-of-drawers and bandboxes, he compelled old Appel, who would
rather dress hams than her person, to prepare the usual Sabbath edition
of the latter, printed with typographic splendor, as early as three
o'clock in the afternoon; otherwise she would not have delivered the
same till after supper. The Jews believe that they get, on the Sabbath,
a new Schabbes-[222] or Sabbath-Soul: into maidens there enters one at
least; into the Appels, two or three.
But why do I expect my hero to make any more active demonstration
to-day,--him who, to-day, buried in that dream-night and in the coming
evening, his emotions stirred by every kindly eye, and by the
_rudera_[223] and urns of a spring which he had dreamed away,--softly
dissolved by the calm, bland summer, which still lay smiling and dying
on the incense-altars of the mountains, on the crape-clad fields, and
amidst the mute funeral escort of birds, and at the rising of the first
cloud would pass away from the boughs,--Victor, I say, who to-day,
greeted with a melancholy smile by nothing but tender remembrances,
felt that he had hitherto been too mirthful? He could only look upon
the good souls around him with glistening eyes of love, then turn them
away, more intensely glistening, and go out. Over his heart and all
its notes stood written, _Tremolando_. No one is more profoundly sad
than he who laughs too much; for when this laughter ceases, everything
has power over the exhausted soul, and a meaningless lullaby, a
flute-concert,--whose D sharp and F sharp keys and mouthpieces are
merely the two lips wherewith a young shepherd whistles,--opens the
flood-gates of the old tears, as a whisper loosens the poised and
trembling avalanche. He felt as if his dream of this morning absolutely
did not allow him to address Clotilda; she seemed to him too holy, and
still escorted by winged children, and placed upon icy thrones. As,
upon the whole, he had to-day neither a tongue nor an ear for Le Baut's
conversations in the realm of the morally dead, he preferred to listen
unseen in the great leafy garden to this Stamitz concert, and at the
farthest let himself be introduced to the company by accident. His
second reason was, that his heart was made for a sounding-board of
music, and gladly drank in the fleeting tones without disturbance, and
loved to conceal their effects upon him from ordinary men, of the
world, who can truly quite as little do without Goethe's, Raphael's,
and Sacchini's things (and for not a whit inferior reasons) as without
Löschenkohl's own. Emotion, it is true, raises one above being ashamed
to show emotion; but while his emotions lasted, he hated and shunned
all attention to another's attention, because the Devil smuggles in
vanity among the best feelings, often one knows not how. In the night,
in a shady nook, tears fall more gracefully, and by-and-by evaporate.
In all this he was strengthened by the Parson's wife; for she had
secretly sent to town and invited her son, and artistically prepared in
the garden a surprise.
The Parson's family repaired at last to the embowered concert-hall, and
gave not a thought to the consideration how much they were despised by
Le Baut's household, who held only noble metals and noble birth, never
noble deeds, to be cards of admission, and who, highly valuing the
people of the Parsonage as friends of his Lordship and of Matthieu,
would, however, have valued them still higher as lap-dogs of either.
Victor kept back a little in the Parsonage garden, because it was
still too light, and also because he pitied poor Apollonia, who was
peering solitary and unseen, in full finery, from the window of the
summer-house, out into the air, and dandling perpendicularly the little
god-son, whom she hung now over her head, now under her stomach. After
the manner of a cit, he did not put on his hat in the summer-house, in
order to strengthen her spirit by courtesy. An infant is, as it were,
prompter and bellows-blower to the nurse: the young Sebastian sent
Appel timely and sufficient succor under the siege by the elder one,
and she undertook at last to speak, and remark that the god-son was a
dear, good, beautiful, little "Basty." "But," she added, "the young
leddy (Clotilda) must not hear that: she will have it that we should
call him Victor, when she hears father call him Basty." Now she began
to magnify how Clotilda loved his godchild, how often she would snatch
the little monkey and smile on him and hug and kiss him; and the
eulogist repeated on a small scale everything that she praised. Nay,
the grown-up Sebastian did it after her, but he sought on the little
lips only the kisses of _others_; and perhaps, in Appel's case, again,
_his_ were among the things which are sought. Made happier himself, he
left one whom he had made happier; for Love despatched now one gayly
attired hope after another as messengers to his heart, and all said,
"Truly, we do not deceive thee: trust us!"
At last Stamitz began to tune up, about whom the stiff family of the
Lord Chamberlain would certainly not have concerned themselves, because
to-day there were no strangers present, had not Clotilda begged for
this garden-concert as the only festival of her birth-night. Stamitz
and his orchestra filled a lighted bower,--the noble audience sat in
the next brightest niche, and wished the thing were already over,--the
commonalty sat farther off, and the Chaplain, for fear of the
catarrhal, dewy floor, twisted one leg round the other above the
thighs,--Clotilda and her Agatha reclined in the darkest leafy box.
Victor did not steal in, till the overture announced to him the seats
and the seating of the company: in the remotest arbor, in a true
aphelion, this comet took its place. The overture consisted of that
musical scrawling and flourishing, of that harmonious phraseology, that
crackling of fire-works produced by the mutual contact of sounding
passages, which I so extol, when it is nowhere but in the overture.
There it is in place; it is the sprinkling rain which softens the heart
for the great drops of the simpler tones. All emotions in the world
need _exordia_; and music paves the way, or the tear-ways, (lachrymal
ducts,) for music.
Stamitz--after a dramatic plan which not every conductor marks out for
himself--gradually descended from the ears into the heart, and from
allegros to adagios: this great composer sweeps in ever-narrowing
circles around every bosom in which there is a heart, until at last he
reaches it and folds it in a rapturous embrace.
Horion trembled alone, without seeing his loved ones, in a gloomy
arbor, upon which a single withered twig let in the light of the moon
and of its pursuing clouds. Nothing ever stirred him more during music
than to look at the chase of the clouds. When he accompanied with his
eyes and with the tones these nebulous streams in their everlasting
flight around our shadowy globe, and when he imparted to them all his
joys and his wishes, then he thought, as in all his joys and sorrows,
on other clouds, of another flight, of other shadows, than those above
him,--then did his whole soul pine and languish; but the strings
stilled the panting bosom, as the cold leaden bullet in, the mouth
allays thirst, and the tones discharged the heavy tears from the full
soul.
Dear Victor! there is in man a mighty wish which was never fulfilled:
it has no name, it seeks its object, though all that thou namest it and
all joys are not its reality; but it recurs, when in a summer night
thou lookest to the north or towards distant mountains, or when
moonlight is on the earth, or the heavens are studded with stars, or
when thou art very happy. This great, vast wish lifts our soul aloft,
but with sorrow: ah! here below we are thrown upward in a prostrate
position like epileptics. But this wish, to which nothing can give a
name,--our strings and tones name it to the human spirit; the yearning
soul then weeps more profusely and can no longer comprehend itself, and
calls inward in rapture of lamentation between the tones: "Ay, all that
ye name to me is what I want!" ...
Mortal man, the enigmatical creature, has also a nameless, monstrous
dread, which has no object, which awakes at hearing of spiritual
apparitions, and which one sometimes feels when one only speaks of
it....
Horion yielded up his bruised heart, with quiet tears which no one saw
flow, to the high adagios which laid themselves with warm wings of
eider-down over all his wounds. All that he loved entered now into
his shady arbor,--his oldest friend and his youngest; he hears the
thunder-storm-bells of life toll, but the hands of friendship stretch
forth to meet each other, and they clasp each other, and even in the
second life they hold each other fast in withering grasp. All tones
seemed the unearthly echoes of his dream, sent back by beings whom one
neither saw nor heard....
He could not possibly stay longer in this dark inclosure with his
burning fancies, at this too great distance from the Pianissimo. He
went--almost too boldly and too closely--through a leafy avenue up to
the tones, and pressed his face far through the leaves, in order at
last to see Clotilda in the dim and distant green glimmer....
Ah, and he saw her! But in too angelic, too paradisiacal a form! He saw
not the thinking eye, the cold mouth, the calm person, that forbade so
much and desired so little; but he saw for the first time her mouth
encircled by a sweet harmonious sorrow, with an inexpressibly touching
smile,--for the first time her eye weighed down under a brimming tear,
as a forget-me-not bows itself beneath a tear-drop of rain. O, this
good soul surely concealed her fairest feelings most of all! But the
first tear in a beloved eye is too mighty for a soft heart.... Victor
knelt down, overpowered by reverence and rapture, before the noble
soul, and lost himself in the darkling, weeping form, and in the
weeping tones. And when he saw at length her features turned to
paleness, because the green foliage overspread her lips and cheeks with
a deathly hue from the reflection of the lamps,--and when his dream
came back to him, with Clotilda sunk under the flowery hill,--and when
his soul, dissolved into dreams, into sorrows, into joys, and into
wishes for her who consecrated her birthday festival with devout
tears,--oh, was there then any need, for the completion of his
euthanasia, that the violin should die away, and that the second
harmonica, the _viole d'amour_, should send its music-of-the-spheres to
his naked, enkindled, palpitating heart? O, the pang of bliss quieted
him, and he thanked the Creator of this melodious Eden, that He, with
the _highest_ tones of His harmonica, which with unknown forces shiver
the heart of man to tears, as high tones shatter glasses, had at last
exhausted his bosom, his sighs, and his tears: amidst these tones,
after these tones, there were no more sounds; the full soul was wrapped
up in foliage and night and tears; the speechless swelling heart drank
the tones into itself, and took the outer ones for inner ones; and at
last the tones played like zephyrs around the head that was drowsy with
bliss, and only in the innermost part of the dying soul still stammered
the too happy wish: "Ah, Clotilda, could I surrender to thee to-day
this mute, glowing heart!--ah, that I might on this imperishable
heavenly evening, with this trembling soul, sink dying at thy feet, and
say the words, 'I love thee!'"
And as he thought of her festive anniversary, and of her letter to
Maienthal, which had given him the greatest praise, that of being a
scholar of Emanuel, and of little tokens of her regard for him, and of
the sweet fraternization of his heart with hers,--ay, then did the
heavenly hope of winning this ennobled heart for the first time draw
near to him amidst the music, and that hope caused the sounds of the
harmonica, like dying echoes, to float far and wide over the whole
future of his life....
"Victor!' said some one, in a slowly lengthened tone. He sprang up and
turned his exalted features toward the--brother of his Clotilda, and
embraced him with joy. Flamin, into whom all music flung war-flames and
more open sincerity, looked at him wonderingly, inquiringly, and with
an imperceptible suspicion, and with that friendliness which resembled
scorn, but which was never anything but the smarting of injuries
received.
"Why didst thou not take me, too, with thee to-day?" said Flamin, in a
friendly tone.
Victor pressed his hand, and was silent.
"No! speak!" said he.
"Let it be for to-day, my Flamin; I'll tell thee some time," replied
Victor.
"I will tell it to thee myself," Flamin began, more quickly and warmly.
"Thou thinkest, perhaps, I shall be jealous. And look thou, did I not
know thee, I should be so: truly, another would be so, if he had thus
lighted upon thee here, and put all things together,--thy late retreat
from our summer-house out into the foliage, thy writing without a
light, and thy singing of love"----
"To Emanuel," said Victor, softly.
"Thy sending off that leaf to her"----
"It was another from her album," said he.
"Still worse; _that_ I did not even know. Thy lingering in St. Luna,
and a thousand other signs, which do not immediately occur to me,--thy
going off alone today"----
"O my Flamin, this is going too far! thou seest with other eyes than
those of friendship."--
Here Flamin, who never could dissemble without immediately becoming
what he assumed, and who could never recount an offence without
falling into the old anger, grew warmer, and said, in a less friendly
manner,--
"And others, too, see it,--even the Chamberlain, and the Chamberlain's
wife."
This tore Victor's heart.
"Thou dear old friend of my youth! so, then, we are to be drawn and
torn asunder, bleed we ever so much; so, then, this Matthieu is to
succeed (for all comes from him, not from thee, thou good soul!) in
getting thee to torment thyself, and me to torment thee. No, he shall
not succeed; thou shalt not be taken from me. See, by Heaven!" (and
here the feeling of his innocence stood in Victor erect and sublime,)
"and though thou shouldst for years misunderstand me, still the time
will come when thou shalt start back, and say to me, 'I have done thee
wrong!'--But I shall gladly forgive thee."
This touched the jealous one, who to-day, indeed, (for a special
reason,) was more composed.
"See," said he, "I believe thee always: say, dost thou never do
anything against me?"
"Never, never, my dear fellow!" answered Victor.
"Now, then, forgive my heat," the other continued. "Thus have I
already, with my cursed jealousy, once tormented Clotilda herself in
Maienthal. But wrong not Matthieu; it is he, rather, who tranquillized
me. He told me, to be sure, what Clotilda's parents thought they
observed; nay, still more,--see, I tell thee everything,--he said they
had even, on account of thy presumed liking and thy present influence,
which the Chamberlain would fain avail himself of for his
reinstatement, spoken of a possible betrothal to their daughter, and
had even spoken to her and sounded her on the subject; but (to thee,
however, this is a matter of indifference) my beloved remained true to
me, and said, No."
Now was the hitherto so happy heart of our friend broken: that hard No
had never yet been uttered to him. With an inexpressible, crushing, but
meek woe, he said, softly, to Flamin,--
"Be thou, too, always true to me, for I have very little; and never
torment me more as thou hast to-day."
He could say no more; the stifled tears stormed surging up over his
heart, and painfully collected themselves under the pupil; he must
needs now have a still, dark place, where he could weep to his heart's
content; and in his lacerated and smarting bosom there remained only
one soft and balmy thought: "Now, in the night, I can weep as much as I
will, and no one can see my shattered face, my shattered soul, my
shattered fortune."
And when he thought, "Ah, Emanuel, if thou shouldst see me as I am
to-day!" he could hardly any longer contain himself.
He fled, with suppressed tears, unconcerned who saw it or did not see
it, out of the garden, over which a dark angel let float a great
funereal banner and the music of a dirge. He bruised himself against
a stone garden-roller which was used to crush the _sprinkled_
grass-blades and _flowerets_,--he wept not yet, but on the observatory
there would he satisfy himself and steep himself in abundant
sorrow,--he kept repeating, "But she remained true, and said, No, no,
no!"--the concert-tones glided after, like fire after the conjurer,--he
waded through moist, slumbering lawns, which concealed their flowers,
and, swifter than he, swept over the earth the shadowy outlines of the
clouds overhead chased by the wind,--he stood at the foot of the
observatory, still held back every tear, and hurried up,--he threw
himself on the bench where he had seen Clotilda for the first time afar
off, in a white dress,--"Rest thou, too, Horion!" she had called to
him out of his dream from under the flowery hill, and he heard it
again.----
Here he tore open joyfully all his wounds, and let them bleed out
freely in tears; they overspread with mournful streams the face which
once had often smiled, but always good-naturedly, and which from other
eyes had never wrung any, but only wiped them away; every flood was a
load taken off, but the heart grew heavy again upon it, and poured out
a fresh one.--At last he could hear the tones again; most of them sank
and were lost before they were wafted to the tower; little ones arrived
dying, and expired in his darkling heart; every tone was a falling
tear, and made him lighter, and expressed his anguish. The garden
seemed to consist of softly resounding, dark-green waves of shadow,
veiled under a broken twilight. Stung by memory, he tore his eye away
from it: "What does it concern me any longer?" he thought. But at last
from this shadowy Eden and from the _viole d'amour_ came up the song,
"Forget me not," to his weary heart, and gave him back the softer pang
and the past love. "No," said he, "I never will forget thee, though
thou hast not loved me! thy form will assuredly forever move me, and
remind me of my dreams! ah, thou heavenly one, it is, indeed, now, the
only thing that does not pain me, to think I forget thee not!"
All was silent and extinguished; he was alone in the presence of night.
At length, after remaining a long time in silence, he went down and
back to Flachsenfingen, exhausted with weeping, and a poor man. And as,
on the way, he cast a hurried glance up at the dark-blue heaven, in
which floating clouds lay flung around the moon like _scoriæ_, and a
hurried glance again over the half-annihilated shadowy landscape, over
the shadow-hills and shadow-villages, all appeared to him dead, empty,
and vain, and it seemed to him as if, in some brighter world, there
were a magic-lantern, and through the lantern glasses moved on which
earth and springs and human groups were painted, and we called the
descending, dancing images of these glasses _us_ and an earth and a
life; and _after all that was bright and many-colored, a great shadow
followed on_.----
Ah, I stir up, perhaps, once more, in many a breast, long-forgotten
troubles! But it is good for us--since sorrows occupy so large a place
in our memory--that this bitter winter-fruit should grow mild by lying,
and that there is but a small difference between a past sorrow and a
present bliss.
Poor Victor arrived after midnight, with a pale face and burning eyes,
at the house of the Apothecary. He asked for nothing, that he might not
betray his broken voice. When he saw his every-day overcoat hanging in
the moonbeams, and when he imagined himself a strange person to whom
the coat belonged, and who took it off so joyfully in the morning and
now would put it on again so sorrowfully, then did a certain compassion
which he had for himself seize again with too strong an impression his
exhausted heart. Marie came, and he turned not away from her even the
signs of this compassion. She stood surprised; he said to her with the
softest voice, woven of sighs, that he wanted nothing; and the good
soul went slowly out without courage to console or to weep, but all
night long she shed invisible tears for those of another, and for a woe
which had not been whispered in her ear.
Why did Fate to-day, of all days, open all the veins of his heart? Why
must the Senior Pastor's silver wedding and the first marriage of his
daughter to the preacher of the Orphan-House fall just on this day?
Why, if indeed the two nuptial feasts had to coincide on this day, must
they last till after midnight, when they gave poor Victor occasion to
gaze into all the mouldering scenes of his burnt-up hopes, when he
could see from his dark chamber, in a brilliantly lighted room, the
love which linked hand in hand, pressed lips to lips, and mingled eyes
and souls? At another time he would have smiled at the Orphan-House
preacher and at two catechists of the poor; but tonight he could only
sigh over them,--and it is a soft line of beauty on his inner man, that
he did not grudge, but felicitated, the poor people's possession of
what he was deprived of himself. "Ah, you are happy!" said he. "O, love
each other truly, press your throbbing, transitory hearts ardently to
each other, ere the wing of Time shatters them, and glow on each
other's bosoms during the short minute of life, and exchange your tears
and kisses ere eyes and lips freeze in the grave! Ye are happier than
I,--I, who can give my heart full of love to no one but the worms of
the grave, and on whose coffin a joiner shall paint the inscription,
which like myself shall be buried in the earth: 'Ye good children of
men, you loved me not, and yet I loved you so well!'"
Every happy smile, every fleeting touch of the violin, every thought,
became now, to his soft tear-bathed heart, a hard, sharp corner,--just
as a hand which dips itself under the water feels everything hard to
the touch.
His unbounded sincerity, his unbounded tenderness, he could now satisfy
in no other way than by a letter to Emanuel, into which he let his
whole soul overflow.
"O Dearly Loved Friend!
"Ought I to hide it from thee, when griefs or follies unman me? Ought I
to show thee the faults I have repented of, and never my present ones?
No, come hither, dear one, to my wounded breast! I will lay open to
thee the heart therein, let it bleed and beat under the exposure as it
will. Thou wilt, perhaps, still cover it up again with thy fatherly
love, and say, 'I love thee still.'
"Thou, my Emanuel, reposest in thy lofty solitude, on the Ararat of the
saved soul, on the Tabor of the shining One: there thou gazest, softly
dazzled, into the sun of Deity, and seest calmly the cloud of death
swim in over the sun; it veils the orb: thou growest blind under the
cloud; it melts away, and again thou standest before God. Thou lovest
men as children who cannot offend,--thou lovest earthly enjoyments as
fruits, which one plucks for refreshment, but without hungering for
them; the storms and earthquakes of life pass by thee unheard, because
thou liest in a life-dream full of tones, full of songs, full of
meadows,--and when death awakes thee, thou art still smiling over the
bright dream.
"But, ah! more than one tempest thunders into the life's-dream of the
rest of us, and makes it distressful. If a higher being could enter
into the hurly-burly of ideas which encompasses our spirit, and from
which it must draw its breath, as we breathe in an air composed of all
kinds of gases poured together,--if he were to see what kinds of
nutriment pass through our inner man, from which it has to extract its
chyle: that medley of comic operas,--Bayle's Dictionaries,--concerts of
Mozart,--Messiahs,--military operations,--Goethe's poems,--Kant's
writings,--table-talks,--lunar observations,--vices and virtues,--men
and sicknesses and sciences of all sorts:--if the Being should examine
this _olla-podrida_ of life, would he not be curious to know what
heterogeneous and mutually repulsive juices thereby run together in the
poor soul, and would he not wonder that anything settled and uniform is
left as a residuum in man? Ah, Emanuel! if thy friend is now in a fine
banquet-hall, now in a garden, now in an opera-box, now under the
great night-heavens, now in the presence of a coquette, and now before
thee,--surely, this ambiguous alternation of scenes must bring him
sorrows, and perhaps leave stains....
"No, I will not deceive my Emanuel----O, are, then, the trifles and
the pebbles of this life worth our choosing crooked paths to avoid
them, as the sapping-caterpillar submits to winding courses through the
twig-work of its leaf? No, all that I have said is true; but I should
not have said it, had not other sorrows led me to speak of these also;
and yet, thou innocently, simple-heartedly, sublimely trusting teacher,
thou wouldst have believed me! Ah, thou hast too good an opinion of
me!... O, it is a long and weary step from admiration to imitation! But
now look into my open heart!
"Since I have, here in the charnel-house of my childish joys, in the
beds where my childhood's years bloomed and faded, been conversing with
perhaps too many dreams of the past,--and, still more, from the day
when thou gavest my heart the provocative to the fever-stroke which has
shaken my whole life,--since thou disclosedst to me the life wherein
man exfoliates, and the thin, sharp moment whereon he so painfully
stands,--since that farewell-night when my soul was great and my tears
inexhaustible,--an eternal wound has been running within me, and the
sigh of a longing which nothing can name but dreams and tears and
love has lain like a stagnant vein, oppressive and consuming in my
breast.----Ah! I still smile as ever, I still philosophize as ever, but
my innermost heart only the beloved friend sees to whom I now lay it
bare.
"O Fate, why dost thou strike in man the spark of a love which must be
smothered in his own heart's blood? Have we not all, abiding within us,
the sweet image of a beloved, of a friend, before whom we weep, after
whom we seek, for whom we hope,--ah, and so vainly, so vainly? Does not
man stand before a human bosom, as the turtle-dove before a mirror,
and, like her, coo himself hoarse before a dead, flat image therein,
which he takes for the sister of his complaining soul? Why is it, then,
that every fair spring-evening, every melting lay, every overflowing
rapture, asks us, 'Where dost thou find the beloved soul to which
thou wilt tell and impart thy bliss?' Why does music give the
tempest-stricken heart, instead of peace, only greater waves,--as the
tolling of bells, instead of dispelling, draws down the thunder-storms?
And why is it, that out of doors, on a fair, still, bright day, when
thou lookest over the whole unrolled picture of a landscape, over the
seas of flowers that tremble upon it, over the shadows flung down by
the clouds which fly from one hill to another, and over the mountains
which stretch like shores and walls round our flowery circle,--why does
then a voice within thee cry incessantly, 'Ah! behind the smoking[224]
mountains, beyond the clouds that repose upon them, there rests a
fairer land, there dwells the soul thou seekest, there heaven lies
nearer to the earth'? But behind the mountain and behind the cloud
there sighs also an unappreciated heart, that looks over towards this
thy horizon, and thinks, 'Ah, in that far region I should doubtless be
happier!'
"Are we _not_, then, all happy?----Do not assert it, nor say to me,
Emanuel, that, in the winter of this life, the few warm sunbeams that
interrupt it burst and destroy the better man like a vegetable; say not
that every year steals away something from our heart, and that, like
ice, it grows less and less, the farther it drifts down the stream of
Time; only say not that the wandering Psyche, though she hears her
second self in her prison, yet can never get into its arms.----But thou
hast already somewhere said: 'All loving souls on earth dwell apart
from each other in two bodies, as on two hills; a waste lies between
them, as between solar systems; they see each other, speak across by
distant signs; at last they hear each other's voices from hill to hill;
but they never touch each other, and each embraces only its thought.
And yet this poor love crumbles like an old corpse, when it is
exhibited; and its flame flickers like a burial-lamp, when it is
uncovered.'
"Are we, then, all not happy?--Do not say so!--Ah, man, who, even from
childhood up, has been calling after an unknown soul that grew up in
_one_ heart with his own,--that entered into all the dreams of his
years, and therein gleamed from afar, and, after his waking, started
his tears,--that in spring sent him nightingales, that he might think
of her and long for her,--that in every tender hour visited his soul,
with so much virtue, so much love, that he would so gladly have offered
in his heart, as in a sacrificial chalice, all his blood to the
beloved,--but who, alas! never, appeared, and only sent her image in
every fair form, but forever kept back her heart;--oh, if at last, oh,
if suddenly, oh, if blissfully, her heart beats against his heart, and
the two souls embrace each other forever, he can no longer say it, but
we can: 'This man, indeed, is happy, and is loved.' ...
"Good Emanuel, thou forgivest me the pain of the fear that I may never
be the happy man,--no, never!--Oh, even for this earth, broken up into
graves, I should be perhaps too happy, I should be permitted to enjoy,
perhaps, too great an Eden for so young a life, and one justified by
such slight merits, if my too soft soul, which even now gives way under
three happy minutes, which loves every human being, and hangs with the
arms of a child on the heart of the whole creation,--oh, which is
already made too blissful by this mere dream of love, and is
overpowered by this description!--no, it were too blessed, such a soul,
long since dissolved by melancholy and humanity, if it should once,
after such a long, deathly yearning, at last, at last--O Emanuel, I
tremble again for joy, and yet it can never, never be!--if it should
find all its wishes, its whole heaven, so much love, accumulated in one
dear, dear soul; if in the presence of great Nature, and before the
face of Virtue, and before God himself, who gave love to her and to me,
I could dare to say, weeping, to this only, this sweet, this beloved--O
God, how shall I name her? this fore-loved one, whom in my frenzy I
would now name: 'At last my heart has thee, thou good soul! to-day God
gives us to each other, and we remain together through all eternity!'
No, I would not say it; I should for ecstasy be dumb and die!
"--Lo! it seemed to me just now as if a form passed across my chamber,
and called, 'Victor!' I looked round, and beheld my empty room, and the
Sunday clothes which I had taken off, and now, for the first time, I
remembered that I was unhappy and not loved.
"But thou, irreplaceable friend, misunderstand me not. I swear to thee
that I will give thee these sheets unaltered, though to-morrow, when
the whirlpools of to-night flow stiller and smoother, I should find all
sorts of alterations necessary. Thy foolish friend remains,
nevertheless, thy friend forever.
"S. V. H."
20. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on the Shoulders.--Walk
to St. Luna.
