The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings
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Title: The Campaner Thal, and Other Writings
Author: Jean Paul
Translator: Juliette Bauer
Thomas Carlyle
Thomas De Quincey
Release date: April 24, 2011 [eBook #35948]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35948
Credits: Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by Google Books.
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RICHTER'S WRITINGS.
TITAN. A Romance. 2 vols. 16mo. $3.00.
FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES. 2 vols. 16mo. $2.75.
LEVANA; Or, The Doctrine of Education. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
THE CAMPANER THAL, and Other Writings. 1 vol. 16mo. $1.50.
HESPERUS. 2 vols. 16mo. _Preparing_.
_The above volumes are printed in uniform size and style_.
IN PRESS.
LIFE OF JEAN PAUL. By Eliza Buckminster Lee. New Edition, Revised. 1
volume.
TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Publishers.
THE
CAMPANER THAL,
AND
OTHER WRITINGS.
_From the German of_
JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER.
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1864.
University Press:
Welch, Bigelow, and Company,
Cambridge.
CONTENTS.
_THE CAMPANER THAL_.
Introduction.
501st STATION.
The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The Cavern.--The
Surprise.
502d STATION.
The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the Long One.--The
Sofa-Cushions.
503d STATION.
Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions
against Immortality.--Eden Jokes.
504th STATION.
Flower Toying.
505th STATION.
The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the Chain
of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.
506th STATION.
Objections to Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the Outer and Inner
Man.
507th STATION.
The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to previous Stations.--On the
Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in
Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The
Country-Seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.
LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN.
Letter to my Friends, instead of Preface.
FIRST LETTER-BOX.
Dog-Day's' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality.
SECOND LETTER-BOX.
Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-Resonance.--Authorcraft.
THIRD LETTER-BOX.
Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence.
FOURTH LETTER BOX.
Office-Brokage.--Discovery of the promised Secret.--Hans von Fuechslein.
FIFTH LETTER-BOX.
Cantata-Sunday.--Two Testaments.--Pontac; Blood; Love.
SIXTH LETTER-BOX.
Office-Impost.--One of the most important of Petitions.
SEVENTH LETTER-BOX.
Sermon.--School Exhibition.--Splendid Mistake.
EIGHTH LETTER-BOX.
Instalment in the Parsonage.
NINTH LETTER-BOX.
Or to the Marriage.
TENTH LETTER BOX.
St. Thomas's-Day and Birthday.
ELEVENTH LETTER BOX.
Spring; Investiture; and Childbirth.
TWELFTH LETTER-BOX.
Steeple-Ball Ascension.--The Toy-Press.
THIRTEENTH LETTER BOX.
Christening.
FOURTEENTH LETTER-BOX.
CHAPTER LAST.
_SCHMELZLE'S JOURNEY TO FLAeTZ_.
Preface.
Circular Letter of the proposed Catechetical Professor Attila Schmelzel
to his Friends; containing some Account of a Holidays' Journey to
Flaetz, with an Introduction, touching his Flight, and his Courage as
former Army-Chaplain.
Journey to Flaetz.
First Stage; from Neusattel to Vierstaedten.
Second Stage; from Vierstaedten to Niederschoena.
Third Stage; from Niederschoena to Flaetz.
First Day in Flaetz.
First Night in Flaetz.
Second Day in Flaetz.
_ANALECTS FROM RICHTER_.
The Happy Life of a Parish Priest in Sweden.
Dream upon the Universe.
Complaint of the Bird in a darkened Cage.
On the Death of Young Children.
The prophetic Dew-Drops.
On Death.
Imagination untamed by the coarser Realities of Life.
Satirical Notice of Reviewers.
Female Tongues.
Forgiveness.
The Grandeur of Man in his Littleness.
Night.
The Stars.
Martyrdom.
The Quarrels of Friends.
Dreaming.
Two Divisions of Philosophic Minds.
Dignity of Man in Self-Sacrifice.
Fancy.
_MISCELLANEOUS PIECES_.
Reminiscences of the best Hours of Life for the Hour of Death.
The New-Year's Night of an Unhappy Man.
The Death of an Angel.
A Dream and the Truth.
The Beauty of Death in the Bloom of Youth.
THE
CAMPANER THAL;
OR,
DISCOURSES ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL.
TRANSLATED BY JULIETTE BAUER.
"Report also, we regret to say, is all that we know of the _Campaner
Thal_, one of Richter's beloved topics, or rather the life of his whole
philosophy, glimpses of which look forth on us from almost every one of
his writings. He died while engaged, under recent and almost total
blindness, in enlarging and remodelling this _Campaner Thal_. The
unfinished manuscript was borne upon his coffin to the burial vault;
and Klopstock's hymn, _Auferstehen wirst du!_ 'Thou shalt arise, my
soul!' can seldom have been sung with more appropriate application than
over the grave of Jean Paul."--From _Carlyle's Miscellanies_.
INTRODUCTION.
In my distilling processes, I frequently precipitated the phlegma
of our earthball--its polar deserts, its Russian forests, its
icebergs--and from the sediments extracted a beautiful by-earth, a
small satellite. If we extract and regulate the charms of this old
world, we can form a delightful though minutely condensed world.
For the caves of this miniature or ditto-earth, we will take the
caves of Antiparos and of Baumann, for its plains, the Rhine
provinces--Hybla, Thabor, and Mont Blanc shall be its mountains--its
islands, the Friendly, the Holy, and the Palm isles. Wentworth's park
and Daphne's grotto, and some corner-pieces from the Paphian, we have
for its forests--for a charming valley, the Seifer's-dorfer and that of
Campan. Thus we possess, besides this dirty, weary world, the most
beautiful by or after-world--an important dessert service--an
Ante-Heaven between Ante-Hells.
I have purposely included this valley of Campan in my extract and
decoction, as I know none other in which I would rather awake, or die,
or love than in this one; if I had to command, I would not permit my
valley to be mixed up or placed beside the vale of Tempe or the Rose
Valley, perhaps with Utopia. The reader must have known this valley in
his geographical lessons, or in the works of Arthur Young, who praises
it even more than I do.[1]
I must take for granted, that in July, 1796, the Goddess of Fortune
descended from her throne to our earth, and placed in my hand--not
mammon, nor garters, nor golden sheep--nothing but her own, and led
me--by this I recognized the goddess--to the Campan vale. Truly, man
needs but look into it, and he will have--as I had--more than the Devil
_offered_ to Christ and Louis XIV., and _gave_ to the popes.
The test of enjoyment is memory. Only the paradises of the imagination
willingly remain, and are never lost, but always conquered. Poetry
alone reconciles the past to the future, and is the Orpheus's lyre
which commands these two destroying rocks to rest.[2]
As stated, in the year 1796, I made a trip through France, with my
friend H. Karlson. He is honorary master of horse in the * * * service.
The wise public cares little for true names, it always treats them as
fictitious ones, by way of literary taxation; and the existing
characters, at least those of any importance, may prefer not to be torn
over the wheel of criticism, and dragged piecemeal through libraries
and reading-clubs. At almost every milestone, I despatched the best
hourly bulletin to my friend Victor: when I had sent him the following
valley-piece, he persecuted me until I promised to grant this
illuminated portrait of nature, not alone to the letter, but also to
the printing-press. Therefore I do it. I know already, my poor Victor
sees, that in our days no green branch is left as a spinning-hut
for the man-caterpillar, and that inimical divers try to cut our
anchor-rope, sunk in the sea of death. Therefore he thinks more of the
conversations on immortality, than of the valley in which they took
place. I know this, because he calls me the counterpart of Claude
Lorraine, who only drew the landscape, while another drew the human
beings in it. Truly such a valley deserves that the mining and
sabbath-lamp of truth should be lowered into the suffocating air of the
grave, in place of our _self_, merely to see if that _self_ can breathe
at such a depth.
I have jokingly divided my letters into stations. I of course omit 500,
and commence at the 501st, wherein I appear in the valley.
CAMPANER THAL.
501st STATION.
The Diversities of Life.--The Dirge as Billet-Doux.--The
Cavern.--The Surprise.
_Campan, 23d July_.
Here have I been since the day before yesterday. After descent into
hell and purgatory, and passage through _limbos infantum et patrum_,
man must at last reach heaven. But I owe you yet our exit from our inn
on the 20th. Never can the head have a harder couch than when we hold
it in our hands. The reason that this happened to Karlson and myself
was, that in the rooms adjoining ours a wedding-dance was taking place,
and that below, the youngest daughter of our _maitre d'hotel_, who had
not only the name, but also the charms of _Corday_, with two white
roses on her cheeks, and two red ones in her hair, was being interred,
and that human beings with pale faces and heavy hearts waited on happy
and blooming ones. When fate harnesses to Psyche's car, the merry and
the mourning steed together, the mourning one ever takes the lead;
i. e. if the muses of Mirth and Sorrow play on the same stage in the
same hour, man does not, like Garrick,[3] follow the former; he does
not even remain neuter, but takes the side of the mourning one. Thus we
always paint, like Milton, our lost Paradise more glowing than the
regained one,--like Dante, hell better than purgatory. In short, the
silent corpse made us cold to the warm, joyful influence of the
dancers. But is it not absurd, my dear Victor, that a man who, like
myself, knows nothing better than that every hour unfolds at once
morning bloom and evening clouds; that here an Ash Wednesday and there
a black Monday commence; that such a man, who grieves little that
dancing music and funeral marches should sound at the same time on the
broad national theatre of humanity, should yet hang his head and grow
pale, when, in a side scene, this double music sounds in his ears? Is
not this as absurd as all his other doings?
Into Karlson's eyes something of this cloud had fallen. It was to him
the restirred ashes of a funeral urn. He can withstand all sorrows, but
not their recollection. He has replaced his years by lands, and the
space he has travelled over must be called his time. But the firm youth
changed color when he came to tell that the lover of the pale Corday
had torn her folded taper hands asunder, and, on his knees, had dragged
them to his burning lips.
He perceived his paleness in the glass; and to explain it, he imparted
the last and most secret leaf of his life's Robinsonade to me. You see
what an opaque gem this youth is, who follows his friends through all
France, without opening to his communicative friend and travelling
companion, even a fold or a loophole in his relation to them. Now only
from emotion on entering the Campan Vale, he draws the key from the
keyhole, which shall become a prompter's hole for you.
That he had accompanied the Baron Wilhelmi and his betrothed Gione,
with her sister Nadine, to Lausanne, in order to celebrate their
Arcadian marriage in the Campan Vale, you know already; that he had
left them suddenly at Lausanne, and returned to the Rhine fall at
Shaffhausen, you know also, but not the reason, which will now be
related to you by me and by him.
By daily contact Karlson had at last penetrated the thickly-woven veil,
magically colored by betrothed love, thrown over the strong, firm, and
kindred mind of Gione. Probably others discovered him ere he had
discovered himself. His heart became like the so-called world's eye[4]
in water, first bright, then varying its colors, then dull and misty,
and at last transparent. Not to cloud their beautiful intimacy, he
addressed the suspicious part of his attentions to Nadine. He did not
explain to me clearly whether he had led her into a beautiful error,
without taking a beautiful truth from Gione.
The sword of death seemed likely to separate all these stage knots.
Gione, the healthy and calm Gione, was suddenly attacked by a nervous
disorder. One evening, Wilhelmi, with his usual poetic ardor, entered
Karlson's chamber weeping, and, embracing him, could only sob forth the
words, "She is no more."
Karlson said not a word, but in the tumult of his own and others'
griefs, departed that night for Shaffhausen, and probably fled at the
same time from a beloved and a loving one,--from Gione and from Nadine.
By this eternal waterspout of the Rhine, this onward pressing, molten
avalanche, this gleaming perpendicular milky-way, his soul was slowly
healed; but he was long imprisoned in the dark, cold, serpent's-nest of
envenomed pains; they entwined and crawled over him, even to his
heart. For he believed, as most world-men among whom he had grown up
do,--perhaps, also, too much accustomed to analyzed ideas and opinions
by his favorite study, chemistry,--that our last sleep is annihilation,
as in the epopee the first man imagined the first sleep to be the first
death.
To Wilhelmi he only sent the name of his retreat and a poem, entitled,
"Grief-without Hope," which declared his disbelief, for he had never
broken the Ambrosia, whose delights a trust in immortality affords. But
just that strengthened his enfeebled heart, that the muses led him to
Hippocrene's spring of health.
Wilhelmi answered, that he had read his beautiful requiem to the
deceased, or the immortal one. A long swoon had occasioned the painful
mistake. Gione and he entreated him to follow speedily. Karlson
replied: "Fate had separated him from their beautiful feast by the
Alpine Wall, but as it would, like the Campan Vale, ever renew its
springs, he hoped to lose nothing but time by his delay."
Now that the next world had cast its supernatural light on Gione's
countenance, Karlson loved her too much to be capable of assisting at
the ceremony of losing her forever. I will give you the opinion I
formed of her by listening to his description.
Even by a love and a praise in a person's absence we may be won; how
much more, then, if both are thrown to us as farewell kisses after the
ascent to Heaven! Therefore the idea of the future funeral procession
behind my gay, richly decorated dust, onion and relic box is only
another incentive, not only to drug, but also to absolve myself, for
when older we are less missed. And even you, who so seldom hang us, or
drive us all to the Devil, I mean, how seldom soever the tempest of
anger sours the beer-barrel of your breast! Even you have no more
efficacious morsel of white chalk, no better _oleum tartari per
deliquium_,[5] with which you can sweeten your internal fluids, than
the thought how we shall all turn pale round your death-bed, and be
dumb at your grave-mound, and how none will forget you! I cannot
possibly believe that there exists one being who, when death draws him
into the diving-bell of the grave, will not leave _one_ weeping eye,
_one_ bending head behind, and therefore each one can love the soul
which will some time weep for him.
When I think now of the convalescent Gione, with her wounded heart,
which had received a new sensitiveness in the hot electric atmosphere
of the sinking thunderbolt of Death, I need not measure her emotion at
Karlson's poem, by the dew and hygrometer, nor with the loadstone of
her love. But not Wilhelmi's brilliant riches, nor his still more
brilliant conduct, her first choice, her first promise, forbade her
even to touch the diamond scales.
When Karlson told me all this, he turned Gione's ring-portrait upwards
on his finger, and pressed the hard edge of the ring-finger with his
tearful eyes, till the adorned hand was unconsciously touched by the
lip's kiss. The bashfulness of his grief moved me so much, that I
offered to take another route into the Vale, under the pretence that
the dreams of it had lessened the desire for the reality, and that we
should disturb the newly-affianced in their first rose-honey days, as
they had probably waited for the mild late spring. He divined my
intention; but his promise to come to-morrow dragged him by chains.
Right gladly would I have missed the new spring-filled Eden, and drawn
from my friend's feet the Jacob's ladder from which he might gaze on
his former glad heaven, but could not ascend to it. On the other hand,
I rejoiced at his firm, promise-keeping character, which opposed its
strong nature to the thorns and boring-worms of sorrow; as with the
increase of moonlight, tempests decrease. Unperceived, I now added
Gione, not only Karlson, to the list of rare beings, who, like
Raphael's and Plato's works, uncloud themselves only on earnest
contemplation, and who, as both, resemble the Pleiades, which to the
naked eye seems only to have seven suns, but with a telescope discloses
more than forty.
On the 20th, we started towards the Vale. On the way, I looked too
often into Karlson's faithful, heavenly, deep-blue eyes. I descended
into his heart, and sought the scene of the day on which the holy
church tie would tear the noble Gione forever from out his pure muse
and goddess-warmed heart. I confess I can imagine no day on which I
regard my friend with deeper emotion that on that never-to-be-forgotten
one, on which Fate gives him the brother kiss, the hand-pressure, the
land of love and Philadelphia and Vaucluse's spring, united in one
female heart.
The day before yesterday, at ten in the evening, we arrived at
Wilhelmi's Arcadian dwelling, which pressed its straw roof against a
green marble wall. Karlson found it easily from its proximity to the
famed Campan Cave, from which he had often broken stalactites. The sky
was clouded with colored shadows, and on the green cradle of slumbering
children night threw her star-embroidered cradle-cover, fastened to the
summits of the Pyrenees. From out Wilhelmi's hermitage advanced some
men in _black_ attire, with torches in their hands, who seemed to be
waiting for us, and told us the baron was in the Cave. By heaven, under
such circumstances, it is easier to imagine the most circumscribed,
than the _largest_ and most _beautiful_ Cave! The sable attendants
carried the flame before them, and drew the flying smoke-picture from
oak-top to oak-top, and led us, stooping, through the catacomb
entrance. But how splendidly was arched the high and wide grotto,[6]
with its crystal sides, shining like an illumined ice Louvre, a
gleaming sub-terrestrial heaven vault. Wilhelmi threw away a handful of
gathered spars, and joyfully hastened into his friend's arms. Gione,
with her sister, advanced from behind a connected stalactite and
stalagmite. The gleaming of the torches gave her an undecided outline,
but at length Wilhelmi advanced to her, and said, "Here is our friend."
Bending low, Karlson kissed the warm living hand, and was dumb with
emotion. But the firm features of Gione's earnest face, which wanted
but Nadine's juvenile bloom, changed into a shining joy, greater than
he dared to return or reward. "We have long expected and missed you in
this paradise," she said, with unshaken voice; and her clear, calm eye
opened a view into a richly-gifted, steadfast soul. "Welcome to the
infernal regions," said Nadine; "you believe in reunion and Elysium
now?" Though she received him with an assemblage or Flora of wit, or
was it grace? for they were difficult to distinguish, this cheerfulness
of character and acquirement seemed not to be the cheerfulness of a
contented or reposeful mind.
My friend introduced me properly, that no supermember or _hors
d'[oe]uvre_ should remain in this corporation of friendship.
To all of us--even to me--for around me never before seen beings
floated in silver reflections--it seemed as if the world had ceased,
Elysium had opened, and the separated, covered, sub-terrestrial regions
cradled only tranquil, but happy souls.
There was a certain heartfulness in the joyous interest which this
affectionate trinity took in Karlson's appearance, which generally
accompanies the last step before the disclosure of some hidden plan,
but this plan was concealed. To speak something also to me, Nadine
said, that there was a critical philosopher and arguer with them, who
would rejoice to hear any one _for_ or _against_ his opinions,--namely,
the house-chaplain. When we stepped from the illumined diamond and
magic cave into the dark night, we saw the cloak of Erebus hang in
thick cloudy folds over the earth, and pale lightning shot from the
nightly mist, the flowers breathed from covered calysses, and under the
fast approaching storm the nightingales raised their melodious voices
behind their blooming hedges.
Suddenly Gione walked more slowly by Karlson's side, and said, with
much warmth, but without hesitation: "I heartily love truth, even at
the expense of stage-like effect: I must, in the name of the Baron,
discover to you that he and I will to-morrow be forever united. You
must forgive _your_ friend that he would not celebrate this ceremony
without _his_."
I think that now, in Karlson's heart, the cooled lava immediately
became fluid and glowing. Suddenly lightning flashed from a cloud
around the rising moon, and illumined the rain-drops, intended for
darkness, in Gione's and in Karlson's eyes. Wilhelmi asked, "Can you
not forgive me?" Karlson pressed him warmly and lovingly to his
grateful heart: this lofty confidence of friendship, and this
affectionate proof of it, raised his strengthened soul above all
desires, and another's virtue spread in his breast the calm
tranquillity of his own. We took shelter for the night in three Thabor
huts,--the ladies in the first, Wilhelmi with the critical philosopher
in the second, Karlson and myself in the third,--which the Baron had
hired for us. The fatigue of the journey, and even of our feelings,
deferred our joys and confidences for another night. But I cannot tell
you how nobly sorrow changed into exaltation in my friend's
countenance, how grief fell like a cloud from his heaven, and
discovered the serene blue beneath. The sacrifices and virtues of our
beloved ones belong to the inexpressible joys which the soul at least
can count and appreciate; which it can imitate.
His and my eyes overflowed with holy gladness from a singularly elysian
mood of harmony in anticipation of the coming day. Ah, my Victor!
nations and men are only the _best_ when they are the gladdest, and
deserve Heaven when they enjoy it. The tear of grief is but a diamond
of the second water, but the tear of joy of the first. And therefore
fatherly fate, thou spreadest the flowers of joy, as nurses do lilies
in the nursery of life, that the awakening children may sleep the
sounder! O, let philosophy, which grudges our _pleasures_, and blots
them out from the plans of Providence, say by what right did torturing
_pain_ enter into our frail life? Have we not already an eternal right
to a warm down bed? I think not now of the deepest mattress in the
earth, because we are so pierced with stigmas of the past, so covered
with its wounds.
You once said to me: "In your early years, you have been drawn and
driven from the stoic philosophy by Sorites; for if the sensation of
pleasure be as little as the stoics pretend, it were wiser to convert
than to benefit your neighbor,--wiser to preach morality from pulpit
and desk than to practise it in the work-rooms,--wiser to turn towards
your neighbor the dirt-balls and _soap-pills_ of moral philosophy, than
the enlarged marble _soap-bubbles_ of joy. Further, that it is a
mistake to assert that virtue makes more worthy of happiness, if
happiness possessed not an eternal, independent value in itself; for
else it might be maintained that virtue would make the possessor of a
straw, &c. worthy--"
You said this once. Do you believe it yet?--I do.
