Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.
by Jean Paul · English · Gutenberg #36071 · 912,636 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. I.
Author: Jean Paul
Translator: Charles Timothy Brooks
Release date: May 9, 2011 [eBook #36071]
Most recently updated: November 13, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36071
Credits: Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HESPERUS; OR, FORTY-FIVE DOG-POST-DAYS: A BIOGRAPHY. VOL. I. ***
Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
Transcriber's Notes:
1. Page scan source: Making of America
http://www.archive.org/details/hesperusorforty01paulgoog
2. Greek words are transliterated within brackets, e.g. [Greek:
naos].
3. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
4. [=a] represents a macron above the letter a.
JEAN PAUL'S WRITINGS.
_TITAN_.
2 vols. 16mo.
_FLOWER, FRUIT, AND THORN PIECES_.
2 vols. 16mo.
_LEVANA, OR THE DOCTRINE OF EDUCATION_.
1 vol. 16mo.
_THE CAMPANER THAL, AND OTHER WRITINGS_.
1 vol. 16mo.
_HESPERUS_.
2 vols. 16mo.
_LIFE OF JEAN PAUL_.
By Mrs. E. B. Lee. Preceded by his Autobiography.
1 vol. 16mo.
* * * * *
The above are published in uniform volumes by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS, Boston.
HESPERUS
OR
_Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days_
A BIOGRAPHY
FROM THE GERMAN OF
_JEAN PAUL FRIEDRICH RICHTER_
TRANSLATED BY
CHARLES T. BROOKS
"The Earth is the _cul-de-sac_ in the great city of God,--the
camera obscura full of inverted and contracted images from a fairer
world,--the coast of God's creation,--a vaporous halo around a better
sun,--the numerator to a still invisible denominator,--in fact, it is
almost nothing at all."
_Selections from the Papers of the Devil_.
IN TWO VOLUMES.
VOL. I.
BOSTON:
TICKNOR AND FIELDS.
1865.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by
TICKNOR AND FIELDS,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.
University Press:
Welch, Bigelow, And Company,
Cambridge.
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
A work which has three prefaces by its author may be thought by some to
need, and by others not to permit, a very long one from its translator.
This is the first of Richter's romances which took hold of the German
public. After he had long tried in vain, by a variety of literary
devices, to entice or provoke the people's attention, and win or force
a way to their hearts for his wit and his wisdom, his odd fancies and
his noble sentiments, on the appearance of Hesperus, the siege, as
Carlyle says, ("the ten-years'-siege of a poverty-stricken existence"
Jean Paul himself calls it,) may be said to have terminated by storm.
It was the Hesperus that brought Richter to Weimar. It was in Hesperus,
and as Hesperus, that this singular genius rose on the horizon of
Goethe and Schiller,--the latter of whom (as will be well remembered)
tells his great friend that he has met "Hesperus," a strange being,
like a man who has dropped from the moon. English readers may have
different opinions on the question whether he "came down too soon" or
too late. The Translator seems to see signs that Jean Paul is to be
better and better understood and appreciated among us in this free and
forming Western world, and he concludes his introduction of this second
great labor to the public with the benediction upon the book which, in
the closing paragraph of _his_ second Preface, the author so touchingly
pronounces on this evening and morning star of his heart.
The Translator is exceedingly indebted to his friend, Professor Knorr
of Philadelphia, and to his former teacher, Dr. Beck of Cambridge, for
their kind and patient assistance in correcting the proof-sheets of his
work; and from the keen and practised eye of Mr. George Nichols he also
received for some time valuable aid.
Newport, R. I.
PREFACE
TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Two long Prefaces follow on the heels of this third,--the first that of
the second edition, and the next that of the first. Now, if I make this
third again a long one,--and perhaps also, in fact, the many remaining
ones of future editions,--I do not see how a reader of these latter can
get through the lane of antechambers to the historical picture-gallery:
he will die on his way to the book.
I report, then, briefly. In this edition such amendments have been made
as were most needed and easiest. In the first place, I have frequently
translated myself into German out of the Greek, Latin, French, and
Italian, and in fact in every instance where the speech-cleanser, with
proper respect for the subject itself, demanded it. Once for all, we
writers must all accommodate ourselves to the verbal-alien-bill, or
decree for exiling foreigners, of Campe, Kolbe, and others; and even
our beloved Goethe, however much he too "emergiert" and "eminiert,"
will at last, in some future edition or other, have, for example, to
throw both of these very words, which in the latest[1] he brings
forward in the same line, out of the book. Is it not time, now that we
have ejected the foreign peoples which had been long enough encamped in
Germany, that we should send after them what has still longer remained
behind,--their echo, or words?
Only let Kolbe, or any other Purist, be a reasonable man, and not
exhort us to change the technical words which are the common property
of cultivated Europe--e. g. of music, of philosophy--into vernacular
ones which will not be understood, especially in cases where the hand
of the interpreter would snatch and pluck away the butterfly-dust of
variegated allusions. For example, the name Purist itself may serve as
an example. Supposing one should call Arndt a _political Purist_ of
Germany, and Kolbe should substitute political _speech-purifier_, or
pure of speech, this small conceit would give up in the translation the
little bit of ghost that it haply possessed.
Even if the author, however, has not turned out such things,--as some
philological anchorites do, who, like the windpipe, eject all foreign
matter with disagreeable coughing and spitting, and only retain their
native air,--still he has at least sought to imitate the glaciers,
which from year to year gradually shove down foreign bodies, such as
stone and wood, from their sides. How diligently I have done this in
the present edition of Hesperus, on every side, may be seen by the old
printed copy interlined with the new emendations, and I could well wish
Herr Kolbe would just travel to Berlin and inspect the copy. At least I
will beseech the German Society there, which some years ago made me a
member, to go to the bookstore and see for themselves what their
colleague has done, what erasions and substitutions he has made.
The ones who have properly sinned the most against the German language,
and against those who understand no other, are the natural-historians,
who--e. g. Alexander von Humboldt--import the whole Latin Linnæus into
the midst of our language, without any other German signs of
distinction than the final flourishes of German terminations, or
tail-feathers, wherewith, however, they are as little intelligible to
the mere speaker of German as a man would be to a stranger behind him
through his mere queue. Has not our inexhaustible language already
shown its capability of creating a German Linnæus when we read a
Wilhelmi, and still more that true German in heart and speech, Oken?
For the rest, the German language will, in general, never shrink up and
grow impoverished, even by the greatest hospitality towards strangers.
For it steadily produces (as all dictionaries show) out of its ever
fresh stems a hundred times as many children and grandchildren and
great-grandchildren as the foreign birth it adopts in the place of
children; so that after centuries the thicket that has sprung from our
prolific radical words must overshadow and choke up the strange words
which have shot up only as flying seed, and finally rear itself into
a true banian forest, whose twigs grow down to roots, and whose
upward-planted roots strike out into summits. How entangled and wild
with foreign growth will, on the contrary, after some centuries, the
English language be, for instance, with its native but powerless stem
full of engrafted word-shrubbery, capable only of inoculation, and
fetching back from its duplicate, America, more new words than wares!
The second, but easier thing which has been done for this third,
improved edition of Hesperus, of course is, that I have gone slowly
through the whole Evening Star with weeder in hand, and carefully
eradicated all the fungous weeds of genitives, or _Es_'s, in compound
words, wherever I found them, which on the very title-page of the
_Dog's_-Post-days was unfortunately the case. I had, however, much to
endure in this work. Of the old actions of our over-rich language
against itself, too many are attachments upon its real estate, and I
was compelled, therefore, to leave many a nested crew of Es's where it
had too long been settled, and appealed to witnesses and ear-witnesses
for right of possession.
Even up to the hour of this Preface, the author of the "_Morgen-Blatt_
letters on compound words" has been waiting, not so much for a
thorough-going _examination_, (it were, perhaps, too soon for that,)
but first of all for a comprehensive _reading_ of them, which, to be
sure, the scattering archipelago of sheets, like islands lying apart
from one another, will make difficult so long as the periodical has not
yet run through its circle of numbers. But then I shall hope from the
speech-investigator, when he has them complete in his house and hands
before his judgment-seat, a thorough refutation or approbation.
Finally, in the third place, after the double amendment of two
editions, (for the first received great improvements, and in fact
_before_ it was printed,) a third was undertaken which had for its
object to let fly at harshnesses, obscurities, mistakes, and other
over-lengthenings and overshortenings of dress.
But, heavens! how often must not a writing-man have to improve upon
himself, who is hardly over half a century old! Were he to live, in
fact, into a Methusalem's millennium, and continue to write, the
Methusalem would have to append so many volumes of emendations that the
work itself would have to be annexed to them as mere preliminary
matter, appendix, or supplementary sheet.
For several years the author has found in his earlier works, in a high
degree, a fault which he has met with in Ernst Wagner, Fouqué, and
others, frequently repeated or imitated, namely, the passion for
enacting, in his authorial person, the trumpeter, or usher, of the
emotions, which the subject himself should have and show, but not the
poet. E. g. "With sublime calmness Dahore replied." Why add _sublime_,
when it is superfluous, presumptuous, and premature, provided the
answer really exalts, or, if it does not so, the result is still more
pitiful? The poet who, in this way, is the _fore-echo_ of his
personages, takes for his model certain modern tragic poets, like
Werner, Müllner, &c., who prefix to every speech for the actor the
bookbinder's directions: "With touching emotion,"--"with a sigh of
painful remembrance out of the depths of sorrow,"--mere sentences of
intensity, or rather of impotence, which only a pantomimic dance needs
or can follow, but which no piece of Shakespeare's, of Schiller's, or
of Goethe's needs, because, indeed, the speech itself teaches how to
speak it.
For the rest, I have not the courage, now that I am a quarter of a
century older and more aged, to give the first youthful outstreamings
of the heart a different channel, and a weaker fall and course. Man in
later life too easily regards every change in his junior as an
improvement; but as no man can take the place of another, so, too,
cannot the same man act as his own substitute in his different periods
of life, least of all the poet.
The best _wedded_ love is not what the _maidenly_ was; and so, too, is
there in inspiration and delineation a maiden muse. Ah, all first
things in poesy, as in life, whatever else may be wanting to them, are
so innocent and good; and all _blossoms_ come so _pure-white_ into the
world, in which by and by,--as Goethe says,[2] even of material colors,
"The sun tolerates no white." Therefore shall all the ardent words of
my inspiration for Emanuel's dying and Victor's loving and weeping, and
for Clotilda's sorrow and silence, stand evermore in Hesperus uncooled
and unchanged. Even the Now shall take nothing from the Once. For
although during these twenty-five years I have been made, by some
imitations and echoes of the book, actually sick of myself,
nevertheless I overcome the disgust of this self-surfeit by the hope
that the youth who wrote will again, by and by, find young men and
young women to read him, and that hereafter, even for older readers,
more will survive of the thing imitated than of the imitations.
And so, then, may this Evening Star--which was once the morning star of
my whole soul--run its _third_ circuit around the reading world in the
fuller light of a better position toward the sun and the earth!
JEAN PAUL FR. RICHTER.
Baireuth, January 1, 1819.
PREFACE
TO THE SECOND EDITION.
I have as yet completed nothing of this Preface beyond a tolerable
sketch, which shall here be given to the leader unadorned. I may
perhaps, by the gift of this sketch, also raise the curtain which
continues to hang down before my literary workshop, and which hides
from posterity how I labor therein as my own serving brother and as
master of the Scottish chair. A plan is with me, however, no outline of
a sermon in Hamburg, which the head pastor gives out on Saturday and
fills out on Sunday. It is no automaton, no lay figure, no canon, after
which I work; it is no skeleton for future flesh, but a plan is a leaf
or sheet on which I make myself more comfortable and move more at ease,
while I shake out upon it my whole brain-tree, in order afterwards to
pick over and plant the windfalls, and cover--the paper with organic
globules and layers of ph[oe]nix ashes, that whole brilliant
pheasantries may rise out of it. In such a sketch I keep the most
unlike and antagonistic things apart by mere dashes. In such sketches I
address myself, and _thou_ myself like a Quaker, and order myself about
a great deal; nay, I frequently introduce therein conceits which I do
not have printed at all, either because no connection can be contrived
for them, or because they are of themselves good for nothing.
And now it will be time that I should really present the reader such a
sketch, which happens to be this time the plan of the present Preface.
It is headed:--
ARCHITECTURAL PLAN AND BUILDING MATERIAL FOR THE PREFACE TO THE SECOND
EDITION OF HESPERUS.
"But make it short, because, as it is, the world will find it a
long way through two antechambers into the passengers'-room of the
Book.--Joke in the beginning.--Seldom does a man bowl all the Nine
Muses on the literary ninepin-alley.--The conclusion from the
reflection.--Bring out many resemblances between the title Hesperus and
the Evening Star, or Venus, of which the following must be specimens:
That mine, like the latter, is full of high, sharp mountains, and that
both owe their greater splendor to their unevenness; further, that the
one as well as the other, in its transit across the sun (of Apollo),
appears only as a black spot.--(In your copy-book of letters you must
have made numbers of such allusions.)--The world expects that the
Evening Star in the second edition will come up from below, as Lucifer,
or Morning Star, and that the glorified body of the paper will
tabernacle a glorified soul: let it pass, and bring the world to its
right bearings.--Regard pedants, who sustain and fodder themselves on
words, not on things, as like the after-moths, which devour and digest
wax cakes, but no honeycomb.--No one so very much resembles as pedants
do the magpies, which are at once thievish and _garrulous_: they dilute
and filch.--Into the critical hell precisely those classes of persons
are not cast, which the Talmud also exempts from the Jewish, namely,
the poor, those who cannot count, and those who are carried off by the
diarrh[oe]a.--Be a fox, and cajole the critical billiard-markers who
announce loss and gain."----
This last I do not understand myself, because this sketch was written
as long ago as the winter. I can rather confess, without irony, that
the critical quarter-judges, or country-judges, have spared my life,
and have not thrown over me either a Spanish mantle, or a cloak of
humility, or a bloody shirt and hair-shirt. This indulgence of the
critics for a writer of books, who, like a Catholic, performs more good
works than he needs for salvation, is certainly not their worst
characteristic, as they thereby exert such a beneficial influence on
our empty days. For one must now be very glad if only four or five new
similes are sent to the Easter fair, and if at Michaelmas only a few
flowers, which are novelties, are offered for sale. Our literary
kitchen-servants know how to play off on the table-cloth and into our
mouths the same _goutée_ over and over again, under the appearance of
six different dishes, and entertain us twice a year with an imitation
of the celebrated potato-banquet in Paris. At first came on merely a
potato-soup; then potatoes again in another preparation; the third
course, on the contrary, consisted of potatoes rehashed; so, too, the
fourth. For the fifth, now, one could serve up potatoes again, when one
had only announced for the sixth, potatoes cut into the novel form of
brilliants,--and so it went on through fourteen dishes, of which,
fortunately, one could still say, that at least bread, confectionery,
and liquor comforted the stomach, and consisted of potatoes.----
Censure is an agreeable lemon-juice in praise; hence both are always
bestowed by the world together, as if in the form of an oxymel; just
as, according to the Talmud, a few fingerfuls of assaf[oe]tida were
thrown with the other things upon the altar of burnt-offerings. The
only thing, accordingly, which I will expose about the reviewers after
the foregoing praise, and with which they really offend, is this, that
they seldom (their heart is good) understand much of the subject or
writing on which they pass judgment; and even this blame applies only
to the greater part of them.----
"Weave it in (the sketch goes on) that you cannot make out what the
unveiling and unshelling of women's arms,[3] bosoms, and backs at the
present day can mean, just as, formerly, peacocks were served up on the
game-dish with precisely the corresponding parts, necks, wings, and
heads, unpicked.--It will be well, therefore, if you conjecture that
the shell-less ladies are female Jesuits and Freemasons in disguise,
because in both orders the mysteries and veilings begin with
denudation; or lay these unfeathered limbs at the door of some
starvation or other, as a chicken creeps forth from an egg, out of
which one has only drawn off a few drops of the white, with featherless
spots.--Threaten, at least, that ladies and crabs are best when caught
and boiled in the moulting-season."----
This is one of the cases of which I said above, that in them I was
obliged to give up and throw away conceits of the sketch, for want of
connection with the main subject: for really the whole matter of the
moulting of the limbs has nothing in common with the Preface, except
the year of birth.
"You must deviate from other authors," the plan goes on, "and glide
silently over the approbation you have reaped, so that the world may
see just what you are.--One expects from the Preface to a second
edition a little map of products, or a harvest register of all the
after-bloom which exalts the second above the first: give them the
register!--
With pleasure!--First, I have corrected all typographical
errors,--then all slips of the pen,--then many cacophonies of
language,--moreover, verbal and real blunders enough; but the conceits
and the poetical tulips I have seldom rooted out. I saw that if I did
so there would be left in the world not much more of the book (because
I should strike out the whole style) than the binding and the list of
errata. The theologian hates juristic allusions,--the jurist,
theological ones,--the physician, both,--the mathematician, all of
them. I love them all. What shall one leave out or retain?--The woman
is displeased with satire, the man with softening warmth, (for
_coldness_ in _books_, as in _cakes of chocolate_, he holds to be proof
of excellence,) and the public itself has forty-five opinions upon a
chapter, as Cromwell dictated four contradictory letters to the same
correspondent, merely for the sake of concealing from his scribes the
purport of the one which he really despatched.----To which opinion
shall an author adhere in such a disagreement?--Most properly to his
own, as the world to its own.--
For the rest, my little[4] work can hardly see so many _printed_
editions as I have arranged of _written_ and improved ones in
my study; and therefore great alterations in it are, if not less
indispensable, at least more difficult. In the plan of the story
itself, therefore,--even supposing I had forgotten that it is a
true one,--there is little to change for the better, because the work
is like my breeches, which were not made by a tailor, but by a
stocking-loom, and in which the breaking of a single stitch of the
right shank unravels the whole fabric of the left. For it is an
essential, but undeniable, fault of the book,--which I easily explain
by the want of episodes,--that the moment I take out from the first
story (or volume) any defective stone whatever, immediately in the
third all totters, and at last comes down. Of course I thereby fall far
in the rear of the best new romances, where one can break out or build
in considerable pieces without the least injury to the composition and
fire-proof quality, simply because they resemble, not, like my book, a
mere house, but a whole toy-city from Nuremberg, whose loose, unhitched
houses the child piles away in his play-house, and whose mosaic of huts
the dear little one easily puts together for his amusement, streetwise,
just as he fancies. A true story always has the annoying thing about
it, that in its case this cannot be done.
However, I sufficiently excuse my work on the score of artistic
_changes_ and _improvements_ by true _enlargements_ of it through
historical additions. As I fortunately have for some years myself lived
and been housed among the persons whom I have portrayed, accordingly I
am perfectly in a position, as fly-wheel of this fair family circle, to
supply, from the depositions of living witnesses, a thousand
corrections and explanations which otherwise no man could learn, which
however throw light on the somewhat dark history. Let the critic simply
turn over the two nearest chapters of the book, or the remotest, or any
others.
My critics would complacently persuade me that I should have avoided in
the additions what they call superfluous wit, and skilfully watered the
gleaming naphtha-soil of my Evening Star, which was neither to be
quenched nor sunk, with fresh history.----Heaven grant it! I have slim
hope of it; but I should be glad if the reviewers would assure me that
I had--although not sold at auction or covered up the crowded images in
my Pantheon-Pandemonium--still, however, at least hung them farther
apart.