"Poor Sebastian!" said I, as I opened to-day's letter-bag, "before I get
it open, I know already beforehand, that, after such a night, thou must
have shut thyself up all day, to turn thy pale, exhausted face toward
the garden of sorrow, that thou to-day lovest these poison-drops better
than the vulnerary balsam, and that thou lookest into the glass to weep
for this still, innocent form which it shows thee with its gashes, as
if it were the form of a stranger.--Oh, when man has nothing more to
love, he embraces the gravestone of his love, and sorrow becomes his
loved one! Forgive one another the short delusion of mourning; for,
among all the weaknesses of man, this is the most innocent, when,
instead of soaring away like the bird of passage above winter, and
flying to warmer zones, he sinks before it, and helplessly stiffens in
his cold grief."
Victor coffined himself, so to speak, that day in his chamber, which he
opened to no one but a next-door neighbor of sorrows,--Marie,--whose
form affected him as softly as an evening sun. Every other female face
on the street gave him stings; and the brother of the lost Clotilda,
whom he saw at the window, and to-day would gladly have embraced, lent
to the remembrance which tears had dimmed, new colors.... Reader!--my
female reader will be, of herself, more reasonable,--laugh not at my
good hero, who _is_ none precisely where the strength of the soul
becomes the strength of sorrow: at least, let me not hear it. Whoever
has the sympathetic nerve of life--love--tied up or cut asunder, can
well, if for no other reason, sigh and say, "Anything on earth can man
lose more patiently than fellow-men."
And yet at evening an accident--namely, a letter--made all his
sorrows pass once more through his weary heart. A short letter from
Emanuel--not, however, an answer to the one just sent to him--arrived.
"My ever-loved one!
"I have learned the day of thy entrance upon a new scene of tumultuous
life, and I have said, 'May my beloved still continue happy! may the
tranquillity of virtue wall in his heart as with a breast against the
frosts and storms of his new life! may neither his sorrows nor his
raptures be loud! may he mourn softly and silently as a princess in
soft white! may he enjoy softly and silently, and in the temple of his
heart may Pleasure play only as a noiseless fluttering butterfly in a
church! and may Virtue float before him in the higher heaven above our
sun, and warm and irradiate and gradually attract to herself his
heart!'
"In thy affectionate anxiety for my parting life, thou wilt not have me
write often: so little, dear one, dost thou believe my hope! Oh, the
weights of my machine, as they run down, fall slowly and softly upon
the grave; this earthly life arrays itself to my soul in ever fairer
colors, and adorns itself for the farewell; this mock-summer around me,
which stands beside the August summer like a mock-sun,--this and the
coming spring take me beguilingly out of the arms of Nature.
"So does the All-Gracious overhang with foliage, overspread with
flowers, the churchyard-wall of life, as we cover the wall of an
English garden with ivy and evergreen, and gives the end of the garden
the appearance of a new thicket.--
"So ascends the spirit even here in this _dark_ life, as the barometer
ascends even during thick weather, and feels the influence of the
_brighter_ life even under the clouds.
"But I obey thy love, and will write to thee no more, except once in
winter, when I describe to thee the great night wherein I told my blind
Julius, for the first time, that there is an Eternal One.--In that
night, my beloved, rapture and devotion bore me too high, and came near
to rending my thin life. I bled a long time. In winter, when the charms
of heaven take the place of those of earth,[225] forbid me not to paint
the summer picture.
"O my son!--I was compelled, indeed; to write to thee, because my
friend Clotilda complains that the new year will draw her out of the
green bower of solitude to the crowded market-place of the court; her
soul is dark with sorrow, and stretches out its arms after the tranquil
life which is being taken away from her. I know not what a court is;
thou wilt know, and, I conjure thee, release my friend, and turn aside
the hand that would draw her from St. Luna. If thou canst not do it,
still forsake not at court the beloved soul; be her only, her most
ardent friend; draw the bee-stings of earthly hours from her gentle
heart. When cold words, like snow-flakes, fall upon this flower, then
let the breath of love melt them to tears that shall flow before thy
sight; when a tempest shall come up, over her life, then show her the
angel who stands in the sun, and draws over our tempests the rainbow of
hope. O thou whom _I_ so love, my sister also will so love thee; and
when my friend discovers to her his gentle heart, his tender eye, his
virtue, his soul, the home of Nature and of the Eternal, then will he
see my sister grow happy before him, and the exalted countenance which
melts into tears and smiles and love before him will remain forever in
his heart.
"EMANUEL."
* * *
Lo! in this glowing moment the exalted form which he had seen yesterday
appeared again before his heart, with the sadly smiling lips and the
eyes full of tears; and as the form continued floating before him, and
gleamed and smiled, his soul rose up before her as before one dead, and
during the uplifting of himself all his wounds began to bleed again,
and he cried, "Now, then, never do thou vanish from my heart, thou
sublime shape, but rest forever on its wounds!" Disconsolateness,
exhaustion, and sleep overwhelmed his spirit, as well as his latest
thought,--to go back shortly to St. Luna, and persuade her parents not
to force her to court...
The long sleep of death closes our _scars_, and the short sleep of life
our _wounds_. Sleep is the half of time which heals us. On awaking,
Victor, whose fever of love had yesterday been so aggravated by
sleeplessness, saw today that his sorrow had been unmoderated
because his hope had been immoderate. At first he had wished,--then
observed,--then assumed,--then seen,--then interpreted,--then
hoped,--then sworn to it. Every little circumstance, even his share in
Clotilda's nomination as maid-of-honor, had poured mild oil of love
into his flame. "Oh, fool that I am!" said he, with the three
swearing-fingers placed upon his forehead; and, like all energetic men,
he was so much the more spirited in proportion as he had been
spiritless. Nay, he felt himself all at once too light; for a too
sudden cure betokens, in the case of souls also, a relapse. A new
consolation was his yesterday's resolve, that he would render Clotilda
a service,--namely, save her from the court-service. He still reflected
upon his determination to see her again.--Feelest thou, haply, Victor,
that everything which Love does, in order to die, is only an expedient
for rising again from the dead, and that its epilogues are only
prologues to the Second Act?
But a basket of apples in the market confirmed him again in his
resolution. That is to say, Flamin came in. He began immediately with
questions about the disappearance on Sunday, and with reports of the
general uneasiness about the dear runaway. Victor, heated again
by the whole recollection, and almost a little enraged against the
image-breaker and government-attorney of a vain love, gave him the true
answer:--"Thou tookest away from me in part my pleasure; and why should
I, at so late an hour, come upon the stage?" The more vividly Flamin
painted the affectionate concern of the Parson's wife and Clotilda
about his disappearing, so much the more painful grew the maze of
contending feelings within him. But for his conscience calling him
back, it would now have been easier for him to confess the love that
was hopeless, than formerly the love that was hopeful.--Accidentally
Flamin wondered at the ripeness of the apples down below in the market,
and desired some. A lightning beam now darted before Victor's eye at
the inherited fruit-pieces on Flamin's shoulders, which always appeared
in the after-summer at the time of the apples' ripening, but which, in
the previous whirl of his feelings, he had forgotten. Heaven knows
whether it has not escaped the reader himself, that Flamin bears this
winter-fruitage (his maternal mole) on his back, which may become a
Sodom-apple and Eve's-apple for him. Might not Matthieu, who until now
could not examine upon Flamin this seal of his princely relationship,
suddenly become convinced of all that which, with his thievish glances
at his Lordship's letter, he had only been able to guess? And might he
not afterward go to the Prince, and there mix for all our friends the
most poisonous broths?--As, however, the magic image generally faded in
one week, Victor needed for only so long a time to keep its wearer out
of sight; he therefore laid before his friend, thus tattooed by Nature,
the request to take for once a social walk to St. Luna, as they had day
before yesterday missed each other.
"I can't do it," said Flamin, who had the lesser delicacy not to avail
himself of the request for company on account of the reproaches in Le
Baut's garden, and forgot in that the greater delicacy of not imputing
such a reference to his Victor.
The latter, in a passionate hurry to avert two such evils (Clotilda's
court-office and Matthieu's inspection), seized upon the singular
expedient of proposing to the page to share the journey with him.
"With pleasure!" said the Evangelist; "_this_ week I have to do
cabinet-service, but I can _next_ week."
And it was precisely this week that Victor wanted it to be done.--So
many sudden miscarriages confounded him to such a degree, that he,
whose careless and innocent heart was always an open letter with flying
seal, dissembled now towards his dear, good friend Flamin.--He wanted
at least to investigate the maternal mole and its distinctness for
himself, He therefore went to him, and found him bent over his writing,
and with a glowing work-face. He conjured him to consider that
recreation and holidays were indispensable to him, and urged it upon
him that he should work, like a compositor, standing. Then he came
gradually upon the subject of Flamin's full-blooded chest, and upon the
question whether it could bear his exertions without stingings and
oppressions. Then he arrived at the point, and proposed that Flamin
should, at all events, have a Burgundy-pitch plaster applied as
lung-conductor to his shoulder-blades; yes, he would himself do it for
him now, and show him how all was to be prepared. He hoped, besides, to
draw thereby a curtain around the apple-piece. But he dissembled so
wretchedly,--for he always succeeded in his innocent intrigues with
maidens, and comic disguises for satirical purposes, while his
serious ones always miscarried,--that even Flamin heard him out, and
dryly replied, he had already had on such a plaster for two days,
and--Matthieu had advised, and himself applied it.
There was a fix.--Sebastian had nothing further left him than, with a
singular _sangfroid_, which, on the St. Luna road, was mixed only with
a few stings from the old thorny latelings of his withered Paradise, to
go unaccompanied to the Chamberlain Le Baut, to say what was to be
said, hardly to peep into the Parsonage, and quietly to trudge off
again without a single--hope.
Dear Fortune! better beheaded than scalped,--better _one_ disaster than
ten miscarriages; I mean, break man upon thy wheel rather from above
than from below upward!--
Victor, to be sure, knew as yet not a word of the turn he should give
to the subject, in order to put two such court-emigrants as the Le
Bauts, who knew nothing holier than the _Latreia_ towards a prince, the
_Douleia_ towards his minister, and the _Hyperdouleia_ towards his
w--, out of humor with Clotilda's promotion; but he thought, "I will do
what I can."
Clotilda's parents received him with so much civility,--i. e. with so
much courtesy of the body, with so much powdered sugar on every
feature, with so much sirup of violets on every word,--in short, he
found the report which Matthieu had rendered to Flamin of their amiable
disposition towards him so well grounded,--that he could have selected
no better opportunity than this to dissuade them from the transplanting
of their daughter, had they not begun to thank him for having been
himself the very transplanter. They had learned or guessed all, and
thanked him for his intercession, to which they probably attached more
self-interested views than the daughter did. It would have been
ridiculous, in Clotilda's presence, to advise _her_ against
Flachsenfingen, and dissuade from that for which they thanked him;
still, however, he attempted something. He told the Chamberlain "his
daughter deserved rather to _have_ a court than to adorn one; nay, that
_he_ deserved at most in the whole matter--an excuse, as Clotilda would
certainly prefer the society of her parents to the constraint of court;
in that case, he would promise to put the index back again with the
Prince, and rectify everything without disadvantage." The father took
this expression for a strong deprecation of gratitude; the step-mother,
for some piece of knavery or other; the daughter, for--words. She said,
a little curtly, "I think it was easy to choose between disobedience
and absence." For, unbending as she was to her step-mother, she
willingly followed the hints of her father, whom, with all his
weaknesses, and as the only soul on the earth attached to him, she
tenderly loved. Victor, at last, though reluctantly, was forced to give
it up; but why does man find it harder to resign himself to the future
than to the past?--The coldness of the daughter was naturally not less
(but sincerer) than the warmth of the parents.... And this coldness was
precisely what refreshed his glowing brain. This cold, indifferent form
was wrapped as a veil about the sublime and loving one, as it ever
floated before him with that melancholy look which he could not endure.
Without the consciousness of anything wrong, satisfied with his
obedience to Emanuel's request, he withdrew, with his feelings
oppressed by decorum, returning coldness with greater coldness.--He
would have been a poor lover, if he had known what he wanted; for
otherwise he never could have desired of Clotilda, even in case of her
love for him, any extraordinary warmth towards a medicus whom her
parents forced upon her (which injures a man even more than ugliness),
who so impolitely took himself out of the garden without a birthday
_carmen_, and who pressed her into the seven gilded towers of
court-service, despite her reluctance, despite every probability of her
future _prison-fever_.--But for the _vacant freehold_ of his heart this
very vexation was wholesome....
If my good reader ever has to take an eternal farewell of a too dear
friend, let him take it _twice_.--The _first_ we all understand, as a
matter of course, when he sinks in the intoxication of sorrow, in the
hemorrhage of heart and eyes, and when the beloved object burns itself
with flames into the tender soul; but _then_ he will never be able to
forget the being thus torn from his heart. Therefore he must take a
_second_ farewell, which is colder even for the reason that passionate
emotions admit no _dal segno_[226] of repetition; nay, (if he will take
the wisest course of all,) he must endeavor, after the first tragic
leave-taking, to see her in a public place (e. g. at a coronation),
where she must appear cold. Her frosty face will then snow over her
glowing one in his brain; and my good reader has, undoubtedly,
collected together again wits enough to know what he reads in the
Dog-Post-Days....
--Upon my word, if Jean Paul does not write industriously, then no one
does; it has already struck one, and he took it for a quarter to
twelve; my sister will already be folding her hands before the
tucked-up smoking pike, which, like the serpent of eternity, has his
tail in his mouth, and saying, incessantly, "It is all growing
cold!"--"It must be so, after such glowing chapters," say I, "if thou
meanest the reader and the author."--Already, while I still sit over
the twentieth chapter, the post-dog is frisking round in the chamber
with the twenty-first; and yet I will starve myself, unless I can still
utter before dinner, like the seven wise men, seven golden sayings:--
1. When one who is stung by a bee or by fate does not keep still, the
sting tears out, and is left behind.
2. Miserable earth, which three or four great or bold men can reform
and agitate! Thou art a true stage: in the foreground are some fighting
players and a few canvas-tents; the background swims with painted tents
and soldiers!
3. States and diamonds are in these days, when they have stains, cut up
into little ones; and as
4. Men in great states and bees in great hives suffer a loss of courage
and warmth; accordingly now-a-days they join to small countries other
small countries, as they do to beehives colony-hives.
5. Man takes _his_ suffering for that of _humanity_, as the bees take
the dropping of their bee-stand, when the sun already shines out again,
for rain, and stay in-doors.
6. But he commits daily a _lesser_ error: he regards as an _eternity_
(that Aristotelian Unity of Time to the drama--of Existence) at first
his present _hour_,--then his _youth_,--then his _life_,--then his
_century_,--then the duration of the _globe_,--then that of the
_sun_,--then that of the _heavens_,--then (this is the least error)
_time_ itself....
7. There are in man, in the beginning and at the end, as in books, two
blank bookbinder's leaves,--childhood and old age; and so, too, in the
Dog-Post-Days: see the end of this day and the beginning of the next.
FIFTH INTERCALARY DAY.
_Continuation of the Register of Extra-Sheets_.
K.
Cold.[227]--In our age decrease of _stoicism_ and increase of _egotism_
are found side by side. The former covers its treasures and germs with
ice; the latter is itself ice. So, in physics, _mountains_ wear away,
and _glaciers_ increase.
L.
Library (Circulating) for Reviewers and Young Ladies.--I still always
adhere to my purpose of having it inserted in the Intelligence-leaf of
the Literary Gazette, that I shall not destroy the purchase-money which
I raise upon my _evening star_ [Hesperus], nor, like Musæus, fritter it
away in the purchase of summer-houses, but shall lay out the whole
capital upon a complete collection of all German _prefaces_ and
_titles_ that appear from fair to fair. I can carry out the plan, if I
give out a preface a week, on the payment of a penny, to reviewers, who
do not care to read the book itself when they review it.
That not even the surplus of the aforesaid mintage may lie as dead
capital in my house, I shall employ it--if I do not change my mind--in
getting the bookbinder to publish the _heavier_ German masterpieces,--e. g.
Frederick Jacobi's, Klinger's, Goethe's Tasso,--likewise the better
satirical and philosophical ones, in a _lighter_ ladies' edition, which
shall consist wholly of so-called _puzzle-volumes_, which have no book
slid into them. I shall thereby, methinks, be playing something pithy
into the hands of my fair readers, which shall be as well bound and
as well titled as the booksellers' edition, and in which--because the
hard stone-fruit is already _shelled out_, and there is nothing
inside--they can lay not only just as much of silk threads and silk
snippings as in the printed edition, but six ounces more. _Allwill's_
correspondence--a heavy, two-yolked ostrich's egg of the author's,
which I have had _blown out_ by the bookbinder in this manner, because
most of the fair readers are too _cold_ to hatch it--is now quite _light_.
But of the German romances I shall never prepare such a work-box edition
of empty state-carriages of the God of the Sun and the Muses, because I
fear the trade would cry out about _piracy_.--A happy man were I, if
the joint subscribers to my circulating-capsule-library had only been
shown round as much as twice in some Italian and Portuguese bookeries:[228]
they would there, where often only the titles of works--and of the
stupidest, into the bargain--are daubed on the wall, be astonished to see
what a miserable figure such useless libraries, beside my bookery of
regular puzzle-books, which I select from so many departments and with
some originality, cannot do otherwise than cut.
--Thus, of course, German capsule-readers among the ladies will never
be overtaken by you Portuguese women! Much rather will the former
follow in the footsteps even of the men, advocates and business people,
who subscribe to similar capsule-journalistics, and jointly read and
circulate the covers of the best German journals,--which latter are
often annexed as _curiosa_ even to the capsules, and fill them out....
Such is my plan and sketch; but even sheep would presume I were merely
playing off a joke here, unless I really carried it through.
M.
Maidens.--Young maidens are like young turkey-hens, that thrive poorly,
if one touches them often; and mothers keep these soft creatures, made
of floating pollen, like _pastel-pictures_, under window-glass--because
everything is afraid of us princess-stealers and fruit-thieves--until
they are fixed. Meanwhile the proper crown-guard around a female heart
is neither solitude,--which leads only to an untried innocence,[229]
that falls, to be sure, not before the debauchee, but yet before the
hypocrite,--nor society, nor hard labor,--otherwise no country girl
would ever fall,--nor good teachings,--for these are to be had in every
mouth and in every circulating library; but these four first and last
things do it all at once, and they are at once superseded, united, and
replaced by a wise and virtuous mother.
N.
Names of the Great.[230]--When I see, as I do, how they scatter their
productions for the Fair, occasional writings and fugitive pieces
(children born out of wedlock) as anonymously as if they were reviews,
then I say: "Herein I recognize genuine modesty; for natural children
are precisely their best and their own, and can, besides, be
acknowledged by the Prince _as_ genuine; whereas their supernatural [or
extra-natural] ones born in wedlock have to do without the
certification; and yet they will not let the world know the name of the
benefactor, but quite as often (nay, oftener) get people _into it_ as
_out of it_ secretly. What the child in other cases first learns to
pronounce, such parents speak to him last,--their name. Methinks they
follow herein Goethe's fine ear; for they hide themselves, while they
fill the orchestra of the world with children's voices and with
_vingt-quatre_,[231] and with alarm-works and repeating-works, (what a
juxtaposition of unlike things!) just as Goethe demands of the playing
musical artist that he shall work for the ears, but hide himself for
the sake of sparing the eyes. Quite as beautifully do they do the thing
when they finally adopt as children, and show to the world, their
children by the thirtieth marriage (often after the five or twenty
years' limitation), and thus imitate the greenfinches, which, it is
said, make their nest and its inmates invisible by means of the
so-called greenfinch-stone, till the latter are fledged."
O.
Ostracism.--It was among the Greeks, as is well known, no punishment.
Only people of great merits achieved it; and so soon as this banishment
from the country was lavished upon bad men, it went entirely into
disuse. An imperial citizen must lament that we, who have a similar
public educational institution,--namely, banishment,--squander it often
upon the very wretchedest rascals, and therefore--with the design of
making one circle or country the spit-box and secreting-vessel of
another--drive out of the country scoundrels who are hardly fit to stay
in it. Thereby is this clearing of the country deprived for the most
part of the honorable and distinguishing feature which it might have
for the man of merit, and an honest man--e. g. a Bahrdt[232]--is almost
ashamed to be invested with such an honor. There should, therefore, be
an imperial police-regulation that only ministers, professors, and
officers of decided worth, like important documents, should be
dismissed and banished. To similar men I would also limit hanging. With
the Romans, in truth, only great heads and lights were interred on the
_way_[233] at the expense of a whole state; but what shall I think of
the Germans, with whom seldom serviceable subjects, but mostly finished
rogues, are buried at public expense, which they call hangman's fees,
having been previously hanged on the gallows by the roadside?--Not even
in his lifetime can a man, unless he has extraordinary, and often
_eccentric_ merits,--although eccentric men fall back into the truth,
as _comets_ do into the _sun_, as fuel,--make his calculations upon
being, in some manner, as the ancients duplicated their noble men in
statues and pictures, hung up in _effigy_ in a thick stone frame....
Let me have an answer; I allow myself to be talked with.
P.
Philosophy.--Some critical philosophers have now borrowed from the
algebra a mathematical method, without which one cannot for a single
minute--not so much think as--write philosophically. The algebraist, by
the transposition of mere _letters_, catches truths which no chain of
reasoning could ever draw out of the deep. In this the critical
philosopher has imitated him, but with greater advantage. As he
cleverly mixes together, not letters, but whole _technical words_,
there rises from the alliteration of the same a cream of truths which
he could hardly have dreamed of. Such philosophers are forbidden, and
rightly, like the preachers of Gotha (Goth. Public Ordinances, P. III.
p. 16), to use allegories, or any flower of speech, which, as other
flowers do for the drawing-hounds, would spoil the scent.--Properly,
however, the picturesque style is more definite than the technical
word-style, which finally, as all _abstract words are pictures_, is
also itself a picturesque style, only one full of pictures that have
run out and faded. Jacobi is not obscure in consequence of his
_images_, but in consequence of the new _ideas_ which through them he
would communicate to us.
I have lately been looking over the birth-lists of the learned and
teaching republic, and counting up the young little Kants whom the old
Kant--otherwise unmarried, like his cousin Newton--has for the last ten
Fairs begotten. Demetrius Magnus, who wanted to make a book of authors
of the same name, must have been very stupid, if he had undertaken to
write in our times, and yet at the same time, though he nevertheless
communicated that there had been sixteen Platos, twenty Socrateses,
twenty-eight Pythagorases, thirty-two Aristotles, had very sinfully
omitted to say that there are now as many philosophers and
philosophists as those make when reckoned all together--namely,
ninety-six--who could bear the name of Kant,--that is, if they chose
to. Such mechanics--thus may I call the magisters, because formerly the
mechanics, inversely, were called magisters, and the upper master
arch-magister--one should take into account as the best propaganda
which bulky books can have. They are, at best, competent to diffuse the
system, because they know how to separate from it the incomprehensible,
the spiritual, and to extract what is popular and palpable, i. e. the
words for readers, who, otherwise simple, nevertheless would not die
without a critical philosophy. The most miserable theological and
æsthetic stone receives now a Kantian setting in words. Although every
new system introduces a certain _one-sidedness_ of view into all
heads,--especially as every cold philosopher has so much the more
_one-sidedness_, precisely as he has the more _insight_,--still that is
no matter; for great bars of truth come forth through the joint digging
of the whole thinking-works.[234] Whoever has seen Kant standing on his
mountain among his learned fellow-laborers, is reminded with pleasure
of a similar incident in Peru, which Buffon communicates. When
Condamine and Bouger were measuring there the equatorial degrees of the
earth (as Kant did of the intellectual world), whole troops of apes
appeared as coadjutors, put on spectacles, looked at the stars and down
at the clocks, and reduced one thing and another to writing, although
without salary, which is their only distinction from the vicariate
Kants.
Every man of genius is a philosopher, but not the reverse. A
philosopher without fancy, without history, and without a _general
knowledge_ of the most important things, is more one-sided than a
politician. Whoever has adopted, rather than discovered, a system;
whoever has not had beforehand dark presentiments thereof; whoever has
not at least pined for it beforehand; in short, whoever does not bring
with him a soul like a full, warm, ground filled with germs, which
waits only for its summer,--such a one may indeed be a teacher, but not
a scholar of the philosophy which he degrades to a mercenary
profession; and, briefly, it is all one what place one climbs as his
philosophical observatory,--a throne, or a Pegasus, or an Alp, or a
Cæsar's-couch, or a bier,--and they are almost all higher than the desk
in a lecture-room and hall of disputation.
Q (_see_ K).
R.
Reviewers.--An editor of a review should have six tables. At the first
should sit and eat the advertisers of the _existence_ of a book; at the
second, the wholesale appraisers of its _value_; at the third, the
epitomists of it; at the fourth, the grammarians and philologists, who
distribute to the public _catalogues raisonnés_ of other men's
grammatical blunders; at the fifth, the fighters, who refute a new
book, not by a new book, but by a sheet; at the sixth should stand the
critical, princely bench, on which might sit Herder, Goethe, Wieland,
and perhaps yet another, who survey a book as a human life, who
apprehend its _individuality_, indicate at once the spirit of the
literary creation and creator, and separate that incarnation and
embodiment of the divine beauty which takes the form of an individual
_from_ the beauty, and then disclose and pardon it.
These six critical benches, which might edit six different literary
periodicals, are now thrown over each other, and form _one_.--Frankly,
however, as I come out against this jumbling together of learned (1)
advertisements, (2) reviews, (3) extracts, (4) verbal and (5) real
criticisms, and (6) artistic judgments, still I am ready and glad to
admit that the critical _Fauna_ and _Flora_ of the first _five_ tables
root out, perhaps, full as many shoots of weeds as they put forth
themselves from their own germs; and I therefore appeal to a private
letter of my own, which is beyond the suspicion of flattery, and
wherein I associate it with a toadstool, which, although it produces,
itself, upon an affusion (in this case, of ink), whole hosts of
insects, nevertheless eradicates the flies.--But as among the reviewers
there are also authors, like myself; as among the Portuguese
inquisitors there are Jews; and, in fact, as I should want to talk
whole intercalary years on the subject,--why talk a whole intercalary
day?
S.
Stripes.--"He that knoweth his Lord's will, and doeth it not, shall
receive double stripes."--Who, then, gets the single ones? Not he,
surely, who knows not the will and does it not?--It follows, therefore,
that greater knowledge, not _aggravates_, but itself _creates_, moral
guilt; for in so far as I absolutely do not discern a moral obligation,
my offence against it is surely not less, but none at all.
I will be my own Academy of Sciences, and assign to myself the
following prize-question, which I will myself answer in a prize essay:
"Since only such actions are virtuous as proceed from love for
goodness, it follows that only those can be sinful which proceed from
mere love of evil, and reference to self-interest must lessen the
degree of a sin, as well as that of a virtue. But, on the other hand,
what could there be but self-interest in our nature, which should impel
us to what is bad? And if evil were done from a pure propensity to
evil, then there would be a second, although opposite, autonomy[235] of
the will."