502d STATION.
The Thundering Morning.--The Short Trip after the
Long One.--The Sofa-cushions.
Through the whole night, a half-lost thundering was heard, as though it
murmured in its sleep. In the morning, before sunrise, Karlson and
myself stepped out into the wide cloud-tapestried bridal-chamber of
nature. The moon approached the double moment of its waning and its
fulness. The sun, standing on America as on a burning altar, drove the
cloudy incense of its _feu de joie_ high and red into the air; but a
morning tempest boiled angrily above it, and darted its fierce
lightnings to meet his ascending rays. The oppressive heat of nature
drew longer and louder plaints from the nightingales, and evanescent
aroma from the long flower-meads. Heavy warm drops were pressed from
the clouds, and beat loudly on the stream and on the foliage. Only the
Mittagshorn, the pinnacle of the Pyrenees, stood brightly and clearly
in the heavenly blue. Now a gust of wind from the waning moon dispersed
the raging storm, and the sun stood victoriously under a triumphal arch
of lightnings. The wind restored the heaven's blue, and dashed the rain
behind the earth, and around the dazzling sun-diamond there lay only
the silvered fringes of the once threatening clouds.
O my Victor, what a new-born day was now on earth, encamped in the
glorious valley. The nightingales and the larks loudly sung its
welcome, the rosechafers rustled round its lily garlands, and the
eagle, riding on the highest cloud, surveyed it from mountain
to mountain. How rurally all things surrounded the serpentine
field-embracing Adour. The marble walls, not raised by human skill,
surround its flower-beds like large vases, and the Pyrenees, with their
high tops, watch over and protect the lowly scattered shepherd huts.
Tranquil Tempe! May a storm never disturb thy gardens and thy murmuring
Adour. May a stronger one never visit thee, than would gently rock the
cradle of nature, or dash a bee from the honey-dew of the wheat-sheaf,
or force but a single drop from the waterfall upon the flowers of thy
shores.
You must not think that I am placing my paintbrushes at my side to copy
the heavenly rounded valley by the measure of art for you; I will let
you peep into this picture-book of nature as chance shall turn each
succeeding page. My stations will lead you through its different
chambers, in which the rich dowry of Spring, like that of a king's
daughter, is placed for show. But truly it is a more glorious thing to
see the whole dowry disposed over the person of the royal bride
herself.
A servant seeking the chaplain, roused us both from our reverie. We saw
him advance towards a gentleman standing on the banks of the Adour, who
slowly turned down his rolled-up shirt-sleeves. It was the chaplain,
who had been catching crabs during the storm, and had subsequently
fished. As I knew that his hairy hand had worked for the food of the
critical, as well as his own philosophy, with trowel and mortar, with
pen and ink, I boldly advanced towards him, and told him what I was
writing. But the coarse, obstinate, yet timid free-mason, coldly
welcomed me in a language as broad as his own frosty visage.
He despises biographers; for the windows of a philosophical audience
are too high,--perhaps, as in ancient temples, in the roof,--so that
they cannot see into the streets of real life, as, according to
Winkelmann, the Roman windows were architecturally as high. Lord
Rochester is said to have been continually drunk during a whole
quintennium; but such a chaplain is capable of being _sober_ for an
entire decennium. A man like this bites the buds of all powerful
truths, experiences, and fictions, as ants bite the buds from
corn-seeds, that they may not fructify, but wither and die and form
building materials.
When the Chaplain left me to join the Baron, as consecrator of the
marriage sacrament, I found Karlson in the dustrain of a near cascade.
Round him, almost close to our windows, the hermitages of the farmers
waded in green foliage, with the fresh harvest wreath roofed by faded
ones; and inside, there bloomed families, outside, elms. He showed me
Gione's card, which, he said, she had given him before her marriage.
But it was not so; he had found it on the moss near the cascade. It
represented a Roman landscape, and beside the living fountain was the
pictured one of Tivoli, and on a stone in the foreground Gione's name
was written. Such a printed trifle, a beloved name shortly before its
sublunar annihilation, moves the whole heart with a succession of
pleasing reflections.
Karlson went to the ceremony. I remained alone under the splendid blue
heaven, and rejoiced that all the inhabitants of Campan wore its
livery, the blue, which we had yesterday mistaken for black.
I will not hide from you that during the coupling, softened by the many
beauties of spring, I lost myself in Nadine's equally charming ones,
which were an undiscovered Central Africa for me, while I wished she
were as warm. After eight or ten dreams, I saw the beautiful couples
cross my path. How earnestly glad and serene we all stood under the
spring music of flutes and pipes, and harps and warbling, which were
living around us, with and without wings. Gione and Karlson concealed
an equal emotion, as at an almost equal fate. Wilhelmi, who is, as a
comet, sometimes in the burning, sometimes in the freezing point of a
sun, requires no joys than those of others to make him happy. But a
tear stood in Nadine's bright eye, which could not be smiled or looked
away. Her heart seemed to me to resemble the earth, whose exterior is
cold, but which carries in its centre a latent heat. And yesterday her
whole being seemed so mirthful and so gay!
We never make more erroneous conclusions in our opinions on any subject
than on woman's cheerfulness. Oh! how many of these charming beings
there are, who decay unvalued, who, while jesting, despair, and while
joking, bleed to death; who hide their merry laughing eyes behind a
wall, as behind a fan, to give glad vent to their long-restrained
tears; who pay for a merry day by a tearful night, just as an unusually
clear, transparent, and fogless air betokens rain. Remember the
beautiful N. N., and also her youngest sister. In the mean time, the
charming, sun-variegated dew-drop under Nadine's eye was balanced by a
wart of half the size, the solitaire among her personal charms.
Wilhelmi's lyric and dithyrambic head was filled with projects for
pleasure, and with the eagerness of delight, he demanded a hasty
determination concerning the proper use and enjoyment of the day. "O
yes," said I, quickly and impertinently, "life flies to-day on a
minute-hand, like an alarum it winds off; but how shall we form a plan,
a good plan?" Nadine, who had arranged everything beforehand with the
bridegroom, replied: "I think we need none for such a delightful day,
and such a charming valley. We will pilgrimize carelessly along the
banks of the Adour, the length of the Vale, and rest at every new
flower, and at every bud, and in the evening we will sail back by
moonlight! That would be quite Arcadian and shepherd-like in this
Arcadia. Will you all? You certainly will, dearest sister?" "O yes,"
said Gione, "for I think we are as yet all strangers to the charms of
this paradise." The Baron seemed to hesitate before giving his consent,
and said: "It depends whether the ladies can walk two and a quarter
miles in one day."[7] I was mad with joy, and cried, "Charming!" Such a
long horizontal heaven-journey, such a melodious Arpeggio through the
chords of delight was an old innate wish of my youth. I imparted my
delight to the Chaplain, to whose feelings this _voyage pitturesque_
was as repugnant as a Good Friday procession, and to whom, instead of
this heaven-way, that of Hoefer[8] would have been more acceptable,
because he would rather have remained at home to read, and because he
did not enjoy the Epopee of nature as a man, nor scan it as a
naturalist, but like an usher, separated and divided it, for practice
in building up again. I said to him: "If we two will be shepherds,
representing the old Myrtil and Phylax, it would be interesting. You
know best that whims should be ten times less bold before ladies and
refined ears than on print, and that for such people it has to be
filtered through so many filtering-papers and strainers, that I would
not give a proof-sheet for it after the process."
A hired country-house, at the end of the valley, was the architectural
Eden with which Wilhelmi intended to surprise and delight his bride in
this botanic one. But Nadine alone knew it.
In as many moments as a swan would take to spread his wings and rise,
we were all ready. I do not blame man for making preparations for the
examination for death, but for no (shorter) journey. The long _hunt_
destroys the game of enjoyment. I, for my part, never think of starting
until I am on the road.
Wilhelmi loaded himself with his bride's guitar; Karlson carried a
portable ice-cellar. The ladies had their parasols; the Chaplain and I
had nothing. I whispered to the shallow Phylax,--so I can now call him,
and myself the old Myrtil,--"Sir Chaplain, we rebel against all good
manners if we follow empty-handed." He immediately offered himself to
Gione, as pack-horse, wagon, and carrier for her--parasol. But clever
genius prompted me to return to Karlson's chamber, and bring two
cushions from the sofa, and I returned with these twins in my arms;
nothing could have been more appropriate, as the ladies sat down a
thousand times on the way, and could not have dipped their silken
elbows in the juicy paint of the flowers. To his vexation, Phylax was
obliged to carry the soft block in his arms; I hung the other one, like
a stick, to my thumb. At last we started.
We advanced towards the Pyrenees. Corn-fields, waterfalls, shepherd
huts, marble blocks, woods and grottoes, animated by the vascular
system of the many-branched Adour, passed beautifully before our eyes,
and we were forced to leave them behind, like the bright years of youth
changed into dreams by the stern hand of Time.
Ah, Victor, travelling alone is life, as life, on the contrary, is only
a journey. And if, like certain shell-fish, I could only push myself on
with one foot, or, like sea-nettles and women, I could only progress
six lines in a quarter of an hour, or if I lived under Fritz II. or
Fritz I. (Lycurgus), who both forbade a long journey, I would make a
short one, that I might not perish like the loach, which languishes in
every vessel, if not shaken.
How spirited, how poetical, how inventive can we not be while we run
onwards. As Montaigne, Rousseau, and the sea-nettle only shine when
they move on. By Heaven! it is no wonder that man rises and will go on;
for does not the sun follow the pedestrian from tree to tree? does not
its reflected likeness swim after him in the water? do not landscapes,
mountains, hills, men, rapidly changing, come and go? and does not
Freedom's breath blow on the ever-varying Eden, when, released from the
neck and heart-breaking chains of narrow circumstances, we fly freely
and gladly, as in dreams, over ever-new scenes.
For unfortunately the bell-glass over men and melons, which at first is
covered by a broken bottle, must always be raised higher and higher,
and at last removed entirely. At first, a man will go into the next
town, then to the university, then to an important residency, then--if
he has only written twenty lines--to Weimar, and finally, to Italy or
to heaven. And if the planets were stringed together on a cord, and
near each other, or if the rays of light were roads, and the atoms of
light bridges, then surely would post-houses be erected in Uranus, and
the insatiable inner man--for the outer one is so very satiable--would
go longing and roaming from planet to planet.----
Therefore, my Victor, nothing is confined in so many prison-walls as is
this our human self. And our cages are enclosed, onion-like, one in the
other. Tour and my _self_ are imprisoned not only on this earth, but in
this King's Bench are the town walls; in these our four walls surround
us; in the four walls, the arm-chair or the bed; in this again, the
shirt or the coat, or both; and lastly, the body. And, to be minute
(according to Soemmering), in the brain crevices, the duck's
pond.---- Start at the fatal many-sided suite of houses of correction
which surround thy_self_?----
503d STATION.
Lampoon on the Chaplain.--Praise of Him.--The Diamond.--Opinions
against Immortality.--Eden Jokes.
We two fellow-carriers formed the rear-guard. I wished to enter into
discourse, but Phylax had a very poor opinion of me; at most he thought
me a fickle sentimentalist who only portrays feelings. Yet feelings are
the sponge of atmospheric air, which the poet, on his high Parnassus,
as well as the philosophical diver in his depths, _must_ hold in his
mouth, and yet poetry has cast an earlier light on many obscure works
of nature than philosophy, as the dark _new moon_ borrows light from
_Venus_.
But the philosopher sins against poets more than you sin against the
followers of Kant, from whom you seem to expect that they shall write
pleasingly. Your arguments are ideas, not reasonings, when you say that
philosophy's attendants are like those of Turkish ladies, mute, black,
and deformed; that the philosophical market-place is a _forium
morionum_,[9] and that beauty is forbidden to philosophers, as it was
to the Helots, who were killed for possessing it. Is it not evident
that a certain barbarous, un-German, far-fetched language is more an
ornament than a detriment to it. Oracles despise grace, _vox dei
sol[oe]cismus_, i. e. a Kantist cannot be read,--he must be studied.
Further, it is not beneath a philosopher to enrich the language instead
of the science. For some other may seek the ideas for the terms, and
find them, as animals were found for the Ammonites. Therefore the
Greeks have the same term for _word_ and _knowledge_, which combination
was at last deified. The philosopher should always write over his door
_pour l'oudalgie_,[10] instead of "here lives a dentist." This is the
best reason, except a second one, why the philosopher, especially the
Kantist, as I saw in Phylax, needs not books, nor men, nor experience,
nor chemistry, botany, the fine arts, nor natural history. He can and
must decipher the positive, the material, the given number, the unknown
X. He creates the term, and sucks, as children often do,--it may
suffocate them,--his own blistered tongue.
I must return to the company! As the Chaplain carried his
walking-stick, or rather walking-tree of a cushion, with the greatest
indifference towards me, I wished to prejudice him for me by a
panegyric at the expense of Kant. I said to him: "It surprised me that
the philosophers should have suffered Kant to have made so great a
distinction between them and artists, and only allowed the merit of
genius to the latter. He says, in Sec. 47 of his 'Kritik der
Urtheilkraft,' 'In sciences, the greatest inventor is only
distinguished from the most labored imitator and apprentice by
gradation; but from, those whom nature has gifted for beautiful nature,
he is specifically distinguished.' This is derogatory, Sir Chaplain,
and besides, not true. Why can Kant, then, only make Kantists, but no
Kants?[11] Are new systems discovered by syllogisms, yet they are
proved and tried by them? Can, then, the connection of a new
philosophical idea with the old one better explain or facilitate its
comprehension than the same connection which each new poetic one must
have with old ones, which are the means of its creation. Sir Chaplain,
I know not whom Kant has most sinned against, Truth, himself, or his
school. Leibnitz's 'Monadology,' _harmonia praestabilita_, &c., are as
much pure, brilliant emanations of genius, as any beaming form in
Shakespeare or Homer. Besides, Leibnitz is a genial almighty Demiurg in
the philosophical world, its greatest and first circumnavigator, and
who, happier than Archimedes, found in his genius the standing-point
from which he might move the philosophical _universa_, and play with
worlds. He was an extraordinary spirit, he threw new chains on the
earth, but he himself bore none: I think you agree with me, Sir
Chaplain!" He replied, He did not, that the critical philosophy knew
what to make of Leibnitz's experiments, his immaterial world, the
asserted approximation of the definite to the indefinite line, and how
to honor genius. In short, I had rather angered than conquered him.
Karlson, whom even Amor's torch could not blind to the philosophical
one, took as much interest in our war as could be taken with the ears.
Fortunately we all stood still. A small diamond had fallen from
Nadine's necklace, and she sought for the silver petrified spark in the
grass. Strange that a man always hopes to find a thing on the spot
where he perceives his loss. Nadine looked for her hardened dew-drop on
the sparkling, spangled mead. As a bright diamond of the first water,
it was so easily mistaken for a dew-drop, that I remarked, seeing one
in Nadine's breast-rose, "Everything is covered with soft diamonds, and
who will find the hard one? The dew in your rose sparkles as brightly
as the lost stone." She looked down, and in the rose-cup lay the
sought-for gem! It was thought I had been clever, and I was angry with
myself for having been so stupid. But Nadine liked me no less for it,
and that was reward enough.
As the Adour bent, not an arm, but a finger, around this gay moss-bank
and bees' sugar-field, the whole company sat among the bees and the
flowers, and the cushion-bearers laid down their burdens. Nadine said,
playfully, "If flowers have souls, the bees, whose nurses they are,
must seem to them like dear sucking children." "They have," said
Karlson, "souls like frozen window flowers, or like the tree of
Petit,[12] which I once showed to you, or like pyramids of alum." "O,
you always destroy, sir," said Gione. "Nadine and I once painted to
ourselves an elysium for the souls of faded flowers." "I believe in a
middle path for flowers after their death," said Wilhelmi, seriously;
"the souls of lilies probably go into woman's forehead; hyacinth and
forget-me-not souls into woman's eyes, and rose souls into lips and
cheeks." I added, "It is a fortunate coincidence for this hypothesis,
that a girl has perceptibly more color from the departing soul at the
moment when she breaks or kills a rose."
Joyfully and affectionately we continued our journey. Only into my
carrier-companion the souls of thistles and sloes seemed to have
entered. This play of ideas and this politeness in argument provoked
him. Only Karlson pleased him.
At last the Chaplain said to me: "No immortality but that of moral
beings can be discussed, and with them it is a postulate or
apprenticeship of practical sense. For as a full conformity of the
human will to the moral law, with which the just Creator never can
dispense, is quite unattainable by a finite being, an eternally
continuing progress, i. e. an unceasing duration, must contain and
prove this conformity in God's eyes, who overlooks the everlasting
course. Therefore our immortality is necessary."
Karlson stood still at Gione's side, that we might approach, and said:
"Dear philosopher, pray take from this proof the boldness or the
indistinctness which it has for laymen. How can we imagine the
supervision, i. e. the termination, of an infinite, a never-ending
course? or how will you make the eternity of time harmonize with the
eternity of the moral requirements. How can a righteousness, scattered
and dispersed over an interminable period of time, satisfy Divine
Justice, which must require this righteousness in each portion of the
period. And has the constant approximation of man towards this state of
purity been proved? And will not the number, if not the grossness of
faults, in this infinite space, increase with the number of virtues?
And what comparison will the list of faults bear to that of the virtues
at the examination? But let us leave that also. Will, in the sight of
the Divine eye, the moral purity of two different beings--for instance,
a seraph and a man, or of two different men, as Robespierre and
Socrates--be equally contained in two equally long, i. e. eternal,
courses of time? If on comparing the two, a difference appear, then one
of them cannot have attained the so-called perfection, and must still
be mortal."
The Chaplain answered: "But Kant does not intend to demonstrate
immortality by this argument. He says even, that it has been left so
uncertain in order that free, pure will, and no selfish views, shall
prompt our aspirations to immortality." "Strange," said Karlson. "But
as we have now discovered this intention, its object would be defeated.
Philosophers ought then to imitate me, and attack immortality to the
advantage of virtue. It is a strange axiom to presuppose the truth of
an opinion from its indemonstrability. Either immortality can be
proved, then one half of your argument is right, or it cannot, then the
whole of it is wrong. Besides, if the belief in immortality makes
virtue selfish, the experience of it in the next world would make it
more so. Does the belief in it deter the common man from doing what his
confessor forbids, and forgives him? As little as the first stroke of
apoplexy deters the drunkard from rushing to the second."
504th STATION.
Flower Toying.
Karlson joined the others in conversation, and Phylax was enraged that
he could not triumph,--not even dispute. I said to him, that my
opinions agreed with his, though not on the same grounds, and that,
uniting, we would subsequently together issue forth and attack Karlson.
I then went with my silken club to Nadine, and on a rose-bush showed
her the flying light-magnets, the shining will-o'-the-wisps of night,
the brown glowworms which she had never seen by day. I colonized a box
with them for a living firework in the evening. Chance had romantically
bent a bright rose-bush between graceful bluebells, on a green marble
boundary stone; its foliage had the appearance of being seamed with
black glowworms;[13] the lily-chafer hung like gold embroidery on the
pale, ripe roses; long-legged, shining gnats ran glittering over the
thorns; the flower-divers and nectary treasure-diggers, the bees,
covered the rose-cups with new thorns; the butterflies, like moving
tints, like Epicurean colors, gently floated round the branch's gay
world. I cannot tell you how this glance, turned from the vast whole on
to a beautiful small portion, gave a warmer glow to our hearts and to
nature. Instead of the hand, we could only hold, like children, the
fingers of the great mother of life, and reverently kiss them. By the
creation, God became human for men, as therefore for angels an
angel,--like the sun whose bright immensity the painter gently divides
into the beauties of a human face.
Wilhelmi said, that, to rise into Eden or Arcadia, he would need no
larger wings than the four of a butterfly. What a poetical,
paradisaical existence, like the papilio, to roam without stomach or
hunger, among buds and flowers, to suffer no long night, no winter, and
no storm, to toy away one's life in a delightful chase for another
papilio, or to nestle, like the flower-colored bird of paradise, among
lemon-blossoms, to float round blooming honey-cups, and to be rocked in
silken cradles!
Blissfully we proceeded on our way, and each new step drove an exciting
blood-drop to our warmed hearts. I said to the Chaplain, that the
temple of nature had been changed into a concert-hall for me, and every
vocal into instrumental music. Victor! should not philosophy and the
philosophers imitate electric bodies, which not only enlighten, but
also attract? The soul's wine will indeed ever taste of the bodily
barrel-hoops, but the soul is scarcely spirit-like enough only to serve
as a body to another soul.
505th STATION.
The Ephemera.--Relative Conclusions.--Doubts of the Length of the
Chain of Living Beings.--The Wart-Eaters.--The Cure.