"On the whole," continues the sketch, "take in hand the historical
_grafting-knife_ rather than the _weeder_!"
I just said that I have done so.
"But as touching those dried-up, withered men, in whose eyes nothing is
great but their own image, and whose stomach at the sight of a fairer
movement of the exalted heart is taken with a _reverse_ movement,--in
short, whom everything nauseates (except what is nauseous),--make
believe as if you did not perceive them; and so much more as they
resemble patients who are gnawed by the tape-worm, and who, according
to medical observations, sicken and vomit at all music, especially
organs, think rather of the good souls whom thou knowest and lovest,
and of the good ones whom thou only lovest,----and therefore at the end
of the Preface be earnest and grateful and rejoice!"----
Verily that I should have done, even without the sketch!--How could I
remain insensible to the indulgence with which, on the whole, the world
has appropriated the Aphrodito-graphic[5] fragments of my Evening Star,
which runs around the sun with such remarkable aberrations, or
deflections, and in so little of a planetary ellipse, that it may
easily, as often happens to the Hesperus in the sky, be taken for a
hairy, bearded, and tailed comet?--And how hard and cold must the soul
be which could remain without emotion and without joy at the thought of
the shortest happy day, nay, even happy second, or _third_, into which
it had been able to introduce suffering men; and at the wide-spread
relationship of lofty wishes and holy hopes, and friendly feelings,
and at the gracious concordat wherein the brawlers and wranglers in
this first world of the prosaic life give each other their hands
in the _second_ world of poetry, in mutual recognitions, and become
brothers?--
Once more, good Asterisk and secondary planet of the soft evening-star
above me, I follow thee on thy way with the wishes of three years ago
for every soul which thou canst gladden. Only never rise upon any eye
as a rainy star,--only never lead one astray, so that it shall take the
_moonlight_ of poesy for the _morning_ of truth, and dismiss too early
its morning dreams!--But into the torture-chambers and through the
prison-gratings of forsaken souls throw a cheering radiance; and for
him whose blessed island has sunk away from him to the bottom of the
sea of eternity, transfigure thou the low, dark region; and whoever
looks round and looks up in vain in a dismantled Paradise, to him may a
little ray from thee show, down on the ground, under the yellow leaves,
some hidden sweet fruit or other of a former time; and if there is any
eye to which thou canst show nothing, draw it softly upward to thy
brother, and to the heaven in which he shines.--Nay, and if I ever grow
too old, then comfort me also!
Hof, May 16, 1797.
PREFACE, SEVEN REQUESTS, AND CONCLUSION.
PREFACE.
I Was going to be indignant, in the beginning, at some hosts of readers
with whom I know not what to do in this book, and I was about to
station myself at the gate of Hesperus as porter, and with the greatest
incivility send off particularly people who are good for nothing, for
whom, as for a prosector, the heart is nothing but the thickest muscle,
and who carry a brain and heart and interior parts generally as moulds
of plaster statues do their stuffing of wood, hay, and clay, merely in
order to turn out _hollow_ from the casting. I was on the point, even,
of scolding at honest business-people who, like Antoninus the Great,
thank the gods that they never did much at poetry; and at those to whom
the chapel-leader, Apollo, must discourse on a rebeck, or straw fiddle,
and his nine soprano girls with the ale-house fiddle and corn-stalk
bass-viol. Nay, even at the reading sisterhood of the Romances of
Chivalry, who read as they marry, and who among books, as among
gentlemen's faces, pick out, not the fair, feminine ones, but the wild,
masculine ones.----
But an author should not be a child, and embitter for himself his
Preface, when it is not every day that he has to make one. Why did I
not rather in the first line address _those_ readers, and take them by
the hand, to whom I joyfully give my Hesperus, and whom I would present
with a free copy of it if I knew where they lived?--Come, dear, weary
soul, thou that hast anything to forget, either a sad day or a clouded
year, or a human being that afflicts thee, or one that loves thee, or a
dismantled youth, or a whole life of heaviness; and thou, crushed
spirit, for whom the present is a wound and the past a scar, come into
my _Evening-Star_ and refresh thyself with its little glimmer; but, if
the poetic illusion gives thee sweet, fugitive pains, be this thy
conclusion from it: perhaps that, too, is an illusion which causes me
the longer and deeper ones.--And as to thee, loftier man, who findest
our life, which is passed only in a _glass_, darkly, less than thyself
and death, and whose heart a veiled great spirit grinds brighter and
purer in the dead dust of other mouldered human hearts, as one polishes
the diamond with the dust of a diamond, I may call thee, too, down into
my evening and night star to such eminence as I am able to throw up,
that, when thou seest gliding around it at the foot, as around
Vesuvius, _morganic fays_ and mist groupings and dreamy worlds and
shadowy lands, thou shalt perhaps say to thyself, "And so is all dream
and shadow around me; but dreams imply spirits, and clouds countries,
and the shadow of the earth a sun and a universe?"--
But to thee, noble spirit, who art weary of the age and of the
after-winter of humanity, to whom sometimes, but not always, the human
race, like the moon, seems to go backward, because thou mistakest the
procession of clouds flying by below it for the course of the heavenly
body, and who, full of exalted sighs, full of exalted wishes, and with
silent resignation, hearest indeed beside thee a destroying hand and
the falling of thy brothers, but yet castest not down thy eye, upraised
to the ever serene, sunny face of Providence, and whom misfortune, as
lightning does man, destroys, but not _disfigures_; to thee, noble
spirit, I have, to be sure, not the courage to say, "Deign to look upon
my play of shadows, that the Evening-Star which I usher before thee may
make thee forget the earth on which thou standest, and which now with a
thousand graves lays itself, like a vampyre, upon the human race, and
sucks the blood of victims!"--And yet I have thought of thee all
through the book, and the hope of bringing my little night and evening
piece before wet, upraised, and steadfast eyes has been the sustaining
maul-stick[6] of my weary hand.
As I have now written too seriously, I must, out of the seven promised
petitions, among which only four are such, omit three. I therefore
present only the
First Request. That the reader will pardon the title, "Dog-Post-Days,"
until the first chapter has explained and excused it; and the
Second. Always to read a whole chapter, and never half a one, because
the great whole consists of little wholes, as, according to the
Homoiomereia[7] of Anaxagoras, the human body consists of innumerable
little human bodies; and the
Seventh Request, which flows partly from the second, but concerns the
critics only, not to anticipate me in their _fugitive leaves_,[8] which
they call Reviews, by the publication of my leading incidents, but to
leave the reader some few surprises, which, to be sure, he can have
only once. And finally the
Fifth Petition, which one knows already from the Lord's Prayer.[9]
CONCLUSION.
And now, then, become visible, little peaceful Hesperus--Thou needest a
little cloud to veil thee, and a little year, in order to have
completed thy orbit!—Mayest thou stand nearer to Truth and Virtue, as
thy image in heaven does to the sun, than the earth into which thou
shinest does to either of the three; and mayest thou, like that star,
never withdraw thyself from the sight of men, except by hiding thyself
in the sun! May thy influence be fairer, warmer, and surer than that of
the Almanac-Hesperus, which superstition places on the misty throne of
_this_ year!--Thou wouldst make me happy a second time if thou shouldst
be an _Evening-Star_ to some withered mortal, and to some blooming one
a _morning star_. Sink with the former and rise with the latter; glow
in the evening sky of the first between his clouds, and overspread his
past life-road up the mountain with a soft lustre, that he may
recognize again the far-off flowers of youth; and rejuvenate his
antiquated recollections into hopes!--Cool off the fresh youth in the
early hours of life, as a tranquillizing morning star, ere the sun
falls hot upon him and the whirl of day sets in!--But for me, Hesperus,
thou art now well set; thou hast hitherto journeyed on beside the
earth, as my companion-planet, as my second world, on which my soul
disembarked as it left the body to the buffetings of earth; but to day
my eye falls sadly and slowly off from thee and thy white flower-bed,
which I planted around thy coasts, down upon the damp, cold ground
where I stand, and I see how we are all encompassed with coolness and
evening, torn far away from the stars, amused with glowworms,
disquieted with _ignes fatui_, all veiled from each other, every one
alone, and feeling his own life only through the warm, throbbing hand
of a friend, which he holds in the dark.----
Yes, there will indeed come another age, when it will be light, and
when man will awake out of sublime dreams and find--the dreams again,
because he has lost nothing but sleep.--
The stones and rocks, which two veiled shapes, Necessity and Sin, like
Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw behind them at the good, shall become new
men.--
And on the western gate of this century stands written: Here is the
road to Virtue and Wisdom; just as on the western gate of Cherson[10]
stood the sublime inscription: Here leads the way to Byzantium.----
Infinite Providence, thou wilt make the day dawn.--
But still struggles the twelfth hour of the night; nocturnal birds of
prey shoot through the darkness; spectres rattle; the dead play their
antics; the living dream.
JEAN PAUL.
In the _Vernal Equinox_, 1794.
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
1. DOG-POST-DAY.
Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--Overture
and Secret Instructions of the Book.
2. DOG-POST-DAY.
Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
3. DOG-POST-DAY.
Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart.
4. DOG-POST-DAY.
Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.--Courtiers, and a Noble
Man.
5. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate sitting on Music.
6. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-Puff.--
Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
7. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Great Parsonage-Park.--Orangery.--Flamin's Promotion.--Festal
Afternoon of Domestic Love.--Rain of Fire.--Letter to Emanuel.
8. DOG-POST-DAY.
Examinatorium And Dehortatorium Of Conscience.--The Studious
Honeymoon of a Scholar.--The Cabinet of Natural History.--Answer
From Emanuel.--The Packed-up Chin.--Arrival of the Prince.--First
Intercalary Day.
9. DOG-POST-DAY.
A heavenly Morning; a heavenly Afternoon.--A House without Walls; a
Bed without a House.
10. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Bee-Master.--Zeusel's Oscillation.--Arrival of the Princess.
11. DOG-POST-DAY.
Transfer of the Princess.--Smuggling of a Kiss.--Montre à
Regulateur.--Simultaneous Love.
12. DOG-POST-DAY.
Polar Fantasies.--The Singular Isle of Union.--One more Bit from
previous History.--The Stettin-Apple as Coat-of-Arms.--Third
Intercalary Day.
13. DOG-POST-DAY.
Concerning his Lordship's Character.--An Evening of Eden.--
Maienthal.--The Mountain and Emanuel.
14. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Philosophical Arcadia.--Clotilda's Letter.--Victor's
Confessions.
15. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Parting.
16. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Potato-Form-Cutter.--Drag-chains in St. Luna.--Wax
Embossments.--Chess according to the _Regula Falsi_.--The
Thistle of Hope.--Escort to Flachsenfingen.--Fourth Intercalary
Day.
17. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Cure.--The Prince's Palace.--Victor's Visits.--Joachime.--
Copperplate Engraving of the Court.--Cudgellings.
18. DOG-POST-DAY.
Clotilda's Promotion.--Incognito-Journey.--Petition of the Majors
of the Chase.--Consistorial Messenger.--Caricature of the
Flachsenfingeners.
19. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Hair-Dresser with a (musical) Disease of the Lungs.--Clotilda in
Victor's Dream.--Extra Lines on Church-Music.--Garden Concert by
Stamitz.--Quarrel between Victor and Flamin.--The Heart without
Solace.--Letter to Emanuel.
20. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letter from Emanuel.--Flamin's Fruit-Pieces on Shoulders.--Walk to
St. Luna.--Fifth Intercalary Day.
21. DOG-POST-DAY.
Victor's Professional Visits.--Concerning Houses full of
Daughters.--The Two Fools.--The Carrousel.
22. DOG-POST-DAY.
Gun-Foundery of Love; e. g. Printed Gloves, Quarrels, Dwarf-Flasks,
and Stabs.-A Title from the Digests of Love.--Marie.--Court-Day.--
Giulia's dying Epistle.
23. DOG-POST-DAY.
First Visit to Clotilda.--The Paleness.--The Redness.--The
Race-Weeks.
24. DOG-POST-DAY.
Rouge.--Clotilda's Sickness.--The Play of Iphigenia.--Difference
between Plebeian and Patrician Love.--Sixth Intercalary Day.
HESPERUS,
OR
45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
1. DOG-POST-DAY.
Difference between the 1st and 4th of May.--Rat-Battle-Pieces.--
Nocturne.--Three Regiments in future Breeches.--Couching-Needle.--
Overture and Secret Instructions of the Book.
In the house of the Court-Chaplain Eymann, in the bathing-village of
St. Luna, there were two parties: the one was glad on the 30th of April
that our hero, the young Englishman, Horion, would return from
Göttingen the 1st of May to stay at the parsonage,--the other disliked
it; they did not want him to arrive till the 4th of May.
The party of the 1st of May, or Tuesday, consisted of the Chaplain's
son, Flamin, who had been educated with the Englishman till his twelfth
year in London, and till his eighteenth in St. Luna, and whose heart
with all its venous ramifications had grown into the Briton's, and in
whose ardent breast during the long Göttingen separation there had been
_one_ heart too few; next, of the Chaplain's wife, a native
Englishwoman, who loved in my hero a countryman, because the magnetic
vortex of nationality reached her soul over land and sea; and, finally,
of their eldest daughter, Agatha, who all day long laughed out at
everything and doted on everything without knowing why, and who, with
her polypus-arms, drew every one to herself who did not live quite too
many houses off from her, as food for her heart.
The sect of the 4th of May could measure itself with its rival, for it
also made out a college of three members. Its adherents were Appel
(Apollonia, the youngest daughter), who acted as cook, and whose
culinary reputation and certificate of good bakery would suffer by it,
if the guest should come before the bread rose; she could well
conceive what a soul must feel who should stand before a guest with
her hands full of skewers and needles, beside the flat-iron of the
window-curtains, and without having even the _frisure_ of her hat, or
of the head which was to be under it, so much as half ready. The second
adherent of this sect, who ought to have had most to say against
Tuesday,--although he said least, because he could not talk and
had only recently been baptized,--was to be carried to church on
Friday for the first time; this adherent was the godchild of the
guest. The Chaplain knew, to be sure, that the moon sent round her
godfather-bidder, Father Riccioli,[11] among the _savans_ of earth, and
got them into the church-book of heaven as godfathers to her spots; but
he thought it was better for him to take a godfather within a
circumference of not more than fifty miles. The Apostles'-day of the
churching and the Festival-day of the arrival of the distinguished
godfather would then have beautifully coincided; but now the plaguy
fine weather was bringing godfather along four days too soon!
The third disciple of Friday was, at bottom, the heresiarch of this
party, the Court-Chaplain himself: the parsonage wherein Horion was to
have his temporary court residence was all full of rats,--a regular
ball-room and _plaza de armas_ of the same,--and of these the Chaplain
wanted first of all to clear his house. Few court-chaplains, with
hectic in their bodies and rats in their houses, ever made so much
stench on that account as did this one in St. Luna against the beasts.
It would have taken very few clouds of it to smoke all the court-dames
out of Europe. Did not our hectic patient burn as much of the hoof of
his nag as he had sawed off from it? Didn't he even take one of the
sharp-toothed creatures themselves prisoner, and smear him with
gudgeon-grease and train-oil, and then let the arrested subject go,
that he might as a pariah trot up and down through the holes, and
constrain by his ointment rats of higher caste to emigrate? Did he not
go to work by the wholesale, and actually take a buck to board, of
which he wanted nothing except that he should stink and displease the
tailed monks? And were not all these remedies as good as useless?...
For the deuse take rats and Jesuits! Meanwhile, I will at least offer
people here on the very third page the moral, that against both of
these pests, as against toothache, mental troubles, and fleas, there
are a thousand excellent recipes which have no effect.
We will now, in a body, make our way farther into the parsonage, and
concern ourselves as minutely about the family history of the Eymanns
as if we lived only three houses distant from them. Horion,--the accent
must fall on the first syllable,--or Sebastian, by abbreviation
_Bastian_, as the Eymanns called him,--or Victor, as Lord Horion, his
father, called him, (for I give him now one name and now another, just
as my prose-prosody requires,)--Horion had, through the Italian
Tostato, who was a peripatetic Auerbach's court for that whole region,
and was hurrying on to St. Luna, caused the little oral lie to be
palmed upon his dear friends at the parsonage, that he was coming on
Friday: he wanted, first, to give them a real surprise; and, secondly,
he wanted modestly to tie the hands, which on his account _would_ be
scouring, brushing up and serving up; and, thirdly, he regarded an oral
lie as at least more trivial than a written one. To his father,
however, he wrote the truth, and fixed his entrance into the parsonage
for the 1st of May, or Tuesday. His Lordship had his abode in the
residence city of Flachsenfingen, where he applied to the Prince at
once moral blinders and _eye-glasses_, and _guided_ his vision while he
_sharpened_ it; but he was himself blind, though only physically. For
that reason his son had to bring an oculist with him from Göttingen,
who should operate upon him in the Chaplain's house on Tuesday. When he
caused his Victor to be made Doctor of Medicine, many Göttingen people,
to my knowledge, wondered that so high-born a youth should put on the
Doctor's head-piece,--that _Pluto's helmet_, which makes, not, like the
mythological one, the wearer, but others indeed invisible,--and thrust
on his finger the Doctor's ring,--that _ring-of--Gyges_, which only to
others imparts invisibility: but was, then, the condition of his
father's eyes unknown or an insufficient apology to the people of
Göttingen?
His Lordship wrote to the Court-Chaplain that he and his son would
come to-morrow. The Chaplain read over the Job's-post silently three
times in succession, and thrust it back with comic resignation into
the envelope, saying: "We have now ample hope that to-morrow our
Doctor will certainly arrive with the rest;--fine tournaments and
watering-place amusements do I anticipate, wife! when to-morrow comes
in, and my rats in a body dance like children before him;--besides, we
have nothing to eat; and then, too, I have nothing to put on, for not
before Thursday can I extort from that Flachsenfingen wind-bag[12] a
hair-bag,--and you laugh at it? Is not one of us in the very middle of
April made an April-fool of?" But the Chaplain's lady fell on his
shoulder with redoubled exclamations of delight, and ran right off to
gather to this rose festival of her good soul the little brethren and
sisters of the church of the children. The whole family circle now
resolved itself into three terrified and three delighted faces.
We will seat ourselves only among the joyous ones, and listen
while they, during the afternoon, work away as portrait-painters,
drapery-painters, and gallery-inspectors, at the picture of the beloved
Briton. All remembrances are made into hopes, and Victor is to bring
nothing with him that is changed except his stature. Flamin, wild as an
English garden, but more fruitful, refreshed himself and others with
his delineation of Victor's gentle truthfulness and honesty, and of his
head, and praised even his poetic fire, which he generally did not rate
very high. Agatha called to mind his humorous knight's-leaps,--how he
once took the drum of a passing dentist and drummed the village
together for nothing before his theatre, because he had previously
bought out the whole travelling apothecary's shop of this honest and
true friend Hain,[13]--how he would often, after a child's baptism,
post himself in the pulpit, and there be-preach two or three devout
spectators in their work-day sward, till they laughed more than they
wept,--and many another piece of waggery, whereby he would make no one
ridiculous but himself, and set no one laughing but other people.