T.
Trouble, Tribulation.--Now, as I write these distressful sounds, which
announce to me that Nature makes only _thorn-hedges_, but men _crowns
of thorns_, all pleasure in lashing about me with the thorns of satire
dies away, and I would rather draw some thorns out of your hands or
feet.
21. DOG-POST-DAY.
Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
The following remark comes not from the dog's knapsack, but from my own
head: One needs not to be a panegyrist of our times, to see with
pleasure that authors, princes, women, and others have now mostly laid
aside the unnatural _false_ masks of virtue (e. g. bigotry, pietism,
ceremonial behavior), and have entirely assumed instead the _genuine_
tasteful _show_ of virtue. This improvement of our character-masks,
whereby we hit more finely the exterior of virtue, is contemporaneous
with a similar one on the stage, where they play their antics and their
tragics no longer, as once, with _paper_ clothes and badly imitated
laces, but with the _true_ ones.--
"The Princess wanted you yesterday," said the Prince to the
Court-Physician, almost as soon as he had entered with his exhausted
face. The inflammation of Agnola's eyes had, in consequence of the
autumn weather, night-feasts, and Culpepper's bold practice and her
own--for the red capital letters of beauty (namely, painted cheeks) she
was always putting on afresh--very much increased. Properly, Victor was
too proud to let himself be sent for as a mere physician; nay, he was
too proud to let himself be in demand for anything else (and though it
were philosophy or beauty) than his character; for his father, who had
just as much delicate pride, had taught him that we must not serve any
one who does not respect us, or whom we ourselves do not respect,--nay,
that one must not accept a favor from any one to whom one can only
return outward, but not inward thanks. But this tender sense of honor,
which never came into an unequal conflict with his self-interest,
though it might well with his humanity, could never bind the hands
wherewith he might relieve an unhappy Princess--unhappy, like himself,
from a famine of love--at least of the pains of her eyes; perhaps,
also, of _younger_ pangs; for his good-heartedness suggested to him
nothing but reconciliations,--of the Prince with Le Baut, with the
Princess, with the Minister. Nothing is more dangerous than to
reconcile two persons,--unless, indeed, one is himself one of them; to
set them at variance is much safer and easier.
He found Agnola, even in the afternoon, still in her chamber, because
its green tapestries flattered (not the face, to be sure, but) the hot
eye. A thick veil over the face was her screen from daylight. When she,
like a sun, lifted her veil, he could not comprehend how in Tostato's
shop he could make, out of this Italian fire and these quick
court-eyes, the face, red with weeping, of a blonde. A part of this
fire belonged, to be sure, to her sickness. Her first word was a
decided disobedience to his first; meanwhile she flew in the face of
the Messrs. _Pringle_ and _Schmucker_, as well as himself; for the
whole triune College advised leeches round the eyes; but those were
disgusting to her. The medicus then suggested cupping-glasses at the
back of the head; but her hair was more precious to her than her eyes.
"Must, then, everything be bought with blood?" said she, with Italian
vivacity.
"Realms and religions ought not to be, but health should," said he,
with English freedom of speech.
Once more he demanded her blood. She would not give it to him, however,
until he changed the sacrificial knife, and proposed opening a vein in
the eye. Persons of rank, like learned men, are often ignorant of the
commonest things: she thought the Doctor would open the vein. And as
she thought so, he did it, with a hand trained by the couching-needle.
Meanwhile, if (according to Pliny) a kiss on the eye is one on the
soul, the opening of a vein in that organ is no joke; but one may,
while he inflicts a wound, himself get one. The poor Court-Medicus
must, with his swimming, friendly eye, from which only within a few
days the tear of love has been dried away, boldly gaze into the sun
pent up in an eye-socket, and, what is more, softly rest his finger on
the warm face, and from the fountain of tears make bright blood spurt
out.... One ought, before undertaking such an operation, to have a
similar one performed on himself, for the sake of the cooling. But, in
truth, fate had given him nothing this week but lancet-cuts into his
heart's arteries. Let one, further, represent to himself how the whole
female sex appeared to him like a magic, far-receded shape, which had
once gleamed near to him in a dream, and as a paled moon by day, which
he had worshipped in a bright night; and then will one have opened his
good innocent heart to behold therein, beside a great ever-active
sorrow, a thousand sympathetic wishes for the compassionated Princess.
Despite her singular mixture of pride, liveliness, and refinement, he
still thought he discovered a change in her, which he could explain
partly by his to-day's assiduity and partly by his influence on the
Prince, which had been thus far so favorable to her,--a change which
would have given him greater courage, had he not insisted upon being
threatened with special drafts upon his courage by the billet above the
imperator of the compass-watch. At the former and first visit his
courage was lamed, because he thought himself avoided, as the son of a
father who seemed to fortify his influence by his care for natural
children; for a man full of love beside one full of hatred is dumb and
stupid.
What put him most in heart to-day, next to the quarrels in which he was
defeated (as the one about leeches, &c.), was the last and following,
in which he conquered (one grows more courageous and prosperous when
one contradicts a proud woman than when one flatters her): He saw a
mask lying there; now, as he knew that in Italy ladies wore them in
bed, as ours do gloves, using them as a sort of glove to the face, he
straightly forbade her the mask, as being tinder to the inflammation of
her eyes. It was no flattery when he said to her that the mask might
take from her more than it gave. In short, he insisted upon it.--
He was, perhaps, too tolerant towards the doubt which only a woman
could make _endurable_ and _enduring_,--the doubt which one she mistook
for the other, the Court-Physician or the favorite; for at last--though
not without a fear of saying too much, which, with people of his fiery
temperament, is a sign that the thing has already happened--he told
her, what he had in the beginning kept back, that the sympathy
(_empressement_) of the Prince had sent him to her; and he extolled the
latter at his own expense, and so much the more, as he had nothing
further of an extraordinary nature to adduce with regard to him, but
only that he had--sent him to her.
Then he went. With the Prince he bestowed on her as many
_beatifications_ and as many _canonizations_ (two contrarieties on this
earth) as decorum and his humor (two still greater contrarieties) would
allow. Singular! she had, for all her fire, no humor. He knew January
succumbed, not merely to the slanderer, but also to the flatterer. The
crowned theatre-managers of the earth have determinations put into
their hearts, and decrees into their mouths; they know what they mean
and what they say two or three days later than their throne-prompter. A
favorite is a Shakespeare and poet, who, from behind the persons he
makes act and speak, never peeps or coughs out himself, but is a
ventriloquist, and gives _his_ voice the sound of another's.
When he visited his patient the next day, the eye-sockets were cooled
down, though not the eyes. Agnola sat convalescent in a cabinet full of
images of the saints. With the indisposition of her eyes had been taken
away, at the same time, a source of conversation; and her pride blocked
up the way at once to his sensibility and to his humor. Although he
said to her a hundred times in his innermost heart, "Torment not
thyself, proud soul; I am no favorite; I will not rob thee of anything,
least of all of thy pride or another's love,--oh, I know what it is to
win none,"--nevertheless he remained (in _his_ opinion) cold before
her, and retired with the annoying prospect that his successful cure
had cut off his return; for the other court visits were, after all, no
confidential visits to the sick. Of the plaguy compass-watch he stood
daily less and less in terror, except just when he was happier than
usual.
--Many people would sooner live without houses than without
building-schemes; Victor, sooner without air to breathe than without
castles in the air. He must always have on hand the lottery-chance and
stocks of some plan or other for the future; and a woman was, in most
cases, the partner in this grand-adventure trade. This time he was
keenly bent upon the reconciliation of January and Agnola. He reasoned
thus:--"It is easy on both sides. January will now always seek Agnola's
society, though merely out of cunning, for the sake of getting with
more decency into that of her future maid-of-honor, Clotilda, whom, in
her condition of singleness, he can, according to his _vow_, still love
with impunity. As he can neither withstand a long praise nor a long
intercourse, this will imperceptibly accustom him to Agnola. She, who
is now left alone on the side of the Minister Schleunes, will not
reject the united regards of Victor and January," &c.... But whether
only the beauty of the action, and not also the beauty of the Princess,
incited him to this mediatorial office, that is what the Twenty-First
Chapter cannot yet know; meanwhile, so far as I am concerned, let the
following stand: his cold inner man, exhausted by bleeding, from which
the harpsichord and the name of Clotilda and the awaking at morning
still draw bloodless daggers, needs so much indeed the din of the world
and everything that may benumb its wounds!
With the design of such preliminaries to a peace, he excused his future
disobedience to his father, who had counselled him against frequenting
the house of Schleunes; for as the Princess always went there, it was
the fittest neutral place for the peace-congress. Oh for only half
an----
EXTRA-LEAF ON HOUSES FULL OF DAUGHTERS!
The house of Schleunes was an open bookstore, whose works (the
daughters) one could read there, but not carry home. Although the five
other daughters stood in five private libraries as wives, and one,
under the earth at Maienthal, was sleeping away the child's plays of
life, there were, nevertheless, in this warehouse of daughters, three
free copies left for sale to good friends. The Minister, at the
drawings of the lottery of offices, loved to give his daughters as
premiums for great winnings and prizes. To whom God gives an office, to
him he gives, if not understanding, yet a wife. In a house rich in
daughters, as in St. Peter's Church, there must be confession-pews for
all nations, for all characters, for all faults, that the daughters may
sit therein as mother-confessors, and absolve from everything, celibacy
alone excepted. I have, as naturalist, often admired the wise
arrangement of Nature for the propagation as well of daughters as of
vegetables. Is it not a wise provision, I said to the natural historian
Goetze, that Nature gives precisely to those maidens who need for their
life a rich mineral fountain something _attaching_, by which they may
fasten on to miserable nuptial finches, who shall carry them to fat
places? Thus Linnæus[236] observes, as you know, that those kinds of
seeds which only thrive in rich earth have little hooks on them, in
order to hang the more easily on the cattle which carry them to the
stable and manure-heap. Wonderfully does Nature scatter about by the
wind--father and mother must make it--daughters and pine-seeds into the
arable places of the forests. Who does not observe the final cause why
many daughters receive from Nature certain charms in designated
numbers, that some canon or other, a German Herr, a cardinal-deacon, an
appanaged prince, or a mere country squire, may come along and take the
aforesaid charmer, and, as groomsman or English bride's-father, hand
her over, ready finished, to some blockhead or other, in a distant
place, as a ready-made wife on sale? And do we find in the case of
bilberries any less precaution on the part of Nature? Does not the same
Linnæus observe, in the same treatise, that they are enveloped in a
nutritious juice, that they may attract the fox to eat them, whereupon
the knave--he cannot digest the berries--becomes, for all he knows, the
sower of them?--
Oh, my innermost spirit is more serious than you think. I am vexed with
those parents who are traders in souls; I pity the daughters who are
negro slaves. Ah! is it any wonder, then, if the daughters who were
obliged to dance, laugh, talk, and sing at the West Indian market, in
order to be carried home by the master of a plantation, if they, I say,
are treated just as much like slaves as if they were sold and bought?
Ye poor lambs!--and yet ye are quite as hard as your sheep mothers and
fathers. What shall one do with his enthusiasm for your sex, when one
travels through German cities, where every richest or most
distinguished man, and though he were a distant relation of the Devil
himself, can point with his finger to thirty houses, and say: "I don't
know,--shall I pick out and marry one from the pearl-colored, or from
the nut-colored, or perhaps from the steel-green house? The shops are
all open for purchasers."--What, ye maidens! is, then your heart so
little worth that you can cut it down, like old clothes, to suit any
fashion, any breast? and is it, then, like a Chinese ball, now great,
now tiny, in order to fit into the ball-form and wedding-ring case of a
man's heart?--"It must indeed be so, unless one will continue to sit
alone, like the Holy Virgin over yonder," is the reply of those to whom
I make no reply, because I turn away from them with contempt, in order
to say to the so-called Holy Virgin: "Forlorn, but patient one!
Unappreciated and withered one! remember not the times when thou still
didst hope for better ones than the present, and never repent the noble
pride of thy heart! It is not always a duty to marry, but it is always
a duty not to forgive one's self anything, never to be happy at the
expense of honor, and not to avoid celibacy by infamy. Unadmired,
solitary heroine! In thy last hour, when the whole of life and the
former goods and scaffoldings of life, crushed into ruins, sink
beforehand,--at that hour thou wilt look out over thy emptied life;
thou wilt see there, it is true, no children, no husband, no wet eyes;
but in the vast, void twilight a great, saintly form; angelically
smiling, radiant, godlike, and soaring to the divine ones, will hover,
and beckon to thee to ascend with her. Oh, ascend with her; that form
is thy _virtue_."
_End of the Extra-Leaf_.
Some days after the Princess gave the Prince an _eye en médaillon_ with
the fine conceit: she gave this _votive-tablet_ to the saint (this was
so much the more _apropos_ as the Prince was named _Januarius_) who had
sent her his wonder-worker, and who now received that which he had
caused to be healed. January said to Victor, to whom he showed the eye,
"She confounds St. Januarius with you, with St. Ottilia,"--who, as is
well known, is the patroness of eyes.
Victor was glad that Matthieu came to him to go with him to St. Luna;
for the latter begged him, because this was done without him, to go
with him to his mother's, "because to-day at the Princess's there was a
great _souper_, but at his mother's not a soul,"--that is, hardly more
than nine persons. Victor therefore--it mattered not to-day that the
distinguished and interesting eye-sufferer was absent--gladly followed
into Schleunes's Nuremberg _Exchange Library_ of daughters behind the
tender Jonathan-Orestes-Mat, whom he, in fact, out of forbearance
towards their mutual friend Flamin, treated now with more toleration.
_Men_, like _ideas_, are associated together quite as often on the
principle of _simultaneousness_ as on that of _similarity_; and as
little can be inferred from the choice of _acquaintances_ as to the
character of a youth, as in regard to that of a woman from her choice
of a husband. Matthieu introduced him to his mother in the reading
cabinet, just as she was hearing an English author read, with the
words, "I bring you here a real live Englishman." Joachime was
reading in a catalogue,--it was not a catalogue of books, but of
stock-gillyflowers,--in order to select some gillyflowers for herself,
not for the purpose of planting, but of imitating them--in silk. She
hated flowers that grew. Her brother said, ironically, "She hated
changeableness, even in a flower." For the truth was, she loved it even
in lovers, and was quite different from April, which, like women, is in
our climate far more steady than is pretended. In the cabinet there
were also two fools, whom my correspondent does not so much as name to
me, because he thinks they would be adequately designated and
distinguished, if I should call the one the fragrant fool, and the
other the fine one.
Both fools were buzzing round the beauty. In fact, whenever I have
wanted to study fools at great parties, I have always looked round
regularly for a great beauty; they gather round such a one like
wasps around a fruit-woman. And if I had no other reason--I have,
however--for marrying the handsomest woman, I would do it for this
reason, if for no other, that I might always have the queen-bee sitting
in the hollow of my hand, after whom the whole foolish bee-swarm would
come buzzing. I and my wife would then be like the fellows in Lisbon,
who, having in their hands a pole of parrots strung together, and at
their feet a leash of _monkeys_ skipping after them, trudge through the
streets, and offer their crazy _personæ_ for sale.
The fragrant fool, who was to-day on the _sunny side_ of Joachime, was
reading to the mother; the fine one, who was on the _weather-side_,
stood near Joachime, and seemed not to trouble himself about her
_cooling of the temperature_. Victor stood there as transition from the
torrid zone to the frigid, and represented the temperate; Joachime
played three parts with one face. The fragrant fool shot, with his left
hand, the swivel-gun of a silver _joujou_. This hanging seal of a fool
he kept in motion, either, as the Greenlander does a block with his
feet, for the sake of keeping himself warm,--or he did it, as the grand
sultan for similar reasons must always be whittling with a jackknife,
in order not to be always having somebody killed out of love,--or in
order, as the stork always holds a stone in his claws, to have all the
time an Ixion's-wheel in his hands, as a rowel on his heels,--or for
the sake of health, in order to counteract the _globulus
hystericus_[237] by the motion of an external one,--or as rosary
bead,--or because he didn't know why.
Each was satisfied with himself. When the mother begged our Englishman
to read to her with his native accent, the _fine_ fool said, "The
English, like certain sentiments, is easier to understand than to
pronounce." That is to say, this fine sheep had universally the habit
of being metaphorical. If a maiden said to him, "I cannot keep myself
from feeling cold to-day," he made out of it coldness of the heart. One
could not say, "It is cloudy, warm, the needle has pricked me," &c.,
without his taking this as a ball-drawer, to extract his heart from the
fire-arm of his breast, and exhibit it. It was impossible in his
hearing not to be fine, and from your good-morning he twisted a
_bon-mot_. Had he read the Old Testament, he would not have been able
to admire sufficiently the fine turns that occur there. On the other
hand, the _fragrant_ fool limited his whole wit to a lively face. He
unfolded before you this bill of invoice and insurance-policy of a
thousand bright conceits, and held it up to you, but nothing came. You
could have sworn by the advertising-poster of wit in his fiery eye,
"Now he is going to blaze out,"--but not in the least! He used the
weapon of satire, as the grenadiers do hand-grenades, which they no
longer throw, but only wear imitated on their caps.
When the fine one had said his erotic _bon-mot_, Joachime looked at our
hero, and said, with an ironical glance at the fine one, "_J'aime les
sages à la folie_."
The pride of the fragrant one in his to-day's superiority, and the
apparent indifference of the fine fool to his own neglect, proved that
neither was often in to-day's ease, and that Joachime coquetted in a
peculiar style. She always made fun of us stately male persons, when
two were with her at once,--of one alone less so; her eyes left it to
our self-love to ascribe the fire in them more to love than to wit; she
seemed to blab out what came into her head, but many things seemed not
to come into her head; she was full of contradictions and follies, but
her _intentions_ and her inclination nevertheless remained doubtful to
every one; her answers were quick, but her questions still quicker.
To-day, in the presence of the three gentlemen,--at other times she did
it in the presence of the whole _bureau d'esprit_,--she stepped up to
the looking-glass, took out her paint-box, and retouched the gay
box-piece of her cheeks. One could not possibly think how she would
look if she were embarrassed or ashamed.
The virtue of many a lady is a thunder-house, which the electric spark
of love shatters to pieces, and which they put together again for new
experiments; to our hero, spoiled by the highest female perfection, it
appeared as if Joachime must be classed among those thunder-houses.
Coquetry is always answered with coquetry. Either this latter it was,
or too feeble a respect for Joachime, which led Victor to make the two
adorers ridiculous in the eyes of the goddess. His victory was as easy
as it was great; he encamped on the foe's position,--in other words,
Joachime took an increased liking to him. For women cannot bear him
who, before their eyes, succumbs to another sex than their own. They
_love_ everything that they _admire_; and one would not have made such
satirical explanations of their predilection for physical courage, if
one had considered that they feel this predilection for everything that
is distinguished,--for men distinguished by wealth, renown, learning.
The dry and wrinkled Voltaire had so much fame and wit, that few
Parisian hearts would have rejected his satirical one. Add to this,
that my hero expressed his regard for the whole sex with a warmth which
the individual appropriated to herself; then, too, his favorite
universal-love, furthermore his eye swimming in sorrow over a lost
heart, and finally his infectious human tenderness, secured him an
attention from Joachime which excited his to the degree, that he
proposed to himself the next time to investigate what it might
signify.----
The next time soon came. So soon as the advent of the Princess was
predicted by the Apothecary,--for _he_ was for the little future of the
court his witch of Endor and of Cumæ, and his Delphic cave,--he went
thither; for he did not drive. "So long as there is still a shoe-black
and a pavement," said he, "I do not drive. But as to the more
distinguished gentry, I wonder that they even travel on foot from one
wing of the palace to the other. Could not one, just as they have a
penny-post for a city, introduce a conveyance for the interior of the
palace? Might not every chair be a sedan-chair, if a lady were less
afraid of an Alpine tour from one apartment to another? And various
circumnavigatresses of the world would even venture to make a
pleasure-tour through a large garden in a close litter."--Victor's own
journey lay straight through one,--namely, that of Schleunes. It was
too bright and pleasant as yet to let him screw himself like a
sewing-cushion to the card-table. He saw in the garden a gay little
party strolling about, and Joachime among them. He joined them.
Joachime expressed an artist's pleasure at the groupings of the clouds,
and it was becoming to her beautiful eyes when she lifted them in that
direction. As they had nothing clever to say, they sought to do
something clever, so soon as they came to the _carrousel_.[238] They
seated themselves in it, and caused it to be set agoing. Many of the
ladies had absolutely not the courage to climb this potter's-wheel;
some ventured into the seats; only Joachime, who was full as daring as
she was timid, mounted the wooden tourney-steed, and took the lance in
hand, to spear away the ring, with a grace which was worthy of finer
rings. But in order not to expose herself to being thrown by the
whirling Rosinante, Joachime had set my hero beside her as a banister,
that she might hold on to him in time of need. The revolution of the
axle grew more rapid, and her fear greater; she clung to him more and
more firmly, and he clasped her more firmly in order to anticipate her
effort. Victor, who understood very well the legerdemain and hocuspocus
of women, easily saw through Joachime's Wiegleb's-natural-magic and
"Trunkus Plempsum Schallalei";[239] besides, the reciprocal pressure
had passed to and fro so rapidly, that one could not tell whether it
had an originator or an originatress....
As they are now all within doors, and I stand alone in the garden by
the horse-mill, I will reflect ingeniously on the subject, and remark
that great people, like women and the French and the Greeks, are
great--children. All great philosophers are the same, and, when they
have almost destroyed themselves with thinking, revive themselves by
child's fooleries, as, e. g., Malebranche did; even so do great people
refresh themselves for their more serious, noble diversions by true
childish ones; hence the hobby-horse chivalry, the swing, the
card-houses (in Hamilton's _mémoires_), the cutting out of pictures,
the _joujou_. With this passion for amusing themselves, they are in
part infected by the custom of amusing their superiors, because the
latter resemble the ancient gods, who, according to Moritz, were
appeased, not by atonement, but by joyous festivals.
As he was acquainted with the whole theatre-company of the Minister,
and, secondly, as he was no longer a lover,--for such a one has a
thousand eyes for _one_ person, and a thousand eyelids for the
rest,--he was not embarrassed at the Minister's, but actually enjoyed
himself. For he had, to be sure, his plan to carry through there; and a
plot makes a life entertaining, whether one _reads_ or _executes_ it.
He was successful to-day in having a tolerably long talk with the
Princess, and, to be sure, not about the Prince,--she avoided that
subject,--but about her trouble of the eyes. That was all. He felt it
was easier to play off an exaggerated regard than to express a real.
The apprehension of appearing false _makes_ one appear so. Hence a
sincere man has the look, with a suspicious one, of being half false.
Meanwhile, with Agnola, who, in spite of her temperament, was
coy,--hence a peculiar, lowered tone reigned in her presence at
Schleunes's,--every step sufficed which he did not take backward.
But toward the sprightly Joachime he took half a step forward. Not so
much she, as the house, seemed to him to be coquettish; and the
daughters therein--they constitute the house--he found to resemble the
old Litones,[240] or people of the Saxons, who were one third free and
two thirds serf, and who therefore could mortgage a third of their
estate. Each had still a third, a ninth, a segment, of her heart left
to her own free disposal. In fact, whoso has ever seen codfishing can
learn the thing here from metaphor,--the three daughters hold long
fishing-rods over the water (father and mother splash, and drive the
codfish along), and have their hooks baited with state-uniforms
or their own faces,--with hearts,--with whole men (as luring
rivals),--with hearts which have already been once taken out of the
stomach of another captured codfish;--from this, I say, one can see in
some sort how they catch the other cod in the sea, precisely as they do
the stock-fish on land,--namely, besides what has been mentioned (now
let one read back again), with bits of red rag, with glass-pearls, with
birds' hearts, with salted herrings and bleeding fishes, with little
cods themselves, with fishes which one has taken out, half digested,
from stock-fish formerly caught.----Victor thought to himself,
"Joachime may be only lively or coquettish for all me; I can easily
skip over marten-traps which I can see set right before my nose." Well,
run, Victor; the _visible_ steel shall lead thee precisely upon that
which is _concealed_. One may observe in the same person coquetry
towards every other, and yet overlook it toward himself, as the fair
one believes the flatterer whom she sets down as a consummate flatterer
of all others.--He observed that Joachime had somewhat oftenish looked
up at the new ceiling this evening, and he could not rightly tell why
it pleased her. At last he saw that she was only pleased with herself,
and that raising her eyes was more becoming to them than looking down.
He undertook presumptuously to investigate this, and said to her, "It
is a pity the painter of the Vatican had not made it, that you might
look up at it oftener."--"Oh," said she, in a tone of levity, "I never
would look up with others; I do not love admiration." By and by she
said, "Men dissemble, when they wish to, better than we; but I tell you
just as few truths as I hear from you." She confessed outright that
coquetry was the best remedy against love; and with the observation
that his frankness pleased her, but hers must please him too, she ended
the visit and the Post-Day.
22. DOG-POST-DAY.
Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
and Stabs.--A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
Giulia's dying Epistle.
The reader will be vexed with this Dog-Post-Day; I, for my part, have
already been vexed about it. My hero is evidently becoming entangled in
the meshes of two female trains, and even in the bonds of the princely
friendship... Nothing more is wanting than that Clotilda should
actually be joined to the hurly-burly.----And something of this kind it
becomes necessary for a mining-superintendent, an islander, to
communicate confidentially to the people on the mainland.
Besides, it must be done chronologically. I will dissect this
Dog-Post-Day, which reaches from November to December, into weeks.
Thereby more order will be observed. For I understand the Germans. They
want, like the metaphysician, to know everything from the beginning
onward, very exactly, in royal octavo, without excessive brevity, and
with some _citata_. They furnish an epigram with a preface, and a
love-madrigal with a table of contents; they determine the zephyr by
compass and the heart of a maiden by conic sections; they mark
everything, like merchants, in black-letter, and prove everything, like
jurists; their cerebral membranes are living parchments, their legs
private surveyors'-poles and pedometers; they cut up the veil
of the Nine Muses, and apply to the hearts of these damsels
turners'-compasses, and insert gauging-rods in their heads; poor Clio
(the muse of history) looks, for all the world, like the Consistorial
Counsellor Büsching, who trudges along slowly, bent up under a land
freight of surveyors'-chains, clocks to calculate _thirds_, and
Harrison's longitude-watches, and interleaved writing-almanacs, so that
I specially weep for the poor Büsching as often as I see him striding
along, since all Germany, (from which I should have expected something
different,)--every magistrate, every stupid justice of the peace, (only
we of Scheerau have never saddled him,)--has loaded down the good
topographical carrier and Christopher (cross-bearer), like a statue
hung with pledges, from knee to nostril, (so that the good man is
hardly to be seen, and I wonder how he stays on his feet,)--has
palisaded, I say, and built him in with all sorts of cursed devil's
whisks, with village inventories, with advertising sheets, with
heraldic works, with books of ground-plats and perspective plans of
pigsties.