The sun and the valley surrounded us with their burning-glasses, and it
was pleasant to sit down in a shady spot, and eat; and as just opposite
to us was a marble-quarry, and close to the iron rock-wall a sap-green
meadow, and beside us a group of elms and a little shining solitary
white house, we asked at it for as much food as a roaming, contented
quintet requires. The mistress of the house was alone, the husband was
at work (as most Campanians are, in Spain), four children waited on us;
our ice-cellar was opened, and with its contents the soul was warmed
and the body cooled. The white glowing keystone of the heaven arch
awoke with its flames the noonday wind, which slept on the cold summit
of the Pyrenees.
Little or nothing would taste well to poor Phylax, to whom it was more
important to prove that he would be eternal. Fortunately, the French
wine armed him more with French customs, and he asked the Baron
politely: "I believe I owe M. Karlson some proofs of our immortality.
Might I be allowed to give them?" Wilhelmi sent him to Gione, saying,
"Ask there." Gione willingly granted his request, and said, "Why should
not recollections of immortality ornament our joys as much as monuments
do English gardens?" Nadine threw in the question, "But if men quarrel
about the hopes of humanity, what remains for women?" "Her heart and
its hopes, Nadine," said Gione. Wilhelmi said, smiling: "The owl of
Minerva, as all other owls, is said to forebode destruction to a
household, by settling on its roof. But I hope it is not so." I added,
"The lives of all our beloved ones are tied to the obelisk of
immortality, as to that of Rameses,[14] that the danger may double our
strength; for they will be destroyed if it rebound."
In the mean time, Karlson had taken an ephemeral fly from a neighboring
elm, to which it had clung, in order to cast off its super body before
death. The ephemera should not be an embodiment of our immortality,[15]
but of our unfolding; for, unlike other insects, after all its
transformations, and when already furnished with wings, it changes its
shape once more before death. He held it before us, and said: "In my
opinion, a philosophical ephemera would argue thus. What! I should have
uselessly accomplished all my various changes, and the Creator had no
other intention in calling me from the egg to the grub, then to a
chrysalis, and at last to a flying being, whose wings must burst
another covering before death, with this long range of spiritual and
corporeal developments, he should have had no other aim than a six
hours' existence, and the grave must be the only goal of so long a long
a course?" The Chaplain opportunely answered, "Your argument proves
against yourself, for it is _petitio principii_ to presuppose mortality
amongst ephemera."
I confess I am an enemy to these relative conclusions, because they
take as much from truth as they give to eloquence, for contrary
opinions can be proved by them. To one whose eyes are hurt by a grain
of sand, I can prove that he is comparatively happy, as there are many
in the world who suffer from sand-blisters and gravel; and also that he
is unfortunate, as Sultanic eyes are never pressed by anything harder
than Circassian eyelids--or two rosy lips. Thus I can make the world
immense in comparison to bullets, grains of poison, or round puddings,
or minute, if placed beside Jupiter, the sun, or the milky-way. If the
ephemera on the ladder of existence would turn its back on the
brilliant development of the beings above it, and only count the
important ones on the steps beneath it, it would increase in its own
importance. In short, our oratorical fantasy continually mistakes the
distinction between more and less for that of something or nothing; but
every relative conclusion must be based on something positive, which
only eternal eyes, which can measure the whole range of innumerable
degrees, can truly weigh. Indeed, there must be some bodily substance,
and were it even the earth; for every comparison, every measurement,
presupposes a fixed, unchanging standard. Therefore, the ephemeral
development is a true one, and the conclusions on it are the same as on
a seraphic one. The difference in the degrees can only bring forth
_relative_, not _opposite_ conclusions. And here, in this letter--for
in print I would not dare to do it--I will acknowledge a doubt. No one
has ever _seen_ the steps of the ladder of beings above us,--no one has
_counted_ those beneath us. What if the former were less, the latter
greater, than we have hitherto imagined. The eternal promotion of souls
from angels to archangels, in short, the nine philosophical hierarchies
have only been asserted, but not proved. The common opinion, that the
immense difference between man and the Eternal must be filled up by a
chain of spiritual giants, is false; as no chain can shorten the
distance, much less fill it, for it will ever retain the same width;
and the seraph, i. e. the highest finite being according to human
thoughts, must imagine just as many, if not more, beings above him, as
I do beneath me. Astronomy, this sawing machine of suns, this ship's
wharf and laboratory of earths, would persuade us that the
_enlargement_ of worlds and beings is a sign of their improvement. But
over the whole sky there hang only earth and fire-balls, and all things
on them, from milk-way to milk-way, are less than the wishes and
longings of our hearts. Then why should our earth alone, why not every
other also, be progressing? why should they, rather than we, have the
start in this inaugural eternity? In short, it may be disputed if in
the whole universe there are other angels and archangels than Victor
and Jean Paul. It seems scarcely credible to me. But truly the
_melodious_ progression to sublime beings has hitherto been merely
taken for granted. I believe in a _harmonious_ one, in an eternal
ascension, but in no created culmination.
I presume Karlson intended to answer my argument, not on the seraphs,
but on ephemera, when Nadine, who had borrowed the fly in order to
examine it, held it too near her eyes, and thereby disturbed and
extinguished our Mendelssohn-Platonic conversation. For Madame Berlier
(such was the noble name of our temporary hostess) stepped up to
Nadine, and said: "It is a pity for the pain. You must take the
wart-locust, I have proofs," do you understand? It is this. The
so-called wart-eater, a locust with light brown spots, takes away a
wart in a very short time by a single bite. Dame Berlier, over whom, as
over most Southrons, beauty had greater power than self-love and sex,
had falsely imagined that Nadine wished to annihilate the only fault in
her charming form with the fly. The Chaplain had scarcely heard the
wart-eater mentioned, when he vanished among the green, and commenced a
hunt for wart-locusts. I was vexed that I had known the remedy as well
as Dame Berlier, and never thought of it. For a shabby simile I should
have easily recollected it, but not for a useful cure. Fortune
permitted him soon to return with the winged wart-operator; this
excited my envy. When he gave it to Nadine, the officious Phylax had
squeezed, with the letter and paper press of his hands, like in a good
calendar-press, the brown spotted vegetable-eater to--death. The animal
could bite no more; I immediately darted off in search of another, and
soon returned, holding one by the tips of its wings, and said, I would
myself hold it over the wart until he would operate on it. While
performing the action I praised it. Every great deed, I said, is only
accomplished in the soul, at the moment of determination; when it comes
outward and is repeated by the body,--which holds the locust,--it
disperses into insignificant movements and thirds; but when it is done,
as now the operation, it becomes great again, and, ever increasing,
flows onward through all time. Thus the Rhine rushes like a giant from
its summit, disperses in the fog, falls as rain upon the plain, then it
forms itself into clouds, and roams over the sands, and carries suns
instead of rainbows.
It need not be concealed from you that it affected me to look into the
retina of two such bright and warm, upturned eyes, without mentioning
the whole warlike array of curls and lips, and forehead, and the
Waterloo landscapes of the cheeks. Nadine's terror at the teeth of the
brown little doctor made her more charming, and the danger of my
situation greater. After holding it for some time, when I thought the
operation was finished, she told me the locust had not yet touched her,
as I held it two or three Parisian feet too far from the wart. It is
true, I had lost myself in her net skin; but I remarked that the cure
could not be accomplished, if I did not rest the ball of my right hand
slightly on her cheek, in order to hold the wart-eater more firmly over
the wart. Now he bit the required wound, and propelled into it as much
of his corrosive fluid as he carried with him. I artfully diverted
Nadine's pain, which resembled that of a pin pricking, by
philosophizing. Man, I said, finds the stoic theory true and forcible
for all pain, only not for the present. And when he bleeds from cut
wounds, he imagines bruises heal more easily. He therefore defers his
practice of the stoic-school until his own schooling is over. O, but
then he stands by a running stream, waiting until the waters shall have
passed. True firmness bears the bite of a locust, and rejoices at the
trial!
Now the operation was happily accomplished, which could easily excite
an illness in me. It is true that her countenance had inflicted a
deeper wound on me than the wart-eater upon it,--I should fear and
examine whether mine, which was just as near to hers, had done as much
damage; but Nadine is exceedingly--young. The hearts of young girls,
like new waterbutts, at first let everything drop through, until in
time, the vessels swell and thus retain their contents.
506th STATION.
Objections To Immortality.--The Second Childhood of the
Outer and Inner Man.
We broke up and proceeded. On high, light feathers floated through the
sky, like the loose-flowing hair of the sun, which could not veil it.
The day became hotter and stiller. But our path lay beneath a green
roof, and each branch spread over us a parasol of broad fresh leaves.
Gione asked, "Can we not continue our conversation in walking?" O, your
Clotilde should know her; she has, excepting her charms, half her soul.
No discord exists between her outer and inner harmony; her earnest,
generous soul resembles the palm-tree, which has neither bark nor
branches, but which bears broad foliage and buds on its summit.
"Gione," said Nadine, "these arguments unsettle our minds, instead of
removing our doubts." "No one," she replied, "has yet given his
opinion; if we even have the firmest convictions, still by their
beautiful conformity with another's convictions our own become more
beautiful and firm." "Just as water-plants, surrounded by their water,
are yet as much refreshed by rain as land plants are," said Myrtil (I
am Myrtil).
Wilhelmi said, just as we were passing through the Midsummer's-day
night of a grotto cooled by oakshade and cascades: "Our conversation
would better suit a total eclipse of the sun. I would that I could see
one, when the moon hangs beauteously before the midday sun, when the
noisy day is suddenly hushed, when the nightingales sing, the flowers
fade, and when nightly mists and shuddering cold and dew fall." Phylax
had now let slip his sofa-cushion into a murmuring spring; Nadine saw
it, and, not to confuse him in the act of drawing it out, she, with
charming zeal, drove us back to our conversation. Her intercourse with
the world had given her a playful, light, ever-joyous exterior. But
Gione's style, like the highest Grecian, is, artistically speaking,
somewhat meagre and spare,--and the ball-rooms had made her, as
mahogany presses make dresses, more agreeable. But her exterior charms
did not contradict or injure her interior beauty.
I said to Karlson, "Pray, prove to us the spiritual mortality, this
soul's death." "M. Karlson needs not do that," answered the stupid
Phylax, vexed at the wet cushion, "only the assertor must prove."
"Very well," I said, "I call proofs objections, but I shall certainly
give you only two;--firstly, the proof or objection: the simultaneous
decay and destruction of the body and of the soul; secondly, the
absolute impossibility of ascertaining the mode of life of a future
existence, or as the Chaplain would say, to see into the spiritual
world from the sensuous one. Now, M. Karlson, throw your two bombs into
the greatest possible angles, which, according to Hennert, is 40
degrees, but according to Bezout, 43 degrees."
He aimed well. He showed how the spiritual Dryad flowered, burst and
dispersed with the corporeal bark, how the noblest impulses are chained
to the lead--earth, revolving wheel of the body; how memory,
imagination, and madness only feed on the egg-yolk of the brain,--how
bravery and mildness stand in as opposite degree to blood as leeches
and Jews;[16] how, in age, the inner and outer man together bend
towards the grave, together petrify, together, like metal compositions,
_slowly_ cool, and at last together die!
He then asked why, with the continual experience that every bodily
down-bending digs a spiritual wound, and with this unceasing parallel
of body and soul, we give to the latter, after death, everything which
we have seen annihilated in the former. He said, and I believe it, that
neither Bonnet's underbody, nor the incorporated soul corsets of
Plattner (the "second soul organ") can diminish the difficulty of the
question, for as both soul's under-garments or night-gowns and
pinafores, always share, in life, the good and bad fate of the coarse,
corporeal coat and martyr-cloak, and as in us double-cased English
watches, the works, and the first and second cases (Bonnet's and
Plattner's) always suffered and gained together, it would be absurd to
seek the Iliad of the future world in the narrow hazel-nut shell of the
_revived_ little body which has first stood and fallen with the coarse
outward one.
I then asked him to aim his second ball in the angle of forty degrees
also. I added, that "I would have begged leave to give a long
parliamentary speech on it, but that long speeches have a life and
reproducing power, as, according to Reaumuer, long animals more easily
re-form themselves, when cut, than short ones." Though certainly it
occurs to me, that Unzer says, tall persons do not live as long as
short ones. But Karlson needed little time or power to prove the
uncertainty of the next world. The Sun-land behind the hillocks of the
God's acre, behind the pest-cloud of Death, is covered by a complete,
an impenetrable darkness of twelve inches, or of as many holy nights.
He showed, and not badly, what an immense leap beyond all terrestrial
analogies and experiences it is, to hope for, i. e. to create, a world,
a transcendent Arcadia, a world of which we know neither copy nor
original, which wants no less than a form and a name, map and globe,
another Vespucius Americus, of which neither chemistry nor astronomy
can give us the compounds or the quarters; a universe of air, on which,
from the leaf-stripped, faded soul, a new body will bud forth, i. e. a
nothing on which nothing is to embody itself.
O, my good Karlson! how could your noble soul omit a second world which
is already contained in this physical first one, like bright crystals
in dark earth, namely, the sun-world of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and
_Beauty_,[17] glowing in our souls, whose golden vein inexplicably
extends its ramification through the dark, dirty clump of the sensuous
world.
It was now my turn to answer: "I will lessen your two difficulties, and
then I will give my innumerable proofs. You are no materialist,[18] you
therefore take for granted that bodily and mental activity only
accompany and mutually excite each other. Yes, the body represents the
keys of the inner Harmonica through all its scales. Hitherto only the
corporeal outward signs have been called feelings, as the swelling
heart and the slowly-beating pulse--longing; the outpouring of gall,
anger, and so on. But the net-like texture, the anastomy between the
inner and outer man, is so life-full, so warm, that to every _picture_,
every _thought_,--a nerve, a fibre must move. We should also observe,
and put into the notes of speech all the bodily after sounds of
poetic, algebraic, artistic, numismatic, and anatomic ideas. But the
sounding-board of the body is neither the soul's scale nor its
harmony. Grief has no resemblance to a tear,--shame, none to the
cheek-imprisoned blood,--wit, none to champagne,--the idea of this
valley, none to its portrait on the retina. The inner man, this God,
hidden in the statue, is not of marble as it is, but in the stony
limbs, the living ones grow and ripen in an unknown life. We do not
sufficiently mark how the inner man even tames and forms the outer one;
how, for example, the passionate body which, according to physiology,
should ever increase in heat, is gradually cooled and extinguished by
principles,--how terror, anger, holds the dividing texture of the body
in a spiritual grasp. When the whole brain is paralyzed, every nerve
rusty and exhausted, and the soul carrying leaden weights, man needs
but to _will_ (which he can do every moment), he needs only a letter, a
striking idea, and the fibre-work of the soul's mechanism proceeds
again without help from the body."
Wilhelmi said, "Then the soul is but a watch which winds itself."
"There must always be some _perpetuum mobile_," I said, "for all things
have moved for an eternity already. The question is, either the soul
never winds off, or it is its own watchmaker. I return to the subject.
If a ruptured life-vein in the fourth brain-chamber of a Socrates place
the whole land of his ideas and moral tendencies in a blood-bath, these
ideas and moral tendencies will surely be covered with blood-water, but
not spoilt by it; because not the drowned brains were virtuous and
wise, but his _self_ was, and because the dependence of a watch on its
case for protection from dust, &c. does not prove the identity of the
two, or that the watch consists only of cases. As spiritual exertions
are not bodily ones, but only _precede_ or _follow_ them; and as every
spiritual activity leaves traces, not only in the soul, but also in the
body; must, then, if apoplexy or age destroy corporeal activity,--must
the soul's fire be therefore quenched? Is there no difference between
the soul of a _childish_ old man, and that of a _child_? Must the soul
of Socrates, imprisoned in Borgia's body as in a mud-bath, lose its
moral powers, and does it suddenly change its virtuous qualities for
vicious ones? Or shall in left-handed wedlock (which has no common
property of body and soul) the one conjugal half only share the gains,
not also the losses of the other? Shall the ablactated soul feel only
the blooming, not also the faded body? And if it does, the earth
surrounding it must, as our earth does to the superior planets, give it
the reflection of our advancing and retrograding. If we shall ever be
disembodied, the slow hand of time, that is, ever encroaching age, must
do it. If our course is not to be concluded in one world, the gulf
between it and the second must always appear to us a grave. The _short_
interruption to our progress by age, and the _longer_ one by death,
destroy this progress as little as the _shortest_ interruption by
sleep. We anxiously suppose--as the first man did--the _total_
sun-eclipse of sleep to be the _night_ of death, and this again the
_doomsday_ of the world."
"That must yet be proved, although I believe it," replied Phylax.
New beauties prevented my answering, and closed the 506th Station.
(P. S.--I have been told the Chaplain has declared that he had
purposely not replied to several of my arguments, but he hoped he could
see them in print, and then he would publish his opinions. But he will
scarcely live until this letter is printed, and he will answer it.)
507th STATION.
The Theft of the Souvenir.--Answers to Previous Stations.--On the
Emigration of the Dead to the Planets.--The Threefold World in
Man.--Grief without Hope.--The Seal of Immortality.--The
Country-seat.--The Balloons.--Ecstasy.
When it is three o'clock, and a wandering Arcadian council is very well
but somewhat warm, when the narrowing Adour, which has its source at
the end of the Valley, flows round a projecting tongue of land, and
draws its silver gauze cover over the pale moon reposing on its
breast,[19] when round this slip of earth, this flowery anchoring
place, half water scene, half bowling green, a broadleaved oak arcade
grows, beneath which trembles a sun-gilt shadow, gliding from between
the branches of the trees, on to the grass, embroidered by the
restless, roving, gay-colored sand, on the book of nature--its insects,
when the hammering in the shining marble blocks, the living Alp-horns,
the bleating pasture-sheep, and the murmuring of waves fill the heart
to its topmost branches and up to the brim with life-balsam, and the
head with life-spirit; and when so many beauties are heard and
seen,--living beauties who walk are inclined to sit down on the slip of
earth, after the cushion-carriers have placed their burdens as
resting-places for their arms.
My dear Victor! all this came to pass.
While sitting, long speeches were not as practicable as while walking.
Even before, when we, from some distance, were choosing this spot for a
resting-place, they had suffered considerably. I remained on the shore
near Nadine, whose cheeks, reflected in the shadow-painted waves,
appeared a charming pale red, as though a cochineal had bled to death
on them. The walk and her red parasol had been too great colorists.
My dear brother, I am preparing to fall in love. The operation on the
wart was unimportant as a corner-piece of vexation, as negative
electricity; but warts have their good points.
Nadine plucked roses and other flowers. I drew an empty jewel-box from
my pocket,--it was empty, like the 9th Kurstuhl, the Elias chair,[20]
or the _limbus patrum_,--and held it under them, begging her to shake
the flowers, that I might catch the millipeds,[21] which, like tallow
candles, are more suitable for the eye than the nose. I caught a whole
germanic diet of these creatures from the fragrant flower-cups, and
imprisoned them in the box.
During the flower-toying, which brought us nearer to each other, a
small cockchafer fell on my skin. I looked round for the flowers and
could find nothing till I saw, protruding from Nadine's left pocket, a
souvenir, filled with sweet-smelling herbs. To steal from a beautiful
woman is often nothing else than to give to her. I thought it
fit, secretly to take the scented pocket-book in order to make a
scent-bottle, and a joke of it in future. I so arranged the theft, that
the Baron perceived my hand, holding the book, retreating from the
pocket.
The souvenir, thought I, may occasion some scene; meanwhile I can smell
at it. I indemnified her for the loss of the scent-bag by the
millipeds, whose prison I immediately insinuated into her pocket. The
Baron was witness.
Wilhelmi said, when we rose: "In the evening we shall be separated and
deafened by the carriages. If something has yet to be decided--"
"Something?" replied Phylax,--"everything has to be decided. M. Jean
Paul, you have yet to raise M. Karlson's second difficulty." "Raise?" I
asked, "I am to raise the cover of the whole future world? I am but
going _towards_ it, not coming _from_ it. But this dissimilarity
between the present and the future world, its inconceivable magnitude,
has made many apostates. Not the bursting of our bodily doll-skin in
death, but the wide disparity between the present autumn and the future
spring, raises such overwhelming doubts in our poor, timid breasts.
This is shown by the savages, who consider the future life merely as
the second volume, the new testament of the first, and make no greater
distinction between the first and second life than between youth and
age: they easily believe in all their hopes; your _first_ difficulty,
the bursting and fading of the bodily polish, does not deprive the
savage of the hope to bud anew in another flower-vase. But your second
difficulty daily increases itself, and its advocates, for by the
increasing proofs and apparatus of chemistry and physiology, the future
world is daily more effectually annihilated and dispersed, as it cannot
be brought within play of a sun-microscope or of a chemical furnace. In
fact, not only the reality, but also the theory of the body, not only
the practised measurement of its longings, but also the pure moral
philosophy of its spirit-world, must darken and make difficult the
prospect on the inner world from the outer one. Only the moralist, the
physiologist, the poet, and the artist more readily comprehend our
inner world; but the chemist, the physician, and the mathematician want
both seeing and hearing faculties for it, and in time, even eyes and
ears.