But women will never approve of it (only men can) when one, like
Victor, belongs to the British subdivision of humorists;--for with them
and courtiers wit itself is caprice;--they cannot approve that Victor
should love to _descend_ to carriers, clowns, and sailors, whereas a
Frenchman would rather _creep upward_ to people of _ton_. For women,
who always respect the citizen more than the man, do not see that the
humorist makes believe that all which these plebeians say he prompts
them to, and that he intentionally exalts the involuntarily comic to
what is artistically so,--folly to wisdom, the earth's madhouse to a
national theatre. Quite as little does an official comprehend, or a
cit, or a metropolitan, why Horion should so often make such a wretched
choice of reading from among old prefaces, programmes, advertisements
of travelling artists, all which he would peruse with indescribable
gusto,--merely because he made believe to himself that all this
intellectual sack of fodder, which belonged properly only to the
rag-picker, he had himself prepared and filled, with satirical design.
In fact, as the Germans seldom appreciate irony and seldom write it,
one is forced to foist fictitiously a malicious irony upon many serious
books and reviews, in order to get any of it at all. And that, indeed,
is no more nor less than what I myself aim at, when in court-session I
elevate in thought the court-house to a play-house, the advocate to a
juristic Le Cain and Casperl, and the whole assembly to an old Greek
comedy; for I never rest till I have made myself believe that I have
caused the good people just to study out the whole case as a star-part,
and am therefore really theatre poet and manager. Thus, in fact, do I
merrily carry my dumb head as a comic pocket-theatre of the Germans
through their most august institutions (e. g. the university, the
administration), and exalt, in perfect silence--behind the dropped
curtain of my face-skin--the comic of Nature to the comic of Art.
To return: the Chaplain's wife now related as much about Victor as all
knew before. But this repetition of the old story is just the fairest
charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to _ourselves_
sweet thoughts without _ennui_, why shall not another be suffered to
awaken them within us still oftener? The good lady pictured to her
children how gentle and tender, how delicate and womanly, her dear son
was (for Victor always called her his mother),--how he relied upon her
in all things,--how he was always sporting without ever teasing
anybody, and always loved all human beings, even the greatest
strangers,--and how she could open before him better than to any
matron her oppressed heart, and how fondly he wept with her. A
court-apothecary, with a heart of pumice-stone,--_Zeusel_ he writes
himself,--once even regarded this melting of the warmest soul as a case
of _lachrymal fistula_, because he thought that no eyes could weep but
diseased ones.... Dear reader, do you not feel now just as the
biographer does, who can hardly wait for the entrance of this good
Victor into the parsonage and the biography? Will you not offer to him
the friendly hand, and say: "Welcome, unknown one! Lo, thy soft heart
opens ours here on the very threshold! O thou man with eyes full of
tears, dost thou, then, feel with us, that in a life whose banks are
lined with affrighted ones clinging to the _twigs_, and despairing ones
clinging to the _leaves_, that, in such a life, where not only follies,
but woes also hedge us round, man must keep a wet eye for red ones, an
aching heart for every bleeding one, and a gentle hand that shall, in
sad sympathy, hold the thick, heavy chalice of sorrow for the poor man
who must drain it, and shall slowly raise it to his lips? And if thou
art such a one, then speak and laugh as thou wilt, for no one should
laugh at men but he who right heartily loves them."
In the afternoon the Chief Chamberlain, Le Baut,--a fragrant
leaf-skeleton,--sent his page, Seebass, to the Chaplain to beg that
he would--for the palace lay near the parsonage across the way--remove
the buck for a while, only until the wind should change, because
his daughter was coming. "Esteemed Mr. Seebass!" answered the
rat-controvertist, with emotion, "carry back my submissive compliments,
and you see my distress. Tomorrow the Lord and his son and his oculist
will gladden me with their presence, and the cataract is to be couched
here. Now, at present, the whole house stinks, and the rats still carry
on composedly their night-dance in the midst of the perfume; I assure
you, Mr. Seebass, we can take assaf[oe]tida and stuff the parsonage
with it up to the ridge-pole, not a tail shall we expel thereby; nay,
it pleases them the more. I, for my part, am already preparing myself
to see them to-morrow, during the operation, spring up on the very
oculist and patient. Thus it fares with us all, please announce at the
palace, but say that I was going to-day also to try an excellent
rosewood-oil."
He fetched, therefore, a great sack of hops and dragged it up under the
roof, in order there, in a literal sense, to lead the rats by the nose
into the bag. Rats are notoriously as dead-set upon rosewood-oil as men
are on anointing-oil, which, so soon as only six drops fall on the
skull, makes one a king or bishop on the spot, which I see by the fact,
that in the first case a golden hoop shoots round the hair, and in the
second it actually falls off. The militia, that is, the Chaplain,
sprinkled the sack with some oil, and laid it with its mouth stretched
and fastened wide open to receive the enemy;--he himself stood in the
background, concealed behind a similarly oiled stove-screen. His plan
was, to start out when the beasts were once in the sack, and carry off
the whole crew like bees in a swarming-bag. The few chamber-hunters who
read me must have frequently used this kind of trap. But they may not
have stumbled over it as the Chaplain did, who was caught with the
fragrant stove-screen between his legs, and who lay unable to stir,
while the enemy ran off. In such a situation a man is refreshed by the
trill of a curse. So after the Chaplain had struck a few such trills
and thrills, had betaken himself to the family, and said to them, _en
passant_: If there were in the temperate zone a fellow who from his
swaddling-clothes rode a mourning-steed, who was lodged in a second
mouse-tower of Hatto, and in an Amsterdam house of correction, and in
limbo,--if there were any such correctioner, in regard to whom the only
wonder was how he continued alive,--he alone was the one, and no devil
beside him ... after he had relieved himself of this, he left the rats
in peace,--and was himself very much so.
In the night nothing memorable occurred, except that he kept awake and
listened in every direction to hear if something with a tail might not
be stirring, because he was minded to vex himself to his heart's
content. As there was no sign of the beasts to be detected, not so
much as a side-leap, he got out and sat on the floor, and pressed his
spy's-ear to that. As good luck would have it, just then the movements
of the enemy with their ballets and gallopades burst upon his ear. He
started up, armed himself with a child's drum, and woke his wife up
with the whisper: "Sweet! go to sleep again, and don't be frightened in
your sleep; I'm only drumming a little against the rats; for the
Zwickau Collection of Useful Observations for Housekeepers in Town and
Country, 1785, recommends this course."
His first thunder-stroke gave his hereditary foes the repose which it
snatched from his blood relations.... But as I have now put everybody
into a condition to imagine the Chaplain in his shirt and with the
cymbal of the soldiery, let us rather go to the bed of his son Flamin,
and see what _he_ is doing therein. Nothing,--but out of it he is at
this moment taking a ride at this late hour, and that, too, without
saddle or waistcoat. He, whose bosom was a cave of Æolus, full of
pent-up storms--(any discreet prothonotary in Wetzlar would have
scraped his fish-head or partridge's-wing cleaner or brushed his
velvet-knee cleaner than he)--could not possibly lie longer on his
pillow,--he to whom a drum came so near to-night, and to-morrow a
friend. Anybody else, of course (at least the reader and myself), in
the midst of the transparent night wherewith April was closing, the
wide stillness on which the drum-sticks fell, the longing for a loved
one with whom to-morrow would again make whole a desolate heart and a
dismembered life, would have been filled by all this with tender
emotions and dreams;--its only effect on the Chaplain's son was to
fling him on his nag and out into the night: his inward earthquakes
could only be allayed by a bodily gallop. He flew up and down the hill,
on which he would to-morrow reunite himself to his Horion, ten times.
He cursed and thundered at all his passions--to be sure _with_
passion--which had hitherto laid the bone-saw to their hands linked in
friendship. "Oh! when I once have thee again, Sebastian," he said, and
twitched his nag round, "I will be so gentle, as gentle as thou, and
never misconstrue thee; if I do, may the thunder--" Ashamed at his
self-contradictory impetuosity, he rode merely at an ambling-pace home.
His longing for his returning friend he expressed in the stable by
plucking out some hairs from the top of the horse's head, drawing the
cue-hair like the fourth string of a fiddle, and twisting off the bit
of the key to the fodder-chest. Only a man who languishes for a friend
_exactly_ as for a loved woman deserves either. But there are men who
go out of the world without ever having been troubled or concerned at
the fact that no one in it had loved them. He who knows nothing higher
than the _commercial treaty_ of self-interest, the _social contract_
of civility, or even than the _boundary_ and _barter agreement_ of
love, such a one,--but I wish he had never ordered me from the
publisher!--whose withered heart knows nothing of the _Unitas Fratrum_
of men joined in friendship, of the intertwining of their nobler
vascular system, and of their sworn confederacy in strife and
sorrow--But I see not why I should talk so long of this ninny, as he
knows not how to enter into the least feeling of Flamin's yearning, who
desired a loving, appreciative eye, because his faults and his virtues
stood out in equal relief; for with other men, either at least the
spots balance the rays, or the rays the spots.
Only in princely stables is there an earlier and louder din than there
was in the parsonage on the blessed 1st of May. I ask any female reader
at random, whether there can ever be more to polish and to boil than on
a morning when a lord with a cataract is expected, and his son, too,
and an eye-doctor? Men's resting-days always fall upon women's
rasping-days; father and son went composedly to meet the doctor and the
coucher.
The 1st of May began, like man and human history, with a mist. Spring,
the Raphael of the northern earth, stood already out of doors and
covered all apartments of our Vatican with his pictures. I love a mist
whenever it glides off like a veil from the face of a fair day, and
whenever it is created, not by the "four _faculties_," but by greater
ones. When (as this one did on the 1st of May) it webs-over summits and
streams like a drag-net,--when the clouds, pressed down by their
weight, crawl along on our lawns and through wet bushes,--when in one
quarter it soils the heavens with a pitchy vapor and lines the wood
with a heavy, unclean fog-bank, while in the other, wiped off from the
moist sapphire of the sky, it gilds with minute drops the flowers, and
when this blue splendor and that dirty night pass over close by each
other and exchange places,--who does not feel, then, as if he saw lands
and nations lying before him, on which poisonous and mephitic mists
move round in groups, now coming and now going? And when, further, this
white night encompasses my melancholy eye with flying streams of vapor,
with floating, fluttering particles of perfume-dust, then do I sadly
see in the vapor human life pictured, with its two great clouds on our
rising and setting, with its seemingly light space around us, and its
blue opening over our heads....
The Doctor may have thought so too, but not father and son, who are
going to meet him. Flamin is more powerfully affected by distant than
by near nature, by the gross than by the detail, just as he has more
feeling for the state than for the family room, and his inner man loves
best to twine upward on pyramids, tempests, Alps. The Chaplain enjoys
nothing about the whole thing except--May-butter, and from his mouth,
amidst all this moral apparatus, issues nothing but--spittle, and both,
because he is afraid of the damp's preying upon him and gnawing at his
throat and stomach.
As they strode down from the hill which was the scene of the nocturnal
gallop into a valley confused with patches of mist; there marched out
from it to meet them three garrison regiments on the double-quick. Each
regiment was four men strong and as many deep, without powder or shoes,
but provided with fine openwork high-ruffles,--that is to say, with
porous pantaloons, and with superfluous officers, because there were no
privates for them at all. When I now go on in my description to add,
that both staffs, as well the regimental as the general staff, had over
six hundred cannon in their pockets, and in fact a whole siege-train of
artillery, and that the first platoon had wholly new _yellow_
balls,[14] unusual in war, which germinated sooner than the gunpowder
sowed by the savages, and which they thrust with the tongue into the
muskets,--I should (I fear) make my readers, especially my lady
readers, a little too distressed (and the more as I have not yet hinted
whether these were soldier-parents or soldier-children) if I were to
dip my pen again, and actually append the annoying circumstance that
the troops began to fire at the befogged Court-Chaplain,--unless I
leaped forward instanter with the information beforehand that a man's
voice from behind the army cried, "Halt!"
Forth came out of the rear ranks the general field-marshal, who was
just as tall again as his lieutenant of artillery;--with a round hat,
with flying arms and hair, he rushed impetuously upon Flamin, and
attacked him with intent to destroy,--less from hatred than from love.
It was the Doctor! The two friends hung trembling in each other's arms,
face buried in face, breast pushed back from breast, with souls that
had no words, but only tears of joy: the first embrace ended in a
second,--the first utterances were their two names.
The Chaplain had volunteered as a private along with the army, and
stood with tried feelings on his insulating-stool, with a bare neck,
around which nothing clung. "Just hug each other a moment longer," said
he, and turned half-way round: "I must station myself only just a
minute or two at the hazel-bush yonder, but I will be back again
directly, and then I, in my turn, will embrace Mr. Doctor with a
thousand pleasures." But Horion understood the natural recoil of love;
he flew from the son's arms into those of the father, and lingered long
therein, and made all good again.
With appeased love, with dancing hearts, with overflowing eyes, under
the full bloom of heaven and over the garniture of earth,--for Spring
had opened her casket of brilliants, and flung blooming jewels into all
the vales, and over all the hills, and even far up the mountains,--the
two friends sauntered blissfully along, the British hand clasping the
German. Sebastian Horion could not say anything to Flamin, but he
talked with the father, and every indifferent sound made his bosom,
laden with blood and love, breathe more freely.
The three regiments had gone out of every one's head; but they had
themselves marched obediently after the general field-marshal.
Sebastian, too humane to forget any one, turned round toward the escort
of little Sansculottes, who came, however, not from Paris, but from
Flachsenfingen, and had attended him as begging soldier-children. "My
children," said he, and looked at nothing but his standing army,
"to-day is for your generalissimo and you, the memorable day on which
he does three things. In the first place, I discharge you; but my
retrenchment shall not hinder you any more than a prince's would from
begging; secondly, I pay each of you arrearage for three years; namely,
to each officer an allowance of three seventeen-kreutzer-pieces,
because we have in these days raised the wages; thirdly, run back again
to-morrow, and I will have all the regiments measured for breeches."
He turned toward the Chaplain, and said: "It is much better to make
presents in articles than in money, because gratitude for the latter is
spent as soon as that is; but in a pair of presented pantaloons,
gratitude lasts as long as the overhauls themselves."
The only bad thing about it will be, that the Prince of Flachsenfingen
and his war-ministry will at last interfere in the matter of the
trousers, since neither can possibly allow regular troops to have more
_on_ their bodies than _in_ them, namely, anything at all. In our
days it should at last enter the heads of the stupidest commissary
of equipment and provisioning,--but in fact there are discreet
ones,--first, that, of two soldiers, the hungry is always to be
preferred to the well-fed one, because it is already known, by the case
of whole peoples, that the less they have, so much the braver they are;
secondly, that just as, in Blotzheim,[15] of two equally virtuous
youths, the poorer is crowned, even so the poor subject is preferred to
the rich, though they may be equally courageous, and is alone enlisted,
because the poor devil is better acquainted with hunger and frost; and,
thirdly, that now, when on all the steps of the throne, as on walls,
cannon are placed (as the sun receives its brilliancy from thousands of
vomiting volcanoes), and, as in a well-conditioned state, the rod of
up-shooting manhood is forced into ramrods,--the people advantageously
fall into two classes of paupers,--the protected and their protectors;
and, fourthly, the Devil take him who grumbles!
When my three beloved _personæ_ at length arrived in front of the
parsonage, the whole disbanded army had secretly marched after them and
demanded the breeches. But something still greater had travelled after
them from Flachsenfingen,--the blind lord. Hardly had the Britoness
smiled-in her young guest, not politely, but delightedly, hardly had
Agatha, for the first time, seriously, hid herself behind her mother,
and old Appel behind the pots and kettles, when Eymann, who was in the
midst of his cleaning, made a long leap from the window at which four
Englanders--not foreigners, but horses--came trotting up. Now for the
first time the question occurred to every one, where the oculist was;
and Sebastian had hardly time to reply, that there was no one else to
come, for he himself was to operate on his father. Into the short
interval which the father occupied in passing from the carriage-door to
the room-door the son had to squeeze in the fib, or rather the entreaty
_for_ the fib, which the family was to put upon his Lordship, that his
son had not yet arrived, but only the oculist, whom a recent apoplectic
attack had deprived of his speech.
I and the reader stand amidst such a throng of people, that I have not
yet been able even to tell him that Dr. Culpepper had as good as
punched out the lord's left eye with the blunt couching-needle; in
order, therefore, to save the right eye of his beloved father,
Sebastian had applied himself to the cure of those impoverished beings,
who, as regards their sight, already grope round in Orcus, and only
with four of their senses stand any longer outside the grave.
When the son beheld the dear form veiled in such a long night, for whom
there was no longer child or sunlight, he slid his hand, whose pulse
trembled with pity, joy, and hope, under Eymann's, and hurriedly
extended it, and pressed the father's under a strange name. But he had
to go out of the house door again, till the trembling of his hand under
the weight of the salvation it was bringing should subside, and he
restrained out there his heart beating with hope by the thought that
the operation might be unsuccessful; he looked with a smile up and down
along the twelve-horse-team of the corps of cadets, that the emotion
and yearning might pass from his excited breast. In-doors, meanwhile,
the Chaplain's wife had made the blind man a still blinder one, and
lied to him _quantum satis_; whenever a lie, a pious fraud, a _dolum
bonum_, a poetic and legal fiction is to be gotten up, women offer
themselves readily as business secretaries and court-printers, and help
out their honest man. "I very much wish," said the father, as the son
entered, "that the operation might at once proceed before my son
arrives." The Chaplain's wife brought back the anxious son and
disclosed to him the paternal wish. He stepped lightly forward amidst
the embarrassed company. The room was shaded, the couching-lancet
brought forth, and the diseased eye steadied. All stood with anxious
attention around the composed patient. The Chaplain peered with a
ludicrous anxiety and agony at the sleeping infant, prepared, at the
least cry, to run with it immediately out of the couching-chamber.
Agatha and Flamin kept themselves far from the patient, and both were
equally serious. Flamin's noble mother drew near with her heart seized
at once by joy and anxiety and love, and with her overflowing eyes,
which obeyed her agitated heart. Victor wept for fear and for joy
beside his dumb father, but he passionately smothered every drop that
might disturb him. Thus does every operation, by the climax of
preparation, communicate to the spectator heart-beating and trembling.
Only the veiled Briton,--a man who lifted his head coldly and serenely,
like a high mountain over a torrid zone,--he offered to the filial hand
a face silent and motionless; he kept composed and mute before the fate
which was now to decide whether his dreary night should reach even to
the grave or no farther than this minute....
Fate said, Let there be light, and there was. The invisible destiny
took a son's anxious hand and opened therewith an eye, which was worthy
of a finer night than this starless one. Victor pressed the mature lens
of the cataract--that smoke-ball[16] and cloud cast over creation--down
into the bottom of the pupil; and so, when an atom had been sunk three
lines deep, a man possessed immensity again, and a father his son.
Oppressed mortal! thou that art at once a _son_ and a _slave_ of the
dust, how slight is the thought, the moment, the drop of blood or
tear-drop, that is required to overflow thy wide brain, thy wide heart!
And if a couple of blood-globules can become, now thy Montgolfier's
globes and now thy Belidor's percussion-balls,[17] ah, how little earth
it takes to exalt or to crush thee!