They have even--that I may only _relate_ an example out of my own
history of the German statistic stupidity, although in the very
doing of it I _give one_--infected Jean Paul. Is it not an old
story that he has approximately assigned in degrees, by means of a
Saussure's cyanometer,[241] the blueness of the fairest eyes into
which an _amoroso_ ever looked, and inspected the fairest drops that
fell from them during the measurement, correctly enough, with a
dew-measurer?--And has not his attempt to catch and prove female sighs
by a Stegmann's measurer of the purity of the atmosphere found more
than too many imitators among us?----
WEEK OF THE 22D POST-TRINITATIS, OR FROM
NOV. 3d to 11th (EXCLUSIVE).
Almost the whole of this week he sat out at the Minister's. Many
people, when they have been only four times in a house, come again
daily, like the quotidian fever,--in the beginning, like the spring
sun, every day earlier; afterward, like the autumn sun, every day
later. He saw, indeed, that he could not contribute anything at this
court-and-ministerial party, either a mystery, or property, or a heart,
because it would resemble honest courts of justice, which--just as
the monks call their property a deposit, and say nothing belongs to
them--inversely promote every deposit into a piece of property, and say
all belongs to them. But he made no account of that. "I come indeed
only for fun," thought he, "and no harm can be done to me."----
The Minister, whom he met only over the table, had all the civility
towards him which can be united with a face full of persiflage, and
with a class of society in whose eyes all the world is divided into
spies and thieves; but Sebastian perceived, nevertheless, that
he looked upon him as a smatterer in medicine and the serious
sciences,--as if they were not all serious,--and as an adept merely in
wit and in the liberal arts. He was, however, too proud to turn to him
any other than the empty new-moon-side, and concealed from him all that
might convert him. Consequently, Victor must needs, in the eyes of the
stupidest government-officer who had seen it, have deprived himself of
all respect by the fact that, when the Minister started an interesting
conversation with his brother, the Regency-President, about imposts,
alliances, or the exchequer, he either did not attend, or ran off, or
looked up the women.----Then, too, he loved in the Prince only the man;
the Minister loved only the Prince. Victor could himself, when with
January, deliver discourses on the advantages of republics, and the
latter would often, in his enthusiasm, (if the supreme courts and his
stomach had allowed it,) gladly have raised Flachsenfingen to a free
state, and himself to the President of Congress therein. But the
Minister hated all this with a mortal hatred, and fastened on all
political free-thinkers--on a Rousseau, on all Girondists, all
Feuillants, all Republicans, and all philosophers--the name of
_Jacobin_, as the Turks call all foreigners, Britons, Germans,
Frenchmen, etc., _Franks_. Meanwhile this was a reason why Victor now
took a greater liking to Mat, who thought better on this subject, and
why he fled from the father to the daughter.
This week he got into Joachime's good graces. She gave to the fine and
fragrant duo of fools, as we do to _virtue_, only the second prize, and
to my hero, as we do to _inclination_, the prize-medal. But as he
respected, at most, merely a certain sentimentalism in friendship and
in love, he could, he thought, have ridden through the moon with this
waggish girl, without sighing _for_ her (though he might, indeed,
_over_ her). But these jolly ones, my Bastian, have seen the old Harry;
for whenever they change to anything else, one changes with them to the
same thing. She told him she wanted to give _pleasure_, like a Lutheran
holy picture, but she would not be _adored_, like a Catholic one. She
prepossessed him most by the gift peculiar to her sex, of understanding
tender allusions,--women are so easy at guessing the meaning of others,
because they always oblige others to guess their meaning, and
_complete_ and _conceal_ each _half_ with equal success. But among her
attractions I reckon also her constraint before the Princess, and
before those who listened with their--eyes. For the rest, his heart,
which Clotilda had rejected, was now in the situation of children who
have made a bet that they will receive blows upon their hands without
crying, and who still continue to smile when the tears already flow.
WEEK OF THE 23d POST-TRINITATIS, OR 46th OF
THE YEAR 179-.
Now he is there even in the forenoon. It is worthy of notice, that
on St. Martin's day he scraped her powdered forehead with the
powder-knife, and that he applied to her for some court offices in
connection with the toilet. "I can be your rouge-box bearer, as the
Great Mogul has tobacco-pipe and betel-bearers, or else your _cravatier
ordinaire_, or your _sommier_ (i. e. prayer-cushion-bearer).--I would,
if you did not kneel yourself on the cushion, myself do it before
you.----I knew in Hanover a handsome Englishman who had his left knee
stuffed and padded, because he did not know whom he should to-day have
to adore, and how long."
It is something quite as important, that on St. Jonas's day he forced
her to accept a pair of fine gloves, on which a very simple face was
painted. "It was his own," he said; "she should have the face only by
night, in bed, in, or on, her hand, that it might look as if he kissed
her hand through the whole November night."
I go on with my pragmatic extracts from this siege-journal, and find
recorded on Leopold's day that, as early as in the forenoon, Joachime
said she would have her parrot, if she kept a master of languages for
him, repeat nothing out of the whole dictionary except the word
_perfide_! "Every lover," said she, "should keep a poll for himself,
which should incessantly cry out to him, _perfide_!"--"The ladies,"
said my hero, "are alone to blame: they want to be loved too long;
often whole weeks, whole months. The like of that is beyond our powers.
Have not the Jesuits made even love to God periodical? Scotus limits it
to Sunday, others to the festival days.--Coninch says, it is enough if
one loves Him once every four years.--Henriquez adds a year more to
it.--Suarez says, it is enough if it is only done before one's
death.----To many ladies the intermediate times have hitherto fallen;
but the hours of the day, the seasons of the year, the days of
betrothal, of burial, form just as many different sects among the
Jesuits of Love."--Joachime made a beginning of putting on an angry
look. The court-physician loved nothing better with a fair one than a
quarrel, and added: "_C'est à force de se faire haïr qu'elles se font
aimer--c'est aimer que de bouder--ah, que je vous prie de vous
fâcher!_"--His humor had carried him beyond the mark.--Joachime had
reason enough to fulfil his prayer for her wrath.--He wanted to
continue the quarrel in order to settle it, but as there are cases
where the _aggravation_ of an offence brings about forgiveness quite as
little as the _taking of it back_ step by step, he did wisely in coming
away.
He wondered that he should think of her all day long. The feeling of
having done her wrong brought her face with a suffering expression
before his softened soul, and all her features were at once ennobled.
Tacitus says, we hate another when we have offended him; but good men
often love another merely on that account.
The day following, Ottomar's day,--_Ottomar_! great name, which makes
the long funeral procession of a great past sweep by all at once before
me in the dark,--he found her serious, neither seeking nor shunning
him. The two fools remained in her eyes the two fools, and gained
nothing in any way. As, therefore, he clearly perceived that out of a
transient resentment there had grown true repentance for her previous
openness,--of which he seemed to have made too free a use and too
selfish an interpretation,--it was now his duty to do in earnest that
which he had hitherto done in joke, namely, to seek her and get her to
be reconciled.
But she stood all the time by the Princess, and nothing was done.
I have not said it myself, because I knew the reader would see
it without me,--that my hero thinks Joachime regards him as the
image-worshipper of her charms, and as the moon-man, or satellite
attracted by her. My hero has, therefore, long since made up his mind
to leave her in this error. As to removing such an error,--for _that_ a
man or a woman seldom has strength enough; but Victor had, besides,
several reasons for indulging her with faith in his love (that is,
himself, also, with faith in hers). In the first place, he wanted to
conceal the reason of his coming; secondly, he knew that in the great
world, and among the Joachimes, a lover is sought for only as third man
in the game,--with them there is no dying of love, one does not even
live on it; thirdly, he reserved for himself in all cases the
sheet-anchor of making earnest out of jest; "when the knife is at my
throat," thought he, "then I will set myself down and fall truly in
love with her, and then all will be well"; fourthly, a coquette makes a
_coquet_.[242] ... Here I began already, as is well known, to be vexed
about the 22d Post-Day, although I know as well as anybody why all
mankind, even the most sincere, even the male kind, incline to little
intrigues towards their beloved; that is to say, not merely because
they are little and _reciprocated_, but because one thinks by his
intrigues to give more than he steals. Only the highest and noblest
love is without real trickery.
WEEKS OF THE 24th AND 25th POST-TRINITATIS.
On Sunday there was a ball. "Very naturally," said he, "she will not
look on me. In ball-dress the fair sex are more implacable than in
morning dress." Hardly had she seen him when she came to meet him,
like an agitated heaven, with her fixed stars of brilliants and her
pearl-planets, and in this splendor begged of him the forgiveness of
her freak. She had at first made believe angry, she said, then had
actually become so; and not until the next day had seen that she did
wrong to appear so and had a right to be so. This prayer for
forgiveness made our Medicus more humble than was necessary. She begged
him sportively to beg her pardon, and made him acquainted with her
percussion-gold of sudden resentment.
For a space of two days this Westphalian peace was kept.
But one quarrel with a maiden, like one fool, makes ten; and
unfortunately one only likes the angry one so much the better (at
least, better than the indifferent), just as people run most after
_those_ Methodist preachers who damn them the most roundly. Joachime
grew daily more susceptible of anger,--which he ascribed to an
increasing love,--but so did he, too. Let them have spent the whole
visit in the finest imperial and domestic peace, at the leave-taking
all was put upon a war-footing again, ambassadors and furloughed ones
(if I may be allowed these poetical expressions) recalled. Then with
the angry sediments in his heart he withdrew, and could hardly wait for
the moment of the next interview,--i. e. of his or her justification.
Thus did they spend their hours in the writing of peace-instruments and
manifestoes. The matter of dispute was as singular as the quarrel
itself: it concerned their demands of friendship; each party proved
that the other was the faulty one, and demanded too much. What most
enraged our Medicus was, that she allowed the fine and the fragrant
fools to kiss her hand, which she forbade him to do, and in truth
without any reasons for the decision. "If she would only lie to me, and
say, such or such is the reason,--that at least would be something,"
said he; but she did him not the pleasure. To my sex, refusal without
reasons, even conjecturable ones, is a pit of brimstone, a threefold
death; upon Joachime, reasons and cabinet-sermons had equal influence.
EXTRA-LEAF ON THE ABOVE.
I have a hundred times, with my legal burden of proof on my back,
thought of women who are able, with a certain effort, to act as well as
to believe without any reasons. For surely, in the end, everybody must
(according to all philosophers) reconcile himself to actions and
opinions for which reasons are entirely wanting; for, since every
reason appeals to a new one, and this again rests upon one which refers
us to one, which again must have its own reason, it follows that
(unless we mean to be forever going and seeking) we must finally arrive
at one which we accept without any reason whatever. Only the scholar
fails in this, that precisely the most important truths--the highest
principles of morals, of metaphysics, &c.--are the ones which he
believes without reasons, and which, in his agony,--thinking to help
himself out thereby,--he names necessary truths. Woman, on the
contrary, makes lesser truths--e. g. there must be drives, invitations,
washing to-morrow, &c.--the necessary truths, which must be accepted
without the insurance and reinsurance of reasons;--and just this it is
which gives her such an appearance of soundness. For them it is easy to
distinguish themselves from the philosopher, who thinks, and into whose
eyes the sun of truth flames so horizontally that he cannot see, for
it, either road or landscape. The philosopher is obliged, in the
weightiest actions,--the moral,--to be his own lawgiver and law-keeper,
without having the reasons therefor given him by his conscience. With a
woman, every inclination is a little conscience, and hates
_Heteronomies_,[243] and beyond that pronounces no reasons, just as the
great conscience does. And it is precisely this gift, of acting more
from private sovereignty than from reasons, which makes women so very
suitable for men; for the latter would rather give them ten commands
than three reasons.
_End of the Extra-Leaf on the above_.
What was full as bad was, that Joachime at last, only for the sake of
removing his documentary piles of complaints and imperial grievances,
allowed him her fingers, without giving him the least reason for it. He
could, therefore, show no title of possession, and, in case of need,
would have had no one who could protect him therein.
There is, however, a well-grounded rule of right or Brocardicon[244]
for men: that everything grows firmer with women, when one builds upon
it, and that a little stolen favor legitimately belongs to us, so soon
as we sue for a greater. This rule of right bases itself upon the fact
that maidens always abate with us, as one does to Jews in trade, the
half, and give only a couple of fingers when we want the hand. But if
one has the fingers, then arises, out of the Institutions, a new title,
which adjudicates to us the hand: the hand gives a right to the arm,
and the arm to everything that is appended to it, as _accessorium_.
Thus must these things be managed, if right is to remain right. There
will, in fact, have to be a little manual written by me, or some other
honest man, wherein one shall expound and elucidate to the female sex
with the torch of legal learning the _modos_ (or ways) _acquirendi_ (of
winning) them. Otherwise many modi may go out of use. Thus, e. g.,
according to civil law, I am rightful proprietor of a movable thing, if
it was stolen thirty years ago (in fact, it should be further back, and
I should not be made to suffer for it, that one began the stealing
later); so, too, by prescription of thirty minutes (the time is
relative) everything belonging to a fair one lawfully falls to me,
which (of a movable nature--and everything about her is movable) I may
have purloined from her, and therefore one cannot begin soon enough to
steal, because before the theft the prescription cannot begin to take
effect.
Specification is a good modus. Only one must be, like me, a
Proculian,[245] and believe that a strange article belongs to him who
has imparted to it a different form; e. g. to me, the hand which I have
put into another shape by pressure.
The late Siegwart said: _Confusio_ (mingling of tears) is my modus. But
_commixtio_ (mixture of dry articles, e. g. the fingers, the hair) is
now with almost all of us the _modus acquirendi_.
I was going once to treat the whole thing according to the doctrine of
the _Servitudes_,[246] where a woman has a thousand things to suffer
(though all these servitudes are entirely extinguished by the
consolidation[247] of marriage); but I do not myself any longer rightly
retain the doctrine of the Servitudes, and would much rather examine
any one in them than be examined myself.----
I return to the Medicus. Since, then, he knew that a kissed hand is a
warrant to the cheeks,--but the cheeks the sacrificial tables of the
lips,--these of the eyes,--the eyes of the neck;--accordingly he would
have proceeded exactly according to his text-book. But with Joachime,
as with all antipodes of coquettes, _no favor paved the way for
another, not even the great one for the small one_; you passed from one
antechamber to another,--and what said my hero to this? Nothing but
"Thank God that for once there is one better than she seemed, who,
under the appearance of being our plaything, plays with us, and makes
her coquetry the veil of virtue!"
He felt now, as often as her name was mentioned, a soft warmth breathe
through his bosom.
FROM THE END OF THE ECCLESIASTICAL YEAR
(DEC. 1) TO THE END OF THE CIVIL (DEC. 31).
Flamin, whose patriotic flames found no air in the session-chamber, and
stifled himself first, grew shyer and wilder every day. It was
something new to him, that it took whole boards and commissions to do
what one person might have done,--that the limbs of the state (as is
also the case, indeed, with the limbs of the body) are moved by the
_short arm_ of the lever, so as to do less with greater power, and a
board, particularly, resembles the body, which, according to
Borellus,[248] spends 2,900 times as much strength on a leap as the
load which it has to lift requires. He hated all great people, and
never went to see any: the page Mat did not even get visits from him.
My Sebastian made his visits to _him_ seldomer, because his leisure and
his calms of dissipation fell exactly upon Flamin's working hours. This
separation, and the eternal sitting at Schleunes's,--which Flamin, from
not being acquainted with Joachime's influence, was obliged at all
events to ascribe to Clotilda's, for future visits to whom Victor must
be creating a pretext by his present ones,--and even the Prince's favor
towards the latter, which in Flamin's eyes could not be any result of
his spirit of freedom and his sincerity;--all this drew the intertwined
bonds of their friendship, which had made life to them hitherto a
four-handed piece of music, further and further asunder; the faults and
the moral dust which Victor could once brush off from his darling he
hardly dared to blow off; they behaved towards each other more
delicately and attentively. But my Victor, to whose heart Fate applied
so many tongues of vampyres, and who was compelled to shut up in _one_
breast the bitterness of lost love and the woe of failing friendship,
was made by it all--really merry. O, there is a certain gayety of
stagnation and grief, which is a sign of the soul's exhaustion, a smile
like that on men who die of wounds in the diaphragm, or that on the
shrivelled, drawn-back lips of mummies! Victor plunged into the stream
of amusements, in order, under it, not to hear his own sighs. But
often, to be sure, when he had all day long been sprinkling over ruined
follies comic salt, which full as often bites the hand of the sower and
makes it ache, and when he had not been able all day long to refresh
himself with any eye, to which he would have dared to show a tear in
his own,--when, thus weary of the present, indifferent to the future,
wounded by the past, he had just passed by the last fool, the
Apothecary, and when from his bow-window he looked out into the
night hanging full of worlds, and into the tranquillizing moon, and
upon the eastern clouds over St. Luna,--then were his swollen heart
and his swollen eyeball sure to burst, and the tears which night
concealed to stream down from his balcony on the hard pavement. "O,
only _one_ soul," cried his innermost being with all the tones of
melancholy,--"give but _one_ soul, thou eternal, loving, creative
nature, to this poor, languishing heart, which seems so hard and is so
soft, which seems so joyous and yet is so sad, seems so cold and yet is
so warm!"
It was well that, on such an evening, no chamberlain, no man of the
world, stood in the balcony, just as poor Marie--on whom her former
life has been precipitated like a crushing avalanche--came to desire
his breakfast-orders; for he would get up, without wiping away a drop,
and advance kindly to meet her, and grasp her soft, but red and
hard-worked hand, which from fear she did not draw back,--although from
fear she did turn away her face, hardened into stone against hope,--and
say, as he softly stroked her eyebrows horizontally, with a voice
rising from a heart full of the deepest emotion, "Thou poor Marie, tell
me--I am sure thou hast little comfort--is it not so? There seldom
comes any longer into thy gentle eyes anything that they love to see,
unless it is thy own tears? Dear girl, why hast thou no courage before
me? why dost thou not tell me thy woe? Thou good, tortured heart,--I
will speak for thee, act for thee: tell me what weighs on thee, and if
ever of an evening thy heart is too heavy, and thou mayest not venture
to weep down below, then come up to me ... look at me now frankly ...
truly I will shed tears with thee, let them say what they will and be
hanged." Although she held it to be uncourteous to weep before so
distinguished a gentleman, nevertheless, it was impossible for her, by
a forcible bending away of her face, to thrust aside all the tears
which his voice, full of love, drew in rivers from her eyes.... Take it
not ill of his over-boiling soul, that he then pressed his hot mouth to
her cold, despised, and unresistingly trembling lips, and said to her:
"Oh, why are we mortals so unhappy, when we are too soft-hearted?"--In
his chamber she seemed to take all as jest,--but all night long she
heard the echo of the humane man;--even as jest, so much love would
have been a comfort to her; then her past flowers once more
crystallized in the window-frost of her present wintry-time; then she
felt as if she were to-day, for the first time, unhappy.--In the
morning she said nothing to any one, and towards Sebastian she was
merely more devoted, but not more courageous; only, at times, she would
concur with the dispenser down below, when he praised him, and say, but
without further explanation, "One should cut up one's own heart into
little bits, and sacrifice it for the English gentleman."
Poor Marie! my own innermost heart repeats after the Doctor, and adds
besides: Perhaps at this very moment, just such an unhappy woman, just
such an unhappy man, is reading me. And I feel as if; now that I have
struck the funeral bells of their past sad hours, I must also write
them a word of consolation. But for one who has to be ever striding
across new gaping ice-chasms of life, I know no resource but my own:
the moment things grow bad, fling all _possible hopes_ to the Devil,
and with utter renunciation fall back upon thyself, and ask, How now,
if even the worst should come, what then? Never reconcile thy fancy to
the _next_ misfortune, but to the greatest. Nothing relaxes one's
spirits more than the alternation of warm hopes with cold anguish. If
this method is too heroic for thee, then seek for thy tears an eye that
shall imitate them, and a voice that shall ask thee why thou art thus.
And reflect: the echo of the next life, the voice of our modest,
fairer, holier soul, is audible only in a sorrow-darkened bosom, as the
nightingales warble when one veils their cage.
Often did Sebastian worry himself about this, that he could here exert
so little his noble powers in behalf of humanity; that his dreams of
preventing evil and accomplishing good through the Prince remained
fever-dreams, because, e. g., even the best men at the helm of the
state filled offices entirely according to circumstances and
recommendations merely, and held offices, whether those of others or
their own, never as obligations, but as mining-curacies. He was
troubled about his uselessness; but he consoled himself with its
necessity: "in a year, when my father comes, I set myself free and rise
to something better," and his conscience added, that his own personal
uselessness was serviceable to the virtue of his father, and that it
was better to be, in a wheel, with all one's fitness for a pendulum, a
tooth, without which the machinery would stop, than to be the pendulum
of a toothless wheel.
In such cases he always asked himself afresh: "Is Joachime, perhaps,
like me, better, tenderer, less coquettish than she seems? and why wilt
thou condemn her on the strength of an outward appearance, which is, to
be sure, the same as thine own?" Her conduct seldom confirmed these
favorable suppositions, nay, it often absolutely refuted them;
nevertheless, he went on to expose himself to new refutations and to
desire confirmation still. The necessity of loving drives one to
greater follies than love itself; every week Victor let himself abate
one perfection more from the female ideal, for which, as for the
unknown god, he had already for years had the altar set up in his
brain. During this haggling the whole of December would have slipped
away, had it not been for the first day of Christmas.
On that day, when he saw through every window laughing faces and
gardens of Hesperides, he too would fain be joyful, and flew amidst the
church-chorals to Joachime's toilet-chamber, in order there to make
himself a Christmas pleasure. He had brought her for a present, he
said, a bottle-case of liqueurs, a whole cellar of Rataffia, because he
knew how ladies drank. When, at last, he drew his gantry full of
bottles out of his--pocket: it was a miserable little box full
of cotton-wool, in which stood imbedded neat little bottles of
sweet-smelling waters, almost as long as wrens'-eggs. What is neat
always pleases girls--as well as what is splendid. He delivered a long
discourse to Joachime upon the temperance of her sex, who ate as little
as humming-birds and drank as little as eagles: with a few show-dishes
and a smelling-bottle he would feast an army of the female sex five
thousand men strong, and there should still be something left. The
physicians observed that they who had borne hunger longest had been
women,--even in the middle classes the whole bee-flora on which these
saints lived consisted of a colored ribbon, which they wore as sash or
scarf, by way of a nourishing poultice and portable soup, and to which
they attached nothing further, except at most a lover. Joachime, during
the eulogy, drew out a bottle, because she thought it wax. Victor, by
way of refuting her--or for some other reason--pressed it tightly
into her hand, and fortunately crushed it. A mining-superintendent
of my disposition would hardly introduce the crushing of a bottle,
not big enough to cover one of Eymann's cucumbers with, into his
Dog-Post-Days,--because he loves to serve up things of importance,--did
not the bottle itself acquire an importance from the fact that it cut
the softest hand upon which the hardest jewel ever yet threw lustre,
till it ran blood. The Doctor was startled,--the patient smiled,--he
kissed the wound, and these three drops fell like Jason's blood, or
like a blood rectified by an alchemist, as three sparks into his
inflammable veins, and the blood-coal of love assumed three glowing
points;--nay, a little more, and he would have obeyed her, when she
playfully commanded him (in order to spare him a greater embarrassment
than he had) to revive the antiquated fashion of the Parisians, of
writing to ladies with rose-colored ink, and here on the spot to
despatch three lines to her in her own blood. Thus much is, at least,
certain, that he told her he wished he were the Devil. To the
last-named personage, as is well known, the warranty-deed or rather
partition-treaty of the soul is despatched with the blood of the
proprietor as fist-[249]pledge and consideration. Blood is the seed of
the Church, the Catholic Church says; and here we are speaking of
nothing less than the _temple_ of the fair.
So it was--and so it stood--when the Court of the Princess was
announced for to-day. This was, in the first place, plaguily awkward
for him, because this evening was spoiled; and, secondly, it was
agreeable to him, because Joachime was obliged to-day to put away the
hat which he and she so loved. Since, as is customary, ladies had the
robes and frisures prescribed to them by the Princess, in which they
must celebrate in her presence the court-day, i. e. the incendiary
Sunday of their freedom: accordingly, she could not to-day keep on the
crape-hat which she so loved, and Victor too, but not on her; for it
was just the mate of that which Clotilda had worn when, during the
concert, she covered her moist eyes with the black-lace veil, which
from that time always hung down over his bereaved eyes.
I will describe the Court-day.
The main object of the Court in setting forth at six o'clock in the
evening was, to drive home again at ten o'clock in a right sulky mood.
I can, however, deliver this ten times as copiously:--
At six o'clock Victor, with the rest of the communion of brethren and
sisters under orders, drove to the Paullinum. He envied, or rather
blessed, the weaver, the boot-polisher, the wood-cutter, who had at
evening his jug of beer, his prayers, his Johnny-[250]cakes and his
trumpeting children; likewise their wives, who already had foretaste of
the morrow, namely, of the marbled, speckled dresses which were to
array them for the second holiday. In the May-colored atmosphere and
zodiac stood the Princess as a sun, full as unhappy as her unhappy
planets; _only dream_ (thought he) _can make a king happy or a poor man
unhappy_. When he saw how they all, after a scanty frog-rain of words;
and after refreshments, i. e. beatings and exhaustions, were harnessed,
one post-team after another, according to the Court almanac and
directory, to the card-tables,--to every board came the same motley set
of old faces,--he wondered first of all at the universal patience; on a
negro of the gold coast of the court (he swore to himself) if one only
considers what he has to _hear_ and to _endure_, the _ears_ and the
_skin_ are certainly, as in the case of roasted sucking-pigs, the best
parts. Here the lion must beg _that_ animal to let him have his skin
for a domino, which has usually borrowed his of him. Here among these
forms bent up by small souls (as leaves also crook up when leaf-lice
live on them) no great, no bold thought can be carried: like wheat
which is _beaten down_, they can yield only _empty_ grains.
Before the sitting down at table, that part or segment of
the--halo[251] encircling the Italian _sun_, which was not invited,
drove home, disgusted at the tediousness of play, and still more
disgusted that certain persons in particular were honored with the
tediousness of a seat at the table.
Joachime, in whom the retiring Agnola found little satisfaction, went
away with them, but not the Doctor, nor her brother Mat either, who had
the honor of making, behind the chair of the Princess, in the column of
march formed by herself, her chamberlain, a page, and a court lackey,
exactly the central point; he stood, as every one knows, immediately
behind the chamberlain, and was the only one who looked like a legible
lampoon upon the _tout ensemble_. About the table, during[252] which
there was little said, at most in a very low tone by two neighbors,
here also there shall be nothing said.