"On the whole, I find fewer men than one would imagine who decidedly
believe in, or deny, the existence of a future world. Few dare to deny
it, as for them this life would then lose all unity, form, peace, and
hope;--few dare to believe it, for they are startled at their own
purification and at the destruction of the lessened earth. The
majority, according to the promptness of alternating feelings, waver
poetically between both beliefs.
"As we paint Devils more easily than Gods, Furies than Venus Urania,
Hell than Heaven, we can more easily believe in the former than in the
latter,--in the greatest misfortune than in the greatest happiness.
Must not our spirit, used to misgivings and earth chains, be startled
at a Utopia against which earth will be shipwrecked, that the lilies of
it, like the Guernsey lilies,[22] may find the shore to bloom on, which
saves and satisfies, elevates and makes blessed, our much tormented
humanity.
"I now come to your difficulty. I imagine, if even we were to take the
grave to be merely the moat of communication between allied globes, our
ignorance concerning the second world should not terrify us, and we
need not take for granted that the mountain ridge of humanity does not
continue under the Dead Sea, merely because we cannot see through its
waters, for do not all mountain ridges continue on the bottom of the
ocean? What! man will guess at _worlds_, when he cannot even guess
_world-quarters_! Would the Greenlander paint a Negro, a Dane, a Greek,
in his mind's eye, without ever having seen one? Can the political
genius divine the inner versifications of the poetic one, without
experience? Can the Abderite imagine the architecture of the sage?
Would we have guessed the existence of but one of the animal creations
of Anthropomorphism which copy the human figure in all animals, and yet
change it? Or could a bodiless self, placed in a vacuum, with all
existing logic and metaphysic, ever have conceived but a single vein of
its present embodification and humanification?"
"But what are you asserting or denying?" asked Wilhelmi.
"I only assert that a second life on another planet cannot be denied,
merely because we are unable to map out the planet, and portray its
inhabitants. But we need no other planet."
The Baron said: "O, I have often dreamed delicious dreams of this
'_grande tour_' through the stars! It seemed the progression of a
student from one class to another,--the classes being worlds."
"But," replied Karlson, "to all these worlds, as upon our own, you will
be refused admittance if you arrive without a body. By what miracle
will you obtain one?"
"_By a repeated one_," I answered. "For by a miracle we have our
present body. But we can say in favor of this planet wandering, that
our eyes too widely separate the worlds of which each one is but an
_element_ of the infinite _integral whole_. The different worlds
and their satellites above and around us, are only far removed
world-quarters. The moon is but a smaller, more distant America, and
space is the ocean."
Nadine said: "One day I so pictured the inhabitants of a lemon-tree to
myself. The worm on the leaf may think it is on the green earth, the
second worm on the white bud is on the moon, and the one on the lemon
believes itself to be upon the sun."
"And yet this," said I, "is but a tree of immeasurable life. As around
the earth-kernel cling wider and finer covers,--the earth, the seas,
the air and space,--so the giant of one world is surrounded by
increasingly large ones, with ever larger arms. The longest shell is
the finest one, as light and the attractive power. The beauteous
covering elongates and rarefies itself from iron bands to pearl ties,
from flower-chains to rainbows and milky-ways."
"Will we not now descend from the milky-way," said Karlson, "for we
cannot ascend it. It is precisely this uniformity of the universe which
forbids the rambling of emigrants from the earth. Every planet already
has its own crew; more dense ones, as for instance Mercury, may be
peopled with real sailors."
"Precisely as Kant supposes!" said Phylax.
"Finer, less solid ones, as e. g. Uranus, only with the most tender
beings, perhaps only with women and nuns who love not the sun. He who
intends to rectify the so-called soul or spirit by distilling it from
one planet to the other, may with as much justice assert, that the
spirits of the slacked Mercury receive their dephlegmation in a
distilling process through our earth,--in short, that the earth is the
second world for Mercury and Venus. The dead of the arctic zones could
even pass into the temperate ones (it would be _distillatio per
latus_), for on all planets there can be no other than coarser or finer
_human beings_[23] like ourselves."
Karlson waited for an answer and a contradiction, but I said his
opinion was also mine. "I have still a stronger reason," I continued,
"against emigration to, and voyage picturesque through, the planets,
because we carry and lock up a heaven of starry light in our own
breasts, for which no dirty earth-ball is clean or large enough. But on
this subject I must have permission to speak uninterruptedly, at least
until we have passed all these cornfields."
Our pleasure-trip now was an alley of magic gardens, our passage
through a golden sea of corn-blades, was accompanied and surrounded on
all sides by a promised land, in which solitary houses reposed beneath
picturesquely grouped leaf groves, as in Italy sleepers take their
siestas on shaded meads. I was permitted to speak.
"There is an inner, heart-contained spirit-world, which breaks through
the dark clouds of the body-world as a warm sun. I mean the inner
universe of _virtue_, _beauty_, and _truth_; three soul-worlds and
heavens, which are neither parts, nor shoots, nor cuttings, nor copies
of the outer one. We are less astonished at the inexplicable existence
of these three transcendent heavens, because they are ever floating
before us, and because we foolishly imagine we _create_ them, while we
merely _recognize_ them. After which copy, with what plastic material,
and of what, could we create and insert in ourselves[24] this same
spirit-world? Let the atheist ask himself how he conceived the giant
ideal of a God, which he either denies or embodies? An idea which has
not been built upon comparative greatness and degrees, for it is the
contrary of every measure and of every created greatness. In short, the
atheist denies the great _original_ of the _copy_.[25]
"As there are idealists of the outer world who believe that perception
makes objects, instead of that objects cause perception, so there are
idealists of the inner world, who deduct the _being_ from the
_seeming_, the _sound_ from the _echo_, the _fact_ from its
_appearance_; instead of, on the contrary, the seeming from the being,
our consciousness from the objects of it. We mistake our power of
analyzing our inner world, for its preformation, i. e. the genealogist
thinks himself both originator and founder.
"This inner universe, which is still more glorious and admirable than
the outer one, needs another heaven than the one above us, and a higher
world than one a sun now shines upon. Therefore we rightly say, not a
second earth or globe, but a second _world_,--another beyond the
universe."
Gione already interrupted me: "And every virtuous and wise being is in
himself a proof of immortality." "And every one," added Nadine,
quickly, "who suffers innocently."
"Yes, it is that," said I, with emotion, "which extends our line of
life through countless ages. The chord of _Virtue_, _Truth_, and
_Beauty_, taken from the music of the spheres, calls us from this dark
oppressive earth, and announces to us the nearness of a more melodious
existence. _Why_, and _from whence_ were these _super-earthly_ wants
and longings created in us, if only, like swallowed diamonds, slowly to
cut through our earthy shell. Why was a being endowed with wings of
light chained to this dirty clump of earth, if it were to rot in its
birth-clod, without ever being freed from it by means of its ethereal
wings?"
Wilhelmi said, "I also like to dream the dream of a second life in the
sleep of this first one. But may not our beautiful spiritual powers
have been given to us for the _enjoyment_ and _preservation_ of the
present life?"
"For its preservation?" I said. "Then an angel has been locked in the
body to be the mute servant and fire-lighter, butler, cook, and porter
of the stomach? Would not brutish souls have sufficed to drive
man-bodies to the fruit-tree and the spring? Shall the pure ethereal
flame only dry and bake the bodily patent stove with life-warmth, while
it now slakes and dissolves it? For every tree of knowledge is the
poison-tree of the body, and every mental refinement a slow-poison
chalice. But, on the contrary, want is the iron key of freedom, the
stomach is the manure-filled hot-house or manufactory of human blood,
and the various animal instincts are but the earthy, soiled steps to
the Grecian temple of our spiritual elevation.
"For _enjoyment_ you said also. That means, we received the palate and
appetite of a god, with the food for an animal. That portion of us
which is of earth, and creeps on worm-folds, may and can, like the
earthworm, be fed and fattened on earth. Exertion, bodily pain, the
burning hunger of necessity, and the tumult of our senses exclude and
choke the spiritual autumn bloom of humanity in nations and classes.
All these conditions of terrestrial existence must be fulfilled ere the
soul may claim its due. To the unhappy, therefore, who must be the
business men and carriers of their bodily wants, the whole inner world
seems but as an imaginary gilt cobweb, like the man who, breathing only
the electrical _atmosphere_, instead of feeling the spark, thinks to
grasp an invisible web. But when our necessary _animal servitude_ is
over, when the barking inner dog-kennel is fed, and the dog-fight
finished, then the inner man demands his nectar and ambrosia, and if he
is turned off with earth-food only, he changes to an angel of Death,
and a Hellfiend, driving himself to suicide, or makes of him a
poison-mixer who destroys all joy.[26] The eternal hunger _in_ man, the
insatiability of his heart, wants not a _richer_, but a _different_
food, fruit, not grass. If our wants referred but to the degree, not to
the quality, then the imagination, at least, might paint a _degree of
satiety_. But imagination cannot make us happy, by showing us
innumerable heaps of treasures, if they be other than _Virtue_,
_Truth_, and _Beauty_."
"But the more beautiful soul?" asked Nadine. I answered, "This
discrepancy between our wishes and our circumstances, the heart and the
earth, will remain, an _enigma_, if we are immortal, and would be a
blasphemy if we decay. Ah! how could the beautiful soul be happy?
Strangers, born on mountains and living in lowland places, pine in an
incurable homesickness. We belong to a higher place, and therefore an
eternal longing consumes us, and every music is our soul's Swiss _ranz
des vaches_. In the morning of life, the joys which hearken to the
anxious wishes of our hearts are seen blooming for us in later years.
When we have attained these years, we turn on the deceitful spot, and
see behind us, pleasure blooming in the strong hopeful youth, and we
enjoy instead of our _hopes_, the _recollections of our hopes_. Joy in
this also resembles the rainbow, which in the morning shines over
evening, and in the evening arches over the east. The _eye_ may reach
the _light_, but the arm is short, and holds but the fruit of the
soil."
"And this proves?" asked the Chaplain.
"Not that we are unhappy, but that we are immortal, and that the second
world in us demands, and proves a second world beyond us. O, how much
might not be said of this second life whose commencement is so clearly
shown in the first one, and which so strangely doubles us! Why is
Virtue too exalted to make us, and, what is more, others (sensually)
happy? Why does the incapability of being useful on earth (as the
expression is) increase with a certain higher purity of character, as,
according to Herschel, there are suns which have no earth? Why is our
heart tortured, dried, consumed, and at last broken by a slow burning
fever of ceaseless love for an unattainable object, only alleviated by
the hope that this _consumption_, like a physical one, must one day be
sheltered and raised by the _ice cover_ of death?"
"No," said Gione, with more emotion in her eye than in her voice, "it
is not ice, but lightning. When our heart lies a sacrifice on the
altar, fire from heaven consumes it as a proof that the offering is
accepted."
I know not why her calm voice so painfully disturbed my whole soul (not
only my argument). Even Nadine's eyes, which triumphed over her own
sorrows, were suffused with tears by her sister's, and, although she is
generally more timid and fastidious than Gione, in passing a little
garden, she raised from a projecting hairy potato-stalk, a large moth,
and showed it to us with a firm mouth, which should have been softened
by a smile.
It was the so-called Death's-head. I stroked the flat, drooping wings,
and said, "It come? from Egypt, the land of mummies and graves; it
bears a _memento mori_ on its back, and a _miserere_ in its plaintive
voice." "In the mean time it is a butterfly, and visits the nectaries,
which we day-birds will do also," appropriately observed Wilhelmi; but
he took the words out of my mouth.
Gione's countenance again expressed thoughtful calmness, and to me she
became immeasurably beautiful and grand by the stillness of her grief.
You once said that the female soul, though it be pierced with burning
shafts, must never beat its wings convulsively together, else, like
other butterflies, it would destroy their beauty. How true is this!
Nadine's eyes seldom shone without at last overflowing, and every
sorrowful emotion remained long in her heart, because she tried to
guard against it. She resembled those springs which take a temperature
opposed to the time of day, and which are warmest in the cool evening.
She turned to me and said, putting her hand in her left pocket, "I will
show you some poetry which will prove your prose." While she was
seeking it, she stood still with her companion Wilhelmi. He guessed
before I did, that she intended to give me something from the Souvenir,
and when, in its stead, she took the milliped's prison from her pocket,
he obligingly said, "If not with my hands yet with my eyes I assisted
at the theft, and as accomplice I beg for mercy." The serious apology
for this foolishness scarcely suited our earnest tone of mind. I said,
"I wished to cause a more useless, than pardonable joke, but I--" She
did not allow me to conclude, but mildly and unchanged (except by a
reproving and a forgiving smile) she showed me in the aromatic book the
noble Karlson's requiem on the death of the exalted Gione. I willingly
give you the prosaic echo of it, from my prosaic memory.
GRIEF WITHOUT HOPE.
What cloud is that, which like the clouds of the tropics, passes from
morn to eve, and then sets? It is humanity. Is that the magnet-mountain
covered with the nails of wrecked ships? No, it is the great Earth,
strewed with the bones of fallen men.
Ah! why did I love? I had not then lost so much!
Nadine, give me thy grief, for it contains hope. Thou standest by thy
crushed sister, who dissolves even beneath the winding-sheet, and
lookest upwards to the trembling stars, and thinkest: Above, O dearest
one, thou dost reside, and on the suns we find again our hearts, and
the small tears of life will be over.
But mine remain, and burn in the dim eye. My cypress alley is not open,
and discloses no heaven. Human blood paints the fluid figure called man
on the monument, as oil on marble forms forests; Death wipes away the
man, and leaves the stone. O Gione! I would have some consolation, if
thou wert but far away from us all, on a clouded forest, in a cave of
the Earth, or on the most distant world in space. But thou art gone,
thy soul is dead, not only thy life and thy body.
See, Nadine, on the judgment-seat of Time lies the crushed angel, with
the death color of the spirit-world. Gione has lost all her virtues,
her love, her patience, her strength, her all-embracing heart, and her
rich mind: the thunderbolt of Death has destroyed the diamond, and now
the wax statue of the body slowly melts beneath the soil.
Serpent of Eternity, quickly take away the beautiful form, as the
larger serpent first poisons and then devours man. But I, Gione, stand
beside your ruins with unalleviated pain, with undestroyed soul; and
grieving, think of you until I also dissolve. And my grief is noble and
deep, for I have no hope! May thy invisible shadow-picture, like the
new moon with the sun,[27] arise to heaven in my soul! And may the
creative wheel of Time, which raises innumerable hearts, and fills them
with blood, only to pour them again into the grave, and let them die,
pour out my life slowly, for long time would I mourn for thee, thou
lost one!
I cannot tell you, dearest Victor, how horrible and fearful the eternal
snow of annihilating death seemed to me, placed beside the noble form
it should have covered; how frightful the thought: if Karlson is right,
the last day has torn this never happy, innocent soul from the prisons
upon the earth to the closer ones beneath it: man too often carries his
errors as his truths only as word arguments, not as feelings. But let
the disbeliever of immortality imagine a life of sixty minutes instead
of sixty years, and let him try if he can bear to see loved, noble, or
wise men only aimless, hour-long air-phantoms, hollow thin shadows
which fly towards the light and are consumed by it, and who, without
path, trace, or aim, after a short flight, dissolve into their former
night. No; even over him steals a supposition of immortality. Else a
black cloud would forever hang over his soul, and the earth would quake
beneath him when he trod on it, as if he were a Cain.
I continued, but all arguments were poetized into feelings. "Yes, if
all forests of this earth were pleasure grottoes, all valleys Campan,
all islands holy, all fields Elysian, and all eyes sparkling, yes,
then--no, even then the Eternal One would have given to our souls the
promise of a future life, even in the blessedness of the present one.
But now, O God! when so many houses are mourning ones, so many fields
battle-fields, so many cheeks pale, and when we pass so many sunken,
red, torn, closed eyes,--O, can death be but the last destroying
whirlwind? And when at last, after thousand, thousand years, our earth
is dried up by the sun's heat, and every living sound on its surface
silenced, will an immortal spirit look down on the silent globe, and,
gazing on the empty hearse moving slowly on, say: 'There the churchyard
of humanity flies into the crater of the sun; on that burning heap many
shadows, and dreamers, and wax-figures, have wept and bled, but now
they are all melted and consumed: Fly into the sun, which will also
dissolve thee, thou silent desert with thy swallowed tears, with thy
dried-up blood!' No, the crushed worm dares raise himself to his
Creator, and say: 'Thou canst not have made me only to suffer.'"
"And who gives the worm the right to this demand?" asked Karlson.
Gione answered, gently, "The Eternal One himself, who gives us charity
and who speaks in all our souls to calm us, and who alone has created
in us our demands to Him and our hope in Him."
This good sweet word could still not calm all the waves of my excited
soul. From a distant house, turtle-doves sent after us trembling,
soul-felt plaints. About my tear-filled inward eye assembled all those
forms whose hearts were without guilt and without joy,[28] who attained
no single wish here below, and who, sinking under the frost and
snow-storm of fate, only longed, like persons freezing to death, to
sleep; and all those forms who have loved too deeply, and lost too
much, and whose wounds were never cured until death had widened them,
like a cracked bell which retains its hollow sound until the crevice is
made larger, and the beings nearest me, and many other female ones,
whose exquisitely tender souls fate most consecrates to torture, as
Narcissus is consecrated to the God of Hell. I also remembered your
true remark, that you had never pronounced the words _pain_ and _the
past_ before a woman, without hearing an almost inaudible sigh at the
union of the two words, from the suffering heart; for woman on the
narrower stage of her plans, with idealized wishes and desires built on
others' worth, rather than on her own, has a thousand times more
disappointments to suffer than we men.
The sun sank deeper behind the mountains, and giant shadows, like
mighty birds of prey, came coldly down upon us from the eternal snow. I
took Karlson's hand in mine, and looked with tearful eyes into his
manly, beautiful countenance, and said, "O Karlson! on what a blooming,
grand world you throw an immeasurable gravestone, which no time can
lift! Are two difficulties,[29] based too on the _necessary ignorance_
of man, sufficient to overthrow a belief, which explains thousand
greater difficulties, without which our existence is without aim, our
sufferings without explanation, and the holy Trinity in our breast
three furies, and three terrible contradictions? A tending God's hand,
leading and feeding the inner man (the child of the outer one),
teaching him to go and to speak, educating, refining him, is shown in
all things, from the shapeless earthworm to the brilliant human face,
from the chaotic nations of the primitive ages to the present century,
from the first faint pulsation of the invisible heart to its full,
bold, throbbing pulse in manhood,--and why? That when man stands
upright and exalted, a beautiful demi-god, even amid the ruins of his
old body temple, the club of Death may annihilate the demi-god forever?
And on the eternal sea, on which the least drop throws immeasurable
rings, on this sea a life-long rising and a life-long falling of the
soul should have the same termination, namely, the end of all
things,--annihilation?[30] And as, from the same cause, the souls of
all other worlds must fall and die with ours, and of this shroud and
crape-veiled immeasurability nothing remain but the ever-sowing and
never-reaping solitary world-spirit, who sees one eternity mourn for
another, there can be no aim and no object in the whole spiritual
universum, for the purpose of the development of succeeding or
successive ephemera is no progress for the vanished ephemera, scarcely
even for the last one which can never exist.[31] And you take for
granted all these enigmas and contradictions by which all the strings
of creation, not only its harmony, are torn, because two difficulties
present themselves to you, which _cannot any better_ explain mortality
... Dearest Karlson, you would bring your eternally jarring discord
into this harmony of the spheres! See how calmly the day goes, how
grandly the night sets in; did you not think that our spirit will rise
one day from its grave of ashes, when you saw the mild pale moon rise
grandly from the crater of Vesuvius?" ... The sun stood on the
mountains, about to plunge into the sea and swim to the new world.
Nadine embraced her sister with emotion, and said, "O, we love each
other forever and immortally, dearest sister." Karlson accidentally
touched the chords of the lyre which he carried: Gione took it from him
with one hand, gave him the other, and said, "You are the only one
among us who is tormented by this melancholy belief,--and you deserve
to have one so beautiful!"
This word of concealed love overpowered his long-filled heart, and two
burning drops fell from the blinded eyes, and the sun gilded the holy
tears, and he said, looking towards the mountains: "I can bear no
annihilation but my own,--my whole heart is of your opinion, and my
head must slowly follow."
I will not again mention a man whom I have blamed so often.
We now stood before a mansion, the windows of which were silvered, and,
when it was darker, gilt by girandoles. Aloft over its Italian balcony
hung two balloons, one at its eastern, the other at its western
extremity. Without those beautiful globes, the counterpart, as it were,
of the two glorious ones in heaven, the sun and the moon, I should have
scarcely paid heed to the scene on earth, in the splendor of the one on
high.