"Victor! thou? Is it thou who hast cured me, my son?" said the
delivered man, taking the hand that was still armed with the surgical
instrument. "Lay it aside and bandage me again! I rejoice that I saw
thee first of all." The son could not stir for emotion. "Bandage me,
the light is painful! _Was_ it thou? speak!" He bandaged in silence the
open eye amidst the glad tears of his own. But when the bandage hid
from that noble stoical soul everything, his blushing and his weeping,
then was it impossible for the happy son to contain himself any
longer;--he gave himself up to his heart, and clung with his tears upon
the veiled countenance to which he had given back brighter days; and
when he felt on his trembling breast the _quicker_ beatings of his
father's heart, and the _tighter_ embrace of his gratitude,--then was
the best child the happiest,--and all rejoiced at his joy, and
congratulated the son more than the father....
Twelve cannon went off from that number of door-keys. They shot this
History dead.
For now it is actually gone,--not a word, not a syllable of it do I
know any longer. In fact I have never in my life seen or heard or
dreamed of, or romantically invented, any Horion or any St. Luna;--the
Devil and I know how it is; and I, on my part, have, besides, better
things to do and to lay open now, namely,
THE OVERTURE AND SECRET INSTRUCTIONS.
Another would have been stupid enough to begin at the very beginning;
but I thought to myself, I can at any time tell where I live,--in fact,
at the Equator, for I reside on the island of _St. John's_, which lies,
as is well known, in the East Indian waters, which are entirely
surrounded by the principality of _Scheerau_. For nothing can be less
unknown to good houses, which keep their regular literary waste-book
(the Fair-Catalogue) and their regular stock-book (the Literary Times),
than my latest home product, the _Invisible Lodge_,--a work, the
reading of which my sovereign should make still more obligatory on his
children, and even on his vassals, (it would not expressly contradict
the Recesses,) than the attending the national university. In this
Lodge, now, I have placed the extraordinary pond better known by the
name of the East Indian Ocean, and into which we, of Scheerau, have
steered and moored the few Moluccas and other islands on which our
productive business lies. While the invisible lodge was being
transformed by the press into a visible one, we again prepared an
island,--namely, the isle of _St. John's_, on which I now live and
write.
The following digression ought to be attractive, because it discloses
to the reader why I prefixed to this book the crazy title,
Dog-post-days.
It was day before yesterday, on the 29th of April, that I was walking
in the evening up and down my island. The evening had already spun
itself into haze and shadow. I could hardly see over to Tidore
Island,[18] that monument of fair, sunken spring-times, and my eye
glanced round only on the near buddings of twig and blossom, those
wing-casings of growing Spring,--the plain and coast around me looked
like a tiring-room of the flower-goddess, and her finery lay scattered
and hid in vales and bushes round about,--the moon lay as yet behind
the earth, but the well-spring of her rays shot up already along the
whole rim of heaven,--the blue sky was at length pierced with silver
spangles, but the earth was still painted black by the night. I was
looking only at the heavens,--when something plashed on the earth....
It was a little Pomeranian dog, who had leaped into the Indian Ocean,
and was now heading full for St. John's. He crawled up on my coast and
rained a shower of drops as he waggled near me. With a dog who is an
utter stranger, it is still more disagreeable undertaking to spin a
conversation than with an Englishman, because one knows neither the
character nor the name of the animal. The dog had some business with
me, and seemed to be a plenipotentiary. At last the moon opened her
sluices of radiance, and brought me and the dog into full light.
"_To his Well-Born_,
_Superintendent of Mines_,[19] _Mr. Jean Paul_,
_on_
_Free_. _St. John's_."
This address to me hung down from the neck of the animal, and was
pasted to a gourd-bottle which was tied to his collar. The dog
consented to my taking off his iron collar, as the Alpine dogs do their
portable refectory-table. I extracted from the bottle, which in
sutlers' tents had often been filled with spirit, something which
intoxicated me still better,--a package of letters. _Savans_, lovers,
people of leisure, and maidens are passionately sharp-set upon letters;
business-people, not at all.
The whole package (name and hand were strange to me) turned upon the
one point, to wit, that I was a famous man, and had intercourse with
kings and emperors;[20] and that there were few mining intendants of my
stamp, etc. But enough! For I must needs not have an ounce of modesty
left in me if, with the impudence which some really possess, I should
go on excerpting and extracting from the letters, that I was the Gibbon
and the Möser[21] of Scheerau, (to be sure only in the biographical
department, but then what flattery!)--that every one who possessed a
life, and would see it biographically delineated by me, should set
about the matter at once, before I was pressed away by some royal house
as its historiographer, and could absolutely no longer be had,--that
it might occur in my case as in that of other mine-intendants, before
whom often the deluded public never took off its hat, until they had
already passed into another lane,[22] i. e. world, etc. Who apprehends
this last more than myself? But even this apprehension does not
bring a modest man to the point of lowering himself down to be the
bellows-blower to the man that shall sound his eulogy; as I to be sure
should have done, if I had gone on to lay myself entirely bare. To my
feeling even those authors are odious, who, in their shamelessness,
only _then_ bring up the rear with the final flourish, that _modesty
forbids them to say more_, when they have already said everything that
modesty _can_ forbid.
At length my correspondent ventures out with his design, namely, to
make me the compiler of an unnamed family history. He begs, he
intrigues, he defies. "He is able,"--he writes more copiously, but I
abridge all, and in fact I deliver this epistolary extract with
uncommonly little understanding; for I have been this half-hour
scratched and gnawed in an unusually exasperating manner by a cursed
beast of a rat,--"to establish everything for me by documentary
evidence, but is not allowed to communicate to me any other names of
the personages in this history than fictitious ones, because I am not
wholly to be trusted,--in time he will explain everything to me,--for
this is a history upon which and its development destiny itself is
still working, and what he hands over to me is only the snout thereof,
but he will duly make over to me one member after another, just as it
falls off from the lathe of time, until we get the tail;--accordingly
the epistolary _Spitz_ will regularly swim back and forth as a _poste
aux ânes_,[23] but I must not on any account sail after the postman;
and thus," concludes the correspondent, who signs himself _Knef_,
"shall the dog, as a Pegasus, bring me so much nutritious sap, that,
instead of the thin Forget-me-not of an annual, I may rear a thick
cabbage-head or cauliflower of folios."
How successfully he has accomplished his purpose the reader knows, who
is fresh from the first chapter of this story, which, from Eymann's
rats to the cannonade complete, was all in Spitz's bottle.
I wrote back to Mr. Knef in the gourd only so much as this: "Anything
nonsensical I seldom decline. Your flatteries would make me proud if I
were not so already; hence, flatteries harm me little. I find the best
world to be contained in the mere microcosm, and my Arcadia stretches
not beyond the four chambers of my brain; the Present is made for
nothing but the maw of man; the Past consists of history, which,
again, is an aggregate present peopled by the dead, and a mere
_Declinatorium_[24] of our perpetual _horizontal_ deviations from the
cold pole of truth, and an _Inclinatorium_[25] of our _vertical_ ones
from the sun of virtue. There is left, therefore, to man, who wants to
be happier in than out of himself, nothing but the Future, or fancy,
that is, romance. Now, as a biography is easily exalted into a romance
by skilful hands, as we see by Voltaire's 'Charles' and his 'Peter,'
and by autobiographies, I undertake the biographical work, on condition
that in it the truth shall be only my maid of honor, but not my guide.
"In visiting-parlors one makes one's self odious by general satires,
because every one can take them to himself; personal ones they set down
as among the duties of _medisance_, and so pardon them, because they
hope the satirist is attacking the person rather than the vice. In
books, however, it is exactly the reverse, and to me, in case several
or more knaves, as I hope, play parts in our biography, their
_incognito_ is a quite pleasing feature. A satirist is not so
unfortunate herein as a physician. A lively medical author can describe
few maladies which some lively reader shall not think he himself has;
he inoculates the hypochondriac by his historical patients with their
pains as thoroughly as if he put him to bed with a real attack of them;
and I am firmly convinced that few people of rank can read living
descriptions of the unclean disease without imagining they have it, so
weak are their nerves and so strong their fancies, whereas a satirist
can cherish the hope that a reader will seldom apply to himself his
pictures of moral maladies, his anatomical tables of spiritual
abortions; he can freely and cheerily depict despotism, imbecility,
pride, and folly, without the least apprehension that any one will
fancy himself to have anything of the kind; nay, I can charge the whole
public, or all Germans, with an æsthetic lethargy, a political
enervation, a politico-economical phlegma towards everything which does
not go into the stomach or the purse; but I rely upon every one who
reads me, that he at least will not reckon himself in the number, and
if this letter were printed, I would appeal to every one's inner
witness. The only performer whose true name I must have in this
historical drama--especially as he plays only the prompter--is
the--Dog. JEAN PAUL."
I have, as yet, got no answer, nor any second chapter; so now it
depends wholly on the Dog whether he will present the sequel of this
History to the learned world or not.
But is it possible that a biographical mining intendant, merely for the
sake of a cursed rat, who, besides, is not working at any journal, but
only in my house, must just run away from the public and thunder
through all rooms, to worry the carrion to death?...
... _Spitzius Hofmann_ is the name of the dog; _he_ was the rat, and
was scratching at the door with the second chapter in the flask. A
whole crammed provisionship, which the learned world may nibble at
have I taken off from Hofmann's neck; and now the reader, who loves to
read wise things as well as stupid ones, shall have opened to him
to-day--for henceforth it is certain that I shall go on with my
writing--glad prospects which, from a certain feeling of modesty,
I do not designate.... The reader sits now on his sofa, the
fairest reading-Hours dance round him and hide from him his
repeating-watch,--the Graces hold my book for him and hand to him the
sheets,--the Muses turn over the leaves for him, or in fact read it all
to him;--he has nothing to disturb him, but the Swiss or the children
must say, "Papa is out." As life has on one foot a sock and on the
other a buskin, he loves to have a biography laugh and weep in one
breath; and as the fine writers always understand how to combine with
the useful moral of their writings a something immoral which poisons,
but charms,--like the apothecaries, who draw at once _medicines_ and
_aqua vitæ_,--so does he willingly forgive me, in consideration of the
immoral which is prominent, the religious quality which I sometimes
have, and _vice versâ_; and as this biography is set to music, because
Ramler sets it beforehand into hexameter (which it certainly needs far
more than Gessner's harmonious prose[26]), he can, when he has done
reading, stand up and play or sing it.... I, too, am almost as happy as
if I read the work;--the Indian Ocean flings up the peacock-wheels of
its illuminated circle of waves before my island,--I stand on the best
footing with all, the Reader, the Reviewer, and the Dog;--everything is
ready to hand with each Dog-post-day: a recipe for ink from an
alchemist; the gooseherd with quills was here day before yesterday; the
bookbinder with gay writing-books only to-day: nature buds, my body
blooms, my mind produces,--and so I hang my blossoms over the tan-bed
and forcing-bed (i. e. over the island), send my root-fibres through
the soil, unable (Hamadryad that I am) to guess from my foliage how
much moss years may collect on my bark, how many woodchafers the future
may gather upon the pith of my heart, and how many tree-lifters Death
may lay under my roots,--nothing of all this do I surmise, but swing
joyfully--thou good destiny!--my boughs in the wind, lay my suckling
leaves to the bosom of a Nature filled with light and dew, and, with
the breath of universal life fluttering through me, stir up as much
articulate noise as is necessary, that one or another sad human heart,
while contemplating these _leaves_, may forget, in short, gentle
dreams, its stings, its throbbings, its stiflings----O, why is a man
sometimes so happy?
For this reason: because he is sometimes a _littérateur_. As often as
Fate, under its veil, dots off from the great world atlas to a special
map the little life-stream of a _literatus_, which runs over some
lecture-halls and bookshelves, it may possibly think and say thus:
"Surely there is no cheaper or rarer way of making a creature
happy than by making him a literary one: his goblet of joy is an
inkhorn,--his feast of trumpets and carnival is (if he is a reviewer)
the Easter-fair,--his whole Paphian grove is compressed into a
bookcase,--and what else do his blue Mondays consist of than (written
or read) Dog-post-days?" And so Fate itself leads me over to the
2. DOG-POST-DAY.
Antediluvian History.--Victor's Plan of Life.
At the gate of the First Chapter, the readers ask the incomers: "What
is your name?--your character?--your business?"
The Dog answers for all: H. Januarius--i. e. Herr Januarius, not Holy
Januarius; but the Prince of Flachsenfingen bore that name--had, in his
younger years, made the grand tour or journey round the beautiful and
the great world. He everywhere distributed gifts to strangers, which
cost him but a single _don gratuit_ from his subjects, and he succored
and pitied many oppressed peasants in France, who fared as badly as his
own did in Flachsenfingen. For the defenceless female sex, like all
travelling princes, he did, if possible, still more; one may say of the
greater number of them, that, like Titus, or like one sailing westward
round the world, they, to be sure, sometimes lose a _day_, but seldom a
_night_, without making others, and consequently being themselves,
happy. In fact, the Regent must have foreseen the present depopulation
of France; for he took measures betimes against it, and left behind him
in three Gallic seaboard cities three sons, and on the so-called Seven
Islands only one. The first was called the Welshman, the second the
Brazilian, the third the Calabrian; the one on the Seven Islands, the
Monsieur, or _Mosye_: these names were probably meant to allude to
Princes of Wales, Brazil, and Asturias. He let his children grow up in
no worse ignorance than ignorance of their rank: they were to be formed
for future co-workers in his administration. Januarius was, to be sure,
sensual and somewhat feeble, but--except where he _feared_--extremely
philanthropic.
Lord Horion met Prince January twice on his journeys: the first time he
cut across the princely planetary orbit as a comet, in the sense of a
hairy star; the second, as a comet with a tail when in its perihelion.
What I mean is this: it was just when Horion was in love with a scion
of January's house, who lived in London, that he saw the Prince for the
second time, and at his house in London entertained him and his court.
Upon this very distant relative of the Prince my papers--from an
excessive deference to political and domestic relations--throw an
unseasonable veil. She was, at the time of marrying his Lordship,
twenty-two years old, and her whole person was (if I may venture to
adopt the bold expression of a London eulogist) nothing but a single,
tender, still blue eye. That is all which is vouchsafed to the public.
The Prince willingly let himself be mastered and managed--by the lord,
whom a singular mixture of coldness and genius constituted an unlimited
monarch and commander of souls. The lord had, moreover, a beautiful
niece in his house, whose charms in princes' eyes made such a spiritual
Old Man of the Mountain as he at once _younger_ and more _smooth_.
But the death-bell threw its discords into these harmonies of life. The
beloved of his Lordship fled from the rough earth, and left behind her
his first-born son as a memorial, and pledge of love; she died in her
twenty-third year, as it were of the life of her child, some days after
its birth, and the thin, tender twig broke down under the ripe fruit.
Lord Horion bowed silently to fate. He had loved her terribly, without
showing it: he mourned her in the same manner, without moistening his
deep black eye.
The Prince found in the niece, i. e. in a true Englishwoman, something
to his taste, for the reason that he _had_ found what was still more so
in the Frenchwomen; and on this ground he would, inversely, have loved
them, had he previously known her. The subsequent Chief Chamberlain, Le
Baut, had the same sentiments, and, what is still more, toward the same
person; and as Indian courtiers imitate all wounds of their sovereign,
so did Le Baut with an arrow of Cupid copy those of his master, and
transferred to himself therewith one of the severest.
These London histories cannot last much longer, and then we shall
happily get back again to our St. Luna.
A burning fever seized the Regent, which his physician, Dr. Culpepper,
held to be merely zigzag dartings of fitful, gouty matter. I have been
unable, hitherto, to ascertain whether this Culpepper has any tolerably
near relationship to his well-known namesake and professional co-master
in London. The fever hunted January so hard, and the Father Confessor
instituted with his conscience, instead of extinguishing processes, so
many incendiary ones, that in the agony of death he took a solemn oath
never again at the sight of a maiden to think of Depopulation and
Revolution. The same weakness which strengthened his superstition and
childlike credulity ministered to his sensuality; when he was up again,
he absolutely knew not what to do. The niece and his oath were
next-door neighbors in the chambers of his brain. A clever ex-Jesuit
from Ireland, who lived only for doubts of conscience, and had himself
a _conscientia dubia_, flew to the help of the doubter, and gave him to
understand that "his vow, especially before getting absolution from it,
he must conscientiously keep, excepting the sinful and impossible point
therein, that, namely, which, without the consent of his spouse, he had
neither the right to promise nor the power to fulfil." In other words,
the Jesuit failed not to show him, that he had in his fever sworn off
only from the _unmarried_ sex, and limited his celibacy merely to nuns,
that accordingly his vow did not, to be sire, forbid him compound
adultery, (which confession would do away) but it did with extreme
strictness the simple kind. January was too religious not to refrain
wholly from the simple form.
It is hard to investigate the relation in which his now _increased_
love for his four grand dukes or _little_ dukes in Gaul stood to the
fulfilment of his vow; in short, he gave his Lordship the commission
and full power to fetch the four little persons from Gaul to London,
because he wanted to take his beloved anonymous little posterity with
him to Germany. It was uncertain whether he loved the mothers so
heartily for the children's sake, or the children for the sake of the
mothers. His Lordship went gladly, like Kotzebue (but differently),
after the death of his beloved, to France. At last there came, not from
him, but from the tutors of the Welshman, the Brazilian, the Calabrian,
the sad intelligence, that in one night, probably according to a
concerted plan of conspired prince-stealers, the three children had
been abducted; and not long after that the sorrowful post was not only
confirmed by his Lordship, but aggravated by the new one, that the
Monsieur or Mosye on the Seven Islands was no more--to be found there.
Fate often gives man the balsam before the wound: January received his
fifth son, whom I shall never call anything but the Infante, still
earlier than the tidings of his forfeited blessing of children. The
chief Chamberlain, Von Le Baut, had wedded the mother of the Infante
(his Lordship's niece); but he dated his marriage three quarter-days
back, instead of announcing it one later. I have never been able to see
the connection of this anachronism or misreckoning of time with the
Prince's vow. For the rest, dangerous as January's _votum_ made him to
the _husbands_ of his court, and harmless to the _fathers_,
nevertheless, the virtuous confidence which the husbands reposed in the
female virtue which they had appropriated to themselves by marriage was
so unlimited, that they, without hesitation, led that virtue into the
midst of his unbridled flames. Nay, they even disdained the fear of
being suspected of doing so in order that, when he laid down his crown
on the toilet-table of their spouses, they might play with the shining
wall-crown (_corona muralis_) as with a _joujou_, and with its
brilliancy throw a dazzling light into people's windows: for a courtier
cares more to own his wife than to watch over her.[27]
It will come on presently, cry the puppet-players; it will be over
presently, say I.
When, at length, his Lordship returned empty-handed, he was
greatly surprised, not at the presence of the Infante, but at his
adoption,--namely, at the marriage of Le Baut. But this High
Chamberlain was--and no one minded it less than Horion--an ardent
friend of the Prince; this rendered him capable of doing for him
(as Cicero requires) even that which he would never have done for
himself,--namely, a dishonorable action. In fact, it is an uncommon
piece of good fortune for a courtier or a world's man, whose honor his
high position exposes often to the worst of weather, that this honor,
however sensitive to slight contusions,[28] easily gets over great
ones, and can, if not by words, yet by deeds, be assailed without
injury. Something similar is remarked by physicians in regard to
madmen, or rather their skin, which to be sure feels the lightest
touch, but on which no blister will draw. The Prince was knit to Le
Baut by a threefold ligament,--by gratitude, son, and wife; his
Lordship plucked the ligament asunder; that is to say, he laid bare
to his niece the Chamberlain's heart, and discovered to her the
poison-bag therein, and a dramatically carried out _plan_, which she
had hitherto regarded as an _indulgent confidence_. All the nobility
and pride of her nature flamed up in her with shame and wrath, and,
pursued by crashing recollections, she flew with her child, and with
the prospect of a second, out of the city to a country-seat of his
Lordship's.