After dinner the Prince came and disturbed the stiff ceremonial, which
he hated from love of comfort, just as Victor despised it on
philosophical grounds. "Verily, an archangel," Victor would often say,
"who should remark the wisdom and virtue observed by mortals in all
trifles at their session-tables, altars, receptions, must needs bet his
heaven and his wings that we are worth a farthing--or at least
something--in greater things; but we all know where the conclusion
limps; and this very disgust at the stiff, pedantic, decent micrology
and machinery of men is the humor of the satirist. Moral deterioration
comes about, it is true, through trifles, but not improvement: Satan
creeps into us through Venetian blinds and _sphincters_[253]; the good
angel enters through the front door."--Agnola rewarded our hero to-day
for his previous so well meant assiduity with a warmer attention, which
was made more beautiful in his eyes by her ornaments--she wore those of
the former princess, her own, and those of her mother before her--and
by her whole state-attire; for he loved finery on women and hated it on
men. His esteem borrowed a tender warmth from the painful fact that she
confounded January's selfish intentions in his visits (with reference
to the future Clotilda) with fairer ones, and that nevertheless one
could not say so to her. How came it that Agnola reminded him then of
Joachime; that the latter was the _conductor_ of regard for the former;
and that all loving emotions with which the Princess inspired him
turned out wishes that Joachime might deserve and receive them?
With a soul full of such longing, he drove back this very day without
ceremony to that Joachime on whose hand, as we know, he had left a
slight wound. He said to her, "He must, as murderer and Medicus, look
once more to-day after the wound"; but a charming new trouble on
Joachime's face fell like sunshine with a warming influence into his
soul. He was impatient to go out with her on the balcony, to talk about
it. Out there, he in a few minutes made the gash and the December chill
a pretext for taking the hand and the gash into his own to warm it.
"Cold is bad for wounds," he said; but the fine fool would here have
had his own comment on the subject. The vacant evening, the
remembrances of the childish joys of Christmas, the starry heaven,
looking down from overhead, which magically illuminates all dark wishes
of man, like flowers in the night,--these and the silence surcharged
and burdened his forlorn soul, and he pressed the only hand which human
kind at this moment extended to him. He put the question to her
directly about her trouble. Joachime answered more softly than usual,
"I was going to ask you the same; but with me it is natural." For she
had, she related, on her return found the luggage of Clotilda and the
news of her arrival, and--which is the precise point--the clothes of
her sister Giulia, which Clotilda had hitherto given a place among her
own. This Giulia, it will be remembered, had expired on Clotilda's
heart, a day before the latter removed from Maienthal to St. Luna.
A chaos shot through his heart; but out of the chaos only the faded
Giulia took shape,--for Clotilda daily receded into a duskier sanctuary
of his soul; her pale Luna-like image caressed with rays of another
world his sore nerves, and he willingly suffered himself to believe
that Joachime had her form. In his poetic exaltation, so seldom
intelligible to women, the dead threw the halo which Clotilda diffused
over her back again upon her sister. Joachime had to-day read over
again the letter which Giulia had dictated to her in her last hour
through Clotilda, and she still had it with her. Probably a heart full
of unrequited love had borne the fair enthusiast down under the earth.
Victor with gleaming eyes begged her for the letter; he opened it in
the moonlight, and when he saw the beloved handwriting of his lost
Clotilda, his whole heart wept.
"Good sister!--
"Forever farewell! Let me say that first, because I know not what
moment may close my lips. The tempests of my life are going home.[254]
I speak this farewell and my heartiest wish for thy welfare through my
friend Clotilda's pen. Give the enclosed to my dear parents, and join
thy prayer to mine, that they will leave me in my beautiful Maienthal,
when I am gone. I see now through the window the rose-bush which stands
by the sexton's little garden in the churchyard: there a place is given
me, which like a scar shall testify that I once existed, and a black
cross with the six white letters _Giulia_,--no more. Dear sister, do
not, I beseech thee, allow them to confine my dust in a tomb!--O no! it
shall flutter in the shape of Maienthal's roses, which I once so loved
to sprinkle!--Let this heart, when it shall have dissolved into the
pollen of a new eternal heart, play and hover in the beams of the moon,
which has so often in my lifetime made my heart sad and soft. If thou
ever drivest, dear sister, along by Maienthal, then will the cross peep
out upon the road through the roses; and if it does not make thee too
sad, then look over to me.
"It seemed to me just now, for some minutes, as if I drew breath in
ether,--in little thin draughts. It will soon be over. But tell my
playmates, if they ask for me, that I was glad to go, though I was
young. Very glad. Our teacher says, the dying are flying clouds, the
living stationary ones, beneath which the former glide away, but verily
at evening both are gone. Ah, I thought I should have to yearn for
death a long time yet, from one year of sorrow to another; ah! I feared
these pale cheeks, these eyes sunk with weeping, would not prevail upon
death, that he would let me grow superannuated, and not take away my
withered heart until it had throbbed itself to exhaustion: but, lo! he
comes sooner. In a few days, perhaps in a few hours, an angel will
appear before me and smile, and I shall see that it is death, and I,
too, shall smile and say most joyfully, Take my beating heart into thy
hand, thou ambassador of eternity, and care for my soul.
"'But art thou not young?' the angel will say; 'hast thou not just
stept upon this earth? Shall I recall thee so soon, even before it has
its spring?'
"But I shall answer: Look on these sunken cheeks, and these exhausted
eyes, and only shut them to. O, lay the snake-stone[255] on my bosom,
that it may suck out all the wounds, and not fall off till they are
healed. Ah! I have haply done no good in the world, but also no evil.
"Then will the angel say: 'If I touch thee, thou becomest
stiff,--spring and mankind and the whole earth vanish, and I alone
stand beside thee. Is, then, thy young soul already so weary and so
sore? What sorrows, then, can there be thus early in thy breast?'
"Only touch me, good angel!--Now he says, 'If I touch thee, thou
crumblest to dust, and all thy loved ones see nothing more of thee--'
"O, touch me!..."
Death touched the bleeding heart, and a human being had passed on....
While Victor read the sorrowful sheet, the sister of the dead one had
several times wiped her eyes, because she imagined to herself what he
was reading, and when he looked up at her, there glimmered therein the
seed-pearls of a tender soul. But he wished now that his face could be
invisible, or that he could be in the balcony of his chamber, so as to
give way to all sighs and emotions unseen. Had he been in a citizen's
house, he might now have gone without being derided to the unpacked
clothes, and into the future apartments of Clotilda; and he might have
seen again, as it were, the green lawns of Maienthal, if he had seen
the romantic dresses, wherein Giulia had roamed through them, locked up
amidst the last kisses of a sister. But in such a house it was an
impossibility.
He could now, as he seldomer had the enjoyment of another's
sensibility, easily pardon its even being carried to excess. That it
shatters the body was to him the wretchedest objection, because,
indeed, everything of a nobler sort, every effort, all thinking, wears
it out; in fact, the body and life were only means, but not an end.
"Giulia's heart in Giulia's body," said he, "is a pure dew-drop in a
tender flower-cup, which everything crushes, chokes, dries up, and
which yet has escaped the noonday sun; such souls, too pliable for a
world full of storm, which have too many nerves and too few muscles,
deserve for their sensibility's sake not the corroding salt of satire,
which gnaws them like snails. Earth and we can give them few joys; why
will we take from them the rest?"
But the lines of sorrow which sympathy now drew through Joachime's
smiles imprinted themselves distinctly in Victor's heart, and that
which she would here conceal made her more charming than all that she
had ever sought to show.
Nothing is more dangerous than--as he had done some weeks before--to
make believe he was in love: one becomes so forthwith in reality. Thus,
the voluptuary _Baron_, when he had played one of Corneille's heroes,
himself was one for some days. Thus Moliere died of a _malade
imaginaire_, and Charles V. of a rehearsal-burial. Thus the paper crown
which Cromwell had worn in a school-drama made him covet a harder
one.--The second lesson which is to be learned from this (this,
however, to be sure, presupposes Joachime's being a coquette) is, that
a hero may scent coquetry, and yet run into the trap; a poet, like the
nightingale (which he resembles in plumage, throat, and simplicity)
sits up on the tree, and sees the snare set, and skips down and--into
it.
After some days,--while the question about Joachime's worth and his own
love was rising and falling like a wave in Victor's mind,--while he
stood on bad terms with Flamin, good ones with the Princess, and
better with the Prince, who kept asking every day when Clotilda was
coming,--she came.
23. DOG-POST-DAY.
First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
Race-Weeks.
"Ay, I must confess," said Victor, as on the day after Clotilda's
arrival he ran round in his chamber, "I could look with more courage
into a thunder-storm or a tempestuous sea than into that little
face,--into a radiant heaven, three noses long." He got relief,
however, by striking a detached fortissimo chord on the piano: then he
could go to see Clotilda. Only on the way he said: "Nowhere is there so
much jangling as within a man. What a devilish uproar in this five-foot
Disputatorium about the smallest trumpery, till a bill grows into an
act! A portable national convention _in nuce_,[256] that is what I am;
I cannot take a step, without the _right_ and _left_ first haranguing
on the subject, and the _enragés_ and the _noirs_,[257] and the Duke of
Orleans and Marat. The most detestable thing about this interior
Ratisbon diet of man is, that Virtue sits therein with ten seats and
one voice, but the Devil with one rump and seven votes."--
By these humorous soliloquies he sought to divert himself from the
aspect of his confused, stubborn, cold-sore spirit, which was always
lifting Joachime to the level of Clotilda. He was finally put in
perfect tune again merely by the virtuous resolution not to conceal now
his love for Joachime,--"not to be ashamed of her," he had almost
thought to himself. "If I _feign_ myself to be somewhat warmer toward
Joachime and colder towards the other than I perhaps am, then the Devil
must have his game in it, if I do not finally _become_ so."
But the Devil had his game, and in fact a true game of Ombre[258] for
_four_ persons,[259] with a dummy:[260] this croupier[261] had made the
original vault of playing out the face[262] of Clotilda with a wholly
different _color_ from what he had given her in Le Baut's palace.
Victor found her, on meeting her again at Schleunes's, infinitely more
beautiful than he had left her,--that is to say, more _pale_. As she
was no nervous patient, never avoided the cold, even on December
evenings walked out alone in the village, her cheeks were usually more
like dark rosebuds than opened and whitened rose-leaves. But now the
sun had become a moon: she had, in some sorrow or other, like the
sapphire in the fire, lost nothing but color; instead of the blood, the
soul, grown more still, lovely, and tender, seemed itself to look more
nearly through the white crape curtain. All the blood which had receded
from her cheeks flowed over into his, and rose like a magic potion into
his head; meanwhile he tried to get into the latter the thought,
"Probably it is more the quarrel with her parents, and less the
affliction of being driven hither, that has made her sick."
When one has once proposed to himself to make believe cold, one becomes
still more so when one finds reasons for _not_ being so: Victor was
made still colder by Clotilda's parents, who had come with her, and
from whose faults the mantle seemed to him to be at once removed. Upon
persons whom, for the sake of a third, one has esteemed too highly, one
avenges himself, when the third no longer exerts the constraining
influence, by a so much the greater depreciation of them. Then, too, he
said to himself: "As she now seldom sees her brother Flamin, it would
be a piece of simplicity to expose her to a minute's embarrassment by
the announcement that I know the relationship." Poor Victor!
Nevertheless, it was impossible for him even to charge his heart with
so much electrical warmth--though he might rub it with cat-skins and
beat it with fox-tails--as would be requisite in order that his pulse
should beat full for Joachime, not to say feverishly; but _this very
thing_ decided him to conduct himself exactly as if heart and pulse
were fuller. "It were ignoble," thought he, "if the good Joachime
should be made to atone for it, that I once had other hopes and wishes
than my hitherto newest ones." This sacrifice warmed him to a proper
degree of regard; this regard gave him the manly pride, which defies
with its love and its choice all the four quarters of the world; this
pride, again, gave him freedom and joy,--and now he was in a condition
to talk with Clotilda like a reasonable man.
All this inner history occupied, of course, twelve times as great a
space of time as Mohammed's journey through all the heavens,--almost
a good hour. But an accident threw itself into the midst of all
his ideas. Namely, as the Minister's lady was a true female
philosopher,--she knew that a couple of quartz crystals with some
preparations and a drowned f[oe]tus do not make a philosopher, but
nothing short of a lecture-room full of natural curiosities, and a
reading cabinet,--and as the Chamberlain Le Baut was a philosopher, for
his cabinet was quite as large,--the collection was exhibited to the
Chamberlain, which he had himself helped to enrich. One would suppose
that they must have laughed at each other in their sleeves, and taken
each other for fools; but they really held each other for philosophers;
for with great folks the fruits of the tree of knowledge grow so into
the window and into the mouth,--they have so much facility in gaining
knowledge (and therefore a second in showing it),--they so seldom seek
in the wells of truth anything else than their own knee-pieces made
with water-colors, and to wade into the depths of this fountain would
give them such a chill,--and yet, on the other hand, they converse with
so many sorts of persons of information in all departments,--that they
get a smattering of everything over the table, and by oral tradition,
like the disciples of the ancients, become through the ears living
cyclopædias. If, afterward, they actually know how to absolutely
renounce that which they have never heard, what difference is there,
then, between them and the poorest philosopher, except in
consciousness?
In the cabinet of books and natural curiosities lay the whole
New-Year's freight of buzzing chafers, with golden wing-sheaths minus
wings,--I mean the gilt Musen-Almanachs. Matthieu, that mimic of the
actual nightingales, was the sworn foe of the human ones, namely, the
poets. He said,--what would have suited better for a Review,--"He was a
great friend of verses, but only in winter,--for when he went roaming
so through the flower-beds of an Annual, he became, like one who walks
through a poppy-field, drowsy enough, and could go to sleep. And just
as the nights grew longer, and one therefore needed a longer sleep, it
was a fine thing that the Annuals should appear, exactly at the
beginning of winter, and that these flowers should bloom at the same
season of the year with the mosses; in this way one could at least be
lulled to sleep beside the brook that murmured in the verses, when
there was no more murmuring or sleeping on the frozen meadow."----
Our Victor was as satirical as the Evangelist; he had in Hanover
laughed as well as this fellow here,--e. g. he had complained that most
Annual-minstrels unfortunately labored more for _connoisseurs_ than for
dull readers, and were well contented if they only got the former to
sleep,--that a man who could not write prose should try whether he
might not make a popular bard, as only those birds can _sing_ who do
not learn to talk,--that he could get through a good Annual at the
quickest and most agreeable rate, if he only ran over the rhymes,--and
that flat heads, like flat diamonds, to which no facettes can be given,
became _hearts_, and instead of thoughts gave us tears, in which there
swam not so much as the infusorium of an idea....
But he saw still one side more than Matthieu, namely, the noble side.
It was his custom to turn this side forward precisely when another had
been showing the bad side, and _vice versâ_. His opinion was, that the
poets were nothing but intoxicated philosophers,--but whoever could not
learn philosophizing from them, would learn it quite as little from the
systematicians. That philosophy made only the _silver-wedding_ between
ideas, but poetry the first marriage; empty _words_ there might be, but
no empty _sensations_. That the poet, in order to move us, has only to
take for his lever all of noble that there is on the earth,--Nature,
Freedom, Virtue, and God; and the very magic-words, the magic-rings,
the magic-lamps wherewith he sways us, react at last upon himself.
He delivered this opinion--when Matthieu had given his and Joachime her
own, namely, that there were three or four leaves, at least, in the
Musen-Almanachs which pleased her, namely, the smooth parchment
leaves--much more briefly than we have put it;--the Minister's lady was
of his opinion (for she herself was a versifex);--the Chamberlain said,
"Every city and every prince did indeed adore the poets in appropriate
temples,--namely, in the play-houses." Clotilda ventured now to join
herself to the victors:[263] "When one reads a poet in January, it is
as lovely as when one goes to walk in June. I cannot read either
philosophers or learned men; there would, therefore, be left to me"
(she meant to say, to her sex) "quite too little, if one should take
from me the dear poets." "You would at most," said the Minister at
last, "find your disciples in them; poets, like the saints, concern
themselves little about the world and its knowledge; they can sing of
the state, but not instruct it." "O thou grinning mummy!" thought
Victor, "a precious stone which thou canst not work into the wall of
the state-building is less to thee than a block of sandstone. If thou
couldst only install every flaming soul sent into the world as a
completion of the republican antiques, in the office of under-clerk,
custom-house collector, or warden of the treasury (as the people of
Grand Cairo transform their ruins into stables and horse-troughs)!" The
noble Mat merely subjoined: "There was a painter in Rome who never
talked with any one but by singing; and I knew a great poet who not
even in common life could speak prose; but he could not do much beside,
and had little of the world, but a great many worlds in his head. When
he comes out in print, he will hardly play off more deception on
his readers than any one has already played off on him, who chose
to."--Victor saw, by Clotilda's downcast eye, that she observed, as
well as he, that the Devil meant her Dahore: but he was silent; his
soul was sad and embittered: he had, however, long since been hardened
by court life to endure those whom he must needs hate.
During this disputation the noble Mat had, unobserved, cut out the
whole group in black paper. "Ah!" said Joachime, "this is not the first
time that he has given _blackened_ likenesses of companies." But as
Victor could never see silhouette-groups, without thinking of us
fleeting shadows of mortals, of this dwindling and drying-up
dwarf-life, of the night-pieces drawn upon life, and of the shadowy
companies called peoples,--and as he was reminded of this not only by
his melancholy, and not only by a wax-skeleton, by Madame Biheron,[264]
which stood there among the natural curiosities, but still more by the
pale form of Clotilda,--and as, casting a glance of comparison at the
skeleton and the profile, she said softly to Victor, "So many
resemblances might at another time make me sad,"--then was his full
heart transpierced with a sharp pang at the thought of his eternal
poverty, and at the certainty, "This great, beautiful heart will never
stir for thine, and when her friend Emanuel is dead, thou art left
forever alone"; and he stepped to the window, threw it open violently,
drank in the north-wind, pressed his fist against his two eyeballs, and
went back with his former expression of countenance to the rest of the
company.
But for to-day such agitations had torn deeply into his heart. And when
Clotilda, at a solitary second, said to him that the Parson's wife and
Agatha were angry at his staying away, then was he, to whom at these
names the whole beclouded past opened like a heaven, in no condition to
give an answer.
When he returned home, Clotilda's voice, which he could of all her
attractions least forget, kept incessantly speaking, and like the echo
of a funeral-song, in his soul.... Reader, when that which thou lovedst
has long vanished from the earth or from thy fancy, then will
nevertheless the beloved _voice_ come back and bring with it all thy
old tears, and the disconsolate heart which has shed them!... But not
merely her voice,--everything came thronging back in the darkness upon
his fancy: her modest eye, which did not in court-like style sparkle
and bid defiance and express desire, as did those of the others,--that
watchful delicacy, which since his entrance on court-life no longer
appeared to him, either in her or in his father, too great,--to this
add the image of Joachime and his chaos of inconsistencies, and the
remark that a man whom the most certain proofs have satisfied that he
is not loved, still suffers afresh at a _new_ one,--and then one can
understand the commotions which sleep, that lull on life's ocean, had
in his case to appease.--
"That was the last fever-shake," said he the next morning, relying upon
his present heart, whose eruptions, like those of volcanoes, daily
burnt out its crater more and more. He enjoined upon himself,
therefore, a weekly flight from the too dear soul, with the design that
the new resonance of his love might cease its vibrations in his heart,
and all become still again within him.
But after a week he saw her again: verily, there sat the Devil again at
the card-table, and played another color against him,--the _red_.
Clotilda looked, not pale, but, though only slightly, red. This redness
made a great blot on his inner man, and adulterated his inner coloring,
as black does every color of the painter. For when he found her well
again; it was not so much _agreeable_ to him,--for he saw how few
claims he any longer had upon her tranquillity,--how she did not so
much as distinguish him in this warehouse of human waste-paper, and how
stupid he had been in letting himself dream so secretly, so very
secretly, that her previous paleness proceeded actually from her vain
longing after such a one as he;--at the same time it was not
_disagreeable_ to him,--for he would have poured out all his heart's
blood, if he could thereby have brought a single artery in her to its
old course;--I say it was not so much either agreeable or disagreeable
to him, as it was both, as it was unexpected, as it was a hint to--give
himself to the Devil. His heart, and the image which had been too long
therein, were absolutely crushed in two. "Be it so!" said he, and bit
the convulsive lip with which he said it. For some days he cared not
even to see Joachime. "Has _she_ then an eye for nature and a heart for
eternity?" asked he, and he knew well the answer.
Now came on a time for him, which was the precise opposite of the
Sabbatical weeks,[265]--one may call them the _race-weeks_ or the
_Tarantula-dancing-hours_ of visiting. It is a cursed time; man knows
not where he stands. With Victor it fell just upon the winter-months,
when, besides, the honeymoons of city and court occur. I will now
portray them regularly.
Victor sought, namely, to drown deeper his unhappy, discordant
heart,--not with the drum-roll of amusements; under this it would only
bleed the more, just as wounds flow more strongly under the sound of
drumming; but with--people; these were the blood-stanching screws
which he applied to his soul. His body was now, like the Catholic
reliquiary body of an Apostle, in all places; he spent the whole day in
running to and fro, now with the Prince and now without him.
At last there was not a lady left in Flachsenfingen whose hand he had
not kissed,--nor a toilet-table where he would have been satisfied.
He made in the _racing-weeks_ double-knots, French _pas_,--dotted
sketches of patterns,--little plays,--charades,--receipts for
canary-birds,--verses for fans,--a thousand visits,--and still more,
morning notes....
These last, which he received and sent, were written in French and
folded French-wise,--namely, crushed into the shape of hair-rollers.
"They are," said he, "the hair-rollers of the fibres of the female
brain,--the cartridges full of Cupid's powder,--the cocoons of loving
butterflies": he spoke of the rise and fall of these female notes, and
called them still further the proof-sheets of the female heart, and the
outer-title-pages of the coquettish Edicts of Nantes. "I assert this,"
he added, "to distinguish myself from the page Matthieu, who denies it,
because he actually contends, that at first one presses letters upon
the fair sex, then things of more cubic contents, e. g. fans, jewels,
hands, then finally one's self; just as the mails at first only took
letters, then packages, finally passengers."--
He found those women daily more amusing who steal away from us people
of understanding the heart out of the breast and the brain out of the
head, and, to be sure, (as a certain nobleman did other stuff,) not
from love for the stolen goods, but from love of robbery itself; the
next morning, like the nobleman, they honestly send the goods back
again to the owner. Their refinements,--his own,--his turns to
escape theirs,--the attention which one had to bestow upon one's
self,--the opportunity of bringing all emotions under the finest
dissecting-knives, or solar and lunar microscopes,--the facility of
taking away from the most sincere truths the sour taste and from the
most agreeable the sickly-sweet,--all this made the toilet-tables of
women, particularly of coquettes, to him _Lectisternia_[266] and tables
of the gods. "By heaven," said the toilet-table-boarder or
pensioner,[267] "a man is merely a Dutchman, at most a German, but a
woman is a native Frenchwoman, or in fact a Parisian: man conceals his
moral as he does his physical breast: thoughts and flowers, which do
not fall through the racks of the four faculties, emotions which cannot
be described in the acts or in a physician's report, one must really
say only to a woman, and not to a man, especially one of
Flachsenfingen"--or Scheerau.
By way of excusing himself for associating with coquettes on the
footing of a general lover, he appealed to his motive,--that of merely
wishing to become acquainted with their ways,--and to the excellent
Forster, who in Antwerp _knelt down_, as well as any born Catholic,
before Rubens's altar-piece of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven,
merely to examine her more nearly.
He had a still more dangerous excuse. "Man," said he, "should be
everything, learn everything, try everything,--he should labor for the
_union_ of the two _churches_[268] in his soul,--he should, if
only for a couple of months, have been a city-musician,[269]
grave-digger, gallows-_pater_,[270] an engineer, tragedy-manager,
upper-court-marshal, an imperial vicar, deputy sheriff, a reviewer, a
lady, in short, everything a man should have been for some days, in
order that the hues of the prism might at last melt together into the
perfect white."
These principles are the more dangerous with one like him, who, strung
with the tense strings of the most dissimilar powers, easily gave every
one's note, not from dissimulation, but because his social poetic
faculty could transport itself deeply into another's soul; hence he
gained, tolerated, and copied the most unlike persons, notwithstanding
his sincerity. But I pity him, that he has everywhere so much to
suppress, his seeing through the Prince, his state of heart toward
Clotilda, his conciliatory intrigues towards Agnola, his knowledge of
Flamin's relations, &c. Ah, reserve and dissimulation easily run
together; and must not a constant dropping, when one stands directly
under it, at last wear scars in the most solid character?
Nothing chills the noblest parts of the inner man more than intercourse
with persons in whom one cannot take any interest. This hotel-life at
court, this daily seeing people who never even say "I," whose relations
one ignores as indifferently as their talents, unless some necessity
seeks them,--this snatching only at the next moment, this racing by of
the finest and most intellectual strangers and ant-swarms of visitors,
who in three days are forgotten,--all this, which makes palaces like
Russian ice-palaces, where even the stove full of naphtha flames is a
lump of ice, and to which I need not at all add the _comic_ salt,
which, besides, chills all warm blood, as that of _Glauber_ does hot
water,--all this made his heart desolate, his days bald and burdensome,
his nights distressful, his conduct too cold towards the good, too
tolerant towards the bad.
In addition to this, his Emanuel was silent, and, like nature, shut up
his flowers within himself. He whom nature nourishes and builds up, is
not in so good a mood in winter as in summer. The earth had on her
powder-mantle of snow, and her night-gown on all day; the trees had
wrapped up their buds in fleecy hair-papers, and the twigs looked like
hair-pins. Victor's soul was like nature: O may Heaven soon warm in
both the flowers of spring!
As the pathological history of my Victor reminds me too painfully of
the latent poisons in the human body, it shall soon come to an end. It
pleased him that he became, by this fluttering round, more and more
gallant and cold towards all women: the cord of love cuts less deeply
into the bosom, when, plucked out into threads and floss, it flutters
about everybody. He who, like his namesake, Saint Sebastian, looked
like one stuck all full with (Cupid's) arrows, shot off arrows of
another kind against the whole sex, though never against individuals.
In this last circumstance his bitterness differed from Matthieu's, who
could say of his own cousin, for example, who had lost her beauty by a
late attack of small-pox: "Her beauty held out right valiantly against
the small-pox, and brought off from this victory the most glorious
_scars_, and all of them indeed, like those of Pompey's knights;[271]
in front and in the face."
As assaf[oe]tida is used for _haut gout_, so does one season the
finest _savoir vivre_ by sundry bold incivilities. Bastian in the
Tarantula-season was not to be embarrassed by anything: he went and
came like a Parisian, without ceremony; he sought often bold, but
advantageous postures of his body; during the play he made tours
through the boxes as the Prince did through the coulisses; five times
he carried matters so far (though with difficulty, and always only by
means of setting before himself the example of the courtiers), that he
listened indifferently, or absolutely looked away, when another was,
telling him a story: all which things, if not essential, are
nevertheless incidental to true politeness.