Dearest friend, how beautiful was the place and the time. Around us,
in their majesty, reposed the Pyrenees, half robed in night and half
in day, not stooping, like man, beneath the load of years, but
erect--forever; and I felt why the great ancients had thought the
mountains were a breed of giants. On the mountain heads hung wreaths of
roses cloud-woven; but each time that a star appeared upon the clear,
deep sea of ether and sparkled on its azure waves, a rose from the
mountain's chaplet faded and dropped away. The Mittaghorn, alone, like
a higher spirit, gazed long after the sinking lonely sun, and glowed
with ecstasy. Down beneath us an amphitheatre of lemon-trees, by its
perfumes, brought us back to the veiled earth, and made a dusky
paradise of it. And Gione, in calm rapture, struck the chords of her
guitar, and softly did Nadine's voice accompany the gliding tones. The
nightingale in the rose-hedges by the lake awoke, and the plaintive
tones from its tiny heart pierced deep into the great heart of man; and
shining glowworms flew from rose-bush to rose-bush, but in the mirror
of the lake they were but as golden sparks, floating over pale yellow
flowers. But when we looked again towards the heavens, lo! all its
stars were gleaming, and in place of rose-woven wreaths, the mountains
were clad in extinguished rainbows, and the giant of the Pyrenees was
crowned with stars instead of roses. O my beloved Victor! in this
moment it was with each of our enraptured souls as if from its
oppressed heart earth's load had dropped away; as if from her mother's
arms, the earth were giving us, matured in the Father arms of the
infinite Creator; as if our little life were over! To ourselves, we
seemed the immortal, the exalted. We fancied that our speech of man's
immortality had been the prophecy of our own, as with two great and
noble men.[32] But though we entered the brilliant rooms, the storm of
new joys could not destroy the old ones. We were not yet able to be
without the great night around us, and we ascended the platform, that
from this little throne we might better contemplate the higher throne
of creation beneath the eternal canopy; although kneeling would have
been a higher ascension for the moved soul.
There were night-violets in a glass box, which traced Gione's name in
blooming colors. I remembered the glowworms and millipeds. I let the
former fly down upon the rose-bushes in confused star-pictures; with
the latter I fired Gione's beautiful flower namesake.
Gione looked longingly towards the eastern Mongolfiere. Wilhelmi
understood her. Her soul was as bold as it was calm, she had already
visited many of the magic caves of earth, and had ascended to the
summits of the highest Alps; she wished now to rise in the air, and to
float in the heavens above this beautiful country, and on this
beauteous night; but the enjoyment of the prospect was not her only
motive. Wilhelmi asked who should be her companion. Solitude was her
chief desire. The breadth and depth of the boat under the globe, a
chair in it, and the cords by which she would be raised and lowered,
secured the trip from all danger.
Like a celestial being she rose beneath the stars,--the night and the
height threw a mist over her rising form. A slight zephyr rocked the
blooming Aurora, and crowned the moving goddess with alternate
constellations. Now her countenance appeared surrounded by pale
supernatural rays. It seemed bright as an angel rising towards its
kindred stars through the rich dark blue space. An unusual tremor
seized on Wilhelmi and Karlson; it was as if they saw their beloved one
again carried from them on the wings of the angel of Death.
When she returned to us her eyes were red with weeping; she had
ascended, that she might in an unseen moment, shed her old heavy tears
near the stars. O the Celestial one! She smiled strangely in the
slumber of this life at higher joys than earthly ones, as sleeping
children smile when they see Angels.
It was now impossible to repress my longing for the stars, and my
petition to be allowed to ascend. Permission to use the western
Mongolfiere was willingly bestowed. Nadine, emboldened by the safe
return of her sister, and by the companion in the danger, skipped into
the boat, with her usual impulsive warmth, to refresh her thirsting
soul with the majestic immeasurability of night.
And now the suns raised us. The heavy earth sank down as the past;
wings such as man has in happy dreams bore us upwards.
The mighty vacancy and silence of space lay stretched before us even up
into the stars;--as we rose higher, the dark forests seemed but clouds,
and snow-girt mountaintops like snow-flakes. The ascending globe bore
us nearer to the harmless, silent lightning of the moon, in whose
bright satellite we seemed cradled, and which stood as a calm Elysium
beneath the heavens, and high above the thick fog air, the light heart
beating more quickly, seemed to pant with ethereal gladness to have
left the earth with out discarding its shell covering. Our ascent was
suddenly arrested--we looked down into the valley, half concealed by
distance and the darkness of the night. Only the lights from the
mansion were visible to us,--a western cloud hung like a white fog
before us, and a black eagle flew like an angel of death from the east
through the cloud pillar, seeking its summit, and a cool breeze
playfully drew us towards the mist-island. The evening red had already
passed the earth at midnight, and wandered over charming France as its
future Aurora. O, how the soul was raised towards the stars, and how
lightly did our hearts beat above the earth!
But now from the bright mansion arose sweet harmony, and the subdued
echo of the voices of our beloved ones calling upon us. And when Nadine
looked down, her lonely heart broke with longing after those dear ones;
and when she glanced into the silvered valley, over which the moon had
risen, and where the trembling waterfalls danced beside the flowing
archings of the stream and the green marble caves, and the white paths
between poplars and wheat-ears, and the whole enchanting path of our
day's journey lay silvered beneath her inconstant rays,--bright,
shining tears flowed unrestrained from her mild eyes, and she looked
imploringly to me, as if begging for consideration and secrecy, and
said expressively, "We are yet so far from the cruel earth."
When our little globe was drawn back to the shining meadows and the
merry music, she looked inquiringly at me, to ask if the traces of
tears yet remained in her eyes. She dried them more quickly, but in
vain. Silently we descended; I took her burning hand in mine, and
looked into her weeping eyes, but could not speak.... --And how could I
speak better now, dearest friend!
LIFE
OF
QUINTUS FIXLEIN.
EXTRACTED FROM
FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.
TRANSLATED BY THOMAS CARLYLE.
LETTER TO MY FRIENDS,
INSTEAD OF PREFACE.
Merchants, Authors, young Ladies, and Quakers, call all persons, with
whom they have any business, Friends; and my readers accordingly are my
table and college Friends. Now, at this time, I am about presenting so
many hundred Friends with just as many hundred gratis copies; and my
Bookseller has orders to supply each on request, after the Fair, with
his copy--in return for a trifling consideration and _don gratuit_ to
printers, pressmen, and other such persons. But as I could not, like
the French authors, send the whole Edition to the binder, the blank
leaf in front was necessarily wanting; and thus to write a
complimentary word or two upon it was out of my power. I have therefore
caused a few white leaves to be inserted directly after the title-page;
on these we are now printing.
My Book contains the Life of a Schoolmaster, extracted and compiled
from various public and private documents. With this Biography, dear
Friends, it is the purpose of the Author not so much to procure you a
pleasure as to teach you how to enjoy one. In truth, King Xerxes should
have offered his prize-medals, not for the invention of new pleasures,
but for a good methodology and directory to use the old ones.
Of ways for becoming happier (not happy) I could never inquire out more
than three. The first, rather an elevated road, is this: to soar away
so far above the clouds of life, that you see the whole external world,
with its wolf-dens, charnel-houses, and thunder-rods, lying far down
beneath you, shrunk into a little child's garden. The second is: simply
to sink down into this little garden; and there to nestle yourself so
snugly, so homewise, in some furrow, that, in looking out from your
warm lark-nest, you likewise can discern no wolf-dens, charnel-houses,
or thunder-rods, but only blades and ears, every one of which, for the
nest-bird, is a tree, and a sun-screen, and a rain-screen. The third,
finally, which I look upon as the hardest and cunningest, is that of
alternating between the other two.
This I shall now satisfactorily expound to men at large.
The Hero, the Reformer, your Brutus, your Howard, your Republican, he
whom civic storm, or genius poetic storm, impels; in short, every
mortal with a great Purpose, or even a perennial Passion (were it but
that of writing the largest folios); all these men fence themselves in
by their internal world against the frosts and heats of the external,
as the madman in a worse sense does; every _fixed_ idea, such as rules
every genius, every enthusiast, at least periodically, separates and
elevates a man above the bed and board of this Earth, above its
Dog's-grottoes, buckthorns, and Devil's-walls; like the Bird of
Paradise, he slumbers flying; and, on his outspread pinions, oversleeps
unconsciously the earthquakes and conflagrations of Life, in his long,
fair dream of his ideal Mother-land.--Alas! To few is this dream
granted; and these few are so often awakened by Flying Dogs![33]
This skyward track, however, is fit only for the winged portion of the
human species, for the smallest. What can it profit poor quill-driving
brethren, whose souls have not even wing-shells, to say nothing of
wings? Or these tethered persons with the best back, breast, and
neck-fins, who float motionless in the wicker Fish-box of the State,
and are not allowed to swim, because the Box or State, long ago tied to
the shore, itself swims in the name of the Fishes? To the whole
standing and writing host of heavy-laden State-domestics, Purveyors,
Clerks of all departments, and all the lobsters packed together heels
over head into the Lobster-basket of the Government office-rooms, and
for refreshments, sprinkled over with a few nettles; to these persons,
what way of becoming happy _here_ can I possibly point out?
My _second_ merely; and that is as follows: to take a compound
microscope, and with it to discover, and convince themselves, that
their drop of Burgundy is properly a Red Sea, that butterfly-dust is
peacock-feathers, mouldiness a flowery-field, and sand a heap of
jewels. These microscopic recreations are more lasting than all
costly watering-place recreations.--But I must explain these metaphors
by new ones. The purpose for which I have sent _Fixlein's Life_
into the Messrs. Luebeks' Warehouse, is simply that in this same
_Life_--therefore in this Preface it is less needful--I may show to the
whole Earth that we ought to value little joys more than great ones, the
night-gown more than the dress-coat; that Plutus's heaps are worth less
than his handfuls, the plum than the penny for a rainy day; and that
not great, but little good-haps can make us happy.--Can I accomplish
this, I shall, through means of my Book, bring up for Posterity a race
of men finding refreshment in all things; in the warmth of their rooms
and of their night-caps; in their pillows; in the three High Festivals;
in mere Apostles' days; in the Evening Moral Tales of their wives, when
these gentle persons have been forth as ambassadresses visiting some
Dowager Residence, whither the husband could not be persuaded; in the
bloodletting-day of these their newsbringers; in the day of
slaughtering, salting, potting against the rigor of grim winter; and in
all such days. You perceive, my drift is, that man must become a little
Tailor-bird, which, not amid the crashing boughs of the storm-tost,
roaring, immeasurable tree of Life, but on one of its leaves, sews
itself a nest together, and there lies snug. The most essential sermon
one could preach to our century were a sermon on the duty of staying at
home.
The _third_ skyward road is the alternation between the other two. The
foregoing _second_ way is not good enough for man, who here on Earth
should take into his hand not the Sickle only, but also the Plough. The
_first_ is too good for him. He has not always the force, like
Rugendas, in the midst of the Battle to compose Battle-pieces; and,
like Backhuisen in the Shipwreck, to clutch at no board but the
drawing-board to paint it on. And then his pains are not less lasting
than his _fatigues_. Still oftener is Strength denied its Arena; it is
but the smallest portion of life that, to a working soul, offers Alps,
Revolutions, Rhine-falls, Worms Diets, and Wars with Xerxes; and for
the whole it is better so; the longer portion of life is a field beaten
flat as a threshing-floor, without lofty Gothard Mountains; often it is
a tedious ice-field, without a single glacier tinged with dawn.
But even by walking, a man rests and recovers himself for climbing; by
little joys and duties, for great. The victorious Dictator must
contrive to plough down his battle Mars-field into a flax and carrot
field; to transform his theatre of war into a parlor theatre, on which
his children may enact some good pieces from the _Children's Friend_.
Can he accomplish this, can he turn so softly from the path of poetical
happiness into that of household happiness,--then is he little
different from myself, who even now, though modesty might forbid me to
disclose it--who even now, I say, amid the creation of this Letter,
have been enabled to reflect, that, when it is done, so also will the
Roses and Elder-berries of pastry be done, which a sure hand is
seething in butter for the Author of this Work.
As I purpose appending to this Letter a Postscript (at the end of the
Book), I reserve somewhat which I had to say about the Third[34]
half-satirical, half-philosophical part of the Work till that
opportunity.
Here, out of respect for the rights of a Letter, the Author drops his
half anonymity,[35] and for the first time subscribes himself with his
whole true name,
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.
_Hof in Voigtland, 29th June_, 1795.
LIFE OF QUINTUS FIXLEIN,
DOWN TO OUR OWN TIMES.
IN FIFTEEN LETTER-BOXES.
FIRST LETTER-BOX.
Dog-days' Vacation.--Visits.--An Indigent of Quality.
Egidius Zebedaeus Fixlein had just for eight days been Quintus,[36] and
fairly commenced teaching duties, when Fortune tabled out for him four
refreshing courses and collations, besprinkled with flowers and sugar.
These were the four canicular weeks. I could find in my heart, at this
hour, to pat the cranium of that good man who invented the Dog-days'
Vacation. I never go to walk in that season, without thinking how a
thousand down-pressed pedagogic persons are now erecting themselves in
the open air; and the stiff knapsack is lying unbuckled at their feet,
and they can seek whatsoever their soul desires; butterflies,--or roots
of numbers,--or roots of words,--or herbs,--or their native villages.
The last did our Fixlein. He moved not, however, till Sunday,--for you
like to know how holidays taste in the city; and then, in company with
his Shock and a Quintaner, or Fifth-Form boy, who carried his Green
nightgown, he issued through the gate in the morning. The dew was still
lying; and as he reached the back of the gardens, the children of the
Orphan Hospital were uplifting with clear voices their morning hymn.
The city was Flachsenfingen, the village Hukelum, the dog Schil, and
the year of Grace 1791.
"Manikin," said he, to the Quintaner, for he liked to speak, as Love,
children, and the people of Vienna do, in diminutives, "Manikin, give
me the bundle to the village; run about, and seek thee a little
bird, as thou art thyself, and so have something to pet too in
vacation-time." For the manikin was at once his page, lackey,
room-comrade, train-bearer, and gentleman in waiting; and the Shock
also was his manikin.
He stept slowly along, through the crisped cole-beds, overlaid with
colored beads of dew; and looked at the bushes, out of which, when the
morning wind bent them asunder, there seemed to start a flight of
jewel-colibri, so brightly did they glitter. From time to time he
drew the bell-rope of his--whistle, that the manikin might, not skip
away too far; and he shortened his league and half of road, by
measuring it not in leagues, but in villages. It is more pleasant for
pedestrians--for geographers it is not--to count by wersts than by
miles. In walking, our Quintus furthermore got by heart the few fields
on which the grain was already reaped.
But now roam slower, Fixlein, through His Lordship's garden of Hukelum;
not, indeed, lest thy coat sweep away any tulip-stamina, but that thy
good mother may have time to lay her Cupid's-band of black taffeta
about her smooth brow. I am grieved to think my fair readers take it
ill of her, that she means first to iron this same band; they cannot
know that she has no maid; and that to-day the whole Preceptorial
dinner--the money purveyances the guest has made over to her three days
before--is to be arranged and prepared by herself, without the aid of
any Mistress of the Household whatever; for indeed she belongs to the
_Tiers Etat_, being neither more nor less than a gardener's widow.
You can figure how this true, warm-hearted mother may have lain in wait
all morning for her Schoolman, whom she loved as the apple of her eye;
since, on the whole populous Earth, she had not (her first son, as well
as her husband, was dead) any other for her soul, which indeed
overflowed with love; not any other but her Zebedaeus. Could she ever
tell you aught about him, I mean aught joyful, without ten times wiping
her eyes? Nay, did she not once divide her solitary Kirmes (or
Churchale) cake between two mendicant students, because she thought
Heaven would punish her for so feasting, while her boy in Leipzig had
nothing to feast on, and must pass the cake-garden like other gardens,
merely smelling at it?
"Dickens! Thou already, Zebedaeus!" said the mother, giving an
embarrassed smile, to keep from weeping, as the son, who had ducked
past the window, and crossed the grassy threshold without knocking,
suddenly entered. For joy she forgot to put the heater into the
smoothing-iron, as her illustrious scholar, amid the loud boiling of
the soup, tenderly kissed her brow, and even said Mamma; a name
which lighted on her breast like downy silk. All the windows were open;
and the garden, with its flower-essences, and bird-music, and
butterfly-collections, was almost half within the room. But I
suppose I have not yet mentioned that the little garden-house, rather a
chamber than a house, was situated on the western cape of the Castle
garden. The owner had graciously allowed the widow to retain this
dowager-mansion; as indeed the mansion would otherwise have stood
empty, for he now kept no gardener.
But Fixlein, in spite of his joy, could not stay long with her; being
bound for the Church, which, to his spiritual appetite, was at all
times a king's kitchen; a mother's. A sermon pleased him simply because
it was a sermon, and because he himself had once preached one. The
mother was contented he should go; these good women think they enjoy
their guests, if they can only give them aught to enjoy.
In the choir, this Free-haven and Ethnic Forecourt of stranger
church-goers, he smiled on all parishioners; and, as in his childhood,
standing under the wooden wing of an archangel, he looked down on the
coifed _parterre_. His young years now enclosed him like children in
their smiling circle; and a long garland wound itself in rings among
them, and by fits they plucked flowers from it, and threw them in his
face. Was it not old Senior Astman that stood there on the pulpit
Parnassus, the man by whom he had been so often flogged, while
acquiring Greek with him from a grammar written in Latin, which he
could not explain, yet was forced to walk by the light of? Stood there
not behind the pulpit-stairs the sacristy-cabin, and in this was there
not a church-library of consequence--no school-boy could have buckled
it wholly in his book-strap--lying under the minever cover of pastil
dust? And did it not consist of the Polyglot in folio, which he,
spurred on by Pfeiffer's _Critica Sacra_, had turned up leaf by leaf,
in his early years, excerpting therefrom the _literae inversae majusculae
minusculae_, and so forth, with an immensity of toil? And could he not
at present, the sooner the more readily, have wished to cast this
alphabetic soft-fodder into the Hebrew letter-trough, whereto your
Oriental Rhizophagi (Rooteaters) are tied, especially as here they get
so little vowel hard-fodder to keep them in heart?--Stood there not
close by him the organ-stool, the throne to which, every Apostle-day,
the Schoolmaster had by three nods elevated him, thence to fetch down
the sacred hyssop, the sprinkler of the Church?
My readers themselves will gather spirits when they now hear that our
Quintus, during the outshaking of the poor-bag, was invited by the
Senior to come over in the afternoon; and to them it will be little
less gratifying than if he had invited themselves. But what will they
say, when they get home with him to mother and dinner-table, both
already clad in their white Sunday dress; and behold the large cake
which Fraeulein Thiennette (Stephanie) has rolled from her peel? In the
first place, however, they will wish to know who _she_ is.
She is,--for if (according to Lessing), in the very excellence of the
Iliad, we neglect the personalities of its author; the same thing will
apply to the fate of several authors, for instance, to my own; but an
authoress of cakes must not be forgotten in the excellence of her
baking,--Thiennette is a poor, indigent, insolvent young lady; has not
much, except years, of which she counts five-and-twenty; no near
relations living now; no acquirements (for in literature she does not
even know _Werter_) except economical; reads no books, not even mine;
inhabits, that is, watches like a wardeness, quite alone, the thirteen
void, disfurnished chambers of the Castle of Hukelum, which belongs to
the Dragoon Rittmeister Aufhammer, at present resident in his other
mansion of Schadeck; on occasion, she commands and feeds his soccagers
and handmaids; and can write herself By the grace of God--which, in the
thirteenth century, the country nobles did as well as princes,--for she
lives by the grace of man, at least of woman, the Lady Rittmeisterinn
Aufhammer's grace, who, at all times, blesses those vassals whom her
husband curses. But, in the breast of the orphaned Thiennette, lay a
sugared marchpane heart, which, for very love, you could have devoured;
her fate was hard, but her soul was soft; she was modest, courteous,
and timid, but too much so;--cheerfully and coldly she received the
most cutting humiliations in Schadeck, and felt no pain, and not till
some days after did she see it all clearly, and then these cuts began
sharply to bleed, and she wept in her loneliness over her lot.
It is hard for me to give a light tone, after this deep one, and to
add, that Fixlein had been almost brought up beside her, and that she,
his school-moiety over with the Senior, while the latter was training
him for the dignities of the Third Form, had learned the _Verba
Anomala_ along with him.
The Achilles'-shield of the cake, jagged and embossed with carved work
of brown scales, was whirling round in the Quintus like a swing-wheel
of hungry and thankful ideas. Of that philosophy which despises eating,
and of that high breeding which wastes it, he had not so much about him
as belongs to the ungratefulness of such cultivated persons; but for
his platter of meat, for his dinner of herbs, he could never give
thanks enough.