Now the Prince with his Lordship and his court (including even Dr.
Culpepper) returned to Germany. Le Baut tarried awhile longer to
appease the niece and persuade her to take the journey. But it was not
only impossible to draw all her deeply sunk roots out of the land of
freedom and go with the party to Germany, but she even separated
herself, not only by seas, but by a bill of divorce, from the filthy
favorite. She was obliged to leave with the Chamberlain her second
child, his real daughter; but the first, the Infante, she clasped to
her maternal breast. Le Baut was glad enough to let it be so, and
thought that after the building-oration the scaffolding of the building
should also go into the house-stove. But when he appeared under the
German throne-canopy, his sun (January) stood at the summer solstice,
which from decreasing warmth gradually passed over to cold storms.
January's love could more easily rise and fall than stay still, and the
greatest crime with him was absence. Le Baut, stripped of both wife and
child, must needs lose now in comparison with his Lordship, because the
latter came upon the stage, and under January's throne-canopy as
treasurer and coast-warden of two treasures left behind in London. But
there were deeper reasons. His Lordship easily governed the Regent,
because he held him in neither by his own nor other people's vices, but
by his own virtues. In the first place, he required nothing of him, not
so much as diet and chastity. Secondly, he lifted no cousins into the
saddle, but tipped bad men out of it; he bore him like a hawk on his
gloved fist, but the falconer did it not for the purpose of darting the
Prince upon doves and hares, but in order to make him at once
_watchful_ and _tame_. Thirdly, his firmness and his fineness mutually
compensated each other: the best one to rule over changeable men is the
unchangeable. Fourthly, he was not the favorite, but the associate,
remained always a Briton and a lord and the country's beneficent
bee-father (apiary), whereas January was the queen-bee and in the
queen-bee's prison. Fifthly, he was one of the few men to whom one must
be _equal_ in order to resist their will; and any one who would play
the juggler's trick of throwing a padlock on his mouth slyly, soon had
one to fetters and manacles on his own soul. Sixthly, he had a good
cheese. This last point needs no copious explanation. In Chester he had
a farmer, who produced a cheese, the like of which was not to be found
in Europe; but to princes generally an extraordinary cheese is more
gratifying than an extraordinary address of thanks from the provincial
syndic.
With such a conjunction of ill stars, of course our Chamberlain found
the bill of divorce, which at first was written with sympathetic ink in
January's face, gradually more and more legible. Still he read it
through several times every week, in order to read it correctly; he
could now no longer procure any lapdog a place, that is, a lap,--his
letters of recommendation were Uriah's-letters,[29]--and now, when he
actually succeeded in getting, through his Lordship, the charge of
chief Chamberlain, he thought it high time to try, against the gout in
his knee, bathing at his knightly seat of St. Luna year in and year
out, and so he set off, having first been obliged to solemnly promise
the whole court that he should come back well.
Properly, now, the preliminary history would be, according to promise,
ended, so that I might get well on in the later history this work
contains, were I not absolutely obliged on the Court-Chaplain's account
to add this much more:--
The only place of which Le Baut had the presentation at court was
the parish of St. Luna. He invested therewith, as its patron, the
Rat-contradictor Eymann, who had begged from him in London the oral
vocation to the Court-Chaplaincy, and who could no longer obtain it.
Hence the Dog-post-days always call him the Court-Chaplain, although in
fact he is only a country pastor.
From the slight circumstance that Eymann, as travelling preacher,
accompanied January's retinue, a great deal grew out. Eymann, at his
Lordship's country-seat, offered to his present wife the neck- and
breast-pendant of a heart hollowed with consumption, as a slight gift,
which was accepted. To the couple while still in England their Flamin
was born. Her Ladyship loved in the person of the Court-Chaplain's wife
a worthy sister of her sex, and a worthy fellow-citizen of her native
land; she urged her with fervent prayers to stay in England, and when
all were refused, she begged and prevailed upon her at least to let her
Flamin--in order to be at all events half a Briton--stay behind in the
society of Victor and the Infante, till the friendly trio[30] should be
transplanted simultaneously into German soil.
The Parson's wife was strong enough to sacrifice for the sake of her
Flamin's finer education the enjoyment of his presence, and left him
behind under the eyes of love and in the little arms of childish
friendship. The same training hand--_Dahore_ was the name of the
teacher--reared and watered the three noble flowers, which sucked from
one kind of bed and ether three kinds of color, and developed unlike
stamens and honeycups. Dahore had the hearts of all children in his
tender hand, simply because his own never boiled and blustered, and
because an ideal beauty sat upon his youthful form and an ideal love
dwelt in his pure breast. The three children loved and embraced each
more warmly in his presence, as the Graces enfold each other before
Venus Urania: they even bore all the same name, as the Otaheitans
exchange names with those they love. When they had attained some
ripeness of years, his Lordship came to put them all with Dahore on
board ship for Germany. But before the embarkation the Infante caught
the small-pox and was made blind, and Dahore was obliged to return with
him to the distressed and weeping lady. Victor had long and
speechlessly hung on the neck of his sick friend and clung around
Dahore's knee, refusing to part from his two loved ones; but his
Lordship parted them: Flamin and Victor were, from that time, educated
in Flachsenfingen, the former for a jurist, the latter for a physician.
There are some improbabilities in Spitzius Hofmann's gourd-flask; but
the Dog must be held responsible for what he delivers. Now the story
goes straight forward again.
His Lordship, during the cannonading of the tattered or riddled
garrison, withdrew with Victor into another apartment; and his first
word was, "Unbandage me a moment, and leave thy hand in mine, that I
may be sure of thy attention, for I have much to say to thee." Good
man! we all remark that thou art more tender than thou art willing to
appear, and we all praise it. Not _coldness_, but _cooling-off_, is the
greater wisdom; and our inner man should, like a hot metal-casting in
its mould, cool but slowly, in order that it may round itself out to a
smoother form: for that very reason has Nature--just as they _warm_ the
mould for statuary metal--poured his soul into an _ardent_ body.
He continued: "I have, my dear boy, in my blindness been able to
dictate to thee only empty letters; I meant to save my secrets for thy
arrival. I am watched by a small gunpowder-conspiracy." Victor
interrupted him with the question, how he had so suddenly become blind.
His Lordship answered, reluctantly, "One eye was probably so already
before thy departure for Göttingen, but I did not know it."
"But the other?" said Victor.
Over his Lordship's face glanced the cold shadow of a buried pang; he
looked on his son a long time, and answered, as if abstractedly and
hurriedly, "Also! as I look on thee, thou seemest to me much taller and
larger."
"That is, perhaps," replied he, for he guessed his thought, "an ocular
illusion of the sensitive retina.[31] You spoke of a gunpowder-plot."
"They have found out," his Lordship continued, "that the Prince's son
is not in London: they even assume that the disease was given to him at
that time designedly; and the Prince daily speaks of the moment when I
shall bring his son back to him. Perhaps he knows these suspicions. I
was obliged to postpone my departure for London till my cure. Now I
shall shortly start for England, where the son is not, to bring his
mother; him I shall bring from otherwheres, and with just as good eyes
as thou hast given me."
"Then," Victor broke out, "not the best of men, but his enemies, will
be hurled down."
"No, I am to be _hurled down_ first (to express myself in thy
fashion),--but thou hast interrupted me: I have never had the courage
to interrupt other people like fools,--for my absence is just what they
want."
I, as installed historiographer, ask no leave of any one, and interrupt
whom I will. One who is interrupted may jest, indeed, but he can no
longer argue. The Socrates grafted upon Plato, who never let a sophist
have his talk out, was therefore one himself. In England, where they
tolerate systems even among the wine-cups, a man can spread himself
out like a royal folio: in France, where the spectacles of wisdom
are splintered into sharp, shiny bits, one must be as curt as a
visiting-card. A hundred times is the wise man silent before the
coxcomb, because he needs twenty-three sheets to express his opinion.
Coxcombs need only lines; their opinions are upstarting islands, held
together by nothing but emptiness.... I add the remark, that between
the lord and his son a fine, courteous wariness reigned, which in the
case of so near a relationship is to be justified only by their rank,
their mental structure, and their frequent separation.--
"But my presence is, perhaps, still worse. The Princess--"
(The Prince's bride, since his first wife died early and without
children, as Spitz says.)
"The Princess brings along with her a stream of diversions, in which he
will no longer hear any voice but that which lures to pleasure. An
interrupted influence is as good as lost. And then, too, I am, up to a
certain point, so tired of this game, that I gladly flee from the new
engagements in which this new arrival would involve me. Should she, as
they say, not love him, she might so much the more easily govern him;
and then my absence would be, again, not good. But, setting me aside,
what dost thou propose to do during my absence?"
After a crotchet-rest, he answered himself, "Thou wilt be his
Physician-in-ordinary, Victor." Victor's hand twitched in his father's.
"Thou hast already been promised to him; and he longs for thee, simply
because I have often named thee. He is impatient to see for himself how
any one looks whose father he knows so well. As Physician-in-ordinary,
thou canst, with thy art and thy fancy, keep him clear of strange
fetters until I come again; then will I impose still softer ones on
him, and go back forever. My engagement has had hitherto the design
merely of averting strange ones, particularly a certain--" Then, with
full heart and changed voice, "My beloved! it is hard in this world to
win Virtue, Freedom, and Happiness, but still harder to diffuse them.
The wise man gets everything from himself; the fool, from others. The
freeman must release the slave, the philosopher think for the fool, the
happy man labor for the unhappy."
He rose, and presupposed Victor's Yes. The latter had therefore to
dribble out his rhetorical flood during the leave-taking. He began
with compressed breath: "I detest most cordially the simoom of the
court-atmosphere ..." (his Lordship has to answer for it with me, that
the son leaves out here the concessive conjunction, "to be sure":
whoever lets it be seen that he expects obedience, gets it at least in
a prouder shape) "which sweeps over nothing but prostrate men, and
turns him to powder who remains upright! I wish I could be in an
antechamber on a court-day; I would say to all in my thoughts: 'How I
hate you and your sour honey of pleasure- and plague-parties; the
cursed watchman's- and rower's-bench of your card-tables; the gifts of
full dishes of slaughtered provinces (I mean your gaming-plates and
your meat-plates)!' But I know very well I can never express myself
strongly enough upon the servile, tide-waiting court-oysters, who know
not how to stir or open anything--not excepting their hearts--but only
their shell, to draw something in ..."
"I have not _interrupted_ thee yet," said his Lordship, and stood still
for a moment.
"Meanwhile," the son continued, "I wade with the greatest pleasure down
to the oyster-bank ... O, my dear father! how could I help going? Why
have I not hitherto left your diseased eye unbandaged, that you might
see in my face the absence of a single objection to your wishes? Ah!
around every throne hang a thousand wet eyes, upturned by maimed men
without hands; above sits iron Fate in the form of a prince, and
stretches out no hand. Why shall not some tender-hearted man go up, and
guide Fate's rigid hand, and with one hand dry, down below, a thousand
eyes?"
Horion smiled, as one who should say, Young man!
"But I beg only for some legal postponements and delays, in order that
I may get time to be more stoical and foolish,--foolish,--that is, I
mean--contented. I should be glad to laugh and go on foot for two
months longer among the good people around us, and by the side of my
Flamin, particularly just now in the almanac spring and in that of my
years, and before the ship of life freezes into the harbor of old age.
Stoical I must be at any rate. Verily, did I not lay Epictetus's manual
as a serpent-stone[32] to myself and my wounds, in order that the stone
might suck out the moral poison; were I to go out of the house with a
breast full of cancer-sores; what would the court think of me?... Ah!
but I mean it seriously. The poor inner man--dried up by the
intermittent fever of the passions, exhausted by the heart-palpitation
of pleasure, burning with the wound-fever of love needs, like any other
sick man, solitude and stillness and tranquillity, in order to get
well."
Though he named the word "tranquillity," his inner being was agitated
even to the dissolving-point, so much had the passions already stirred
his blood and shaken his heart.
And now the two went back in a deepening silence of harmony to Eymann.
"I have a request for my Flamin."
"What is it?" said his Lordship.
"I do not yet know, but he wrote me he would soon name it."
"Mine to him is," said his Lordship, "that, if he will get a place, he
must love the Pandects better than tactics, and, instead of the rapier,
take the pen."
The son had been treated too politely by the father to have courage
enough to ask for his secrets, especially that relating to the
whereabouts of January's son. I treat the reader with the same
delicacy, and hope he will have just as little courage; for, when any
one explains himself guardedly, nothing is more uncivil than to put a
new question.
His Lordship now travelled back, a cured man, to the Prince.
3. DOG-POST-DAY.
Sowing-Day of Joys.--Watch-Tower.--Fraternization of the Heart!
The departure of his Lordship was the removal of the dam which had
hitherto stood in the way of the flood of narrations, questions, and
pleasures. The first investigation upon which the Parsonage entered
was, to see whether it was really the old Bastian. And he it was, hide
and hair; even the left side-lock he had still, as of old, shorter than
the right. When the butcher's boy comes home from Hungary, he wonders
that his kin are the same old pennies; they, however, wonder that he is
no longer so. But in the present case there was mutual delight at the
unchangedness on both sides. On every face lay the halo of joy, but
on each composed of different rays. On a soft face, like Victor's,
rapture looks like virtue. Old Appel, who had never, in all her life,
turned over any leaves but those of David's Psalter and that in an
ox's stomach,[33] expressed her pleasure all day long to the brass
kettles by scouring them with unusual zest. The Vienna hospital for
animals--consisting of an old pug and puss, who no longer hated
each other, just as in the old man the good and bad souls are
reconciled--and the bird-collection under the stove, which was one
rusty-black bulfinch strong, took their full share of interest in the
general uproar, and introduced themselves, and--which no ambassador
would have done--waived the right of the first visit. Agatha expressed
her joy only with her lips, by keeping silence with them, and pressing
them to her brother's. To the Court-Chaplain's credit, it is reported
that he took the invalid pug, who had the podagra in his hind-feet and
the chiragra in his fore-paws, and shoved him quietly in his basket
keeping-room and chamber under the stove again; restored the
architectural order of the chairs without scolding; and rocked the
little Bastian amidst the joyful confusion of tongues, that he might
not wake up and aggravate it. But in the highly refined heart of
Victor's countrywoman, the Chaplain's wife, the rays of joy from the
whole family came to a focus, and diffused through her whole bosom the
living glow of love. She smiled right into Victor's face to such a
degree that she knew no way of escape but by bethinking herself of his
destined chamber, which she directed to be opened and shown to him.
Agatha flew forward with the jingling bunch of keys; and the guest, as
he entered, was followed by only so many people as there were in the
house, all eager to see what he would say to it.
He surrendered himself to all this friendly handling, not with the vain
egotism of a cultivated stranger, but with a delighted, docile, almost
child-like confusion; it gave him not the least concern that he looked
like a child, so gentle, so glad, and so unpretending. In such hours it
is hard to sit down, or to listen to a story, or to tell one....
Everybody began one, but the Chaplain interposed: "We have quite other
things to talk about." But no _quite other things_ came. Everybody
wanted to enjoy the stranger where there were only four ears, but the
six remaining ears could not be kept away. My description of his
confusion is itself confused, but so it is with me always; for
instance, when I describe haste, I do it, unconsciously, with the
greatest. To a heart like his, that hung rocking in the feathers[34]
of love, was there any need that it should see in every notched
window-sill, in every smooth pavement-pebble, in every round hole
drilled by the rain in the door-step, his boyhood's years mosaically
pictured, and that he should enjoy in the same objects age and novelty?
Those boyish years, which appeared to him out of a shadow, abiding on
the lawns of St. Luna, between happy Sundays and among beloved
faces,--those _boyish years_ held a dark mirror in their hands, in
which the glimmering perspective of his _childish years_ ran backward;
and in that remote magic-night stood, dimly gleaming, the form of
_Dahore_, his never-to-be-forgotten teacher in London, who had so
loved, so indulged, so improved him. "Ah!" thought he, "thou unrequited
heart, too warm for this earth, where beatest thou now? why can I not
unite my sighs with thine, and say to thee, Teacher, Beloved? O, man
often perceives but late how much he was loved, how forgetful and
ungrateful he was, and how great the heart he misunderstood." What
nourished his still pleasure the most was the thought that he had
earned it by his filial obedience to his father, and by his resolve to
undertake the future labors-of-Hercules at court; for into every great
joy of his the doubt would fall, like a bitter stomach-drop, whether he
deserved it,--a doubt which reigning houses, palatines, patriarchs, and
grand-masters have skilfully taken from them in childhood. The better
sort of men find pleasure sweetest only after a good action,--the
Easter-Festival after a Passion-Week.
My lady-readers will now want to hear what was cooked for dinner;
but the documents of this Post-day, which reach me half by wheel and
half by water, state, in the first place, that no one had any
appetite,--which joy takes away more than grief,--except the three
regiments, which slashed like veterans into the enemy,--that is, into
the leavings of the table; secondly, that the meal was still leaner
than the guest himself. We will, however, hereby invite all the
reading-societies in a body to the _immovable_ feast of the 4th of May,
the Friday when, for the first time, Victor's arrival and his godson's
churchgoing are suitably celebrated.
The Parson's wife extricated the beset darling in the afternoon from
the musical circle of so many tones, and smuggled him away from under
the eyes of her husband, whose Directress and Lady Mayoress she was,
and led him to his chamber, that she might there, before him alone,
distress and delight herself, and speak out her heart, like a mother.
Long-suppressed sighs and antiquated tears now forced their way out of
the opened motherly heart into another and tender one, which was,
indeed, her son's best friend. She complained to him of Flamin's
excitability, which Victor used always to allay; of his love for
military life, while, after all, he was a scholar; and, finally, of the
company he kept,--namely, he went roving round with a young page, one
_Matthieu_, son of the Minister _Von Schleunes_, a dissolute,
universally-beloved, universally-spoiled, bold, artful young scoffer,
who, when his service allowed it, would spend his time either over
yonder with the Chamberlain's people, or here with her son: "Heaven
only knew what designs he had in his visits at a citizen's house." She
rejoiced that Victor would bear off his old friend out of the traps and
fangs of this rake. Victor pressed her hand with emotion, and said: "I
could hardly think of sharing his heart with the best bond-fellow.
Not so much as fall in love should he dare to, if it depended on me.
Only me must he love, and one other person, who depicts him quite
wrongly,--namely, yourself." He greatly mistrusted, also, her drawing
of the sun-spots of Matthieu, because women seldom comprehend eccentric
men, and because maidens, indeed, often love wild youths, but matrons
(enlightened by marriage) always prefer gentle ones.
He easily drew the hearts of married women into his drag-net by a
certain kindly gallantry towards them which a German saves for
unmarried ones. Old ladies and old tobacco-pipes, however, easily
cleave to men's lips. The younger pigeons he enticed to himself by his
_comic salt_, as they catch turtle-doves by another kind. A _bon-mot_
is to them a _dictum probans_; a _pasquin_, a _magister sententiarum_;
and the critical calendar of scandal is to them a Kant's Critique of
the Pure Reason, in an improved edition. With his medical doctor's
ring, also, he fastened to himself female souls; as physician, he laid
claim to corporeal mysteries, and then the spiritual easily follow
these.