Nor will I let it be unnoticed in his praise, that he took to himself
the regular _exotic_ and _satirical_ liberties of the _Gallican_ Church
toward several women at once, for in the presence of a single one he
had still the old veneration of a noble heart. I will give at least one
example of that. Once he was among five slanderesses (the company
consisted of six females and a male person); the ugliest blackened all
maidens, even those in print, e. g. the deceased Clarissa, whom she
charged with not having in her intercourse with Lovelace been quite
able to _sauver les dehors de la vertu_.[272] One can anticipate how
the Königsberg school will receive it in their reviews, that he let
himself down on one knee before the calumniatress, and said with some
seriousness: "_O Clarisse! voici votre Lovelace; retranchons quatre
tomes, commençons comme les faiseurs d'Epopées par le reste_."[273]
To be sure, he frequently during the Tarantula-season reproached
himself for the Tarantula-season; and when the Gentile-fore-court of
his heart grew so full of women, while in the Holy of Holies there was
nothing but mute darkness, and when his brain became an entomological
cabinet of court trifles, then, of course, he often sighed in his
balcony: "O come soon, good father, that thy sinking son may soar out
of this unclean March fog into a clearer life, before he has utterly
stained himself, so as no longer even to frame this wish." And
as often as he got sight, in Joachime's chamber, of the views of
Maienthal,--which Giulia had had taken by the painter of Clotilda's
portrait,--then in the midst of his jestings he turned his eye away
from them with a sigh.----But he was not healed, until fate said, Now!
Then all at once the theatre-key struck, which bids men come and act in
the players' rehearsal of life;--the play itself is not given till the
next life;--and then transpired something which I shall at once report
in the following chapter, when I have done relating in this one how
Victor stood with all the people about him.
With many, properly speaking, badly,--in the first place, with
Clotilda. She resided, to be sure, at the Minister's; as maid of honor,
she would have belonged in the Paullinum, only the Prince had so
contrived it for the greater facility of seeing her; but she was always
about the Princess, with whom she was soon linked in intimacy by a
similarity of seriousness and a similarity of reserve. Her indifference
to one who had with her a common friend and teacher inspired this
Victor with a still greater, especially as he knew she must feel that,
in this cold mountain- and court-air, only a single, though faded,
carnation slip of her fair soul bloomed, namely, himself. Then, too,
the obligation of decorum, to look upon her coldly, must become a
habit. The worst thing for him was that she was indifferent towards him
without ill-feeling, and cold towards him with respect. Others were
quite furious about the "phlegmatic virtue of this Pygmalion's statue."
The noble Mat called her often the _Holy_ Virgin, or the Demoiselle
Mother of God. It is made out very clearly by the Dog-documents, which
I have opened, that some gentlemen of the Court, after various abortive
attempts to explain to themselves a virtue irreconcilable with so much
beauty, now on the ground of temperament, now of concealed love,
and now of a coquettish coyness, ending at last, like the water
at St. Clermont, in petrifying and becoming _its own bridge over
itself_,--that these cunning gentlemen most felicitously fell upon the
conjecture that Clotilda wore this mask over her face as a copy of the
face of the Princess, for the sake of continuing in favor. Hence
Clotilda's discreet virtue was judged by most with greater indulgence,
while one could excuse it, as an intentional imitation of a similar
fault in the Princess, even by the example of like imitations, as
courtiers often aped the greatest external natural faults, nay, even
the virtues of a prince. So thought at least the more reasonable
portion of the Court.
Agnola was assiduous in testifying an ever increasing gratitude to our
hero for January's visits, although, as I think, she could detect the
faithless intentions of the Prince in the presence of Clotilda full as
well as she might sometimes see into Victor's soul in the presence of
Joachime.... In fact, I should have begged the reader long since to be
on the look-out; I deliver the facts with excusable stupidity, though
with historic fidelity; if, now, there are therein fine, knavish,
significant, intriguing traits and hints, it is without my knowledge,
and therefore I cannot point them out to the reader with an index-hand,
or announce them with a fire-drum,[274] but he himself--as he
understands court histories--must know what I mean by my hints,--not
_I_.
With Joachime Victor would have gone on very well,--as he set down all
faults which he found in other women, and not in her, to her credit as
virtues, and as he grew more intimate with her personally; for the
faults of maidens, like chocolate and tobacco, appear at first the more
odd to the palate the better they taste to it afterward: he would have
got on very well, but for two sharp corner-stones; but they were there.
The first was,--for I will not reckon his slight annoyance at the short
duration of her Christmas sentimentality,--that she was always finding
fault with Clotilda, particularly with her "affected" virtue. The
second was, that Clotilda sought her society quite as little: Victor
could love no one whom Clotilda did not love. And now the race-weeks
and visiting-Tarantula-dance hours of one man are at an end; but, alas!
all posterity must yet cross the same hot _line_ of folly and of youth.
24. DOG-POST-DAY.
Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play Of Iphigenia.--Difference
between Plebeian and Patrician[275] Love.
On the 26th of February Victor found in the morning at Joachime's--the
proud Clotilda. I know not whether it was by accident that she was
here, or from politeness, or for the purpose of meeting more nearly a
person whom Victor treated with some interest. But, O heavens! the
cheeks of this Clotilda were pallid, her eyes were as if breathed over
by an eternal tear, her voice emotional, as it were broken, and the
pale marble body seemed only the image standing on the monument of the
departed soul. Victor forgot the whole past, and his innermost soul
wept for longing to succor her and wipe out from her life all dark
winter landscapes. "I am as well as usual to-day," said she to his
professional inquiry, and he knew not what to make of this unexpected
paleness; he could not, in fact, to-day make anything, not so much as a
joke or a piece of flattery; his soul, dissolved into sympathy, would
not take any form; then, too, he was embarrassed. Clotilda soon took
leave;--and it would not have been possible for him to-day, not for all
Great Poland (that ice-floe beautifully ground down under the sledging
of emigrating nations and crowns), after she was gone, to stay half an
hour longer.
Besides, he would have been obliged to go; for the page Matthieu called
him to the Princess. The time was unusual; he could not wait to see,
nor could he guess what was the matter. The Evangelist smiled (that he
did now somewhat often when the Princess was the subject), and said:
"To Princes and Princesses weighty things were trivial and trivial
things weighty, as Leibnitz[276] said of himself. When the crown and a
hair-pin fall from their heads together, they look first of all for the
hair-pin."[277]
By the way! It would be malice on my part toward the noble Matthieu, if
I should longer suppress, the fact, that for some time he has been much
more tender and ardent towards my hero,--which on any other man than
he, I mean on a lurking villain, would be a Cain's-mark, and would have
somewhat of the same meaning as the wagging of a cat's tail.
Victor was astonished at the request of the Princess,--that he would
cure Clotilda: that is to say, not at the fact of her making a
request,--for she often did him that honor,--but at the intelligence
that Clotilda, on whose cheeks he had hitherto seen the apple-blossoms
of health at his soul's expense in the _race-weeks_, had worn only dead
blossoms,--namely, rouge, which the Princess had been obliged to
enforce upon her for the sake of having a uniformity of bloom with the
remaining red copper-flowers[278] of the court. Agnola, who, like her
rank, was quick, besought him further, when he was appointed to the
medical upper-examining-commission, to enter on his office as soon as
might be, this very day forthwith, at the play, where he would find the
candidate for examination.
And he found her. The play was a sparkling brilliant brought from
Eldorado,--Goethe's _Iphigenia_. When he saw the patient again with the
evening-red of the rouge, wherein she was to glow at another's behest
even during her going down,--when he saw this still victim (marked
red, as it were, for the altar), which he and others had driven away
from its meadows, from its solitary flowers, to the midst of the
sacrificial knives of the Court, mutely enduring, the extinction of its
wishes, and when he compared with woman's dumb patience man's raging
restlessness,--and when it seemed as if Clotilda had lent her sorrow to
Iphigenia with the prayer, "Take my heart, take my voice and mourn with
it,--mourn with it over thy separation from the fields of youth, over
thy separation from a beloved brother,"--and when he saw how she tried
to fasten her eyes more steadfastly on Iphigenia, when she pined for
her lost brother, in order to control their overflow and their
direction (towards her own brother in the Parterre, towards Flamin), O
then did such great sorrows and their signs in his eyes and looks need
a pretext like the omnipotence of genius, in order to be confounded
with pangs growing out of poetic illusion!
Never did a physician question his patient with greater sympathy and
forbearance than did he Clotilda in the next interlude: he excused
his importunity with the commands of the Princess. I must first
state that the fair patient--although he had been hitherto a falling
Peter, whom many a cock-crow had brought rather to tears than to
repentance--nevertheless remained the _second person_, whom he never
denied, ... i. e. whom, he never addressed with the frivolous,
whimsical, bold, entrapping turns of conversation now so common with
him. The _first person_--whom he esteemed too highly to write to him in
the present state of his heart--was his Emanuel.
Clotilda answered him, that "she was as well as ever; the only thing
there was sickly about her," she said, smiling, "namely, her color, was
already under the hands of a female surgeon, who, against her
inclination, healed her only outwardly." This playful allusion to the
rouging decreed by the Princess had the double design of excusing her
painting and of diverting the Doctor from his tender-hearted
seriousness. But the first was unnecessary,--since in the theatre even
ladies who never wore rouge put it on as they entered the box and wiped
it off on going out, in order not to hang there as the only quinces on
a tree full of glowing Stettin-apples, and as, in fact, mineral cheeks
were required of the whole female court-retinue as facial court livery.
The second was vain; much more likely were the wounds of his heart to
be aggravated by two causes: by that cold, almost fanatical resignation
to fading away,--and by something inexpressibly mild and tender which,
in the female face, often betokens the breaking heart, the failing
life, as fruit by _soft_ yielding to _pressure_ announces its ripeness.
O ye good creatures, ye women, while joy already beautifies you, is the
reason why sorrow makes you still more beautiful and too touching
_this_, that it so often overtakes you, or is it because sorrow borrows
the dress of joy? Why must I here confess so passingly my pleasure at
your endurance and veiling of sorrows, when at this moment before my
fancy so many hearts full of tears sweep by with open countenances full
of smiles, and win for your sex the praise of opening its heart as
gladly to sorrow as to joy, as flowers, although they *unclose only
before the sun, yet also burst open when it is overcast by a cloudy
heaven?
Victor, without being led off his track by her answer, continued:
"Perhaps you cannot wean yourself from fair nature and from
exercise,--these late hours, which I myself feel"----She prevented his
finishing the sentence, to remind him that she had, he must remember,
brought her present complexion with her from home. One sees, however,
in this reminder more forbearance than truth; for she would not
complain of her court office before the very one who had helped her
gain it.----Victor, who saw her sickliness so clearly, and yet knew not
how to propound another question, stood there dumfounded. Their own
silence loosens reserved people's tongues: Clotilda began of herself,
"As I do not know what harms me here, except the rouge, I beg my
physician to prohibit me this dietetic fault," i. e. to persuade the
Princess into a revocation of her rouge-edict. "I should be glad," she
continued, "to gain some resemblance at least to two such good friends
as Giulia and Emanuel,"--i. e. a pale color, or else the notion of a
speedy death. Victor threw out a hasty "Yes," and turned his smarting
eye toward the rising curtain.
Never, haply, were the scenes of players and hearers more like each
other. Iphigenia was Clotilda; the wild Orestes, her brother, was her
brother Flamin; the soft, radiant Pylades was his friend Victor. And as
Flamin stood below in the pit with his cloudy face,--(he came only for
the sake of seeing his sister more conveniently,)--then did it seem to
our and his friend as if he were addressed by him, when Orestes said to
Pylades:--
"Remind me not of those enchanting days,
When a free room thy house afforded me:
Thy noble father wisely, tenderly,
Nursed the half-stiffened blossoms of my youth;
When thou, an ever-gay associate,
Even as a motley, light-winged butterfly
Plays round a dark-hued flower, day after day
Didst dance and hover round me with new life,
And win thy bliss a way into my soul."
Clotilda felt quite as painfully that they were playing her life on the
stage, and struggled against her eyes.... But when Iphigenia said to
her brother Orestes,--
"O hear me! Look on me! See how my heart
Opens at last, after so long a time,
To the sweet bliss of kissing that dear brow,
Most precious treasure earth yet holds for me, ....
O let me,--let me--for in brighter waves
Not from Parnassus leaps the eternal stream
From rock to rock down to the golden vale,
Than from my bosom joy outgushing flows
And like a sea of bliss enclasps me round";--
and when Clotilda mournfully surveyed the greater interval of sorrows
and days between herself and her brother; then gushed up the inner
fountains and filled her large eyes, so often fixed upon the heavens,
and a quick bending forward hid the sisterly tear from all eyes
untouched by emotion. But it did not escape the feeling eyes with which
her friend beside her imitated her.... And here a virtuous voice said
within Victor: "Disclose to her that thou knowest the secret of her
relationship,--lift off from this sorely oppressed heart the load of
silence: perhaps she is withering under a grief which a confidant may
cool and take away!" Ah, to listen to this voice was indeed the least
with which he could content his infinite sympathy! He said in an
extremely low tone, and which emotion rendered almost unintelligible to
her: "My father has long since disclosed to me, that Iphigenia knows
the presence of her brother and of my friend." Clotilda turned suddenly
and blushingly towards him; for a more minute explanation he let his
eyes glide down to Flamin; turning pale; she looked away and said
nothing; but during the whole play her heart seemed to be far more
compressed, and she was compelled now to stifle still more tears and
sighs than before. At last in the midst of her sadness she gave
gratitude its rights, and whispered to him for his sympathy and his
confidence, as if with a dying smile, her thanks. He laid upon the
distaff of the conversation entirely new and foreign material, because
he would fain, during the spinning, get a clearer and more certain
light upon the sad impression which his confession seemed to have
produced. He inquired after the latest letters from Emanuel. She
replied: "I only wrote to him yesterday all through the eclipse of the
moon; he cannot answer me often, because writing pains his breast."
Now, as the eclipse of the 25th of February began at twenty minutes
after ten in the evening, at eleven o'clock and forty-one minutes was
at its climax, and at one o'clock and two minutes was over: accordingly
Victor, as physician, could fall upon the medical sinner with sermons
and hammers of the law and pronounce the verdict; now, it was no
wonder. Pass it by, Doctor! These dear creatures can more easily obey a
man--the Ten Commandments,--books,--Virtue,--the Devil himself more
easily, than the Dietician. Clotilda said: "The midnight hours are
simply my only free hours,--and Maienthal, indeed, I can never forget."
"Ah, how could one?" said he.
The music before the last act, and the tragic tone, and the sorrows
inspired her, and she continued: "Did not one drink of _Lethe_, when
one trod the shores of Elysium and when one left it?" ... She paused.
"I would drink of no Lethe, not in the first case, still less in the
_last_,--no!" And never was "No" said in a lower, softer, more
slow-drawn tone. In Victor's heart a three-edged compassion passed
painfully to and fro, as he imagined to himself Clotilda mocked by
fate, writing and weeping in the midnight under a moon dismembered and
beclouded by earth's shadow; he said nothing, he stared rigidly into
the mournful scenes of the stage, and still wept on when the joyous
ones had, there, already evolved themselves in their place.
At home he made his brain-fibres Ariadne's threads to extricate himself
from the labyrinth of the causes of her trouble, and particularly of
the _new_ one which had seemed to come upon her at his disclosure. But
he remained in the labyrinth; undoubtedly grief begat the sickness, but
who begat the grief? It would be hard for these poor, tender
butterflies, if there were more than one mortal affliction; in every
lane, in every house, thou wilt find a wife or a daughter who has to go
to church or to the Tragedy to sigh, and who must go up into the upper
story to weep; but this aggregated trouble is worried away with smiles,
and years increase for a long time side by side with the tears. On the
contrary, there is a grief which breaks them off,--think of that, dear
Victor, in the joyful hours of thy general love,[279] and think of it,
all ye who with warm, loving hands draw the throbbing heart of such a
delicate creature out of its breast, to take it into your own by the
side of your own heart, and warm it forever! When you then throw
away this hot heart, which you have torn out like a butterfly's
honey-proboscis: still, like that, it continues to quiver, but then it
grows cold, and erelong beats no more.
Unhappy love, then, was the gnawing honey-dew on this flower, Sebastian
concluded. Naturally he thought of himself first; but all his nicest
observations, his now so familiar _ricochet-glances_ out of the _corner
of his eye_ had long since convinced him that he had to ascribe the
distinction, which she did not deny him, more to her impartiality than
to her inclination. Who else it could be at Court,--that was a thing
which he in vain applied one electrometer after another to draw out.
And he knew beforehand that he should experiment in vain, since
Clotilda would baffle all auscultation of her inner state, if she had
an unreciprocated inclination; reason was with her the wax, which they
stick to one end of the magnetic needle, in order to obviate or conceal
the sinking (_inclination_) of the other. Nevertheless, he made up his
mind the next time to hold some divining-rods to her soul.----
I must here utter a thought, which may discover some sense and my
general speculation in the matter. My Dog-Post-Master Knef did not
probably foresee that I should calculate the year and the duration of
this whole story merely from the lunar eclipse of the 25th of February,
which he announced, just as, in fact, great astronomers, by means of
the moon's phases, found out so much about the earth's geographical
longitude. 1793 was the year in which what is related in this chapter
occurred: I am good for that; for as, at all events, the whole story,
as is well known, takes place in the ninth decade of the eighteenth
century, and as no lunar eclipse of a 25th of February is to be found
there at all, except in the year 1793, i. e. the present year, my
proposition is made out. To make assurance doubly sure, I have compared
all the changes of moon and weather occurring in this book with those
of 1792 and 1793; and all fitted together beautifully;--the reader
should also reckon it after me. It is uncommonly gratifying to me,
that, consequently, as I write in July, the history follows in a
half-year from my description.--
Victor delayed not his visit to the Princess's, that he might there
announce the reserved Clotilda as a complete nervous patient. He
himself laughed inwardly at the expression,--and at the Doctors,--and
at their nervous cures,--and said, that, as formerly the French kings
in their treatment of the goitre had to say, "The King touches thee,
but God heals thee," so should physicians say, The city and country
physician feels thy pulse, but God works the cure. Here, however, he
had three good intentions in giving out that she was a nervous
sufferer: first, that of gaining for her the abolition of her
Court-vassalage,--at least her deliverance from the precise office of
maid of honor, because the splinter of the reproach was continually
festering in his heart, "It is my fault that she is obliged to be
here"; further, of securing for her in advance permission to take the
spring and country air, in case she should by and by sue for it;
finally, of releasing her from her compulsory resemblance to those
ladies on whose lead-colored faces, as on the leaden soldiers of
children, the red daily wears off and is daily renewed. But as Agnola
herself painted, he was obliged, out of courtesy, as physician, to
forbid it to both at once. The Princess countersigned all his petitions
very graciously: only as to the rouge-article she gave, in regard to
herself, no resolution at all, and in regard to Clotilda the following:
she had nothing to say against her appearing in her presence, except on
court days and at the play, without rouge; and she would willingly
grant her a dispensation from both, unless her health was restored.
He could hardly wait for the moment of taking leave, so impatient was
he to carry this imperial-recess or resolution to the beloved patient.
He himself wondered at this complaisance of the Princess, with whom,
generally, petitions were sins, and who refused nothing--except what
was asked. His perplexity was now only this,--how to communicate to
Clotilda the indulgences of the Princess, without the offensive
confession of having made a plea of her illness. But out of this slight
evil a great one extricated him: when he came into her presence, she
looked ten times as sick as she had day before yesterday, at the
disclosure of her relationship: her blossoms, heavy with cold dew,
drooped to the earth.
Gait and posture were unchanged; there was the same external
joyousness, but the glance was often too fluttering, often too fixed;
across the lily-cheeks darted often a hectic flush, through the lower
lip at one moment a subdued convulsion.... At this point sympathy
frightened her friend out of the bounds of courtesy, and he told her
outright the consent of the Princess. He summoned to the aid of his
burdened heart his previous court-boldness, and commanded her to make
the coming spring her apothecary's shop, and the flowers her medicinal
herbs, and her--fancy her pharmacy. "You seem," said she, smiling, "to
count me among the larks, who must always have _green turf_ in their
cage. However, that my Princess and you may not have had your kindness
for nothing, I will, finally, do it. I confess to you, I am at least a
_valide imaginaire_.[280] I feel myself well." ... She interrupted
herself to question him, with the frankness of virtue and with an eye
swimming in sisterly love, about her brother, whether he was happy and
contented, how he worked, how he filled his position? She told him how
sad a burden these questions, hitherto locked up so deeply in her soul,
had been to her and she thanked him for the gift of his confidence with
a warmth which he took as a delicate reproof of his previous silence.
Of old she always loved to stand in a flower-garland of children;
but in Flachsenfingen she had gathered still more of these little
nebulous stars about her brightness, and indeed for a peculiar reason,
namely, to cover the fact, that she drew to herself Giulia, a little
five-years-old grandchild of the city Senior, with whom her brother
resided, as his unwitting biographer and news-carrier. More than three
times he felt as if he must fall at the feet of this lily-white angel,
borne higher and higher by her cloud, and say with outspread arms:
"Clotilda, be my friend, before thy death,--my old love for thee is
long since crushed out, for thou art too good for me and for all of us;
but I will be thy friend; my heart will I conquer for thee; for thee
will I resign my heaven. O, thou wilt, besides, not live to see the
evening dew of age, thou wilt soon close thy eyes, and the morning dew
still hangs therein!" For he held her soul to be a pearl, whose
mussel-body lies open in the dissolving sun, that the pearl may the
earlier be dislodged. On leaving, he could with the frankness of the
friend, which had taken the place of the lover's reserve, offer a
repetition of his visits. Altogether he treated her now more warmly and
unconstrainedly; first, because he had so utterly renounced her noble
heart, that he wondered at his former bold claims to it; secondly,
because the feeling of his disinterested, self-sacrificing honesty
towards her poured balm on his previous stings of remorse.
To this sickness was added an evening or an event, which the reader, I
think, will not know how to understand. Victor was to take Joachime to
the play, and her brother, was to come and fetch him first. I have
already twice set it down, that for some weeks Matthieu had no longer
been so repulsive to him as a mouse is to an elephant: he had, after
all, found out a single good side, dug out some moral yellow mica
attaching to him,--namely, the greatest attachment to his sister
Joachime, who alone had the key to his whole heart, closed to his
parents, the sole claim on his secrets and his services; secondly, he
loved in Matthieu what the Minister condemned,--the spirit-of-salt of
freedom; thirdly, it is so with us all: when he have heated our
heart for some female one out of a family, we afterwards extend the
stove-warmth to the whole kin and trenchership,--brothers, nephews,
fathers; fourthly, Matthieu was continually praised and excused by his
sister. When Victor arrived at Joachime's, she had with her headache
and dressing-maids,--finery and pain were increasing; at last she sent
off the live fitting-machines, and so soon as she was hardened into a
Venus out of the foam of powder and jewel boxes, rouge-rags and
_mouchoirs de Vénus_, _poudres d'odeur_ and lip-pomades, then she sat
down and said she should stay at home on account of headache. Victor
stayed too, and very gladly. Whoso knows not the framework and cellular
work of the human heart will wonder that Victor's friendship for
Clotilda brought a whole honey-comb of love for Joachime into his
cells; it was delightful to him when they visited and embraced each
other; he sought not in the blessing-fingers of the Pope so much
healing virtue as in Clotilda's; her friendship seemed to him an excuse
for his, and to set Joachime on the pedestal of esteem, to which with
all his windlasses he had not been able to raise her. Even the sense of
his increasing worth gave him new right to love; and to-day even
Clotilda's crape and princely hat would have asserted its helmet
ornaments on Joachime's aching and more than commonly patient head. To
her continued flirtation with the pair of fools he had long since
adapted himself, because he knew very well _which one_ among the three
wise men from the East she had not for a fool, but for an adorer. But
to return!
Matthieu, who also stayed at home to please his sister,--he and Victor
and she made the entire band of this _concert spirituel_. Joachime on
the sofa leaned back her delicate, sick head against the wall and
looked at the inlaid floor, and her drooping eyelids made her more
beautiful. The Evangelist went out and came in. Victor, as he always
did, dashed round the chamber. It was a very fine evening, and I wish
this of mine were so. The conversation turned upon love; and Victor
asserted the existence of two kinds,--the citizenly, and the
_distingué_ or French. He loved the French in books and as a general
love, but he hated it the moment it was to be the only love; he
described it to-day thus: "Take a little ice,--a little heart,--a
little wit,--a little paper,--a little time,--a little incense; pour
together and put into two persons of rank; in that way you have a good,
true French Fontenellian love." "You forgot," added Mat, "one
ingredient,--a small amount of senses, at least a _fifth_ or _sixth_
part, which must be added to the medicine as _adjuvans_ or
_constituens_.[281] Meanwhile, it has at least the merit of shortness;
love, like a tragedy, should be restricted to unity of time, namely, to
the space of one day, that it may not take still more resemblance to
the tragic. But describe now common love!"
_Victor_: "That I prefer."
_Matthieu_: "Not I. It is merely a longer madness than anger. _On y
pleure, on y crie, on y soupire, on y ment, on y enrage, on y tue, on y
meurt,--enfin, on se donne à tous les diables, pour avoir son
ange_.[282] Our talks are to-day for once full of arabesques and _à la
grecque_: I will make you a cookery-book receipt for a good citizenly
love: take two young and large hearts,--wash them clean in baptismal
water or printer's ink of German romances,--pour on them warm blood and
tears,--set them on the fire and under the full moon, and let them
boil,--stir them briskly with a dagger,--take them out and garnish
them, like crabs, with forget-me-not or other wild-flowers, and serve
them up warm: in that way you have a savory citizenly heart-soup."[283]
Matthieu further added, that "in the ardent commonalty-love there was
more agony than amusement; in it, as in Dante's poem, the Hell was
worked out best, and the Heaven worst. The older a maiden or a pickled
herring was, so much the darker was the eye in both, and the eye was
made dark by love. Every lady in one of the higher circles ought to be
glad that she needs to retain nothing of the man's to whom she is
chained but his portrait in the ring, as Prometheus, when Jupiter had
once sworn to leave him soldered for thirty thousand years to Caucasus,
wore during the whole period only a small bit of this Bastille on his
hand in the shape of a finger-ring." Whereupon Matthieu darted out, as
he always did after witty explosions. Victor loved the bitterest and
most unjust satire in another's mouth, as a work of art; he forgave
all, and continued cheerful.
Joachime then said, jestingly: "If, then, no style of love is good for
anything, as you two have proved, there is nothing left for us but to
hate."