Innocent and contented, the quadruple dinner-party--for the Shock with
his cover under the stove cannot be omitted--now began their Feast of
Sweet Bread, their Feast of Honor for Thiennette, their Grove-feast in
the garden. It may truly be a subject of wonder how a man who has not,
like the King of France, four hundred and forty-eight persons (the
hundred and sixty-one _Garcons de la Maisonbouche_ I do not reckon) in
his kitchen, nor a _Fruiterie_ of thirty-one human bipeds, nor a
Pastry-cookery of three-and-twenty, nor a daily expenditure of 387
Livres 21 Sous,--how such a man, I say, can eat with any satisfaction.
Nevertheless, to me, a cooking mother is as dear as a whole royal
cooking household, given rather to feed upon me than to feed me.--The
most precious fragments which the Biographer and the World can
gather from this meal consist of here and there an edifying piece of
table-talk. The mother had much to tell. Thiennette is this night, she
mentions, for the first time, to put on her morning promenade-dress of
white muslin, as also a satin girdle and steel buckle; but, adds she,
it will not sit her; as the Rittmeisterinn (for this lady used to hang
her cast clothes on Thiennette, as Catholics do their cast crutches and
sores on their patron Saints) was much thicker. Good women grudge each
other nothing save only clothes, husbands, and flax. In the fancy of
the Quintus, by virtue of this apparel, a pair of angel pinions were
sprouting forth from the shoulder-blades of Thiennette; for him a
garment was a sort of hollow half-man, to whom only the nobler parts
and the first principles were wanting; he honored these wrappages and
hulls of our interior, not as an Elegant, or a Critic of Beauty, but
because it was not possible for him to despise aught which he saw
others honoring. Further, the good mother read to him, as it were, the
monumental inscription of his father, who had sunk into the arms of
Death in the thirty-second year of his age, from a cause which I
explain not here, but in a future Letter-box, having too much affection
for the reader. Our Quintus could not sate himself with hearing of his
father.
The fairest piece of news was, that Fraeulein Thiennette had sent word
to-day, "he might visit Her Ladyship to-morrow, as My Lord, his
godfather, was to be absent in town." This, however, I must explain.
Old Aufhammer was called _Egidius_, and was Fixlein's godfather; but
he--though the Rittmeisterinn duly covered the cradle of the child with
nightly offerings, with flesh-tithes and grain-tithes--had frugally
made him no christening present, except that of his name, which
proved to be the very balefullest. For, our _Egidius_ Fixlein, with his
Shock, which, by reason of the French convulsions, had, in company with
other emigrants, run off from Nantes, was but lately returned from
college--when he and his dog, as ill-luck would have it, went to walk
in the Hukelum wood. Now, as the Quintus was ever and anon crying out
to his attendant: "Coosh, Schil" (_Couche Gilles_), it must apparently
have been the Devil that had just then planted the Lord of Aufhammer
among the trees and bushes in such a way, that this whole travestying
and docking of his name--for Gilles means Egidius--must fall directly
into his ear. Fixlein could neither speak French, nor any offence to
mortal; he knew not head or tail of what _couche_ signified; a word,
which, in Paris, even the plebeian dogs are now in the habit of saying
to their _valets de chiens_. But there were three things which Von
Aufhammer never recalled,--his error, his anger, and his word. The
provokee, therefore, determined that the plebeian provoker and
honor-stealer should never more speak to him, or--get a doit from him.
I return. After dinner he gazed out of the little window into the
garden, and saw his path of life dividing into four branches, leading
towards just as many skyward Ascensions; towards the Ascension into the
Parsonage, and that into the Castle to Thiennette, for this day; and
towards the third into Schadeck for the morrow; and lastly, into every
house in Hukelum as the fourth. And now, when the mother had long
enough kept cheerfully gliding about on tiptoe, "not to disturb him in
studying his Latin Bible" (the _Vulgata_), that is, in reading the
_Litteraturzeitung_, he at last rose to his own feet; and the humble
joy of the mother ran long after the courageous son, who dared to go
forth and speak to a Senior, quite unappalled. Yet it was not without
reverence that he entered the dwelling of his old, rather gray than
bald-headed, teacher, who was not only Virtue itself, but also Hunger,
eating frequently, and with the appetite of Pharaoh's lean kine. A
schoolman that expects to become a professor will scarcely deign to
cast an eye on a pastor; but one who is himself looking up to a
parsonage as to his working-house and breeding-house, knows how to
value such a character. The new parsonage--as if it had, like a _Casa
Santa_, come flying out of Erlang, or the Berlin Friedrichs-strasse,
and alighted in Hukelum--was for the Quintus a Temple of the Sun, and
the Senior a Priest of the Sun. To be Parson there himself was a
thought overlaid with virgin honey; such a thought as occurs but one
other time in History, namely, in the head of Hannibal, when he
projected stepping over the Alps, that is to say, over the threshold of
Rome.
The landlord and his guest formed an excellent _bureau d'esprit_;
people of office, especially of the same office, have more to tell each
other, namely, their own history, than your idle May-chafers and
Court-celestials, who must speak only of other people's.--The Senior
made a soft transition from his iron-ware (in the stable furniture), to
the golden age of his Academic life, of which such people like as much
to think, as poets do of their childhood. So good as he was, he still
half joyfully recollected that he had once been less so; but joyful
remembrances of wrong actions are their half repetition, as repentant
remembrances of good ones are their half abolishment.
Courteously and kindly did Zebedaeus (who could not even enter in his
Notebook the name of a person of quality without writing an H. for Herr
before it) listen to the Academic Saturnalia of the old gentleman, who
in Wittenberg had toped as well as written, and thirsted not more for
the Hippocrene than for Gukguk.[37]
Herr Jerusalem has observed that the barbarism, which often springs up
close on the brightest efflorescence of the sciences, is a sort of
strengthening mud-bath, good for averting the over-refinement wherewith
such efflorescence always threatens us. I believe that a man who
considers how high the sciences have mounted with our upper
classes,--for instance with every Patrician's son in Nuernberg, to whom
the public must present 1000 florins for studying with,--I believe that
such a man will not grudge the Son of the Muses a certain barbarous
Middle-age (the Burschen or Student Life, as it is called), which may
again so case-harden him that his refinement shall not go beyond the
limits. The Senior, while in Wittenberg, had protected the one hundred
and eighty Academic Freedoms--so many of them has Petrus Rebuffus
summed up[38]--against prescription, and lost none except his moral
one, of which truly a man, even in a convent, can seldom make much.
This gave our Quintus courage to relate certain pleasant somersets of
his own, which at Leipzig, under the Incubus-pressure of poverty, he
had contrived to execute. Let us hear him. His landlord, who was at the
same time Professor and Miser, maintained in his enclosed court a whole
community of hens. Fixlein, in company with three room-mates, without
difficulty mastered the rent of a chamber, or closet. In general their
main equipments, like Ph[oe]nixes, existed but in the singular number:
one bed, in which always the one pair slept before midnight, the other
after midnight, like nocturnal watchmen; one coat, in which one after
the other they appeared in public, and which, like a watch-coat, was
the national uniform of the company; and several other _ones_,
Unities both of Interest and Place. Nowhere can you collect the
stress-memorials and siege-medals of Poverty more pleasantly and
philosophically than at College; the Academic burgher exhibits to us
how many humorists and Diogeneses Germany has in it. Our Unitarians had
just one thing four times, and that was hunger. The Quintus related,
perhaps with a too pleasurable enjoyment of the recollection, how one
of this famishing _coro_ invented means of appropriating the
Professor's hens as just tribute, or subsidies. He said (he was a
Jurist), they must once for all borrow a legal fiction from the Feudal
code, and look on the Professor as the soccage tenant, to whom the
usufruct of the hen-yard and hen-house belonged; but on themselves as
the feudal superiors of the same, to whom accordingly the vassal was
bound to pay his feudal dues. And now, that the Fiction might follow
Nature, continued he--"_fictio sequitur naturam_,"--it behooved them to
lay hold of said Yule-hens, by direct personal distraint. But into the
court-yard there was no getting. The feudalist, therefore, prepared a
fishing-line; stuck a bread-pill on the hook, and lowered his
fishing-tackle, anglewise, down into the court. In a few seconds the
barb stuck in a hen's throat, and the hen, now communicating with its
feudal superior, could silently, like ships by Archimedes, be heaved
aloft to the hungry air-fishing society, where, according to
circumstances, the proper feudal name and title of possession failed
not to be awaiting her; for the updrawn fowls were now denominated
Christmas-fowls, now Forest-hens, Bailiff-hens, Pentecost and
Summer-hens. "I begin," said the angling lord of the manor, "with
taking _Rutcher-dues_, for so we call the triple and quintuple of the
original quitrent, when the vassal, as is the case here, has long
neglected payment." The Professor, like any other prince, observed with
sorrow the decreasing population of his hen-yard, for his subjects,
like the Hebrews, were dying by enumeration. At last he had the
happiness, while reading his lecture--he was just come to the subject
of _Forest Salt and Coin Regalities_--to descry through the window of
his auditorium a quitrent hen suspended, like Ignatius Loyola in
prayer, or Juno in her punishment, in middle-air. He followed the
incomprehensible direct ascension of the aeronautic animal, and
at last descried at the upper window the attracting artist, and
animal-magnetizer, who had drawn his lot for dinner from the hen-yard
below. Contrary to all expectation, he terminated this fowling sport
sooner than his Lecture on Regalities.
Fixlein walked home, amid the vesperal melodies of the steeple
sounding-holes; and by the road courteously took off his hat before the
empty windows of the Castle. Houses of quality were to him like persons
of quality, as in India the Pagoda at once represents the temple and
the god. To the mother he brought feigned compliments, which she repaid
with authentic ones; for this afternoon she had been over, with
her historical tongue and nature-interrogating eye, visiting the
white-muslin Thiennette. The mother was wont to show her every
spare-penny which he dropped into her large empty purse, and so raise
him in the good graces of the Fraeulein; for women feel their hearts
much more attracted towards a son, who tenderly reserves for a mother
some of their benefits, than we do to a daughter anxiously caring for
her father; perhaps from a hundred causes, and this among the rest,
that in their experience of sons and husbands they are more used to
find these persons mere six-feet thunder-clouds, forked waterspouts, or
even reposing tornadoes.
Blessed Quintus! on whose Life this other distinction, like an order of
nobility, does also shine, that thou canst tell it over to thy mother;
as, for example, this past afternoon in the parsonage. Thy joy flows
into another heart, and streams back from it, redoubled, into thy own.
There is a closer approximating of hearts, and also of sounds, than
that of the _Echo_; the highest approximation melts Tone and Echo into
_Resonance_ together.
It is historically certain that both of them supped this evening; and
that instead of the whole dinner fragments which to-morrow might
themselves represent a dinner, nothing but the cake-offering or pudding
was laid upon the altar of the table. The mother, who for her own child
would willingly have neglected not herself only, but all other people,
now made a motion that to the Quintaner, who was sporting out of doors
and baiting a bird instead of himself, there should no crumb of the
precious pastry be given, but only table-bread without the crust. But
the Schoolman had a Christian disposition, and said that it was Sunday,
and the young man liked something delicate to eat as well as he.
Fixlein--the counterpart of great men and geniuses--was inclined to
treat, to gift, to gratify a serving housemate, rather than a man who
is for the first time passing through the gate, and at the next
post-stage will forget both his hospitable landlord and the last
postmaster. On the whole, our Quintus had a touch of honor in him, and
notwithstanding his thrift and sacred regard for money, he willingly
gave it away in cases of honor, and unwillingly in cases of
overpowering sympathy, which too painfully filled the cavities of his
heart, and emptied those of his purse. Whilst the Quintaner was
exercising the _jus compascui_ on the cake, and six arms were
peacefully resting on Thiennette's free-table, Fixlein read to himself
and the company the Flachsenfingen Address-calendar; any higher thing,
except Meusel's _Gelehrtes Deutschland_,[39] he could not figure; the
Kammerherrs and Raths of the Calendar went tickling over his tongue
like the raisins of the cake; and of the more rich church-livings he,
by reading, as it were levied a tithe.
He purposely remained his own Edition in Sunday Wove-paper; I mean, he
did not lay away his Sunday coat, even when the Prayer-bell tolled; for
he had still much to do.
After supper he was just about visiting the Fraeulein, when he descried
her in person, like a lily dipped in the red twilight, in the Castle
garden, whose western limit his house constituted, the southern one
being the Chinese wall of the Castle.... By the way, how I got to the
knowledge of all this, what Letter-boxes are, whether I myself was ever
there, &c., &c.--the whole of this shall, upon my life, be soon and
faithfully communicated to the reader, and that too in the present
Book.
Fixlein hopped forth like a Will-o'-wisp into the garden, whose
flower-perfume was mingling with his supper-perfume. No one bowed
lower to a nobleman than he, not out of plebeian servility, nor of
self-interested cringing, but because he thought "a nobleman was a
nobleman." But in this case his bow, instead of falling forwards, fell
obliquely to the right, as it were after his hat; for he had not risked
taking a stick with him; and hat and stick were his proppage and
balance-wheel, in short, his bowing-gear, without which it was out of
his power to produce any courtly bow, had you offered him the High
Church of Hamburg for so doing. Thiennette's mirthfulness soon unfolded
his crumpled soul into straight form, and into the proper tone. He
delivered her a long, neat Thanksgiving and Harvest sermon for the
scaly cake; which appeared to her at once kind and tedious. Young women
without the polish of high life reckon tedious pedantry, merely like
snuffing, one of the necessary ingredients of a man; they reverence us
infinitely; and as Lambert could never speak to the King of Prussia, by
reason of his sun-eyes, except in the dark, so they, I believe, often
like better--also by reason of our sublime air--if they can catch us in
the dark too. _Him_ Thiennette edified by the Imperial History of Herr
von Aufhammer and Her Ladyship his spouse, who meant to put him, the
Quintus, in her will; _her_ he edified by his Literary History, as
relating to himself and the Subrector; how, for instance, he was at
present vicariating in the Second Form, and ruling over scholars as
long in stature as himself. And thus did the two in happiness, among
red bean-blossoms, red May-chafers, before the red of the twilight
burning lower and lower on the horizon, walk to and fro in the garden;
and turn always with a smile as they approached the head of the ancient
gardeneress, standing like a window-bust through the little lattice,
which opened in the bottom of a larger one.
To me it is incomprehensible he did not fall in love. I know his
reasons, indeed. In the first place, she had nothing; secondly, he had
nothing, and school-debts to boot; thirdly, her genealogical tree was a
boundary tree and warning-post; fourthly, his hands were tied up by
another nobler thought, which, for good cause, is yet reserved from the
reader. Nevertheless--Fixlein! I durst not have been in thy place!
I should have looked at her, and remembered her virtues and our
school-years, and then have drawn forth my too fusible heart, and
presented it to her as a bill of exchange, or insinuated it as a
summons. For I should have considered that she resembled a nun in two
senses, in her good heart and in her good pastry; that, in spite of her
intercourse with male vassals, she was no Charles Genevieve Louise
Auguste Timothe Eon de Beaumont,[40] but a smooth, fair-haired,
white-capped dove; that she sought more to please her own sex than
ours; that she showed a melting heart, not previously borrowed from the
Circulating Library, in tears, for which in her innocence she rather
took shame than credit.--At the very first cheapening, I should, on
these grounds, have been out with my heart.--Had I fully reflected,
Quintus! that I knew her as myself; that her hands and mine (to wit,
had I been thou) had both been guided by the same Senior to Latin
penmanship; that we two, when little children, had kissed each other
before the glass, to see whether the two image-children would do it
likewise in the mirror; that often we had put hands of both sexes into
the same muff, and there played with them in secret; had I, lastly,
considered that we were here standing before the glass-house, now
splendent in the enamel of twilight, and that on the cold panes of this
glass-house we two (she within, I without) had often pressed our warm
cheeks together, parted only by the thickness of the glass,--then had I
taken this poor gentle soul, pressed asunder by Fate, and seeing, amid
her thunder-clouds, no higher elevation to part them and protect her
than the grave, and had drawn her to my own soul, and warmed her on my
heart, and encompassed her about with my eyes.
In truth, the Quintus would have done so too, had not the
above-mentioned nobler thought, which I yet disclose not, kept him
back. Softened, without knowing the cause,--(accordingly he gave his
mother a kiss,)--and blessed without having had a literary
conversation; and dismissed with a freight of humble compliments, which
he was to disload on the morrow before the Dragoon Rittmeisterinn, he
returned to his little cottage, and looked yet a long while out of its
dark windows, at the light ones of the Castle. And then, when the first
quarter of the moon was setting, that is, about midnight, he again, in
the cool sigh of a mild, fanning, moist, and directly heart-addressing
night-breeze, opened the eyelids of a sight already sunk in
dreaming....
Sleep, for to-day thou hast done naught ill! I, whilst the drooping,
shut flower-bell of thy spirit sinks on thy pillow, will look into the
breezy night over thy morning footpath, which, through the translucent
little wood, is to lead thee to Schadeck, to thy patroness. All
prosperity attend thee, thou foolish Quintus!--
SECOND LETTER-BOX.
Frau von Aufhammer.--Childhood-resonance.--Authorcraft.
The early piping which the little thrush, last night adopted by the
Quintaner from its nest, started for victual about two o'clock,
soon drove our Quintus into his clothes; whose calender-press and
parallel-ruler the hands of his careful mother had been, for she would
not send him to the Rittmeisterinn "like a runagate dog." The Shock was
incarcerated, the Quintaner taken with him, as likewise many wholesome
rules from Mother Fixlein, how to conduct himself towards the
Rittmeisterinn. But the son answered: "Mamma, when a man has been in
company, like me, with high people, with a Fraeulein Thiennette, he soon
knows whom he is speaking to, and what polished manners and Saver di
veaver (_Savoir vivre_) require."
He arrived with the Quintaner, and green fingers (dyed with the leaves
he had plucked on the path), and with a half-nibbled rose between his
teeth, in presence of the sleek lackeys of Schadeck. If women are
flowers--though as often silk and Italian and gum-flowers as botanical
ones--then was Frau von Aufhammer a ripe flower, with (adipose)
neck-bulb, and tuberosity (of lard). Already, in the half of her body,
cut away from life by the apoplexy, she lay upon her lard-pillow but as
on a softer grave; nevertheless, the portion of her that remained was
at once lively, pious, and proud. Her heart was a flowing cornucopia to
all men, yet this not from philanthropy, but from rigid devotion; the
lower classes she assisted, cherished, and despised, regarding nothing
in them, except it were their piety. She received the bowing Quintus
with the back-bowing air of a patroness; yet she brightened into a look
of kindliness at his disloading of the compliments from Thiennette.
She began the conversation, and long continued it alone, and said,--yet
without losing the inflation of pride from her countenance,--"She
should soon die; but the godchildren of her husband she would remember
in her will." Further, she told him directly in the face, which stood
there all over-written with the Fourth Commandment before her, that "he
must not build upon a settlement in Hukelum; but to the Flachsenfingen
Conrectorate (to which the Burgermeister and Council had the right of
nomination) she hoped to promote him, as it was from the then
Burgermeister that she bought her coffee, and from the Town-Syndic (he
drove a considerable wholesale and retail trade in Hamburg candles)
that she bought both her wax and tallow lights."
And now by degrees he arrived at his humble petition, when she asked
him sick-news of Senior Astmann, who guided himself more by Luther's
Catechism than by the Catechism of Health. She was Astmann's patroness
in a stricter than ecclesiastical sense; and she even confessed that
she would soon follow this true shepherd of souls, when she heard, here
at Schadeck, the sound of his funeral-bell. Such strange chemical
affinities exist between our dross and our silver veins; as, for
example, here between Pride and Love; and I could wish that we would
pardon this hypostatic union in all persons, as we do it in the
fair, who, with all their faults, are nevertheless by us--as, according
to Du Fay, iron, though mixed with any other metal, is by the
magnet--attracted and held fast.
Supposing even that the Devil _had_, in some idle minute, sown a
handful or two of the seeds of Envy in our Quintus's soul, yet they had
not sprouted; and to-day especially they did not, when he heard the
praises of a man who had been his teacher, and who--what he reckoned a
Titulado of the Earth, not from vanity, but from piety--was a
clergyman. So much, however, is, according to History, not to be
denied; that he now straightway came forth with his petition to the
noble lady, signifying that "indeed he would cheerfully content himself
for a few years in the school; but yet in the end he longed to be in
some small quiet priestly office." To her question, "But was he
orthodox?" he answered, that "he hoped so; he had, in Leipzig, not only
attended all the public lectures of Dr. Burscher, but also had taken
private instructions from several sound teachers of the faith, well
knowing that the Consistorium, in its examinations as to purity of
doctrine, was now more strict than formerly."
The sick lady required him to make a proof-shot, namely, to administer
to her a sick-bed exhortation. By Heaven! he administered to her one of
the best. Her pride of birth now crouched before his pride of office
and priesthood; for though he could not, with the Dominican monk,
Alanus de Rupe, believe that a priest was greater than God, inasmuch as
the latter could only make a World, but the former a God (in the mass);
yet he could not but fall in with Hostiensis, who shows that the
priestly dignity is seven thousand six hundred and forty-four times
greater than the kingly, the Sun being just so many times greater than
the Moon. But a Rittmeisterinn--_she_ shrinks into absolute nothing
before a parson.