In the evening, when the woodland stream of the first jubilation had
run out, three sober words were at length possible. The Parson, too, by
this time, scolded less; for joy had made him rabid in the forenoon.
Anger and the body are strengthened together, and therefore by
pleasure. Hence in January and February, when dogs get the longer
madness, men have the short one of wrath; hence convalescents grumble
more at all about them, just as people do under strong mental
excitements,--e. g. Dog-post scribes; hence, too, in the exhaustion
following sick-headache, or a fit of intoxication, one is gentler than
a lamb.
Towards evening, there already transpired something of consequence.
Apollonia swept and dusted her blood-relationship and her guest with
her whisks even sooner than the spiders and the dust. On the 4th of May
was this day's arrival of the long-absent fugitive to be right properly
celebrated. Flamin and Victor led the way through the Parsonage garden,
whose _memorabilia_ and _curiosa_ are so edifying that the
correferent[35] of these acts wishes he could, by the Dog-express,
portray the garden to me more clearly. The Chaplain had stamped off
many beds, not into rectangles, but had curved and twisted them into
the shape of Latin characters, in double black-letter, to represent the
initials of his family. His own (E) he had sowed with radishes;
Apollonia's (A), with capuchin-lettuce;[36] Flamin's (F), with
rape-cole; Sebastian's (S), with sweet-root, or _Glycyrrhiza vulgaris_
(liquorice). Whoever was not present had left for him, at all events, a
vacant place and _almanac royal_ among squashes and Stettin-apples,
round which was wrapped a perforated paper with the name cut out,
which, after the peeling off of this wrappage, would appear green or
red on the pale fruit. Victor, as he passed along by a C made of
tulips, asked his Flamin the meaning of it. "Why dost thou ask?" he
inquired; and the loquacious Parsonage-people, following after, drove
away the answer.
Beyond the Parsonage-meadow stood--one had only to leap the brook--a
hill, and thereon an old watchtower, in which there was nothing but a
wooden staircase, and overhead nothing but a board covering instead of
the Italian roof, both of which the Chamberlain had had made, that the
people--not himself, for the unfeelingness of magnates labors for the
feeling of minorites--might up there look round them a little. One
could see from there the columnar architecture of the Creator, the
Swiss mountains, standing, and the Rhine moving along with his ships.
On the tower two linden-trees had grown aloft, twined together by
nature, so as, sometimes, with their foliage, which had been hollowed
out into a green niche and underlaid with a grassy bench, to fan, up
there, a fevered islander. The loving party climbed the battlement, and
carried up with them in their rural breasts a tranquillity which softly
copied therein the still outer heaven that encircled these good hearts
with its veiled suns. One lingering cloud gave a farewell glow, but it
melted away before it burned out.
Now could the supplementary volumes of the Universal History of St.
Luna be conveniently issued. Eymann could deliver his folio volumes of
_gravamina_ (grievances) upon the consistorial councils and the rats.
All at once, Agatha, like her saintly namesake, was invoked down below
by the organ-blower _loci_, who was _valet-de-place_ of the village,
and Parsonage-coachman. When certain authors say, "The coachman was
blind, and the horse was deaf," they exactly reverse the case. The
churl was deaf. He had in his _mouchoir de Vénus_--the handkerchief is,
with the common people, at once letter-bag and envelope, because a
letter is as important and rare a thing to them as a good one is to a
reviewer--to-day discovered and unwrapped an epistle to Agatha, which
he should have delivered yesterday with his Lordship's: but coachmen
consider a master only as the mock-sun and second party to the horse,
and the lady absolutely as no more than a parasite-growth of the
stable; hence "immediately" means with them one or two or three days;
and "to-morrow forenoon" meant, on the Ratisbon notification-programme
of matters to be voted on, one or two or three years. Agatha, with more
eagerness, hurried down, held the letter towards the lighter quarter of
the west, and deciphered something, which, with sparkling eyes, she
carried in a gallop up the stairs. "She is coming to-morrow!" she cried
out to Flamin; for she seemed almost, in the person of every one of her
friends, to love only the companion and friend of her other friends.
The case was this: _Clotilda_, Le Baut's only daughter by his first
wife (his Lordship's niece), was coming from the Girls' Institute in
Maienthal, where she had been educated, back to her father.
"Do _you_ take good care!" said the Chaplain's wife; "she is very
beautiful."
"Then," said he, "I shall much rather take care _not_ to take care."
"In fact," she continued, "all that is beautiful is now gathering
around you" (here he tried to confuse and chastise her by a flattering
look, but in vain). "The Italian Princess comes, too, on St. John's
Day; and she is said to be as charming as if she were no princess at
all, but only an Italian woman." There she did most princesses wrong;
but a certain irony upon her own sex was the only fault of the
Chaplain's wife, to whom, as to many other mothers, there were almost
no step-sons and hardly anything but step-daughters.
He hoped, he replied, that very few princesses, even in America, had
yet been married, in whose affections he could not have become
completely entangled, and that merely from pity for such a poor, tender
creature or heraldic beast, pressed under the seal-stamp and then on
the contracts, which were often the only children of these marriages.
"The young Mothers of the Country are really, like bee-mothers, set up
for sale in their queen's prison, and wait to see into what hive the
bee-father, or Father of the Country, will this year trade them off
again."
A woman cannot possibly comprehend how a man whom she esteems can
fall in love, except with her; and she can hardly wait to get sight of
his beloved. Quite as curious is she about this man's style in his
love,--that is, whether it is of the Flemish or French or Italian
school. The Chaplain's wife questioned her confidential guest on this
point also.
"My harem," he began, "reaches from this watchtower to the Cape, and
away round the globe: Solomon is but a yellow straw-widower compared
with me. I have in it even his wives; and, from Eve with her Sodom's
Borsdorf-apple down to the latest Eve with an Imperial apple, and even
to a marchioness with a mere fruit-piece, they are all in my hold and
breast."
A lady excuses esteem for her sex on the ground that she is included
therein. Women themselves have not so much as an idea of the
peculiarities of their sex.
"But what says the favorite Sultana to this?" asked the Grand
Inquisitress.
"She--" He paused, less from embarrassment than as one sunk in the
fulness of glowing dreams. "_She_, of course--" he continued. "I pledge
my head, meanwhile, that every youth has two periods, or, at least,
moments. In the first, he stakes his head that he would sooner let his
heart mould in his thorax or chest, and his _poples_ or knee-joint grow
lame, than that either should stir for any other woman than the very
best of her sex,--for a real angel, a decided Quinterne.[37] He
absolutely insists on the highest prize in the marriage Loto,--that is,
in the first period; for the second comes, and cheats him out of so
much. The female Quinterne would naturally require a _male_ one; and,
in case he were _that_,...
"I am a stupid drawing, an _ambe_, a double number, I say, and
absolutely refuse to let the period have its talk out; but I shall
still be on the look-out for the _Quinterne_.... And here let me ask,
What would be the use of being a man if one were not a fool? Well, now,
if I should draw the above-mentioned Quinterne,--which, to be sure,
without any extravagant hope, I may well presuppose,--I should not be
indifferent on the subject, but in raptures. Good heavens! I must
instanter be frizzled, and have my profile taken. I should make verses
and _pas_, and both with their traditional _pedes_ (or feet); I should
bend myself oftener than a devout monk, to make bows and (where there
was anything to gather) bouquets; body, soul, and spirit I should have
consist with me of so many finger-tips and feelers, that I should
perceive at once (the Quinterne would perceive it still quicker) if our
two shadows should come in collision. The touch of the smallest little
end of a ribbon would be a good conductor to the electrical ether,
which would shoot out from me in lightnings, as she would be charged
negatively and I positively; and as to touching her hair, that could
not create any less explosion than if a world should fall into the
dishevelled[38] hair of a bearded comet....
"And yet what does it all amount to, if I have sense, and consider what
she deserves, this good creature, this faithful, this undeserved one?
What, in fact, were dull verses, sighs, shoes (boots I should put
away), one or two hands pressed, a sacrificing heart, but a slight
_gratial_ and _don gratuit_, if thereby a creature was to be obtained
who, as I see more and more, has everything belonging to the fairest
angel that conducts man through life (invisibleness perhaps excepted);
who has all virtues, and arrays them all in beauties; who gleams and
gladdens like this spring evening, and yet, like it, conceals her
flowers and all her stars, except the star of love; into whose
all-powerful and yet gentle harmonica of the heart I would fain be so
absorbed in listening; in whose eyes I would behold with such
extraordinary delight the tear-drops of the tenderer soul, and the
beamings of the loftier one; by whose side I could so fondly remain
standing through the whole flying _opera buffa_ and _seria_[39] of
life,--so fondly, I say, that so the poor Sebastian might at least,
when, in life's holy evening, his shadow grew longer and longer, and
the landscape around--him melted away to a broad shadow, and he
himself, too, that I might at least behold _both_ shadowy hands," (one
of them Flamin was just then holding,) "and exclaim--" (Checking
himself:) "Here comes the-old bellows-blower, too, with something in
one of his!"
As he could no longer either hide his emotion behind jest, nor the
signs of it in his eyes behind some low-hanging linden-leaves, it was a
real piece of good luck, that, just at the second when his voice was
about to give way to it, he looked over the watch-tower, and saw the
coachman come racing over again. The man cried from below, "he had got
it from Seebass, but not till this moment." Agatha flew down
passionately, and, after reading a billet below, darted off across the
meadow. The bellows-blower ascended slowly, like a barometer before
settled weather, and lifted himself and the billet he had brought back
with him,--not a minute the sooner for all the beckoning overhead
there,--with his levers, to the top of the tower. In the billet was
written, in Clotilda's hand, "Come to thy bower, beloved friend!"
All eyes now ran after the runner, and fluttered with her through the
clear-obscure of evening into the Parsonage, around whose arbor,
however, no one could yet be seen. Hardly had Agatha caught sight of
the opening of the latter, when her hurrying became flying; and when
she was almost up to it, a white form flew out with widespread arms and
into hers, but the arbor concealed the end of the embrace, and the eyes
of all lingered long in vain expectation up in the cloister of love.
The Chaplain's wife, who generally would allow maidens only
degradations and not elevations of rank, now imparted to Clotilda all
the seven consecrations, and praised her so much--perhaps also because
she was a countrywoman of hers on the mother's side--that Victor could
have embraced the eulogist and her subject at once. The Chaplain added,
as his mite to her praise, that he had printed the initial of her name
(C) with tulips in red, like a title, and that the letter would shine
out, when the bed bloomed, far and wide.
The husband and husbandman began now to break in more and more upon the
sphere-music of night with the reed-stops of his cough; at last, he
made off with Victor's enthusiastic female friend, and left the two
friends alone, in the lovely night, with the two full hearts that
panted to pour themselves out into each other.
Flamin had, during this whole day, shown a deepening silence of
touching tenderness, which seldom found its way into his being,
and which seemed to say, "I have something on my heart." When the
watch-tower was comparatively deserted, Victor, who had become full of
loving and softening dreams, could no longer conceal his tear-swimming
eyes: he opened them freely before the oldest darling of his days, and
showed him that open eye which says, "Look right through, if thou wilt,
down to my very heart; there is nothing therein but clear love." ...
Silently the vortices of love swept round the two, and drew them nearer
together; they opened their arms for each other, and sank into each
other's without a sound, and between the brother-hearts lay only two
mortal bodies. Covered deep by the stream of love and ecstasy, they
closed for a moment their enraptured eyes; and when they opened again,
there stood the night sublimely before them, with its suns withdrawn
into eternal depths; the milky-way ran, like the ring of eternity,
around the immensity of space; the sharp sickle of the earthly moon
glided, cutting, across the short days and joys of men.
But in that which stood under the suns, which the ring encircled, which
the sickle smote, there was something higher, clearer, and more lasting
than they: it was the imperishable friendship lodged in these
perishable integuments.
Flamin, instead of being satisfied by this exhausting expression of our
speechless love, became now a living, flying flame. "Victor! in this
night give me thy friendship forever, and swear to me that thou wilt
never disturb me in my love to thee."
"O thou good soul! I have given thee my heart long since, but I will
gladly swear to thee again to-day."
"And swear to me that thou wilt never plunge me into misfortune and
despair."
"Flamin! that distresses me too much."
"O, I beseech thee, swear it! and lift thy hand and promise me, even if
thou hast made me unhappy, nevertheless that thou wilt not forsake me
nor hate me." ... Victor pressed him to his bosom. "But we will come up
hither when we can no longer be reconciled,--O, it pains me, too,
Victor!--up hither, and embrace each other, and throw ourselves down
and die!"
"Ay!" said Victor, in a low and exhausted voice. "O God! has anything
happened, then?"
"I will tell thee all. Now let us live and die together."
"O Flamin! how inexpressibly I love thee to-day!"
"Now will I let thee see into my whole heart, Victor, and reveal to
thee all."
But, before he could do it, he had to man himself by holding his peace;
and they remained a long time silent, lost in the depths of the inner
and outer heavens.
At last he was able to begin, and to tell him that that Clotilda, about
whom he had jested to-day, had written herself in ineffaceable
characters on his heart; that he could neither forget nor possess her;
that the creeping fever of a frightful, frenzied jealousy burned,
galling, within him; that he could not, to be sure, say a word to her
about his love, according to her prohibition, until her brother (the
Infante) should come back and be present; but that she, to judge by her
demeanor, and according to Matthieu's assurances, had perhaps some
regard for him; that her position must be an eternal wall of separation
between them, so long as he took the _juristic_ instead of the
_military_ road to promotion; and that on this last, if his Lordship
would lend him a hand in the matter, he would attain to Clotilda more
swiftly on similar steps; and that the request of which he had spoken
in his letters to Victor was just this,--that he would repeat all to
his Lordship, and beg his assistance. In fact, his wild arm could hold
the sword better than the balance of justice. A frightful
predisposition to jealousy, which even from future possibilities
catches palpitations, was the chief reason.--Victor rejoiced that he
could give his feelings the best language,--namely, action, and
assented to all he required, with delight at his confidence, and at the
absence from his communication of dreaded news; and so, newly attached
to each other, they went to rest. And the Twins--that ever-burning,
intertwined name of friendship--glimmered in the west, beckoning upward
out of an _earthly_ eternity; and the heart of the Lion blazed on their
right....
There are men laid upon this earth, and bound to the soil, who never
erect themselves to the contemplation of a friendship which winds
around two souls, not earthy, metallic, and unclean bonds, but the
spiritual ones that interweave this world itself with another and man
with God. Such ones, degraded to the dust, it is, that, like
travellers, regard from below the temple that hangs round the Alpine
peaks as baseless and airy, because they do not themselves stand on
the heights, and on the great floor of the temple,--because they know
not that in friendship we revere and love something higher than self
(which latter cannot at once be the _source_ and the _object_ of
love),--something higher, namely, the embodiment and reflection of the
virtue which in ourselves we only _approve_, and not till we see it in
others can _love_.
Ah! can, then, higher beings judge severely the weaknesses of the
shadowy groups that seek to hold fast to one another, driven apart as
they are by north winds,--who would fain press to their bosoms the
noble, invisible form of each other over which the thick and heavy
earthly mask hangs,--and who fall, one after another, into graves into
which the mourned draw their mourners?
4. DOG-POST-DAY.
Profile-Cutter.--Clotilda's Historic Figure.[40]--Courtiers,
and a Noble Man.
Clotilda, as Sebastian learned the next morning, had originally meant
to stay at the seminary till after St. John's; but, as her best friend
and schoolmate _Giulia_ had gone beforehand, not to her parents, but to
the long home, her distressed eyes must needs draw themselves away by a
speedier departure from the grave-mound which lay like a ruin over her
forlorn heart. Without packing up, she had fled from the flowerless
Golgotha of her wounded soul; and a second contemplation of it, and a
second departure, and a renewal of the old tears, still awaited her.
Never was a great beauty praised in a more unembarrassed manner by a
little one than Clotilda was by Agatha. Generally, the only thing
maidens appreciate about maidens is the heart; the evanescent charms of
another's face have so little worth in their eyes, that they hardly
care to mention them. Young men are justly reproached with selecting by
preference beautiful youths for their friends. In the case of girls, on
the contrary, their eulogists make much of the fact that they entirely
despise female beauty, as a too loose and base cement-and-mortar of
friendship, and that, therefore, to a beautiful woman, the _heart_ of
the very ugliest is more precious than the face of the handsomest on
the five zones and scarfs of the earth. Agatha was otherwise: she ran
over, the first thing in the morning, to the palace, to dress her
friend.
Flamin behaved still worse. He could not wait for the reality itself to
hang up Clotilda's Madonna-image in the chambers of Victor's brain: he
anticipated it with the pen-and-ink sketch of a painter, which is, at
least, not cold; for painters, in the _æsthetic_ and in the
_calligraphic sense_, seldom write well. The painter had, merely for
the sake of seeing and sketching Clotilda, stretched himself, almost
every Sunday morning, on a hill of Maienthal, where he transferred to
his note-book the glittering landscape round the seminary; and the
beautiful head which looked out of the eighth window he transferred
into his heart. Even Flamin, who generally set even the vignettes of
prose above the living oil-paintings of poetry, found, in the following
Madonna or Clotilda of the artist, something to his taste:--
"When my conscious being is a single thought, and burns; and when, with
the flames waving around me, I dip my hand into colors, to cool myself
therein;--then, when the lofty beauty[41] that forever beams within me
lets fall its image on the waves which tremulously picture heaven and
earth, and sets on fire the clear stream; and then, when an image of
Pallas, descending from heaven, rests upon the stream, a lily-casing
and cast-off wing-wrappage of an up-flown angel,--a form whose
unstained soul no body, but only the snow which lies around the throne
of God, and out of which the angels weave their fleeting vehicular
bodies,[42] encloses; and when the most delicate drapery is too coarse
and hard, and becomes a wooden frame around that divine breath on the
countenance, around that trembling flowered-velvet of flesh, around
that skin of white roses transfused with a glow of red ones; when this
reflection of my shining soul falls upon the colored surface,--then
every one will turn round, and think Clotilda is lying asleep on the
bank.... And here my art is over; for, ah! when she awakes, and when,
for the first time, the soul shall move these charms like wings; when
the fast-closed bud of the lips shall break into a smile, and the bosom
breathes in half a sigh, and, from modesty, breathes it not out again;
when the sighs, veiled in songs, steal from those lips,--which, like
two souls, hover over without touching each other--as bees steal out of
roses; when the eye stirs between gleams and tears;--then, when at
length the goddess of heavenly love approaches her daughter, and
electrically touches her still heart, and says, 'Do thou, too, love';
and now, when all charms tremble and bloom out, shrink and languish,
hope and shudder, and the dreaming heart shuts itself up more deeply
into its blossoms, and hides itself, trembling, behind a tear, from the
happy one who has divined and deserves it;--then the happy one is mute,
the happy one and the artist."