"Surely not," said he, "your respected brother has simply not said a
true word. Imagine to yourself, that I were the poor people's
catechist[284] and in love. I am in love with the second daughter of
the _pastor primarius_; her part is that of a listening-sister;[285]
for maidens in citizenly life know not how to talk, at least they can
do it better in hatred than in love. The poor's catechist has little
_bel esprit_, but much _saint esprit_, much honesty, much truth, too
much soft-heartedness, and infinite love. The catechist cannot spin out
any gallant intrigue for several weeks or months, still less can he
dispute the Pastor's second daughter into love, like a _roué_;--he
holds his peace to keep up his hope, but with a heart full of eternal
love, full of devoted wishes, trembling and silent, he follows every
step of the loved and--loving one; but she guesses not his feelings,
nor he hers. And then she dies.... But before she dies, comes the pale
catechist disconsolate to the side of her dying bed, and presses her
trembling hand ere it relaxes, and gives the cold eye one more tear of
joy ere it stiffens, and breaks in even upon the pangs of the wrestling
soul with the soft spring sound, 'I love thee.' When he has said it,
she dies of the last joy, and then he loves no one on earth any more."
...
The past had come over his soul. Tears hung in his eyes, and confounded
in a singular obscurity the image of the sick Clotilda with that of
Joachime;--he saw and conceived a form which was not present;--he
pressed the hand of the one that looked on him, and thought not that
she might refer all to herself.
Suddenly Matthieu entered, smiling, and his sister smiled with him, in
order to explain everything, and said, "The court-physician has been
taking the trouble to refute thee."
Victor, suddenly chilled, replied ambiguously and bitterly: "You will
comprehend, Herr von Schleunes, that it is easiest for me to put you to
flight when you are not in the field."
Mat transfixed him with his eyes; but Victor cast his down and repented
his bitterness. The sister continued indifferently: "I think my brother
is often in the condition of changing with the fashion." He received it
with a sunny smile, and thought, as did Victor, that she alluded to his
gallant adventures and sham-fights with women of all ranks that sit at
the Diet. But when she had sent him off to inquire of her mother who
was coming to the _cercle_ this evening, she said to the Medicus: "You
do not know what I meant. We have at court a sick lady, who is the very
incarnation of _your_ Pastor's daughter,--and my brother has not so
much nor so little spirit as to act the poor's catechist." Victor
started back, broke off and took his leave.
Why? How so? On what account? But does not the reader perceive, then,
that the sick lady must be Clotilda, who seeks to escape Mat's fine
approaches within ear-shot and bow-shot of her heart? In fact, Victor
had seen well enough that the Evangelist had been hitherto playing a
more devoted part towards Clotilda than before her entrance into his
Escurial and robber's castle he could carry on; but Victor had ascribed
this politeness simply to the fact of her having there her quarters.
But now the map of his plan lay open there: he had intentionally met a
person who was indifferent towards him with the show of contempt
(which, however, he finely directed more at her future small income
than at her personal attractions), in order thereby to win her
attention,--that next-door neighbor of love,--and afterward, by a
sudden change to complaisance, to win something more than attention.
"O, thou canst win nothing!" every sigh in Victor exclaimed. And yet it
gave him pain, that this noble woman, this angel, must strike such an
adversary with her wings. Now there were thirty things at once
suspicious to him. Joachime's disclosure and coldness, Matthieu's
smile, and--everything.
So far this chapter, to which I have nothing more to append than some
mature thoughts. Of course, one sees plainly, that poor Victor
mutilates his soul to the size of every female one, as that tyrant did
the bedfellows to the length of their bed.[286] To be sure, respect is
the mother of love; but the daughter is often some years older than the
mother. He takes back one hope of female worth after another. Latest of
all, indeed, did he give up his demand or expectation of that sublime
_Indian_ sense of eternity, which imparts to us, shadowy figures
hanging in the magic smoke of life, an inextinguishable luminous point
for self-consciousness, and which lifts us above more than _one_ earth;
but as he saw that women, among all resemblances to Clotilda, acquired
this last, and as he bethought himself that a worldly life grinds down
all the greatness in man, as the weather gnaws away from statues and
gravestones precisely the _relieved parts_, there wanted nothing to his
handing over to Joachime the declaration of love which had long been
fairly written out, nothing except, on her part, a misfortune,--a wet
eye, a storm of the soul, a buskin. In more perspicuous words, he said
to himself: "I wish she were a sentimental ninny and absolutely
intolerable. Then when, some time or other, she had her eyes right
full, and her heart too, and then, when I could not tell, for emotion,
where my head was standing,--then I could advance and take out my heart
and reach it to her and say, It is poor Bastian's, only keep it." It
seems to me as if I heard him in thought softly add, "To whom else
could I give it?"
That he really had the first thought, we see from the fact that he
inserted it in his diary, from which my correspondent draws everything,
and which he, with the sincerity of the freest soul, made for his
father, in order as it were to atone for his faults by protocolling
them. His Italian lackey did hardly anything but engross it.---Did it
not depend on the dog and his news-box, his declaration of love should
take place this very day: I would break an arm of Joachime's,--or lay
her in the sick-bed,--or blow out the Minister's lamp of life, or bring
on some disaster or other in her house,----and then I would conduct my
hero to the suffering heroine, and say: "When I have gone, kneel down
and hand her thy heart." But in this way the chemical process of his
love-making may last full as long as a process at law, and I am
prepared for three quires.
But here I will confess something which the reader's pride conceals:
that he and I, at the entrance of every lady in these Dog-Post-Days,
have made a _mis-shot_ of _salute_,--every one of them we have taken for
the heroine of the hero,--at first Agatha,--then Clotilda,--then, when
he enclosed his declaration of love in the watch of the Princess, said,
"I see now beforehand through the whole business." Then we both said,
"After all, we were right about Clotilda." Then in distress I laid hold
on Marie, and said, "I shall not reveal anything further." At last
it turns out to be one whom none of us had thought of (at least not
I),--Joachime.--So it may fare with myself, when I marry....
Before passing from the Post-Day to the intercalary day, the following
additional minutes are to be passed: Clotilda put off her illegitimate
cheeks, her _joues_[287] _de Paris_, her rouge, and seldomer exposed
now her withering heart to the shaping of the court napkin-press. The
Prince, who for her sake had attended as a transient hearer in the
lecture-hall of his consort, stayed away somewhat often, and then
called at Schleunes's: nevertheless, the Princess had magnanimity
enough not to make our Victor atone, by the taking back of her
gratitude, for the withdrawal of January's favor.--In Victor there was
a long war, whether he should impart to Clotilda's brother the new
proofs of her sisterly love:--at last,--moved by Flamin's suffering,
impoverished heart, stung by reports and rascals and suspicion, and by
the thought that he had been able hitherto to give so little pleasure
to this ingenuous friend,--he told him almost everything (_except_ the
relationship).
P. S.--The undersigned testifies, by request, that the undersigned has
completed his 24th Post-Day in due order on the last day of July, or
Messidor. On the island of St. John's, 1793.
JEAN PAUL,
_Mining-Superintendent of Scheerau_.
SIXTH INTERCALARY DAY.
Concerning the Wilderness and the Promised Land of Humanity.
There are vegetable men, animal men, and divine men.--
When we were to be dreamed, an angel grew drowsy and fell asleep and
dreamed. Then came _Phantasus_,[288] and swept broken meteorological,
phenomena, things like nights, fragments of chaos, conglomerated
plants, before him, and disappeared with them.
Then came _Phobetor_, who drove herds of beasts along before him, that
murdered and grazed as they passed, and disappeared with them.
Then came _Morpheus_ and played before him with happy children, with
crowned mothers, with shapes that kissed each other, and with fleeting
mortals, and when the angel awoke with ecstasy, Morpheus and the human
race and the world's history had disappeared....
--At present the angel still sleeps and dreams,--we are still in his
dream,--only _Phobetor_ is with him, and Morpheus still waits for
Phobetor with his beasts to disappear....
But let us, instead of dreaming, think and hope; and for the present
ask: will _vegetable_ men, _animal_ men, at last be succeeded by
_divine_ men? Does the _going_ of the world-clock betray as much design
as the building of it, and has it a _dial-plate_ wheel and an _index
hand_?
One cannot (with a well-known philosopher) reason directly from final
causes in _Physics_ to final causes in _History_, any more than I, in
the individual, can deduce from the teleological (intentional)
structure of a man a teleological biography of the same, or any more
than, from the ingenious structure of animals, I call infer a
continuous plan in their universal history. Nature is iron, always the
same, and the wisdom shown in her framework is never obscured; the
human race is free, and, like the infusorial animal, the multiform
Vorticelle, assumes every moment, now regular, now anomalous shapes.
Every physical disorder is only the hull of an order, every foul spring
is the hull of a fair autumn; but are, then, our vices the buds of our
virtues, and is the earthly fall of a continually sinking villain
nothing but a disguised ascension of his to heaven?--And is there an
object in the life of a Nero? Then I could just as well take back and
reverse all and make out virtues to be the heart-leaves of disguised
vices. But if, as many a one does, we carry the abuse of language so
far as to reverse _moral_ height and depth, like _geometrical_,
according to the _point of view_, as _positive_ and _negative_
magnitudes; if, therefore, all gouty knobs, spotted fevers, and
_lead_-[289] or _silver_-colics of the human race are nothing but a
different kind of healthiness: then we certainly need not ask whether
man will ever get well; in that case he could never in any possible
maladies be anything but well.
If a monk of the tenth century had shut himself up in a fit of
melancholy, and meditated on the earth, not however on its end, but on
its future: would not, in his dreams, the thirteenth century have been
already a brighter one, and the eighteenth merely a glorified tenth?
Our weather-prophesyings from _present_ temperature are logically
correct and historically false, because new casualties, an earthquake,
a comet, reverse the currents of the whole atmosphere. Can the
above-imagined monk correctly calculate, if he does not assume such
future magnitudes as America, Gunpowder, and Printer's ink?--A new
religion, a new Alexander, a new disease, a new Franklin, can break,
swallow up, dam, turn back the forest stream whose course and contents
we propose to reduce on our parchment. There lie still four quarters of
the globe full of enchained savage races;--their chain daily grows
thinner,--time unlooses it;--what desolation, at least what changes,
must they not bring about on the little _bowling-green_ of our
cultivated countries? Nevertheless, all nations of the earth must one
day be fused together and be purified in a common fermentation, if ever
this atmosphere of life is to be cleared up.
Can we draw from some miniature earthquakes and volcanoes, which we
ourselves have produced with iron-filings and aquafortis, (in this
case, types and printer's ink,) conclusions as to the Ætna eruptions,
i. e. from the revolutions of the few cultivated peoples as to those of
the uncultivated? Since we may assume that the human race lives as many
thousands of years as the individual does years, may we venture from
the sixth year to set the horoscope of youth and manhood? Add to this
that the biography of this childish period is precisely the most
meagre, and that awakened nations--almost all quarters of the globe are
as yet full of sleeping ones--in _one_ year produce more historical
material, and _consequently_ more historians, than a sleep-buried
Africa in a century. We shall, therefore, _then_ be best able to
prophesy from universal history, when the awaking nations shall have
appended to it their million or two supplementary volumes.--All savage
nations seem to have been under _one_ stamp; on the contrary, the mint
of culture coins each one differently. The North American and the old
German resemble each other more strongly than Germans do Germans of
neighboring centuries. Neither the Golden Bull, nor the _Magna Charta_,
nor the _Code Noir_, could Aristotle inlay into his forms of government
and obedience; else he would have extended them; but are we then
confident of foreseeing any better the future national convention in
Mongolia, or the Decretal Letters and Extravagants of the enlightened
Dalai-Lama, or the Recesses of the Arab Imperial Bench of Knights?
Since Nature coins no people with _one_ mint-stamp or one hand alone,
but with thousands at once,--hence on the German race is there a
greater multitude of impressions than on the shield of Achilles,--how
do we, who cannot even calculate the past, but simpler, revolutions of
the globe, expect to look into the moral ones of its inhabitants?
Of all that follows from these premises I believe the opposite,
excepting the necessity of prophetic modesty. Scepticism, which makes
us, instead of slow to believe, unbelieving, and instead of the _eyes_
proposes to purge the _light_, becomes nonsense and the most fearful
philosophical impotence and atony.
Man regards his century or his half-century as the culmination of
light, as a festal-day, to which all other centuries lead only as
week-days. He knows only two golden ages,--the one at the beginning of
the world, and the one at the end of it,--by which he understands only
his own; he finds history to be like great woods, in the middle of
which are silence, night-birds, and birds of prey, and whose borders
only are filled with light and song.--Certainly all things serve me;
but I too serve all. As Nature, who in her eternity knows no loss of
time, in her inexhaustibleness no loss of power, has no other law of
frugality assigned her than that of prodigality,--as she, with _eggs_
and _seed-corns_, ministers equally well to _nourishment_ and to
_propagation_,[290] and with an undeveloped germ-world sustains half a
developed one,--as her way leads over no smooth bowling-alley, but over
alps and seas;--our little heart must needs misunderstand her, whether
in its hopes or in its fears; it must, as it becomes enlightened,
reciprocally interchange _morning_ and _evening red_; it must, in
its contentment, now regard after-summer as _spring_, and now
_after-winter_ as _autumn_. _Moral_ revolutions mislead us more than
_physical_, because the former according to their nature occupy a
_greater_ play-room and space of time than the latter,--and yet the
Dark Ages are nothing but a dipping into the shadow of _Saturn_, or an
eclipse of the sun of short duration. A man who should be six thousand
years old, would say to the six creation-days of the world's history,
They are very good.
But one should never set _moral_ and _physical_ revolutions and
developments too near to each other. All Nature has no other motions
than _former_ ones; the circle is her path, she has no other years than
Platonic,--but man alone is _changeable_, and the straight line or the
zigzag describes his course. A sun has its eclipses as well as the
moon, has its bloom and decay like a flower, but also its
_palingenesia_ and renovation. But there lies in the human race the
necessity of an everlasting mutation; yet here there are only
_ascending_ and _descending_ signs, no culmination; they do not
necessarily draw one another after them, as in physics, and have no
extreme limit. No people, no period returns; in physics, all must come
back again. It is only accidental, not necessary, that nations, at a
certain age and stage of progress, and on a certain rotten round of the
ladder, fall again,--one only confounds the _last_ step, from which
nations fall, with the _highest_; the Romans, with whom not single
rounds, but the whole ladder broke, were not necessitated to sink by a
culture which does not equal even our own.[291] Nations have no age, or
old age with them often precedes youth. Even with individuals the
crab's-walk of the mind in old age is only accidental; still less has
virtue in them a summer-solstice. Humanity has then the capacity of an
endless improvement; but has it the hope also?--
The disturbance of the _equipoise_ of his own faculties makes the
individual man miserable; the _inequality_ of citizens, the
_inequality_ of nations, makes the earth miserable; just as lightnings
arise from the neighborhood of the ebb and flow of the ether, and all
storms from unequal distributions of air. But fortunately it lies in
the nature of mountains to fill the valleys.
Not inequality of goods,--for the majority of voices and fists on the
part of the poor balances in the scale the power of the rich,--but
inequality of culture, does most to create and distribute the political
fly-presses and forcing-pumps. The _Lex agraria_ in the fields of
science passes over at last into the physical fields. Since the tree of
knowledge has thrust out its branches from the school windows of
philosophy and the church windows of the priesthood into the common
garden, all nations have become stronger.--Unequal cultivation chains
the West Indies to the feet of Europe, Helots to Spartans, and the iron
hollow-head[292] with the trigger on the negro's tongue presupposes a
hollow-head of another kind.
With such a frightful disparity among nations in power, wealth,
culture, only a universal rush of storms from all points of the compass
can terminate in a lasting calm. A perpetual balance of Europe
presuppose a balance of the four remaining parts of the world, which
one may, deducting small librations, promise our globe. In future men
will quite as little discover a salvage as an island. One people must
draw another out of pits blundering years. A more equal culture will
conclude commercial treaties with more equal advantages. The longest
rainy months of humanity--which always fell upon the time of national
transplantations, just as one always sets out flowers on cloudy
days--have spent themselves.
One spectre still remains from the midnight, which reaches far into the
hours of light,--War. But the claws and bill of the armorial eagle grow
on, till, like the boar's tusks, they crook up and make themselves
useless. As it was calculated in regard to Vesuvius, that it contained
material for only forty-three eruptions more,--so might one also reckon
the number of future wars. This long tempest, which already for six
thousand years has been standing over our planet, will continue to
storm till clouds and earth have charged each other full with an
_equal_ measure of electric matter.
_All_ nations become illuminated only in joint fermentation; and the
precipitate is blood and dead men's bones. Were the earth narrowed
to one half of its size, then would the time of its moral--and
physical--development be shortened one half.
With wars the strongest drag-chains of the sciences are cut off. Once
war-machines were the sowing-machines of new knowledges, while they
crushed old harvests; now it is the press which scatters the pollen
more widely and gently. Instead of an Alexander, Greece would need now
to send to Asia nothing but a--compositor; the conqueror grafts, the
author sows.
It is a characteristic of enlightenment that, although it still leaves
to individuals the possibility of the illusion and weakening of vice,
nevertheless it releases nations from company-vices and national
deceptions,--e. g. from wrecking, piracy. The best and worst deeds we
do in company; war is an example. The slave-trade must in our days,
unless indeed the trade in subjects begins, come to an end.[293]
The highest and steepest thrones stand, like the highest mountains, in
the warmest lands. The political mountains, like the physical, daily
grow lower (especially when they spout fire), and must at last be with
the valleys in a common plain.
From all this follows:--
There comes one day a golden age, which every wise and virtuous man
even now enjoys, and when men will find it easier to live well because
they will find it easier to live indeed,--when men will have, not more
pleasure (for this honey they draw from every flower and leaf-louse),
but more virtue,--when the people Will take part in thinking, and the
thinker--in working,[294] in order that he may save himself the need of
Helots,--when military and judicial murder shall be condemned, and only
occasionally cannon-balls shall be turned up with the plough. When that
time comes, then will a preponderance of good no more stop the machine
by frictions. When it comes, then will the necessity no longer lie in
human nature of degenerating again and again breeding tempests (for
heretofore the noble element has merely kept up a flying fight with the
overpowering evil), just as, according to Forster, even on the hot
island of St. Helena[295] there are no storms.
When this festal day comes, then will our children's children be--no
more. We stand now in the evening and see at the close of our dark day
the sun go down with a red-hot glory, and promise us behind the last
cloud the still, serene sabbath-day of humanity; but our posterity have
yet to travel through a night full of wind, and through a cloud full of
poison, till at last over a happier earth an eternal morning-wind full
of blossom-spirits, moving on before the sun, expelling all clouds,
shall breathe on men without a sigh. Astronomy promises the earth an
eternal vernal equinox;[296] and history promises it a higher one;
perhaps the two eternal springs may coincide.--
Since man disappears among men, we downcast ones must erect ourselves
before humanity. When I think of the Greeks, I see that our hopes move
faster than fate.--As one travels by night with lights over the icy
Alps, in order not to be terrified at the abysses and at the long road,
so does fate spread night around us, and hands us only torches for the
way immediately before us, that we may not worry ourselves about the
chasms of the future, and the distance of the goal.--There were
centuries when humanity was led with bandaged eyes--from one prison to
another;--there were other centuries when spectres rattled and
overturned all night long, and in the morning nothing was disturbed;
there can be no other centuries except those in which individuals die,
but nations rise, and in which nations decay, but mankind rises: when
mankind itself sinks and falls to ruins, and ends with the scattering
of the globe in a dust-cloud ... what shall console us?--
A veiled eye behind the bounds of time, an infinite heart beyond
the world. There is a higher order of things than we can
demonstrate,--there is a Providence in the world's history and in every
one's life which reason has the boldness to deny, and which the heart
has the boldness to believe;--there must be a Providence, which,
according to other rules than we have hitherto assumed, links this
confused earth as daughter-land to a higher city of God,--there must be
a God, a Virtue, and an Eternity.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: His collected works, Vol. III. p. 68.]
[Footnote 2: In Faust,--Scene of the Easter Holidays.--Tr.]
[Footnote 3: A Jew once separated from his wife when she appeared with
bare arms; but it is difficult to ascribe the present frequent divorces
in Paris to that cause.]
[Footnote 4: It is amusing to hear Jean Paul call it so, but the German
diminutive, "Werk_lein_," also expresses attachment to the thing in
question. Thus children say _Väter-chen_, "Little Papa; Daddy."--Tr.]
[Footnote 5: Descriptive of Venus, or written under her
influence.--Tr.]
[Footnote 6: The stick on which a painter rests his arm.--Tr.]
[Footnote 7: Similarity of the parts to the whole.--Tr.]
[Footnote 8: _Fliegende Blätter_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 9: Of course, "Forgive us our debts."--Tr.]
[Footnote 10: A city of the Tauric Chersonesus, the modern
Crimea.--Tr.]
[Footnote 11: A Jesuit astronomer, A. D. 1598-1671, who named the
moon's spots Tycho, Plato, Hercules, St. Catharine, &c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 12: He alludes to the chimney-sweeper of his perukes.]
[Footnote 13: The name the Germans give to Death. _Hein_ would seem to
mean Hal.--Tr.]
[Footnote 14: Probably peas, which the children, as now, blew through
long tubes with great force.--Tr.]
[Footnote 15: In Upper Alsace, where every three years only the best
youth receives the crown and medal, and the jurisdiction of the
pastures.]
[Footnote 16: A sort of fire-ball, which, as it goes, emits smoke to
blind the enemy.--Tr.]
[Footnote 17: Small balls invented by him to put into a horse's ear,
and act as a spur.--Tr.]
[Footnote 18: An island of the Malay Archipelago, wooded, volcanic, and
spicy.--Tr.]
[Footnote 19: It is notorious how little I know of mining operations;
I therefore thought I had reason to apply to my superiors for a
spur which might stimulate me to do something in such a weighty
science,--and such a spur is certainly the office of mining-superintendent.]
[Footnote 20: Except the two emperors Silluck and Athnac, and the four
kings Sgolta, Sakeph-Katon, etc., I never had intercourse with any; and
that only as upper-class scholar, because we jurists, with the Devil's
help, had to learn Hebrew, wherein just the above-mentioned six
potentates appear as the names of the accents on words. Perhaps,
however, my correspondent means the great, acute, crowned accents of
nations. [_Sakeph-Katon_ is the only one the translator has not been
able to verify of these interesting names. _Kauton_ is given among the
Hebrew accents, but not Sakeph.--Tr.]]
[Footnote 21: Justus Möser, author of the "Patriotic Fantasies," one of
Germany's dearest memories, in many respects a Franklin.--Tr.]
[Footnote 22: Lane of the mine.--Tr.]
[Footnote 23: Ass's Post.--Tr.]
[Footnote 24: Instrument for taking the distance of a star north or
south from the equator.--Tr.]
[Footnote 25: Instrument for reckoning the deviation of the hour-circle
from the meridian.--Tr.]
[Footnote 26: Jean Paul seems to indulge here in an hexameter himself:
"Welches sie auch mehr bedarf, als der harmonische Gessner."--Tr.]
[Footnote 27: _Bewähren_ and _bewahren_ are the two German words.--Tr.]
[Footnote 28: E. g. their honor suffers, if their carriage does not
pass ahead of another carriage of rank.]
[Footnote 29: Such letters as David sent by Uriah to Joab. (See 2
Samuel xi. 14, 15.)--Tr.]
[Footnote 30: _Kleeblatt_ (_trefoil_) in the German.--Tr.]
[Footnote 31: After an operation for the cataract, the sensitive retina
represents everything magnified.]
[Footnote 32: A piece of charred bone or horn used by natives of the
East to absorb the blood from wounds made by the bite of a snake. See
Tennent's Natural History of Ceylon, p. 312.--Tr.]
[Footnote 33: The _Psalter_ in the ox's stomach is the _Blättermagen_
(lit. _leaf-stomach_), the third stomach of ruminant animals, the
tripe. So we speak of the _leaves_ of fat.--Tr.]
[Footnote 34:
"My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now."--Hood.]
[Footnote 35: Joint-reporter.--Tr.]
[Footnote 36: A kind that heads in the form of a capuchin's hood.--Tr.]
[Footnote 37: When one's five numbers are all drawn in their order, it
is a quinterne.--Tr.]
[Footnote 38: _Aufgebunden_ may mean either tied up or untied.--Tr.]
[Footnote 39: Burlesque and serious operas.--Tr.]
[Footnote 40: Or, figure in history.--Tr.]
[Footnote 41: The ideal of the beautiful.]
[Footnote 42: As the Rabbins believe, according to Eisenmenger's
Judaism, Part II. 7.]
[Footnote 43: _Usance_ means the month's grace allowed for the
payment of a bill of exchange; double usance, of course, allows two
months.--Tr.]
[Footnote 44: Petrarch, like German reviewers, avoided nightingales,
and sought frogs.]
[Footnote 45: "Schatten_riss_ oder Schatten_schnitt_" is the
German.--Tr.]
[Footnote 46: The literal rendering would be "_cut out of the eyes_,
or, rather, out of the face." The phrase in Italics is a German idiom
for expressing an exact likeness.--Tr.]
[Footnote 47: The readers of Boswell's Johnson will remember that
interesting native of the South-Sea Islands.--Tr.]
[Footnote 48: Matthieu being the French for _Matthew_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 49: _Zeusel_ was a court-apothecary, mentioned on page 7, of
whom we shall hear more.--Tr.]
[Footnote 50: An Italian word, meaning literally gallant, applied to
those Platonic lovers who, with the connivance of the husbands,
attended married ladies, and were everywhere seen in confidential chat
with them.--Tr.]
[Footnote 51: La Mettrie was a noted medical man and materialist in his
day, b. 1709.--Tr.]
[Footnote 52: Remember the beautiful passage in Bede's History, where
the Northumbrian prince compares man's life to the flight of the
swallow through the lighted hall out of darkness into darkness.--Tr.]
[Footnote 53: An allusion, perhaps, to the legend, so lovely to the
fancy, that a crucifix in Naples, when Alphonso was besieged there, in
1439, bowed its head before a cannon-ball, which consequently took off
only the crown of thorns!--_Voyage d'un François_, Tom. VI. p. 303.]
[Footnote 54: This clover insures him who accidentally finds it against
future deception. Hitherto it has been found only by--princes and
philosophers.]
[Footnote 55: _Matz_, in German, means also both a starling and a
blockhead.--Tr.]
[Footnote 56: Elegant paper for the upper classes.--Tr.]
[Footnote 57: In the original, "hang hares' tails on us," i. e. "make
fools of us."--Tr.]
[Footnote 58: Literally, spit-devils,--a sort of firework.--Tr.]
[Footnote 59: I. e. Birthday-festival.--Tr.]
[Footnote 60: Not one of the commonplace souls that jog steadily on
like the hexameter.--Tr.]
[Footnote 61: This was a common practice of our old New England Puritan
parsons.--Tr.]
[Footnote 62: Disciples of Kennicott, the well-known English verifier
of the general accuracy of the Sacred Text.--Tr.]
[Footnote 63: A trap extemporized by setting up a heavy book obliquely,
with one end resting on a stick, and the cheese attached.--Tr.]