In the servants' hall he applied to the lackeys for the last annual
series of the _Hamburg Political Journal_; perceiving that with these
historical documents of the time they were scandalously papering the
buttons of travelling raiment. In gloomy harvest evenings, he could now
sit down and read for himself what good news were transpiring in the
political world--twelve months ago.
On a Triumphal Car, full-laden with laurel, and to which Hopes alone
were yoked, he drove home at night, and by the road advised the
Quintaner not to be puffed up with any earthly honor, but silently to
thank God, as himself was now doing.
The thickset blooming grove of his four canicular weeks, and the flying
tumult of blossoms therein, are already painted on three of the sides.
I will now clutch blindfold into his days, and bring out one of them;
one smiles and sends forth its perfumes like another.
Let us take, for instance, the Saint's day of his mother, _Clara_, the
twelfth of August. In the morning, he had perennial, fire-proof joys,
that is to say, Employments. For he was writing, as I am doing. Truly,
if Xerxes proposed a prize for the invention of a new pleasure, any man
who had sat down to write his thoughts on the prize-question had the
new pleasure already among his fingers. I know only one thing sweeter
than making a book, and that is, to project one. Fixlein used to write
little works, of the twelfth part of an alphabet in size, which in
their manuscript state he got bound by the bookbinder in gilt boards,
and betitled with printed letters, and then inserted them among the
literary ranks of his book-board. Every one thought they were novelties
printed in writing types. He had labored--I shall omit his less
interesting performances--at a _Collection of Errors of the Press_, in
German writings; he compared _Errata_ with each other; showed which
occurred most frequently; observed that important results were to be
drawn from this, and advised the reader to draw them.
Moreover, he took his place among the German _Masorites_. He observes
with great justice in his Preface: "The Jews had their _Masora_ to
show, which told them how often every letter was to be found in their
Bible; for example, the Aleph (the A) 42,377 times; how many verses
there are in which all the consonants appear (there are 26 verses), or
only eighty (there are 3); how many verses we have into which 42 words
and 160 consonants enter (there is just one, Jeremiah xxi. 7); which is
the middle letter in certain books (in the Pentateuch, it is in
Leviticus xi. 42, the noble V[41]), or in the whole Bible itself. But
where have we Christians any similar Masora for Luther's Bible to show?
Has it been accurately investigated which is the middle word, or the
middle letter here, which vowel appears seldomest, and how often each
vowel? Thousands of Bible-Christians go out of the world, without ever
knowing that the German A occurs 323,015 times (therefore above 7 times
oftener than the Hebrew one) in their Bible."
I could wish that inquirers into Biblical Literature among our
Reviewers would publicly let me know if, on a more accurate summation,
they find this number incorrect.[42]
Much also did the Quintus _collect_; he had a fine _Almanack
Collection_, a _Catechism_ and _Pamphlet Collection_; also, a
_Collection of Advertisements_, which he began, is not so incomplete as
you most frequently see such things. He puts high value on his
_Alphabetical Lexicon of German Subscribers for Books_, where my name
also occurs among the Js.
But what he liked best to produce were Schemes of Books. Accordingly,
he sewed together a large work, wherein he merely advised the Learned
of things they ought to introduce in Literary History, which History he
rated some ells higher than Universal or Imperial History. In his
Prolegomena to this performance, he transiently submitted to the
Literary republic that Hommel had given a register of Jurists who were
sons of wh--, of others who had become Saints; that Baillet enumerates
the Learned who _meant_ to write something; and Ancillon those who
wrote nothing at all; and the Luebeck Superintendent Goetze, those who
were shoemakers, those who were drowned; and Bernhard those whose
fortunes and history before birth were interesting. This (he could now
continue) should, as it seems, have excited us to similar muster-rolls
and matriculations of other kinds of Learned; whereof he proposed a
few; for example, of the Learned who were unlearned; of those who were
entire rascals; of such as wore their own hair,--of cue-preachers,
cue-psalmists, cue-annalists, and so forth; of the Learned who
had worn black leather breeches, of others who had worn rapiers;
of the Learned who had died in their eleventh year,--in their
twentieth,--twenty-first, &c.,--in their hundred and fiftieth, of which
he knew no instance, unless the Beggar Thomas Parr might be adduced; of
the Learned who wrote a more abominable hand than the other Learned
(whereof we know only Rolfinken and his letters, which were as long as
his hands[43]); or of the Learned who had clipt nothing from each other
but the beard (whereof no instance is known, save that of Philelphus
and Timotheus[44]).
Such by-studies did he carry on along with his official labors; but I
think the State in viewing these matters is actually mad: it compares
the man who is great in Philosophy and Belles-Lettres at the expense of
his jog-trot officialities, to _concert-clocks_, which, though striking
their hours in flute-melodies, are worse time-keepers than your gross,
stupid steeple-clocks.
To return to St. Clara's day. Fixlein, after such mental exertions,
bolted out under the music-bushes and rustling trees; and returned not
again out of warm Nature, till plate and chair were already placed at
the table. In the course of the repast, something occurred which a
Biographer must not omit; for his mother had, by request, been wont to
map out for him, during the process of mastication, the chart of his
child's-world, relating all the traits which in any way prefigured what
he had now grown to. This perspective sketch of his early Past he
committed to certain little leaves which merit our undivided attention.
For such leaves exclusively, containing scenes, acts, plays of his
childhood, he used chronologically to file and arrange in separate
drawers in a little child's-desk of his; and thus to divide his
Biography, as Moser did his Publicistic Materials, into separate
_letter-boxes_. He had boxes or drawers for memorial-letters of his
twelfth, of his thirteenth, fourteenth, &c., of his twenty-first year,
and so on. Whenever he chose to conclude a day of pedagogic drudgery by
an evening of peculiar rest, he simply pulled out a letter-drawer, a
register-bar in his Life-hand-organ, and recollected the whole.
And here must I, in reference to these reviewing Mutes, who may be for
casting the noose of strangulation round my neck, most particularly
beg, that, before doing so on account of my Chapters being called
Letter-boxes, they would have the goodness to look whose blame it was,
and to think whether I could possibly help it, seeing the Quintus had
divided his Biography into such Boxes himself: they have Christian
bowels.
But about his elder brother he put no saddening question to his mother;
this poor boy a peculiar Fate had laid hold of, and with all his genial
endowment dashed to pieces on the iceberg of Death. For he chanced to
leap on an ice-board that had jammed itself among several others; but
these recoiled, and his shot forth with him; melted away as it floated
under his feet, and so sunk his heart of fire amid the ice and waves.
It grieved his mother that he was not found, that her heart had not
been harrowed by the look of the swoln corpse.--O good mother, rather
thank God for it!--
After breakfast, to fortify himself with new vigor for his desk,
he for some time strolled idly over the house, and, like a Police
Fire-inspector, visited all the nooks of his cottage, to gather from
them here and there a live ember from the ash-covered rejoicing-fire of
his childhood. He mounted to the garret, to the empty bird-coops of his
father, who in winter had been a birder; and he transiently reviewed
the lumber of his old playthings, which were lying in the netted
enclosure of a large canary breeding-cage. In the minds of children, it
is regular _little_ forms, such as those of balls and dies, that
impress and express themselves most forcibly. From this may the reader
explain to himself Fixlein's delight in the red acorn-blockhouse,
in the sparwork glued together out of white chips and husks of
potato-plums, in the cheerful glasshouse of a cube-shaped lantern, and
other the like products of his early architecture. The following,
however, I explain quite differently; he had ventured, without leave
given from any lord of the manor, to build a clay house; not for
cottagers, but for flies; and which, therefore, you could readily
enough have put in your pocket. This fly-hospital had its glass
windows, and a red coat of coloring, and very many alcoves, and three
balconies; balconies, as a sort of house within a house, he had loved
from of old so much, that he could scarcely have liked Jerusalem well,
where (according to Lightfoot) no such thing is permitted to be
built. From the glistening eyes with which the architect had viewed
his tenantry creeping about the windows, or feeding out of the
sugar-trough,--for, like the Count St. Germain, they ate nothing but
sugar,--from this joy an adept in the art of education might easily
have prophesied his turn for household contraction; to his fancy, in
those times, even gardeners'-huts were like large waste Arks and Halls,
and nothing bigger than such a fly-Louvre seemed a true, snug
citizen's-house. He now felt and handled his old high child's-stool,
which had in former days resembled the _Sedes Exploratoria_ of the
Pope; he gave his child's-coach a tug and made it run; but he could not
understand what balsam and holiness so much distinguished it from all
other child's-coaches. He wondered that the real sports of children
should not so delight him as the emblems of these sports, when the
child that had carried them on was standing grown up to manhood in his
presence.
Before one article in the house he stood heart-melted and sad; before a
little angular clothes-press, which was no higher than my table, and
which had belonged to his poor drowned brother. When the boy with the
key of it was swallowed by the waves, the excruciated mother had made a
vow that this toy-press of his should never be broken up by violence.
Most probably there is nothing in it but the poor soul's playthings.
Let us look away from this bloody urn.----
Bacon reckons the remembrances of childhood among wholesome, medicinal
things; naturally enough, therefore, they acted like a salutary
digestive on the Quintus. He could now again betake him with new heart
to his desk, and produce something quite peculiar,--petitions for
church livings. He took the Address-calendar, and, for every country
parish that he found in it, got a petition in readiness; which he then
laid aside, till such time as the present incumbent should decease. For
Hukelum alone he did not solicit.--It is a pretty custom in
Flachsenfingen, that, for every office which is vacant, you are
required, if you want it, to sue. As the higher use of Prayer consists,
not in its fulfilment, but in its accustoming you to pray; so likewise
petitionary papers ought to be given in, not indeed that you may get
the office,--this nothing but your money can do,--but that you may
learn to write petitions. In truth, if, among the Calmucks, the turning
of a calabash[45] stands in place of Prayer, a slight movement of the
purse may be as much as if you supplicated in words.
Towards evening--it was Sunday--he went out roving over the village; he
pilgrimed to his old sporting-places, and to the common where he had so
often driven his snails to pasture; visited the peasant who, from
school-times upwards, had been wont, to the amazement of the rest, to
_thou_[46] him; went, an Academic Tutor, to the Schoolmaster; then to
the Senior; then to the Episcopal-barn or church. This last no mortal
understands, till I explain it. The case was this. Some three-and-forty
years ago a fire had destroyed the church (not the steeple), the
parsonage, and, what was not to be replaced, the church-records. (For
this reason it was only the smallest portion of the Hukelum people that
knew exactly how old they were; and the memory of our Quintus himself
vibrated between adopting the thirty-third year and the thirty-second.)
In consequence, the preaching had now to be carried on where formerly
there had been threshing; and the seed of the divine word to be
turned over on the same threshing-floor with natural corn-seed. The
Chanter and the School-boys took up the threshing-floor; the female
mother-church-people stood on the one sheaves-loft, the Schadeck
womankind on the other; and their husbands clustered pyramidically,
like groschen and farthing-gallery men; about the barn-stairs; and far
up on the straw-loft, mixed souls stood listening. A little flute was
their organ, an upturned beer-cask their altar, round which they had to
walk. I confess, I myself could have preached in such a place, not
without humor. The Senior (at that time still a Junior), while the
parsonage was building, dwelt and taught in the Castle; it was here,
accordingly, that Fixlein had learned the _Irregular Verbs_ with
Thiennette.
These voyages of discovery completed, our Hukelum voyager could still,
after evening prayers, pick leaf-insects, with Thiennette, from the
roses; worms from the beds, and a Heaven of joy from every minute.
Every dew-drop was colored as with oil of cloves and oil of gladness;
every star was a sparkle from the sun of happiness; and in the closed
heart of the maiden, there lay near to him, behind a little wall of
separation, (as near to the Righteous man behind the thin wall of
Life,) an outstretched blooming Paradise.... I mean, she loved him a
little.
He might have known it, perhaps. But to his compressed delight he gave
freer vent, as he went to bed, by early recollections on the stair. For
in his childhood he had been accustomed, by way of evening-prayer, to
go over, under his coverlet, as it were, a rosary, including fourteen
Bible Proverbs, the first verse of the Psalm, "All people that on
Earth," the Tenth Commandment, and, lastly, a long blessing. To get the
sooner done with it, he had used to begin his devotion, not only on the
stair, but before leaving that place where Alexander studied men, and
Semler stupid books. Moored in the haven of the down-waves, he was
already over with his evening supplication; and could now, without
further exertion, shut his eyes and plump into sleep.----Thus does
there lurk, in the smallest _homunculus_, the model of--the Catholic
Church.
So far the Dog-days of Quintus Zebedaeus Egidius Fixlein.--I, for the
second time, close a Chapter of this _Life_, as Life itself is closed,
with a sleep.
THIRD LETTER-BOX.
Christmas Recollections.--New Occurrence.
For all of us the passage to the grave is, alas! a string of empty,
insipid days, as of glass pearls, only here and there divided by an
orient one of price. But you die murmuring, unless, like the Quintus,
you regard your existence as a drum; this has only one single _tone_,
but variety of _time_ gives the sound of it cheerfulness enough. Our
Quintus taught in the Fourth Class; vicariated in the Second; wrote at
his desk by night; and so lived on the usual monotonous fashion--all
the time from the Holidays--till Christmas eve, 1791; and nothing was
remarkable in his history except this same eve, which I am now about to
paint.
But I shall still have time to paint it, after, in the first place,
explaining shortly how, like birds of passage, he had contrived to soar
away over the dim, cloudy Harvest. The secret was, he set upon the
_Hamburg Political Journal_, with which the lackeys of Schadeck had
been for papering their buttons. He could now calmly, with his back at
the stove, accompany the winter campaigns of the foregoing year; and
fly after every battle, as the ravens did after that of Pharsalia. On
the printed paper he could still, with joy and admiration, walk round
our German triumphal arches and scaffoldings for fireworks; while to
the people in the town, who got only the newest newspapers, the very
fragments of these our trophies, maliciously torn down by the French,
were scarcely discernible; nay, with old plans he could drive back and
discomfit the enemy, while later readers in vain tried to resist them
with new ones.
Moreover, not only did the facility of conquering the French prepossess
him in favor of this journal; but also the circumstance that it--cost
him nothing. His attachment to gratis reading was decided. And does not
this throw light on the fact that he, as Morhof advised, was wont
sedulously to collect the separate leaves of wastepaper books as they
came from the grocer, and to rake among the same, as Virgil did in
Ennius? Nay, for him the grocer was a Fortius (the scholar), or a
Frederick (the king), both which persons were in the habit of simply
cutting from complete books such leaves as contained anything. It was
also this respect for all waste-paper that inspired him with such
esteem for the aprons of French cooks, which it is well known consist
of printed paper; and he often wished some German would translate these
aprons; indeed, I am willing to believe that a good version of more
than one of such paper aprons might contribute to elevate our
Literature (this Muse _a belles fesses_), and serve her in place of
drivel-bib.--On many things a man puts a _pretium affectionis_, simply
because he hopes he may have half stolen them; on this principle,
combined with the former, our Quintus adopted into his belief anything
he could snap away from an open Lecture, or as a visitor in
class-rooms; opinions only for which the Professor must be paid, he
rigorously examined.--I return to the Christmas eve.
At the very first, Egidius was glad, because out of doors millers and
bakers were at fisticuffs (as we say of drifting snow in large flakes),
and the ice-flowers of the window were blossoming; for external frost,
with a snug warm room, was what he liked. He could now put fir wood
into his stove, and Mocha coffee into his stomach; and shove his right
foot (not into the slipper, but) under the warm side of his Shock, and
also on the left keep swinging his pet Starling, which was pecking at
the snout of old Schil; and then with the right hand--with the left he
was holding his pipe--proceed, so undisturbed, so intrenched, so
cloud-capt, without the smallest breath of frost, to the highest
enterprise which a Quintus can attempt,--to writing the Class-prodromus
of the Flachsenfingen Gymnasium, namely, the eighth part thereof. I
hold the _first printing_ in the history of a literary man to be more
important than the _first printing_ in the history of Letters. Fixlein
could not sate himself with specifying what he purposed, God willing,
in the following year, to treat of; and accordingly, more for the sake
of printing than of use, he further inserted three or four pedagogic
glances at the plan of operations to be followed by his schoolmaster
colleagues as a body.
He lastly introduced a few dashes, by way of hooking his thoughts
together; and then laid aside the _Opus_, and would no longer look at
it, that so, when printed, he might stand astonished at his own
thoughts. And now he could take the Leipzig Fair Catalogue, which he
purchased yearly, instead of the books therein, and open it without a
sigh; he too was in print, as well as I am.
The happy fool, while writing, had shaken his head, rubbed his hands,
hitched about on his chair, puckered his face, and sucked the end of
his cue.--He could now spring up about five o'clock in the evening to
recreate himself; and across the magic vapor of his pipe, like a
new-caught bird, move up and down in his cage. On the warm smoke the
long galaxy of street-lamps was gleaming; and red on his bed-curtains
lay the fitful reflection of the blazing windows and illuminated trees
in the neighborhood. And now he shook away the snow of Time from the
winter-green of Memory; and beheld the fair years of his childhood,
uncovered, fresh, green, and balmy, standing afar off before him. From
his distance of twenty years, he looked into the quiet cottage of his
parents, where his father and his brother had not yet been reaped away
by the sickle of Death. He said to himself: "I will go through the
whole Christmas eve, from the very dawn, as I had it of old."
At his very rising he finds spangles on the table; sacred spangles from
the gold-leaf and silver-leaf with which the Christ-child[47] has been
emblazoning and coating his apples and nuts, the presents of the
night.--On the mint-balance of joy, this metallic foam pulls heavier
than the golden cars, and golden Pythagoras-legs, and golden
Philistine-mice of wealthier capitalists.--Then came his mother,
bringing him both Christianity and clothes; for in drawing on his
trousers, she easily recapitulated the Ten Commandments, and in tying
his garters, the Apostles' Creed. So soon as candle-light was over,
and daylight come, he clambers to the arm of the settle, and
then measures the nocturnal growth of the yellow wiry grove of
Christmas-Birch; and devotes far less attention than usual to the
little white winter-flowerage, which the seeds shaken from the
bird-cage are sending forth in the wet joints of the window-panes.--I
nowise grudge J. J. Rousseau his _Flora Petrinsularis_;[48] but let him
also allow our Quintus his _Window-flora_.--There was no such thing as
school all day; so he had time enough to seek his Flescher (his
brother), and commence (when could there be finer frost for it?) the
slaughtering of their winter-meat. Some days before, the brother,
at the peril of his life and of a cudgelling, had caught their
stalled-beast--so they called the sparrow--under a window-sill in the
Castle. Their slaughtering wants not an axe (of wood), nor puddings,
nor potted meat.--About three o'clock the old Gardener, whom neighbors
must call the Professor of Gardening, takes his place on his large
chair, with his Cologne tobacco-pipe; and after this no mortal
shall work a stroke. He tells nothing but lies; of the aeronautic
Christ-child, and the jingling Ruprecht with his bells. In the dusk,
our little Quintus takes an apple; divides it into all the figures of
stereometry, and spreads the fragments in two heaps on the table; then
as the lighted candle enters, he starts up in amazement at the
unexpected present, and says to his brother, "Look what the good
Christ-child has given thee and me; and I saw one of his wings
glittering." And for this same glittering he himself lies in wait the
whole evening.
About eight o'clock--here he walks chiefly by the chronicle of his
letter-drawer--both of them, with necks almost excoriated with washing,
and in clean linen, and in universal anxiety lest the Holy Christ-child
find them up, are put to bed. What a magic night! What tumult of
dreaming hopes!--The populous, motley, glittering cave of Fancy opens
itself, in the length of the night, and in the exhaustion of dreamy
effort, still darker and darker, fuller and more grotesque; but the
awakening gives back to the thirsty heart its hopes. All accidental
tones, the cries of animals, of watchmen, are, for the timidly devout
Fancy, sounds out of Heaven; singing voices of Angels in the air,
church-music of the morning worship.--
Ah! it was not the mere Lubberland of sweetmeats and playthings, which
then, with its perspective, stormed like a river of joy against the
chambers of our hearts; and which yet in the moonlight of memory, with
its dusky landscapes, melts our souls in sweetness. Ah! this was it,
that then for our boundless wishes there were still boundless hopes;
but now reality is round us, and the wishes are all that we have left!
At last came rapid lights from the neighborhood playing through the
window on the walls, and the Christmas trumpets, and the crowing from
the steeple, hurries both the boys from their bed. With their clothes
in their hands, without fear for the darkness, without feeling for the
morning-frost, rushing, intoxicated, shouting, they hurry down-stairs
into the dark room. Fancy riots in the pastry and fruit perfume of the
still eclipsed treasures, and paints her air-castles by the glimmering
of the Hesperides-fruit with which the Birch-tree is loaded. While
their mother strikes a light, the falling sparks sportfully open and
shroud the dainties on the table, and the many-colored grove on the
wall; and a single atom of that fire bears on it a hanging garden of
Eden.----
--On a sudden all grew light; and the Quintus got--the Conrectorship,
and a table-clock.