Victor saw beside him the happy one, who was his friend, looked upon
him with moist eyes, and said, "Of that thou wast worthy!" But now
twenty rowels spurred him to follow Agatha to the palace;--the
pen-and-ink drawing of the artist; the arrangement of dresses; the
relationship; the desire which every man has to see the Grace and
Infanta of his friend; the desire which _not_ every one has, but he
had, to speak with any one for the first time (rather than for the
eighth time); and, most of all, the evening of yesterday. Flamin's fire
had yesterday burned Victor's bosom to a heap of tinder, through which
nothing but sparks were running. He should have set all before him
indifferently, because the contest _against_ love differs in nothing
from the contest _for_ it, except in order of precedence. But let not
the reader by any means imagine that now (as in one of your emasculated
and emasculating romances) the Devil is to break loose in our
biography, and the hero is to march into the palace and there fall down
before Clotilda, and beg, on bended knee, "Be the heroine!" and go
about to wrangle with her, out of love, and with the former _pastor
fido_ out of hatred, and actually play nothing else than the æsthetic,
self-seeking, sensitive--scamp. If I should wish this last, I could
excuse myself only on the ground that then I might perhaps come to some
biographical murders and duels. I hope, however, I may still, without
injury to morals or honesty, in the course of these pages make out a
murder or homicide or two, at least in the last volume, where every
æsthetic reaper thins out his characters, and throws half of them into
the _oubliette_ or family-vault of the inkstand.
Victor had too many years and acquaintances to allow himself, with so
little regard to days of grace and double usance,[43] on the spot,
before supper,--_cito citissime_,--what hast thou, what canst thou?--to
fall in love. His optic nerve daily unravelled itself into finer and
more delicate fibres, and touched all points of a new form, but the
sore feelers curled back again more readily; every month the sight of a
new face, like new music, made a _stronger_ and _shorter_ impression.
He could only talk his way into love, not see it. Only words winged by
virtue and sensibility are the bees which, in such cases, carry the
pollen of love from one soul into another. But such a love, of the
better kind, is annihilated by the least immoral alloy. How could it
form and filter up in a defiled heart, filled with high-treason against
a friend?
Victor would have gone to the palace as early as half past nine, but
the Lady Chamberlain had not yet combed out her eyebrows and the King
Charles's spaniel.
Seebass brought a billet to Flamin:--
"I cannot see you, my dearest, to-day. Three Graces hold me fast, and
the third you yourself have sent. Tell your British friend he must love
me because I love you. Surgery may do without sympathy, but friendship
cannot.
"Your Matthieu."
An absurd billet! When Victor heard that Agatha was the third Grace,
there was a great hole torn in the curtain of the theatre in which
Matthieu played Flamin's friend and Agatha's--first lover. Nothing is
more annoying than a nest in which there sit none but brothers or none
but sisters: the nest must be shaken up into a mixed and motley
gradation,--that is to say, of brothers and sisters, packed in layers,
so that an honest _pastor fido_ can come and ask after the brother when
he is only on the look-out for the sister; and so, too, must the girl
who loves a brother absolutely and by stronger necessity have a sister
whose friend she is, and who may be hook and handle to the brother. Our
_Turkish_ decorum required, therefore, that Matthieu should point his
opera-glass at Flamin to see Agatha; and that Clotilda should visit the
latter, since Flamin, as a man without ancestors, but of honor, could
not possibly force his citizen's-visits upon the house of a
chamberlain. Clotilda came often, and thereby involved herself in a
contradiction, which I have till now been unable to solve, with the
womanly refinement of her character.
Flamin dipped Matthieu's likeness into a quite different dyeing-copper
from that the mother used: he was a jolly genius, and nothing worse. He
personated everything in the world, and no one could personate him. He
could imitate and travesty all the players of the Flachsenfingen
troupe, and the boxes too. He understood more sciences than the whole
court; yes, and more languages, even to the voices of the nightingale
and the cockerel, which he mimicked so perfectly that Petrarch[44] and
Peter would have run away. He could do with women what he chose, and
every court dame excused herself by the example of her neighbor; for it
used to be part of the _ton_ in Flachsenfingen to have one's fidelity
once put to the proof. They say love for him began to be knit, like a
stocking, at the calf, but it is utterly false. It is therefore no
wonder that, with such uninterrupted moderation in courtly pleasures,
he grew stronger and _healthier_ than the whole burnt-out, evaporated
court, only he was too caustic, and too philosophic, and almost too
roguish.
Victor and the reader and I have still, after all, only an indistinct,
blurred crayon-drawing of Matthieu in our heads. My hero was somewhat
pleased with him, as every eccentric man is with an eccentric one; it
was a fault of his, that he pardoned too easily those of energy, even
moral ones. With redoubled curiosity did he now take his way to the
palace, or rather to its great garden, which joined thereto its
semicircle of green beauties. He put in at the harbor of an embowered
alley, and was delighted at the way in which the pierced shadow of the
arbor, around whose iron skeleton tender twigs wound-like soft hair
around hair-needles, glided dazzlingly over his body. Side by side with
his arbor another parallel one passed along. He followed some scattered
black paper snippings as way-marks. The fluttering of the morning wind
tossed down from a twig a little leaf of fine paper, which he picked up
to read. He was still on the first line, "Man has two minutes and a
half, one in which to smile once, ..." when he ran against an almost
horizontal queue, which was a black club of Hercules, compared with
mine or the reader's plaited capillary tube. The queue was projected by
a head crooked downward, which, peering in a listening attitude out of
a niche in the arbor, was cutting a female profile, the original of
which in a by-avenue was talking with Agatha. At the rustle of Victor's
approach, the person, whose half-face was being stolen through the
niche, turned round with surprise, and saw the proprietor of the
Cyclops-queue with the profile-scissors, and also the hero of the
Dog-post-days. The proprietor, without saying a word, thrust his
artistic hand through the bush-work, and reached out to her her shadow
or shadow-cutting.[45] Agatha took it, smiling; but the nameless one
seemed to assume toward the cutter of forms and faces that seriousness
which, on female faces, is nowise distinguished from contempt but in
its ambiguousness, because his scissors awoke too strong a suspicion of
his having been listening. Victor could perceive nothing of the
nameless one yet except her stature, which, although bent forward a
little, still surpassed the ordinary height. The face-cutter turned
about with two flashing black eyes toward Victor, received him very
politely, knew his name, told his own,--Matthieu,--and had, at his
eighth pace, already had four good ideas. The fifth was, that he,
unsolicited, introduced my hero to the couple in the side-arbor. The
leafy nunnery-grating came to an end; a female form stepped forth, and
Victor was so struck by it, that he, who knew little about
embarrassments, or was made only more quick-witted by them, began his
introductory sermon without the exordium, and that was--Clotilda. When
she had said three words, he listened so to the melody instead of the
text, that he understood not a word of what she was saying....
I have here, lying beside me, on the snow-white ground of vellum, the
very _silhouette_ which Matthieu had taken of her with the scissors. My
correspondent will have me depict Clotilda as uncommonly beautiful.
Otherwise, he says, a hundred things in this history are
incomprehensible; and therefore he sends me (because he cannot trust my
fancy) at least her profile. And that is to be, even during my writing,
steadily looked at all the time,--so much the more, as it might seem
actually to have been cut from the very face[46] of another loveliest
female angel that ever flew out of an unknown paradise down to this
earth: I mean the Fräulein von * * *, at present maid-of-honor in
Scheerau; I am not sure whether all my readers know her.
Victor felt as if his blood had been driven outward, and with warm
touches described its circles on the external skin. At last Clotilda's
cold eye, of which not the intoxicated pride of beauty, but the sober,
retiring pride of innocence belonging only to the female sex, was
mistress, and her nose, which betrayed too much reflectiveness, brought
his new Adam to his legs again, upon which the old Adam had already set
himself up. He congratulated himself that he was Flamin's friend, and
consequently had some claims upon her attention and her society.
Nevertheless he continued to feel all the time as if everything she did
occurred now for the first time in the world; and he watched her as one
does a man who has been operated on for blindness from his birth, or an
Omai,[47] or a Li-Bu. He kept thinking, "How could sitting down ever
become her,--or the handing of a fruit-dish, or the eating of a cherry,
or stooping down to read a note?" I am a still worse ninny beside the
above-mentioned court dame.
At last came Le Baut into the garden, after the first toilet, and his
wife after the second. The Chamberlain--a short, supple, bedizened
thing, that will pull off its hat before the Devil in hell when it
enters there--received the son of his hereditary enemy in an uncommonly
complimentary manner, and yet with a dignity, for which, however, not
his heart, but his rank, gave him strength. Victor, for the mere reason
that he imagined him an injured person, cherished a predisposition of
good-will towards him. Although Le Baut's tongue was almost, like his
teeth, false and inserted, and consequently the words were so, too,
which were made up of dentals and linguals, still his neither coarse
nor uncourteous flatteries--among which his attitudes and intentions
also are to be counted--pleased our honest Victor, who could not hate
fine flatterers, as being weak persons. The Chamberlain's lady--who was
already in the years which a coquette seeks to conceal, although she
had still more reason to conceal the preceding ones--received our
well-disposed hero with the sincerest voice that ever yet issued from a
false Judas's bosom, and with the most artful face, on which it seemed
impossible that the deceptions of love could ever have found room for a
glance.
The new company took away Victor's embarrassment at once. He soon
remarked, indeed, the peculiar fighting- and dancing-positions of the
circle towards each other. Clotilda seemed reserved and indifferent
towards all, except her father. The step-mother was refined towards the
Chamberlain, haughty towards her step-daughter, obliging towards
Victor, and bore herself with an easy and subservient coquetry towards
Matthieu, who, on his part, was, toward the wedded pair, alternately
complimentary and ironical; towards Clotilda, cold as ice; and towards
my hero, as courteous as Le Baut was to all. Nevertheless Victor was
more joyous and free than any of them, not merely because he was under
the free heavens,--for a room always lay upon him like a blockhouse,
and a chair was like the stocks,--but because he was among _fine_
people, who, despite the most angular relations, give to conversation
four butterflies'-wings, that it may--in contrast to the clinging
caterpillar, who impales himself on every thorn--fly without noise and
in little curves over all prickles, and alight only on blossoms. He was
the greatest friend of fine people and fine turns of expression; hence
it was that he took so much pleasure in the society of a Fontenelle, a
Crébillon, a Marivaux,--of the entire female sex, and particularly of
the decently coquettish portion of it. Do not mistake me. Ah! upon his
Flamin, upon his Dahore, on all great men who were exalted above the
refined, cowardly, vacant microcosmologists of the great world, his
whole soul hung glowing; but for that very reason did he seek out,
with a view to greater completeness, the smaller men, as fringe and
corner-trimmings, with so much zeal.
Four persons had at this moment four telescopes pointed at once at his
soul: for himself, he took nothing of the kind into his hand, because
he was too good-natured and too happy to be the spy of a heart; and
only after the lapse of some days did he observe the image which any
one with whom he had been in company left behind in his brain. He did
not conceal himself, and yet he was seen in a false light: good men can
more easily see into bad ones than the latter can into the former. He
guessed others better than they guessed him. Only Clotilda deserves a
word of defence for having, even until after dinner,--during which Le
Baut, the greatest story-teller of this story-telling century, carried
through his part,--regarded him as too malicious and satirical. But she
could hardly do otherwise: a woman easily discerns the human, but
hardly the divine (or devilish), nature in a man, with difficulty his
worth, but easily his intentions, and his inner complexion more so than
his contour. Matthieu gave occasion for her error, but also (as I shall
presently report) for its retraction. This Evangelist,[48] who was a
much greater satirist than his namesake in the New Testament, placed
almost all Flachsenfingen on his private pillory, from Prince and Court
down to Zeusel;[49] only the Minister (his father) and his many sisters
he was compelled, unfortunately, to leave out, and likewise those
persons with whom he happened at the moment to be talking. What was
called calumny in him was at bottom an exaggerated Moravianism. For, as
St. Macarius commands that one shall, out of humility, add twenty
ounces of evil when one has five, but with regard to good, the
reverse,--accordingly ingenuous, courtly souls, seeing that no one will
use this modest language, endeavor to speak it in every one's name, and
always ascribe to him whose humility they wish to represent fifteen
ounces more of evil and less of good than he really has. On the
contrary, in the case of present company, they find this mediatorial
system of satisfaction unnecessary: hence the life of such court-nobles
is wholly dramatic; for as, according to Aristotle, comedy paints men
as worse, and tragedy as better, than they are, so do the nobles
referred to bring forward in the former only _absent_, in the latter
only _present_ persons. I do not know whether this perfection will go
to the length of atoning for a real fault of the Evangelist,--namely,
that, like the Romans on the Lupercalia, he--too often made thrusts at
the female sex. Thus, for instance, he said to-day, maidens and
raspberries were wormy before they were ripe; female virtue was the
red-hot iron which a woman (as was also the case in the old ordeals)
had to carry from the font (the baptismal-day) to the altar (the
wedding-day), in order to maintain her innocence, &c. Nothing fell upon
Clotilda--and the same I have always found the case with the best of
her sex--more keenly than satire upon her whole sex; but Victor was
astonished at her art--very peculiar to her sex and to worldly
experience at once--of concealing the fact, that she both--endured and
despised.
The Evangelist's example brought it about that Victor, too, began to
phosphoresce at all points of his soul; the spark of wit ran round the
whole circle of his ideas, which, like Graces, clasped each other by
the hand, and his electrical chime of bells outdid the Page's
discharges, which were lightnings, and stank of brimstone. Clotilda,
who was very observing, mistrusted Sebastian's lips and heart.
The young nobleman held him to be one of his feather, and in love
with Clotilda; and that, on the ground that "the gayer or more earnest
tone into which a man fell in company was a sign that a female
electrical-eel had struck at his bosom." I must confess it,--Victor's
effervescent soul never allowed him to hit that expression of respect
for women which does not run into untimely tenderness, and for which he
often envied cultivated people of the world; his regard unfortunately
always looked like a declaration of love. The Chamberlain's lady
accounted him as false as her Cicisbeo.[50] People like her cannot
comprehend any other kind attentions than polite or artful ones.
They kept our hero over there all day and half the evening.
Not once in the whole day was he able,--although the invisible eyes of
his inner man stood full of tears at Clotilda's noble figure, at her
secret grief for her cold, buried friend, at her thrilling voice when
she merely spoke to Agatha,--for all that, he never found himself able
to say so much as an earnest word: toward strangers his nature always
impelled him in the beginning to make sundry satirical leaps and other
caprioles. But in the evening, when they were in the festal garden,
where his usual shudder at the emptiness of life was made more intense
by merriment, as it always was,--whereas serious, sad, passionate
conversations diminished it,--and when Clotilda granted him only a very
cold civility, as if shown to him at a father's dictation, and did not
divine in its full extent the difference between him and Matthieu, who
assumed no second world, nor any inner man organically adapted to it:
then was there a stifled feeling about his yearning heart; too many
tears seemed to fill his whole breast and press for a passage; and as
often as he looked up to the great, deep heavens, something whispered
in his soul: Take not the least thought for the fine circle, but speak
out!
But there was only _one_ soul for him, to which Nature had attached
those treadles, as to pedal-harps, which impart to every thought a
higher tone of the spheres, to life a holy worth, and to the heart an
echo from Eden: that soul was not his once so-loved Flamin, but his
teacher, Dahore, in England, whom he had long ago lost from sight, but
never from his dreams. The shadow of this great man stood, as it were,
projected upon the night, hovering and erect before him, and saying,
"Dear one, I see thy inward weeping, thy sacred longing, thy desolate
heart, and thy outstretched, trembling arms; but all is in vain; thou
wilt never find me, nor I thee." He gazed at the stars, whose exalting
science his teacher had even then instilled into his youthful soul; he
said to Clotilda: "The topography of the heavens should be a piece of
our religion; a woman ought to learn the catechism and Fontenelle by
heart." And then he described the astronomical lessons of his Dahore
and the teacher himself.
From Clotilda's face there broke forth a great transfiguration, and she
depicted with words and looks her own astronomical teacher at the
Seminary,--how he was just as noble and just as quiet,--that he called
himself _Emanuel_, and bore no surname, because he said, "With
transitory man, with one whose genealogical tree so speedily sank into
nothingness, the difference between family names and baptismal names
was too slight";--that, unhappily, his noble soul inhabited a shattered
body, which already bent low toward the grave,--that he was, according
to the assurance of her Abbess, the gentlest and greatest man who had
yet come from the East Indies (his native country), although there were
some singularities of his way of life in Maienthal, which one had to
overlook....
Matthieu, whose wit borrowed from the snake his line of beauty, his
poisonous tooth, his leap, and his coldness, said, softly and
composedly: "It is well for his withered body that he was not made
astronomer and night-watchman here at once; he applied, several years
ago, for a telescope and a horn."
Clotilda was, for the first time, suffused with a flush of angry
redness, like the morning before the rain: "If," said she, quickly,
"you know him merely from my portraiture, you cannot possibly seek this
characteristic among his." But the Chamberlain came to the Page's
assistance, and said that Emanuel had actually, five years before, been
refused that application. Clotilda looked, as if for help, to the only
one whose attentiveness was not ironical,--our Victor, on whom the
reflection of her transfiguration threw its beauty,--and asked, more in
the tone of hope than of assertion, "Should one expect anything like
that of such a mind?" "Of mine sooner," he replied, by way of evasion;
for he, who could have contradicted the Pope to his face, found it
often impossible to gainsay fair lips, especially when they propounded
a question with so much reliance on his negative. "As often as I walk
through towns by night, I listen to the bodily night-watch with more
pleasure than to the spiritual. In the silent, listening night, under
the outspread starry heaven, there is something so sublime in the
homiletic owl's-song or hoot of the night-watch, that I have a hundred
times wished me a horn and six verses."
The Chamberlain and his _associé_ took this for clumsy persiflage; the
latter--perhaps for the sake of displeasing Clotilda, to the advantage
of his heart's czarina, armed with false bosom and false rump--went on
unshamed with his, and asserted that the best method of making the
aforenamed anonymous person sad was a very merry one, a comedy;--to be
sure, a farce moved him still more strongly, as he himself witnessed in
him at Goethe's moral puppet-play or fair.
Then flashed upon the surprised Victor a new face and a new relation;
for he was exactly like Emanuel. A fair, with its human streams running
up and down,--with its flitting of figures to and fro, as in a clock
with images,--with its perpetually buzzing air, in which fiddle-squeak
and human janglings and lowing of cattle conspire in one deafening
roar,--and with the booths, crammed with commodities, offering a mosaic
picture of our little life, patched up of varied necessities.... a
village-fair, by all these reminiscences of the great, frosty
_New-Year's fair_ of Life, made Victor's noble bosom at once heavy and
full; he sank away, sweetly overpowered, into the din, and the human
ranks around him absorbed his soul into its stiller fantasies. That was
the reason why Goethe's Hogarthian _tail-piece_ of a village-fair (like
Shakespeare) always left him melancholy; just as he was most fond,
indeed, of finding in the low-comic the highest earnest (women are
capable only of a reverse discovery), and a comic book, without any
nobler trait or hint (e. g. Blumauer's Æneid), he could endure as
little as La Mettrie's[51] disgustingly laughing face, or the faces on
the frontispieces of the Vade Mecum.
Like a true youth, he forgot himself and all around him, half-stretched
out his arms, and said, with an eye in which one saw a soul longingly
laboring at a portrait of Emanuel: "Now I know thee, thou nameless one!
thou art the lofty man, who is so rare.... I assure you, Herr Von
Schleunes, this Mr. Emanuel has something in him ... No, amidst this
life on the wing, a thing which darts so _prestissimo_ out of one
rain-shower into another,[52] and from cloud to cloud, should not keep
its bill open on the stretch for one continued peal of laughter.... I
have read today somewhere: Man has only two and a half minutes, and
only one for a smile...." He had quite lost himself in the thicket of
his feelings, else he would have kept back more than he did, especially
the last line of the leaf found in the garden. Clotilda was startled at
something or other. He would now gladly have read the leaf through. She
related to him now those characteristics of her teacher into which she
knew better how to enter; that he was a Pythagorean, went only in white
robes, had himself put to sleep and waked with flute-music, ate no
leguminous fruits or animal food, and often walked half the night under
the stars.