[Footnote 64: Christina, daughter of Charles XII., abdicated in May,
1654, at the age of twenty-eight.--Tr.]
[Footnote 65: A famous and popular old volume delineating the world of
nature and life in pictures, with numbers referring to the different
parts of each picture.--Tr.]
[Footnote 66: That is, threw into them, as into scrap-baskets, the bits
of paper on which he had written his thoughts.--Tr.]
[Footnote 67: Allusion to Ezekiel.--Tr.]
[Footnote 68: Literally, _God's-box_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 69: _Gesprungen_ seems to mean both _vibrated_ and
_snapped_.]
[Footnote 70: _Haupt_- und _Staat-actionen_, the phrase used by Faust in
his first dialogue with Wagner. Schlegel says the title was affixed to
dramas designed for marionettes when they treated heroic and historical
subjects.--Tr.]
[Footnote 71: Epiglottis.--Tr.]
[Footnote 72: What has come into the world feet foremost.--Tr.]
[Footnote 73: Basselisse (French).--Tr.]
[Footnote 74: _Ladenhüter_ (shop-keeper) is the German word,
meaning goods that keep the store as a sick man keeps his
bed,--_shop-ridden_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 75: A court that decided matters in dispute among the
sovereigns of the German Confederation.--Tr.]
[Footnote 76: A selection of choice learning.--Tr.]
[Footnote 77: Midsummer-day.--Tr.]
[Footnote 78: A name given by the Greeks to the Hebrew word Jehovah,
which consists, in the original, of _four letters_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 79: The thumb of a hanged thief was considered as a
lucky-bone.--Tr.]
[Footnote 80: Full.--Tr.]
[Footnote 81: Or it _went a begging_, as we say.--Tr.]
[Footnote 82: "Rara avis."--Tr.]
[Footnote 83: See page 67.--Tr.]
[Footnote 84: It is precisely the possession of _heterogeneous_
faculties in _similar_ degree that makes one inconsequent and
inconsistent; men with one predominant faculty act by it with more
equableness. In despotisms there is more quiet than in republics; at
the hot equator there is a more even rate of the barometer than in the
zones of four seasons.]
[Footnote 85: One of Burns's words.--Tr.]
[Footnote 86: The bust of the Vatican Apollo, by which he would learn
to model no other figure than his own.]
[Footnote 87: There is something in the use and application of the word
_Wissenschaft_ which requires for its appreciation an understanding of
the peculiar genius of the German mind.--Tr.]
[Footnote 88: Bacon's remark will recur to the reader.--Tr.]
[Footnote 89: A solar system is only a dotted profile of the genius of
the world, but a human eye is his miniature. The _mechanics_ of the
bodies of the universe the mathematical masters of reckoning may
calculate, but the _dioptrics_ of the eye, growing bright amidst
nothing but dull moistures, transcends our algebraic audit-offices,
which therefore cannot reckon away from the imitated eyes (the glasses)
the space of diffusion and the narrow field.]
[Footnote 90: Jean Paul would probably have said Rubicon if he had not
been going to say it elsewhere,--e. g. p. 199.]
[Footnote 91: Hieronym. cont. Jov. L 2.]
[Footnote 92: _Hof_ means in German _both_ court--and yard.--Tr.]
[Footnote 93: Bayle's Dictionary, Art. _François d'Assise_, Note C.]
[Footnote 94: A half-way house.--Tr.]
[Footnote 95: Jean Paul probably means, that such noble hearts as
Victor's Le Baut might shut up into silence, but could not with his
Chamberlain's master-key open and find out their secrets.--Tr.]
[Footnote 96: In a later edition Jean Paul substitutes for _Schein-tod_
(sham death) a half French word, _Postiche-tod_ (supposititious
death).--Tr.]
[Footnote 97: "On whose board he had a _stone_," literally,--a proverb
for being in one's good graces.--Tr.]
[Footnote 98: There is an inconsistency in date of month here with p.
135.--Tr.]
[Footnote 99: The dog as well as myself know what island that is, but
no more.]
[Footnote 100: "Burning-chambers," a name originally given to the place
for judging criminals of state belonging to illustrious families. The
room was lined with black, and lighted with flambeaux. Originated with
Francis I. in 1535, in his persecution of heretics.--Tr.]
[Footnote 101: Plebeian.--Tr.]
[Footnote 102: One at hearing from Emanuel, the other at seeing
Clotilda.--Tr.]
[Footnote 103: Red drops fall from butterflies in their last
transformation, which they used to call bloody rain.]
[Footnote 104: When one looks a long time into the blue of heaven, it
begins to undulate, and these waves in the air one imagines in
childhood to be angels at play.]
[Footnote 105: This monologue is a fragment from an earlier dark hour,
such as every heart of sensibility once suffers.]
[Footnote 106: _Noth-münzen_ means originally coin containing alloy,
struck off in hard times.--Tr.]
[Footnote 107: The Hebrew language has but three vowels
("vowel-points") which, from the assistance they gave in enunciating a
vast variety of words, were called _matres lectionis_, or mothers of
the reading.--Tr.]
[Footnote 108: I. e. bowing so low.--Tr.]
[Footnote 109: Herkommen, as a common noun, means _tradition_ or
_custom_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 110: An infusorial or minute animal, called in natural
history _rotifera_ (wheel-bearer).--Tr.]
[Footnote 111: _Famulus_ is the Latin name in the German. Wagner was
one in Faust.--Tr.]
[Footnote 112: So called in allusion to the _shaking_ they were giving
it.--Tr.]
[Footnote 113: _Kopfstück_ (lit. _head-piece_), a coin bearing the head
of the regent.--Tr.]
[Footnote 114: The billiard-pockets (like the contribution-bags) used
to have bells to them.--Tr.]
[Footnote 115: Who felt himself to be "a child picking up pebbles on
the shore of the great ocean of truth."--Tr.]
[Footnote 116: A conventual term,--a six.--Tr.]
[Footnote 117: God bless you!--Tr.]
[Footnote 118: Many thanks!--Tr.]
[Footnote 119: Of course a parody on "Verbum sat _sapienti_,"--"A word
for the _fool_," &c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 120: Or reading-_easel_ (the latter word seeming to be an
English corruption of the German _Esel_, ass),--any book-rest.
_Maler-esel_ means a painter's easel.--Tr.]
[Footnote 121: When they occur in actual life.--Tr.]
[Footnote 122: Eclectic or miscellaneous science, not confined to one
department.--Tr.]
[Footnote 123: A King of France once sent a vassal _illum baculum,
quo se sustentabat, in symbolum traditionis_. (Du Fresne's
Glossary.) So far as I know, there has never been made a good and
serviceable--abridgment of this _glossarium_ for ladies.]
[Footnote 124: Just as there are _listening sisters_ (_les Tourières_
or _S[oe]urs écoutés_) who go with the nuns into the conversing room,
to overhear their talk.]
[Footnote 125: Or absentee-curates.--Tr.]
[Footnote 126: Literally _looker-on_,--one admitted to behold the
secret ceremonies in the Eleusinian mysteries.--Tr.]
[Footnote 127: To know how to obey is a glory equal to that of
commanding.--Tr.]
[Footnote 128: "Slaves are accounted nobodies."--Tr.]
[Footnote 129: In real life.--Tr.]
[Footnote 130: _To make one a queue_ is a proverb for imposing on him
(like pinning a rag to one's coat-tail?).--Tr.]
[Footnote 131: _Diet_ (from _dies_) _implies_ the idea of _day_,
but the German "Reichs_tag_" makes the pun more palpable in the
original.--Tr.]
[Footnote 132: A lady's watch, as is well known, shaped like a heart,
provided on the back with a dial-gnomon and magnetic needle. The latter
points out to the ladies (who hate _cold_) the _south_ also, in fact,
and the sun-dial-index serves as a moon-dial-index.]
[Footnote 133: "Rome concealed the name of her god, and she was wrong;
I conceal the name of my goddess, and I am right."]
[Footnote 134: Or _Tensa_, the carriage on which they bore the images
of the gods in the Circensian games.--Tr.]
[Footnote 135: A shrine.--Tr.]
[Footnote 136: Properly, a pitcher, or urn.--Tr.]
[Footnote 137: Here Jean Paul inserts, after "in die Federn," "(_nicht
in die Feder_),"--i. e. _not into the pen_ (a German phrase for
_dictating_). The pun could not be kept.--Tr.]
[Footnote 138: A watch that tells only the hours.--Tr.]
[Footnote 139: The reference is to Laurence Sterne, and the snuff-box
he mentions in the early part of the "Sentimental Journey," as given
him by a monk, and carried ever after as an amulet.--Tr.]
[Footnote 140: Ignatius's-plate means probably a breastplate, or
medallion, consecrated by Ignatius Loyola.--Tr.]
[Footnote 141: I. e. to throw light upon it.--Tr.]
[Footnote 142: Like John Buncle, who went round, as was said, to
propagate his faith and his species.--Tr.]
[Footnote 143: A fourth reason would be, that now, every time be loves
another than Clotilda, he seems to earn a new claim to the gratitude of
his friend.]
[Footnote 144: Italian for everybody.--Tr.]
[Footnote 145: May there be a sly allusion--here to the possibility of
their putting their hair up in papers torn from the leaves of Jean
Paul's works?--Tr.]
[Footnote 146: Schickaneder was the Director of a Theatre in Vienna in
the time of Mozart, and wrote the text for the _Magic Flute_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 147: A wreath given in derision to brides who before marriage
had been unchaste.--Tr.]
[Footnote 148: And then are ready to verify the proverb: _Curses, like
chickens, come home to roost_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 149: Musical interval.--Tr.]
[Footnote 150: Old scholastic term for a _past_ eternity, in
contradiction to a coming eternity, _a parte post_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 151: The Invisible Lodge; a Biography in Two Parts. [A work
of Jean Paul's.--Tr.]]
[Footnote 152: Such was the name of his Lordship's wife, who in her
twenty-third year sank to rest in the eternal arms.]
[Footnote 153: In the original, _Semper-freie_ (always free,--eligible
to office).--Tr.]
[Footnote 154: Hence too it was, that, so long as Victor was at the
Parsonage, she avoided Flamin's society.]
[Footnote 155: The reader will remember this same remark, in so many
words, on p. 223.--Tr.]
[Footnote 156: It turned out more fortunately, and without loss of the
stones, and I had the satisfaction to find that no woman who read the
first edition of this work has, in her womanlike _castling_ or
_rotation in office_, at all interchanged the two _thats_. Nay, even
the female readers of the second edition have remained consistent with
themselves.]
[Footnote 157: Demoralization.--Tr.]
[Footnote 158: The German word _kleiden_; it has a corresponding double
meaning of _dressing_, and also of _suiting_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 159: Science,--Mathematics.--Tr.]
[Footnote 160: Step-measurers.--Tr.]
[Footnote 161: Men entitled to lecture in three branches.--Tr.]
[Footnote 162: Or disciple of the indifferential calculus.--Tr.]
[Footnote 163: Or, in prose, fiery water-wheel.--Tr.]
[Footnote 164:
"And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps,
Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze,
At once the soul of each and God of all?"
Coleridge, _The Æolian Harp_.]
[Footnote 165: _Fromm_ is the German. It is time the words _religious_
and _pious_ were redeemed from the base uses of sectarianism and
bigotry.--Tr.]
[Footnote 166: _Enlightenment_ in an _empty_ heart is mere memory-work,
let it strain the faculty of acumen ever so much. Most men of our day
resemble the new houses in Potsdam, in which (according to Reichard)
Frederick the Second caused _lights_ to be placed at night, that every
one, including Reichard himself, might think they were--_occupied_.]
[Footnote 167: Most men have, perhaps, only an equal number of good
_thoughts_ and _actions_; but it is still an open question how long the
virtuous man may interrupt his good thoughts (which have less need than
good actions of the outer world) by indifferent ones.]
[Footnote 168: For the noblest leans just the most on loving souls, or
at least on his ideals of them, with which, however, he is only in so
far satisfied as he regards them as pledges of future prototypes. I do
not except either the Stoic (that Epicurean God) or the Mystic: both
love in the Creator only the sum total of his creatures; we the former
in the latter.]
[Footnote 169: The German _Vorwand_ means literally front wall (not far
from the etymological meaning of _pretext_); so that there may be a
figurative element here beyond what appears to the casual reader.--Tr.]
[Footnote 170: The reader of this letter will readily presuppose that
Clotilda, as she does not know into whose hands it may fall,--in fact,
it is actually in ours,--will have to hurry over her relations and
mysteries (e. g. respecting Flamin, Victor, &c.) with an obscurity
which to her proper reader was clear enough.]
[Footnote 171: Let the reader remember that she is master of as much of
this biography as he, if not more.]
[Footnote 172: She means Giulia, from whose corpse grief had hurried
her away.]
[Footnote 173:
"Now spring returns, but not to me returns
The vernal joy my better years have known," &c.
Michael Bruce.]
[Footnote 174: "Fly not from me, because I am always encompassed by a
great shadow, which increases till at last it shall wall me up."]
[Footnote 175: Every seven years of human life.--Tr.]
[Footnote 176:
"Or had it drizzled _needle-points of ice_
Upon a feverish head made suddenly bald."
Coleridge's _Remorse_.]
[Footnote 177: As the spots in the moon are fields of flowers and
plants.]
[Footnote 178: Here ended (in the original) the first volume.--Tr.]
[Footnote 179: So called, as it was made to answer for both bed and
board. See the next sentence but one.--Tr.]
[Footnote 180: The rudiments of printing.--Tr.]
[Footnote 181: He is indignant, it is true, only at the _typographical_
history of learned works, and despises only the anxious search after
the birthdays, &c., of deceased and stupid books in the midst of a
world full of wonders; but here, too, he must needs consider that
brains which can let nothing _press_ upon them more than operations of
the _press_ still do better this little something, which saves and
accumulates most for the better ones, than nothing at all, or anything
beyond their ability.]
[Footnote 182: A name given to screens used for partitions.--Tr.]
[Footnote 183: A well-known good writer on the eyes.]
[Footnote 184: Or crystalline lens?--Tr.]
[Footnote 185: Glands in the eyelids, discovered by Meibom in
1673.--Tr.]
[Footnote 186: A glandule at the corner of the eye, which secretes
moisture.--Tr.]
[Footnote 187: Honeymoon. One of Jean Paul's variations on the
phrase.--Tr.]
[Footnote 188: The Germans are peculiarly rich in synonymes for the
honeymoon. The word used here is _Flitterwochen_ (Spangle-weeks).--Tr.]
[Footnote 189: Moldavian or Wallachian governor.--Tr.]
[Footnote 190: Some of the German written letters are like the Greek.
_Alphabet_ (at the end of the sentence) is a printer's term for 23
sheets.--Tr.]
[Footnote 191: The Fetzpopel, or _ragged ninny_, was a sort of
scarecrow or bugbear.--Tr.]
[Footnote 192: A fistful.--Tr.]
[Footnote 193: An Indian moss used for the gout.--Tr.]
[Footnote 194: An allusion to a scandalous Scotch imposture of
1780.--Tr.]
[Footnote 195: Sledges for riding astraddle.--Tr.]
[Footnote 196: The Britons found out that whalebone shavings made the
softest kind of bed.]
[Footnote 197: The English of this seems to be:--
"Turkey rhubarb powdered.
Starred anise-seed.
Fennel do.
Peel of green orange.
Carbonate of potash,--equal parts,--1 drachm.
Leaves of Alexandrian senna without stalks,--2 drachms.
Half an ounce of white sugar."
And the final direction may read, "Of which let him take a mixture,
finely pulverized, given in sufficient quantity to produce ejection.
Mark [i. e. on the paper], Wind-powders," &c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 198: The name given to the halo about the head, when one is
electrized.]
[Footnote 199: An allusion, perhaps, to the pasteboard images carried
about on the heads of Italian peddlers, in which the loose-hung head
bobs right and left to the spectators.--Tr.]
[Footnote 200: The German expression for all this is too elliptical to
be literally rendered. It is simply "Meinetwegen!" (For all me!)--Tr.]
[Footnote 201: Fancy-man.--Tr.]
[Footnote 202: Their good works are good words.--Tr.]
[Footnote 203: The horse referred to on page 91.--Tr.]
[Footnote 204: That is, he would be, when this letter arrived, for he
was going to carry it.--Tr.]
[Footnote 205: Culpepper never did him the pleasure, for which he had
so often begged him, of prescribing for the Prince a clyster, which
then the apothecary himself would have administered, in order just for
once to _get at_ the ruler, and transform _his_ weak side into his own
sunny side.]
[Footnote 206: When those twins chipped the shell of Leda's egg, out of
which they were born.--Tr.]
[Footnote 207: Literally, "Knapsack."--Tr.]
[Footnote 208: French for clyster.--Tr.]
[Footnote 209: A Greek jurist, compared by Gibbon to Bacon, of great
influence in the first half of the sixth century,--dishonest, but
able.--Tr.]
[Footnote 210: The red-deer, and the wild-boar, bear, badger, &c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 211: i. e. about two kreutzers.--Tr.]
[Footnote 212: Entity.--Tr.]
[Footnote 213: "_Gesegnete Mahlzeit_" is the familiar phrase Richter
uses; it was formerly common, at the close of dinner, to shake hands
and wish "a blessing on the meal."--Tr.]
[Footnote 214:
"Hast thou a friend, take care to keep him,
And often to his threshold wend:
Briers and thorns o'ergrow the path
On which a man neglects to walk."--_Old Saying_.
Tr.]
[Footnote 215: Little Britain.--Tr.]
[Footnote 216: He with the long shoes, in his "Education of a Young
Prince, 1705."]
[Footnote 217: Thus did merely the first edition, in 1797, speak of the
Viennese; a third, improved one, in 1819, acknowledges also an improved
edition of them, although it retains lively _shadows_ of their former
times.]
[Footnote 218: A coarse writer no longer known.--Tr.]
[Footnote 219: Author of the Burlesque Virgil.--Tr.]
[Footnote 220: The author appears to have had in his mind a
reminiscence of a passage in Bürger's "Lenore":--
"Like croak of frogs in marshy plain,
Swelled on the breeze that dismal strain," &c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 221: Sacred musical composition of a stylish character.--Tr.]
[Footnote 222: The Jewish name for Sabbath in the Middle Ages. See
Auerbach's Spinoza.--Tr.]
[Footnote 223: Latin for ruins, fragments of old buildings, &c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 224: "He toucheth the hills, and they smoke."--Tr.]
[Footnote 225: December is most favorable to astronomical
observations.]
[Footnote 226: A musical direction: Go back to the sign; Begin
again.--Tr.]
[Footnote 227: The German word is _Kälte_, which explains the
incongruity of our English heading.--Tr.]
[Footnote 228: A word copied exactly from the German, and well enough
justified by the analogy of _rookery_, for instance.--Tr.]
[Footnote 229: See that noble passage of Milton, beginning
"I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue."--Tr.]
[Footnote 230: I have wholly recast the letter N, because in the first
edition I unfortunately had a good idea, which, without recollecting
its first publication, I gave the world a second time, as a learned
thief of my own property, in the commentary on the woodcuts. [Probably
the ones illustrating the Ten Commandments, in the _Campaner Thal_,
Jean Paul's work on Immortality.--Tr.]]
[Footnote 231: The royal band (of twenty-four).--Tr.]
[Footnote 232: A freethinker and Freemason, in the latter half of the
eighteenth century imprisoned, for a certain comedy, in Magdeburg
fortress.--Tr.]
[Footnote 233: The highway.--Tr.]
[Footnote 234: As an example, we have now the First Principle of
Morals, and that of the Forms of Government.]
[Footnote 235: Self-government.--Tr.]
[Footnote 236: See his _Am[oe]n. Acad_., the treatise on the habitable
globe.]
[Footnote 237: The hysterical ball, i. e. the hysteric morbid feeling,
as if a ball were rolling up into the throat.]
[Footnote 238: Used here by Jean Paul evidently, with figurative
freedom, for a Russian swing, but meaning originally a _chariot-race_
(afterward tournament), and derived from _currus solis_ (chariot of the
sun).--Tr.]
[Footnote 239: Conjurer's jargon.--Tr.]
[Footnote 240: "The _Litones_ were slaves among the old Saxons, who
still possessed a third of their property, and could make contracts for
it." _Flegeljahre_, No. 8.--Tr.]
[Footnote 241: An instrument for determining the blueness of the sky.]
[Footnote 242: French for a male flirt.--Tr.]
[Footnote 243: Differing laws.--Tr.]
[Footnote 244: Axiom in law; named from Brocard, a Bishop of Worms, who
made a collection of canons called "Brocardica Juris."--Tr.]
[Footnote 245: Proculus and Sabinus were the founders of two rival
schools of jurisprudence in Rome (Proculians and Sabinians) in the
first century of our era.--Tr.]
[Footnote 246: A term from the Pandects of Justinian, meaning
liabilities to burdens or duties.--Tr.]
[Footnote 247: Alluding to the consolidating of stocks, debts,
&c.--Tr.]
[Footnote 248: An Italian astronomer and anatomist, born in 1602.--Tr.]
[Footnote 249: Faust (meaning both fist and the Faust of story) is the
word in the original.--Tr.]
[Footnote 250: Or journey.--Tr.]
[Footnote 251: There is a play on words in the original, _Hof_ meaning
_court_, and also, when applied to the sun or moon, a _circle_ round
the luminary.--Tr.]
[Footnote 252: The original has a slight pun; _über die Tafel_ meaning
both _on the subject_ of the table and _during_ the table (or
dinner).--Tr.]
[Footnote 253: A name given to different groups of delicate muscles in
certain sensitive parts of the human body.--Tr.]
[Footnote 254:
"But where of ye, O tempests, is the goal!
Are ye like those within the human breast,
Or do ye find, like eagles, some high nest?"
_Childe Harold_.]
[Footnote 255: The snake-stone sucks at the wound till it has sucked
out all the poison.]
[Footnote 256: In a nutshell.--Tr.]
[Footnote 257: The conservative or court party in the French Revolution
were called the _noirs_ (blacks), from the fact of the emigrant nobles
wearing black velvet. The _Ensragés_ was the name of a radical
club.--Tr.]
[Footnote 258: Literally, the game of _man_ (_ombre_, Spanish).--Tr.]
[Footnote 259: Joachime, Clotilda, Victor, and the Devil.]
[Footnote 260: _Mort_ (French) in the original.--Tr.]
[Footnote 261: Manager of the game.--Tr.]
[Footnote 262: Or face-card.--Tr.]
[Footnote 263: No pun in the original.--Tr.]
[Footnote 264: A Parisian anatomiste (b. 1719) persecuted by the
profession to London, where she exhibited her wax-skeleton with
success.--Tr.]
[Footnote 265: Described on pages 127-134.--Tr.]
[Footnote 266: Entertainments for the gods, at which their images
were laid on couches (_lecti_), and food was served up to them in
public.--Tr.]
[Footnote 267: _Panist_ from the Latin _panis_,--an allusion to an old
class of charity scholars. It might be rendered, _loafer_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 268: Alluding to the long attempts in Germany to fuse the
Calvinistie and Lutheran Churches.--Tr.]
[Footnote 269: _Musicus_ here, not _musicant_, which latter means the
more common performer, fiddler, or whatever else.--Tr.]
[Footnote 270: Father confessor.--Tr.]
[Footnote 271: Plutarch mentions how vain Pompey's cavaliers were of
their personal appearance, and that Cæsar accordingly directed his
soldiers to aim at their faces; "for Cæsar hoped that those young
cavaliers who had not been used to wars and wounds, and who set
a great value on their beauty, would avoid above all things a stroke
in that part, and immediately give way, as well on account of the
present danger as the future deformity. The event answered his
expectation."--Tr.]
[Footnote 272: To save the external decencies of virtue.--Tr.]
[Footnote 273: I. e., O Clarissa! behold your Lovelace; let us skip the
first four volumes, and, like the makers of Epics, begin with the
rest!]
[Footnote 274: A kind of fire-alarm.--Tr.]
[Footnote 275: These terms are adopted as the shortest correspondents
of the German _bürgerlich_ and _stiftfähig_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 276: He mistakes; Leibnitz only said, everything difficult
was light to him, and everything light difficult.]
[Footnote 277: As the old fellow who carried his pipe in his boot, when
his leg was shot off at the battle of Prague, grabbed at his pipe first
and then at his leg. (See Old Song.)--Tr.]
[Footnote 278: "Colors produced on ores by the action of the
air."--Adler.]
[Footnote 279: _Viel-Liebe_ is Jean Paul's word, to match which, after
the analogy of Polygamy (marriage to many), we might coin the word
_Polyagapy_ (love to many).--Tr.]
[Footnote 280: Instead of _malade imaginaire_, an imaginary invalid,
she was an imaginary _convalescent_.--Tr.]
[Footnote 281: _Adjuvans_ is the ingredient which strengthens the
powers of the main ingredients; _constituens_ is what gives the
medicine the form of pill, electuary or mixture.]
[Footnote 282: One weeps, one cries, one sighs, one lies, one raves,
one kills, one dies,--in fine, one gives himself to all the devils, in
order to have his angel.--Tr.]
[Footnote 283: As we say _pea-soup_, _vermicelli-soup_.]
[Footnote 284: Referring to the one whose marriage to the Senior
Parson's daughter Victor witnessed that night from his window.--Tr.]
[Footnote 285: See note to page 194.--Tr.]
[Footnote 286: Of course, Procrustes.--Tr.]
[Footnote 287: Cheeks.--Tr.]
[Footnote 288: The God of sleep was attended by three beings:
_Phantasus_, who could change himself only into lifeless things;
_Phobetor_, who could assume and conjure up all animal forms; and
_Moropheus_, who could, all human forms. Metamorph. Lib. II. Fab. 10.]
[Footnote 289: Painter's colics.--Tr.]
[Footnote 290: "Seed to the sower and bread to the eater."
(Isaiah.)--Tr.]
[Footnote 291: Nor yet by a luxury, whose magnitude one exaggerates in
comparing their outlays with our income, and which injured them only in
this way, that they inherited the nations like East Indian cousins. It
was that of a cobbler who has won the highest prize in the lottery; it
was the squandering of a soldier after the plundering. Hence they had
luxury without refinement. It could maintain its greatness only by
growing greater. Had one thrown to them America with its gold bars,
they might, with greater luxury, have gone on this crutch some
centuries longer.]
[Footnote 292: It is well known that the head of the poor negro is shut
up in a hollow one of iron, which presses down his tongue.]
[Footnote 293: Written in the year 1792.]
[Footnote 294: The millionnaire presupposes the beggar, the scholar,
the Helot; the higher culture of individuals is purchased by the
degradation of the mass.]
[Footnote 295: Written in 1792. At present the tempest which once stood
in the heavens over all Europe lies out there in the level earth.]
[Footnote 296: For after 400,000 years the earth's axis, as Jupiter's
is now, will be perpendicular to the plane of its orbit.]
END OF VOL. I.
* * * * *
Cambridge: Stereotyped and Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co.
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