FOURTH LETTER-BOX.
Office-brokage.--Discovery of the Promised Secret.--Hans
von Fuechslein.
For while the Quintus, in his vapory chamber was thus running over the
sounding-board of his early years, the Rathsdiener, or City-officer,
entered with a lantern and the Presentation; and behind him the courier
of the Frau von Aufhammer with a note and a table-clock. The
Rittmeisterinn had transformed her payment for the Dog-days sick-bed
exhortation into a Christmas present; which consisted, _first_, of a
table-clock, with a wooden ape thereon, starting out when the hour
struck, and drumming along with every stroke; _secondly_, of the
Conrectorate, which she had procured for him.
As in the public this appointment from the private Flachsenfingen
Council has not been judged of as it deserved, I consider it my duty to
offer a defence for the body corporate; and that rather here than in
the _Reichsanzeiger_, or _Imperial Indicator_.--I have already
mentioned, in the Second Letter-Box, that the Town-Syndic drove a trade
in Hamburg candles; and the then Burgermeister in coffee-beans, which
he sold as well whole as ground. Their joint traffic, however, which
they carried on exclusively, was in the eight School-offices of
Flachsenfingen; the other members of the Council acting only as
bale-wrappers, shopmen, and accountants in the Council wareroom. A
Council-house, indeed, is like an India-house, where not only
resolutions or appointments, but also shoes and cloth, are exposed to
sale. Properly speaking, the Councillor derives his freedom of
office-trading from that principle of the Roman law, _Cui jus est
donandi, eidem et vendendi jus est_; that is to say, He who has the
right of giving anything away has also a right to dispose of it for
money, if he can. Now as the Council-members have palpably the right of
conferring offices gratis, the right of selling them must follow of
course.
_Short Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general_.
My chief anxiety is lest the Academy-product-sale-Commission[49] of the
State carry on its office-trade too slackly. And what but the
commonweal must suffer in the long run, if important posts are
distributed, not according to the current cash which is laid down for
them, but according to connections, relationships, party
recommendations, and bowings and cringings? Is it not a contradiction,
to charge titulary offices dearer than real ones? Should one not rather
expect that the real Hofrath would pay higher by the _alterum tantum_
than the mere titulary Hofrath?--Money, among European nations, is now
the equivalent and representative of value in all things, and
consequently in understanding; the rather as a _head_ is stamped on it;
to pay down the purchase-money of an office is therefore neither more
nor less than to stand an _examen rigorosum_, which is held by a good
_schema examinandi_. To invert this, to pretend exhibiting your
qualifications, in place of these their surrogates, and assignates, and
_monnoie de confiance_, is simply to resemble the crazy philosophers in
_Gulliver's Travels_, who, for social converse, instead of names of
things, brought the things themselves tied up in a bag; it is, indeed,
plainly as much as trying to fall back into the barbarous times of
trade by barter, when the Romans, instead of the figured cattle on
their leather money, drove forth the beeves themselves.
From all such injudicious notions I myself am so far removed, that
often, when I used to read that the King of France was devising new
offices, to stand and sell them under the booth of his Baldaquin, I
have set myself to do something of the like. This I shall now at least
calmly propose; not vexing my heart whether Governments choose to adopt
it or not. As our Sovereign will not allow us to multiply offices
purely for sale, nay, on the contrary, is day and night (like managers
of strolling companies) meditating how to give more parts to one
State-actor; and thus to the Three Stage Unities to add a Fourth, that
of Players; as the above French method, therefore, will not apply, could
we not at least contrive to invent some Virtues harmonizing with the
offices, along with which they might be sold as titles? Might we not,
for instance, with the office of a Referendary, put off at the same
time a titular Incorruptibility, for a fair consideration; and so that
this virtue, as not belonging to the office, must be separately paid
for by the candidate? Such a market-title and patent of nobility could
not but be ornamental to a Referendary. We forget that in former times
such high titles were appended to all posts whatsoever. The scholastic
Professor then wrote himself (besides his official designation) "The
Seraphic," "The Incontrovertible," "The Penetrating"; the King wrote
himself, "The Great," "The Bald," "The Bold," and so also did the
Rabbins. Could it be unpleasant to gentlemen in the higher stations of
Justice, if the titles of Impartiality, Rapidity, &c., might be
conferred on them by sale, as well as the posts themselves? Thus with
the appointment of a Kammerrath, or Councillor of Revenue, the virtue
of Patriotism might fitly be conjoined; and I believe few Advocates
would grudge purchasing the title of Integrity (as well as their common
one of Government-advocacy), were it to be had in the market. If,
however, any candidate chose to take his post without the virtues, then
it would stand with himself to do so, and in the adoption of this
reflex morality Government should not constrain him.
It might be that, as, according to Tristram Shandy, clothes, according
to Walter Shandy and Lavater, proper names, exert an influence on men,
appellatives would do so still more; since, on us, as on testaceous
animals, _the foam so often hardens into shell_; but such internal
morality is not a thing the State can have an eye to; for, as in the
fine arts, it is not this, but the _representation_ of it, which forms
her true aim.
I have found it rather difficult to devise for our different offices
different verbal-virtues; but I should think there might many such
divisions of Virtue (at this moment, Love of Freedom, Public-spirit,
Sincerity, and Uprightness occur to me) be hunted out; were but some
well-disposed minister of state to appoint a Virtue-board or Moral
Address Department, with some half-dozen secretaries, who, for a small
salary, might devise various virtues for the various posts. Were I in
their place, I should hold a good prism before the white ray of Virtue,
and divide it completely. Pity that it were not crimes we wanted--their
subdivision I mean;--our country Judges might then be selected for this
purpose. For in their tribunals, where only inferior jurisdiction, and
no penalty above five florins Frankish, is admitted, they have a daily
training how out of every mischief to make several small ones, none of
which they ever punish to a greater amount than their five florins.
This is a precious moral _Rolfinkenism_, which our Jurists have learned
from the great Sin-cutters, St. Augustin and his Sorbonne, who together
have carved more sins on Adam's Sin-apple than ever Rolfinken did faces
on a cherry-stone. How different one of our Judges from a Papal
Casuist, who, by side-scrapings, will rasp you down the best deadly sin
into a venial!--
School-offices (to come to these) are a small branch of traffic
certainly; yet still they are monarchies,--school-monarchies, to
wit,--resembling the Polish crown, which, according to Pope's verse, is
twice exposed to sale in the century; a statement, I need hardly say,
arithmetically false, Newton having settled the average duration of a
reign at twenty-two years. For the rest, whether the city Council bring
the young of the community a Hamel's _Rat_-and-Child-_catcher_; or a
Weissen's _Child's-friend_,--this to the Council can make no
difference; seeing the Schoolmaster is not a horse, for whose secret
defects the horse-dealer is to be responsible. It is enough if
Town-Syndic and Co. cannot reproach themselves with having picked out
any fellow of genius; for a genius, as he is useless to the State,
except for recreation and ornament, would at the very least exclude the
duller, cooler head, who properly forms the true care and profit of the
State; as your costly carat-pearl is good for show alone, but coarse
grain-pearls for medicine. On the whole, if a schoolmaster be adequate
to flog his scholars, it should suffice; and I cannot but blame our
Commission of Inspectors, when they go examining schools, that they do
not make the schoolmaster go through the duty of firking one or two
young persons of his class in their presence, by way of trial, to see
what is in him.
_End of the Extra-word on Appointment-brokers in general_.
Now again to our history! The Councillor Heads of the Firm had
conferred the Conrectorate on my hero, not only with a view to the
continued consumpt of candles and beans, but also on the strength of a
quite mad notion: they believed the Quintus would very soon die.
--And here I have reached a most important circumstance in this
History, and one into which I have yet let no mortal look; now,
however, it no longer depends on my will whether I shall shove aside
the folding-screen from it or not; but I must positively lay it open,
nay, hang a reverberating-lamp over it.
In medical history, it is a well-known fact, that in certain families
the people all die precisely at the same age, just as in these families
they are all born at the same age (of nine months); nay, from Voltaire,
I recollect one family, the members of which at the same age all killed
themselves. Now, in the Fixleinic lineage, it was the custom that the
male ascendants uniformly on Cantata-Sunday, in their thirty-second
year, took to bed and died; every one of my readers would do well to
insert in his copy of the _Thirty Years' War_, Schiller having entirely
omitted it, the fact, that, in the course thereof, one Fixlein died of
the plague, another of hunger, another of a musket-bullet; all in their
thirty-second year. True Philosophy explains the matter thus: "The
first two or three times, it happened purely by accident; and the other
times, the people died of sheer fright: if not so, the whole fact is
rather to be questioned."
But what did Fixlein make of the affair? Little or nothing; the only
thing he did was, that he took little or no pains to fall in love with
Thiennette; that so no other might have cause for fear on his account.
He himself, however, for five reasons, minded it so little, that he
hoped to be older than Senior Astmann before he died. First, because
three Gypsies, in three different places, and at three different times,
had each shown him the same long vista of years in her magic mirror.
Secondly, because he had a sound constitution. Thirdly, because his own
brother had formed an exception, and perished before the thirties.
Fourthly, on this ground: When a boy he had fallen sick of sorrow, on
the very Cantata-Sunday when his father was lying in the winding-sheet,
and only been saved from death by his playthings; and with this
Cantata-sickness, he conceived that he had given the murderous Genius
of his race the slip. Fifthly, the church-books being destroyed, and
with them the certainty of his age, he could never fall into a right
definite deadly fear: "It may be," said he, "that I have got whisked
away over this whoreson year, and no one the wiser." I will not deny
that last year he had fancied he was two-and-thirty; "however," said
he, "if I am not to be so till, God willing, the next (1792), it may
run away as smoothly as the last; am I not always in _His_ keeping? And
were it unjust if the pretty years that were broken off from the life
of my brother should be added to mine?" Thus, under the cold snow of
the Present, does poor man strive to warm himself, or to mould out of
it a fair snow-man.
The Councillor Oligarchy, however, built upon the opposite opinion;
and, like a Divinity, elevated our Quintus all at once from the
Quintusship to the Conrectorate; swearing to themselves that he would
soon vacate it again. Properly speaking, by school-seniority, this holy
chair should have belonged to the Subrector Hans von Fuechslein; but he
wished it not; being minded to become Hukelum Parson; especially, as
Astmann's Death-angel, according to sure intelligence, was opening more
and more widely the door of this spiritual sheepfold. "If the fellow
weather another year, 't is more than I expect," said Hans.
This Hans was such a churl, that it is pity he had not been a
Hanoverian Post-boy; that so, by the Mandate of the Hanoverian
Government, enjoining on all its Post-officers an elegant style of
manners, he might have somewhat refined himself. To our poor Quintus,
whom no mortal disliked, and who again could hate no mortal, he alone
bore a grudge; simply because _Fixlein_ did not write himself
_Fuechslein_, and had not chosen along with him to purchase a Patent of
Nobility. The Subrector, on this his Patent triumphal chariot, drawn by
a team of four specified ancestors, was obliged to see the Quintus, who
was related to him, clutching by the lackey-straps behind the carriage;
and to hear him, in the most despicable raiment, saying to the train:
"He that rides there is my cousin, and a mortal, and I always remind
him of it." The mild, compliant Quintus never noticed this large
wasp-poison-bag in the Subrector, but took it for a honey-bag; nay, by
his brotherly warmness, which the nobleman regarded as mere show, he
concreted these venomous juices into still feller consistency. The
Quintus, in his simplicity, took Fuechslein's contempt for envy of his
pedagogic talents.
A Catherinenhof, an Annenhof, an Elizabethhof, Stralenhof, and
Petershof, all these Russian pleasure palaces, a man can dispense with
(if not despise), who has a room, in which on Christmas eve he walks
about with a Presentation in his hand. The new Conrector now longed for
nothing but--daylight; joys always (cares never) nibbled from him, like
sparrows, his sleep-grains; and to-night, moreover, the registrator of
his glad time, the clock-ape, drummed out every hour to him, which,
accordingly, he spent in gay dreaming, rather than in sound snoring.
On Christmas morn he looked at his Class-prodromus, and thought but
little of it; he scarcely knew what to make of his last night's foolish
inflation about his Quintusship. "The Quintus-post," said he to
himself, "is not to be named in the same day with the Conrectorate; I
wonder how I could parade so last night before my promotion; at
present, I had more reason." To-day he eat, as on all Sundays and
holidays, with the Master-Butcher Steinberger, his former Guardian. To
this man Fixlein was, what common people are _always_, but polished,
philosophical, and sentimental people very _seldom_ are,--_thankful_; a
man thanks you the less for presents, the more inclined he is to give
presents of his own; and the beneficent is rarely a grateful person.
Meister Steinberger, in the character of storemaster, had introduced
into the wire-cage of a garret, where Fixlein, while a Student
at Leipzig, was suspended, many a well-filled trough with good
canary-meat, of hung-beef, of household bread, and _Sauerkraut_. Money
indeed was never to be wrung from him; it is well known that he often
sent the best calf-skins gratis to the tanner, to be boots for our
Quintus; but the tanning-charges the Ward himself had to bear.--On
Fixlein's entrance, as was at all times customary, a smaller damask
table-cloth was laid upon the large coarser one; the arm-chair, silver
implements, and a wine-soup were handed him; mere waste, which, as the
Guardian used to say, suited well enough for a Scholar; but for a
Flescher not at all. Fixlein first took his victuals, and then
signified that he was made Conrector. "Ward," said Steinberger, "if you
are made that, it is well.--Seest thou, Eva, I cannot buy a tail of thy
cows now; I must have smelt it beforehand." He was hereby informing his
daughter that the cash set apart for the fatted cattle must now be
applied to the Conrectorate; for he was in the habit of advancing all
instalment-dues to his Ward, at an interest of four and a half per
cent. Fifty gulden he had already lent the Quintus on his advancement
to the Quintusship; of these the interest had to be duly paid; yet, on
the day of payment, the Quintus always got some abatement; being wont
every Sunday after dinner to instruct his guardian's daughter in
arithmetic, writing, and geography. Steinberger with justice required
of his own grown-up daughter that she should know all the towns where
he in his wanderings as a journeyman had slain fat oxen; and if she
slipped, or wrote crookedly, or subtracted wrong, he himself, as
Academical Senate and Justiciary, was standing behind her chair, ready,
so to speak, with the forge-hammer of his fist to beat out the dross
from her brain, and at a few strokes hammer it into right ductility.
The soft Quintus, for his part, had never struck her. On this account
she had perhaps, with a few glances, appointed him executor and
assignee of her heart. The old Flescher--simply because his wife was
dead--had constantly been in the habit of searching with mine-lamps and
pokers into all the corners of Eva's heart; and had in consequence long
ago observed--what the Quintus never did--that she had a mind for the
said Quintus. Young women conceal their sorrows more easily than their
joys; to-day, at the mention of this Conrectorate, Eva had become
unusually _red_.
When she went after breakfast to bring in coffee, which the Ward had to
drink down to the grounds: "I beat Eva to death if she but look at
him," said he. Then addressing Fixlein: "Hear you, Ward, did you never
cast an eye on my Eva? She can suffer you, and if you want her, you get
her; but _we_ have done with one another; for a learned man needs quite
another sort of thing."
"Herr Regiments-Quartermaster," said Fixlein, (for this post
Steinberger filled in the Provincial Militia,) "such a match were far
too rich, at any rate, for a Schoolman." The Quartermaster nodded fifty
times; and then said to Eva, as she returned,--at the same time taking
down from the shelf a wooden crook, on which he used to rack out and
suspend his slain calves: "Stop!--Hark, dost wish the present Herr
Conrector here for thy husband?"
"Ah, good Heaven!" said Eva.
"Mayst wish him or not," continued the Flescher; "with this crook thy
father knocks thy brains out, if thou but think of a learned man. Now
make his coffee." And so by the dissevering stroke of this wooden crook
was a love easily smitten asunder, which in a higher rank, by such
cutting through it with the sword, would only have foamed and hissed
the keenlier.
Fixlein might now, at any hour he liked, lay hold of fifty florins
Frankish, and clutch the pedagogic sceptre, and become coadjutor of the
Rector, that is, Conrector. We may assert, that it is with debts, as
with proportions in Architecture; of which Wolf has shown that those
are the best which can be expressed in the smallest numbers.
Nevertheless, the Quartermaster cheerfully took learned men under his
arm; for the notion that his debtor would decease in his thirty-second
year, and that so Death, as creditor in the first rank, must be paid
his Debt of Nature, before the other creditors could come forward with
their debts--this notion he named stuff and old-wifery; he was neither
Superstitious nor Fanatical, and he walked by firm principles of
action, such as the common man much oftener has than your vaporing man
of letters, or your empty, dainty man of rank.
As it is but a few clear Ladydays, warm Mayday-nights, at the most a
few odorous Rose-weeks, which I am digging from this Fixleinic Life,
embedded in the dross of week-day cares; and as if they were so many
veins of silver, am separating, stamping, smelting, and burnishing for
the reader,--I must now travel on with the stream, his history to
Cantata-Sunday, 1792, before I can gather a few handfuls of this
gold-dust, to carry in and wash in my biographical gold-hut. That
Sunday, on the contrary, is very metalliferous; do but consider that
Fixlein is yet uncertain (the ashes of the Church-books not being
legible) whether it is conducting him into his thirty-second or his
thirty-third year.
From Christmas till then he did nothing, but simply became Conrector.
The new chair of office was a Sun-altar, on which, from his
Quintus-ashes, a young Ph[oe]nix combined itself together. Great
changes--in offices, marriages, travels--make us younger; we always
date our history from the last revolution, as the French have done from
theirs. A colonel, who first set foot on the ladder of seniority as
corporal, is five times younger than a king, who in his whole life has
never been aught else except a--crown-prince.
FIFTH LETTER-BOX.
Cantata-Sunday.--Two Testaments.--Pontac; Blood; Love.
The spring months clothe the earth in new variegated hues; but man they
usually dress in black. Just when our icy regions are becoming
fruitful, and the flower-waves of the meadows are rolling together over
our quarter of the globe, we on all hands meet with men in sables, the
beginning of whose Spring is full of tears. But, on the other hand,
this very upblooming of the renovated earth is itself the best balm for
sorrow over those who lie under it; and graves are better hid by
blossoms than by snow.
In April, which is no less deadly than it is fickle, old Senior
Astmann, our Conrector's teacher, was overtaken by death. His departure
it was meant to hide from the Rittmeisterinn; but the unusual ringing
of funeral peals carried his swan-song to her heart; and gradually set
the curfew-bell of her life into similar movement. Age and sufferings
had already marked out the first incisions for Death, so that he
required but little effort to cut her down; for it is with men as with
trees, they are notched long before felling, that their life-sap may
exude. The second stroke of apoplexy was soon followed by the last; it
is strange that Death, like criminal courts, cites the apoplectic
thrice.
Men are apt to postpone their _last_ will as long as their _better_
one; the Rittmeisterinn would perhaps have let all her hours, till the
speechless and deaf one, roll away without testament, had not
Thiennette, during the last night before from sick-nurse she became
corpse-watcher, reminded the patient of the poor Conrector, and
of his meagre, hunger-bitten existence, and of the scanty aliment and
board-wages which Fortune had thrown him, and of his empty Future,
where, like a drooping, yellow plant in the parched deal-box of the
school-room, between scholars and creditors, he must languish to the
end. Her own poverty offered her a model of his; and her inward tears
were the fluid tints with which she colored her picture. As the
Rittmeisterinn's testament related solely to domestics and dependants,
and as she began with the male one, Fixlein stood at the top; and
Death, who must have been a special friend of the Conrector's, did not
lift his scythe and give the last stroke, till his _protege_ had
been with audible voice declared testamentary heir; then he cut all
away,--life, testament, and hopes.
When the Conrector, in a wash-bill from his mother, received these two
Death's-posts and Job's-posts in his class, the first thing he did was
to dismiss his class-boys, and break into tears before reaching home.
Though the mother had informed him that he had been remembered in the
will (I could wish, however, that the Notary had blabbed how much it
was), yet almost with every O which he masoretically excerpted from his
German Bible, and entered in his Masoretic Work, great drops fell down
on his pen, and made his black ink pale. His sorrow was not the
gorgeous sorrow of the Poet, who veils the gaping wounds of the
departed in the winding-sheet, and breaks the cry of anguish in soft
tones of plaintiveness; nor the sorrow of the Philosopher, who, through
one open grave, must look into the whole catacomb-Necropolis of the
Past, and before whom the spectre of a friend expands into the spectral
Shadow of this whole Earth; but it was the woe of a child, of a mother,
whom this thought itself, without subsidiary reflections, bitterly
cuts asunder: "So I shall never more see thee; so must thou moulder
away, and I shall never see thee, thou good soul, never, never any
more!"--And even because he neither felt the philosophical nor the
poetical sadness, every trifle could make a division, a break in his
mourning; and, like a woman, he was that very evening capable
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