Lost in mute rapture over the teacher, he hung with enthusiastic eyes
upon the friendly lips of the pupil, who was ennobled by her interest
in a sublime and singular genius. She found here the first man whom she
had ever put into an unfeigned enthusiasm for her Pythagorean favorite;
and all her chasms turned themselves, blooming, towards Emanuel's
image, like flowers toward the sun. Two fair souls discover their
affinity first of all by the like love which binds them to a third. The
full, inspired heart loves to hush and hide itself in a finery-room,
which holds only heterogeneous persons, but when it finds therein
its second, then in its joy at that its silence and secrecy and the
finery-room are all forgotten.
The quicksilver of Victor's morning gayety had fallen ten degrees. In
the twilight of his soul nothing peered forth but the paper which he
wanted to read, and in fact presently read out in the avenue; and so he
took an early leave.
The leaf had blown out of Clotilda's loose Album, and was written
by--Emanuel.
"Man has here two and a half minutes,--one to smile, one to sigh, and
half a one to love; for in the midst of this minute he dies.
"But the grave is not deep, it is the gleaming footmark of an angel who
seeks us. When the unknown hand sends the last arrow at the head of
man, he bends his head in anticipation, and the arrow merely takes off
the crown of thorns from his wounds.[53]
"And with this hope, go forth from Maienthal, noble soul! but neither
continents nor graves nor the second world can sunder or bind together
two human beings: but only thoughts part or marry hearts.
"O, may thy life hang full of blossoms! From thy first Paradise may a
second, as from the midst of one rose a second, be destined to bloom!
May the Earth glow in thy sight, as if thou stoodest above it, and
followedst with thine eye its path in heaven! And as Moses died because
God kissed him, so be thy life a long kiss of the Eternal! And may thy
death be mine!... EMANUEL."
"O thou good, good soul!" cried Victor, "I can now no more forget thee.
Thou must--thou wilt--take an interest in my weak heart!" From his
inner strings the drops of vapor that choked their music had now fallen
off. His brain became a radiant landscape, in which there stood nothing
but Emanuel's shining form. He arrived late at the parsonage, with a
face expressive of blissful emotion; and in this glow he arrayed before
his spectators the image of Clotilda, to whom he gave everything an
angel has, even the wings that threatened a short stay. His friendship
raised him so far above the suspicion of a suspicion, that he thought
he could give his friend no warmer or tenderer proof of the same, than
by the strongest sympathetic praise of Clotilda; Flamin's love for her
passed over through this friendship into his soul. The feeling for the
beloved of a friend carries with it an unspeakable sweetness and moral
tenderness. For Victor I answer, in this matter, that he understood,
indeed, how a friend can sacrifice his love to another, but not how the
other can accept the offering; but for Flamin I cannot stand security
that he is cool enough, and a sufficient connoisseur of men, to regard
the prize-medals which Victor stamps upon Clotilda, and upon which he
sets her beautiful face and his coat of arms, as only just so many
coins _de confiance_, and as pledges of brotherly fidelity. He was too
impetuous and too ambitious to see, or even to listen to, the truth;
for his open-hearted friend had to suppress many a tender reproach,
which would have tried him too much, because he had too much love of
praise and fieriness of spirit, and too little self-confidence. Hence a
flatterer like Matthieu fastened himself so much the more firmly with
his ivy-hooks into the fissures of this rock. When he a little harshly
called the nameless Emanuel an enthusiast, Victor said little more
about him that day. Flamin--either because he was a Jurist, or because
he was a Hotspur, or both--could endure anything better than poets,
philosophers, courtiers, and enthusiasts,--one excepted, who was all
these at once, namely, his Sebastian Victor.
5. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Third of May.--The Nightingale.--The Abbate Sitting on Music.
I must here--premise, once for all, that I should be very stupid if I
did not notice the multitude of improbabilities in this history: I am
well aware of them all; nay, I have observed some of them--e. g. in
Clotilda's behavior, or those in my hero's medical doctorship--even
sooner than the reader, because I have--read everything before he has.
I therefore delayed no longer, but entreated my correspondent by
to-day's Hofmann-mail to write me by the dog the next time, in his
portrait-box, what we were all about. I told him flatly, that the devil
a bit did he know, though I did, however, of the readers and their
tyranny. I must tell him (I said) that they were people of sense, whom
a Biographer, nay, even a Romance-architect, dared not approach with
poetic deception, but they would say, like the Areopagus, "Give us the
naked historical fact here, without any superfluous poetic dressing
up." And in fact it was a marvel to me, I went on to say, that he
should not yet know that they had so much, partly understanding and
partly four-leaved clover[54] in them, that, if the greatest authors
and tragic poets should undertake to be fine, and by æsthetic
juggleries to excite in them fear, like cuppers, or pity, like beggars,
they would cold-bloodedly let these men work till they were tired, and
say, "We are not to be caught." That the Reviewers, however, were still
more crazy and clever, and were perhaps the best _Skotometers_
(measurers of darkness), at the same time that they were the
wretchedest _Photometers_ (light measurers) going. And finally, I said
right out to my historical adjutant, that it was no injury to him, but
very much to me, that I should be translated into several languages,
and therein, for every improbability in the text, be dragged down into
the scourging-cellar of a note, and there sorely lashed, without daring
to open my mouth, if the interpreting scoundrel who translated (or
transported) my gourd-bottle-case like a cask of wine, from one country
to another, should, on the way, as all carriers do, outwardly
besprinkle and inwardly fill up the wine with water.--He must, at
least, (I entreated him) give me an answer, that I might show it to the
readers, as an evidence that I had written to him.
By the next Dog-post-day, therefore, at all events, great things may be
expected.--
Besides, the 4th of May comes into that also, with what should
seem its two important Thanksgiving festivals for the arrival of the
two Sebastians,--the little one into the world, the elder at the
bathing-town.--Even Clotilda is to be there to-morrow, and Victor is
very eager (and so am I) to see her in the sunshine of love beside
Flamin; for over yonder all her charms seemed to bloom round a heart
not yet smitten and ripened by love's ray, as flower-leaves hide the
_white heart-leaves_ from the sun.... Matthieu came to-day to take
leave, because he was going back to-morrow to the city. Our hero was
less and less pleased with him, and a Page's history, which he related
of himself, renewed Victor's resolve to fulfil soon the entreaty of the
Parson's wife by ridding himself of such a fellow.
Matthieu, as Page, rendered service to the chief Tutor's lady, I
believe both the greater and the lesser service. Nevertheless, he had
once to smuggle an Abbate and conscience-keeper into one of her
cabinets, which was destined to be the confessional and holy place to a
degree of which, to be sure, her stupid, jealous husband had no notion.
Now there was in the next room a musical armchair, upon which, in fact,
one played with no other instrument than the rump; so soon as one sat
down in it, it began its overtures, and I myself once sat in such
a one at Prince Esterhazy's. Our Mat,[55] as all the citizens of
Flachsenfingen called him,--some government people called him even the
Evangelist,--appointed the Abbate two hours too soon; but, lest the man
with the shorn peruke should be tired of waiting, he first carried in
the music-making chair as resting-bench and anchoring-ground for weary
expectants. Toward three of the night, when the company was gone,
except the chief Tutor, the counsellor of conscience, weary of
standing, let his rump sink at last into the easy-chair stuffed out
with favorite arias, and woke up with his breeches the whole wailing
music therein with its thrilling passages, without the least
possibility of stilling the cabinet-serenade of this alarmer. At last
the husband darted like a herring at the final cadences (or falls), and
dragged from his organ-stool the sedentary conscience-man in the midst
of counterpoint and shakes, and spoiled his quail-call for him, I
believe, by an administered cudgelling. The chief Tutor's lady easily
guessed the master of the chair, Mat; but so very much a matter of
course is pardon at court,--not merely _past_ offences, but _future_
ones being forgiven there by good, easy female souls,--that the chief
Tutor's lady did not avenge herself upon Mat, although he _served_ her
two weeks and a half longer, till after just two weeks and a half....
Victor was indignant at Flamin's laughter; he loved drollery, but not
bantering. His sweetened blood began gradually with this _mother of
vinegar_ to grow sour towards this Mat, whose cold, ironical gallantry
toward the honest Agatha of itself exasperated him, though her
phlegmatic, and, as it were, married pulse, beat in his absence and in
his presence at the same rate. Still more heart-burning matter and acid
collected in Victor's bosom, from the fact that he, who tolerated
everything,--vain men, proud ones, atheists, enthusiasts,--could
nevertheless not endure men who regard virtue as a kind of refined
provision-bakery, wantonness as allowed, the spirit as an almsgatherer
for the flesh, the heart as a blood-syringe, and our soul as a new
shoot of the body. But this was what Matthieu did, who besides had a
passion for philosophizing, and threatened to infect Victor's friend,
who, in fact, was as cold toward the whole world of poets and spirits
as a statesman, with his philosophical cancer-poison.
In the evening he endeavored to sound, a little nearer to Flamin's
ear, a blast upon a second Trumpet of Fame against the departed
pseudo-Evangelist. It was in the garden that he blew it. He took the
hand of which Matthieu's was not worthy into his better one, and began,
with the finest and heartiest forbearance,--which one must grant even
to true friendship for a hollow friend,--his iconoclastic attack. For
while he charged it upon the lady of the Chamberlain, that she threw
down at Agatha from her high post looks nowise cleaner than what
monkeys used to throw down from their high roosts at passers-by; and
while he blamed the young Page, that, like many of the nobility, only
among the nobility could he scent best (perhaps by the help of
contrast) the heretical odor of one belonging to the burgher-class, and
that his words and looks at the palace flew like icicles at the good,
warm heart of Agatha; at the same time the reproach of this May-frost
toward the sister was only a pretext behind which he veiled the
observation, that the Page would not be Flamin's friend, if he were not
Agatha's lover.
Flamin's silence (the sign of his indignation) gave the stream of his
eloquence a new and swifter descent; in addition to this a nightingale,
poetizing in Le Baut's garden, woke up all the echoes of love in his
soul.--He therefore grasped, of course, both of Flamin's hands in that
effervescence which always transformed his steps toward an object into
springs, and thereby overshot the mark. Many plans miscarry, because
the heart toils after the head, and because at the end of the execution
one applies less caution than at its beginning. He looked upon his
beloved, the fluting throat of the nightingale set the text of his love
to music, and with indescribable emotion he said: "Best one, thy heart
is too good not to be outwitted by those who cannot reach thee. O if,
some day, the sharp edge of court _ton_ should pass bloodily across the
veins of thy breast (Flamin's looks seemed to ask, Art thou not then
even satirical?)--O if he, who has no faith in virtue and
disinterestedness, should one day himself cease to show any; if he
should sorely betray thee; should the hand, which court-life had
hardened, like a lemon-squeezer, wring blood and tears from thy heart,
then, I beseech thee, despair not, only not of friendship,--for thy
mother and I love thee far otherwise. O verily, at the time when thou
art forced to say, Why did I not hearken to my friend who so warned me,
and to my mother who so loved me?--then mayest thou come to me, to one
who never changes, and who prizes thy error higher than self-interested
vigilance; then would I lead thee weeping to thy mother, and say to
her, take him wholly, thou only art worthy to love him." To all this
Flamin said not a word. "Art thou sad, my Flamin?" "Tired!" "I am sad;
the plaints of the nightingale strike upon my soul like echoes of
_future_ ones," said Victor. "Are you pleased with this nightingale,
Victor?" "Indescribably, as if she were a friend of my innermost soul."
"Thus are people imposed on; it is _Matthieu singing_," Flamin quickly
answered. For the Evangelist differed from a nightingale in nothing
except size. And then Flamin, somewhat irritated, and yet with a
pressure of his friend's hand, took his departure.
6. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Threefold Deception of Love.--Lost Bible and Powder-puff.--
Churching.--New Concordats with the Reader.
Knef's answer is wretched: "By your well-born's favor, dated the 6th
instant, I see that the public has taste and some refinement, which
does not surprise me, since the same is treated like gold-leaves, which
are beaten out thin and fine, first within a book of parchment, and
then between two of sheep-skin leaves, and thus, in like manner, by
being passed from one book to another, and therein through the force of
the press-bar, is made as fine as cavalier-paper.[56] If the public
keeps on reading in this way a year or two, it may at last be more
clever than Germany itself. Touching the improbabilities in our
work, several such are of course desirable, because without them a
biography or a romance gives miserable satisfaction, since it wants the
charm by which the German hospital-ship and ship of fools, full of
original romances, proves so attractive to us, ... which ship, as
secretive-gland of disagreeable works, may justly be called the liver
of the Republic of Letters, and the bookstore the gall-duct. But in
reference to improbabilities, I am myself only too apprehensive that
even the few on which we rely may in the end disappear. I am, &c."
The wag, as one may easily see, would fain pull the wool[57] over my
eyes and those of the reader. For me, however, it is a magnificent
document in evidence that I have done my part by writing to the rogue.
There are certain persons who, if in the evening they were very warm
and friendly, the next morning are very gloomy and cold,--like
Maupertuis's half-suns, which burn only on one side and disappear
from us when they turn towards us the earthly half,--and if they were
cold, the next time they are warm. Flamin forgot the next morning both
the warm evening and the night-chill. Today is the festival of
churching! Over there with Sebastian he launched out like a German
police-puritan and purist, with fire-devils[58] and musketry against
churching,--against infant-baptismal festivals,--against felling trees
for Christmases and Whitsuntides,--against holidays, and against all
the merry-makings of mankind.
Nothing in our century so enraged Victor as its haughty
crusade-preachings against unfashionable follies, whereas with
unfashionable vices it makes contracts of subsidy. He took a long
breath to start with, and then showed that the good of a state, as of a
man, consisted not in riches, but in the use of riches, not in its
commercial, but in its moral worth, that the sweeping out of the
ancient leaven and most of our institutions and pandects and edicts had
for their object only to enhance princely incomes, not morality, and
that one wanted to have vices and subjects, like the old Jews, bring
their offerings only in one city, namely, the residence city,--that
humanity, from time immemorial, had cut its nails only on its bare
_hands_, not on its covered _feet_, which often themselves decayed on
that account,--that economical and sumptuary laws were still more
needful to princes themselves, at least to the highest classes, than to
the lowest,--that Rome owed to her many holidays much of her
patriotism.... Flamin had no eye for the little pearl-print of domestic
joy, for infusory-flowerets of pleasure; on the contrary, his soul kept
step with a Brutus when he strode majestically up to Pompey's statue,
and with a sigh over fate drove the scissors of the Parcæ into the
greatest heart of earth, which confounded its worth with its right.
Victor had room in his heart for the most unlike feelings.
I cannot repeat often enough, that to-day is the churching. I will
sketch it for posterity; not, however, with that curtness with which a
newspaper-writer condenses the funeral of a king into three sheets, but
a little more circumstantially. For the stately initial letters of this
day the Parsonage had quite other reasons _in petto_ than one has ever
yet, to my knowledge, been pleased to disclose to our age: three
interested parties wished to deceive each other,--at least, two did a
third.
In the first place, the Lady of the Parsonage wished to deceive our
hero, who did not know that to-day was the birthday of his father, and
that that personage--whom she had taken the liberty of inviting--was
coming today for the space of five minutes. In the morning, she set her
two daughters to boiling yarn, in order that they might confess nothing
to Victor,--at least, not the truth; for it is a well-known
superstition that yarn boils whitest when one lies soundly over the
operation. Hence we should be the more watchful when women lie, and
inquire whether they mean, by their poetical deceptions, to _burn
anything else white_ except yarn. Her beloved Victor--that was her
plan--should to-day present to her husband, whose cradle-festival[59]
also fell on to-day, the usual congratulation, and afterward halve it,
and carry it on to his Lordship, who was to arrive with his own
birthday.
Secondly, Sebastian and she wished to deceive the old Chaplain, who had
forgotten that he had been born, which absence of mind had already
occurred to him at his first birthday. Mankind keep the run of
another's life better than of their own; truly we make altogether too
little account of a history which once was ours, and which is the shell
of hours that have flown away, and yet the drops of time through which
we swim do only in the distance of memory form the rainbow of
enjoyment. Men know when all emperors were born and all philosophers
died; women know, by reckoning time, only this, when their husbands,
who are _their_ regents and classic authors, underwent both. Victor,
whose delicate feeling was seared by too great attentions to himself,
was glad that Eymann's shoulders must bear half of to-day's honor.
Thirdly, the Lord of the Parsonage wanted to play his deception as well
as any one else, and in fact upon everybody. As this Festival-day was
to him--like the three High Festivals of the Cloisters--at the same
time shaving-day, on which the wisest heads make the foolishest faces,
the barber must needs cut with the razor-lancet upon the skin of the
soul-keeper, as upon the bark of a birch-tree, a memorial of himself;
but the little blood that flowed out suggested to the Parson a cleverer
thought than what the cupper left therein, which, however, secreted the
nervous sap, that, according to the merest sciolists, is the grease of
our mental motions, the gold solution of our most significant ideas,
and the spirit of our spirit. This cleverer thought which I so much
praise was, to have a vein opened in his left arm, to conceal it from
the whole household, in the evening to congratulate his Lordship and
everybody, and, at last, to strip up his sleeve and show the wound,
like a Roman, and say, "Congratulate me, I pray, on the bleeding!" He
executed his idea, and the shaver was obliged, to his amazement, to
hack something else beside the chin. The wounded man escorted him even
to the outer door, not so much from politeness, as in order that he
might not hold forth to the whole domestic company on the subject, but
keep the occurrence absolutely to himself, except in houses where
there was a beard and an ear. For let an historian be ever so much the
_month-hand_ of the age, and consequently the newspaper-compositor its
_hour-hand_, and accordingly a woman its _second-hand_, still, after
all, the beard-trimmer is both, woman and _second-hand_.
As Flamin and Victor passed down into the sitting-prinking-summer and
winter-room, from amidst none but glad faces protruded one sullen one,
which belonged to the Parson, who was plunging about like one
possessed: there were two things which he could not possibly nose
out,--his Bible and his powder-puff. Three minutes before he had thus
lamented: "Am not I and my wretched life then singled out for a true
Passion-history? Let an urn of fortune be given me, from which anybody
else would claw out, as if he were crabbing, whole kingdoms. So soon as
the Archfiend sees it to be me, he drops his dung in; and I claw that
out instead of crabs and kingdoms, and nothing more. It would have gone
finely to-day, the Devil saw,--we should have had until four o'clock in
the afternoon no fun, but dog's-work; but then we should have broken
loose; then would have come the dinner in the summer-house, the
congratulation and salutation and real jollity.... And for you all
this is still waiting; but to me, if the puff and the Bible do not
appear, just send some of the soot and ashes (the leavings of the
evening-feast) that I may brush therewith Fox's [his horse's] bit, and
in the evening I can weed radishes by the summer-house."
At this moment, he had to salute, with the dipped flag of his poll, his
tasselled cap, the Briton just entering,--when the gesture shook out of
the cap a hair-tuft, which, to be sure, was not the long-sought Bible,
but was the puff, which had been given up for lost. That is to say, the
thinking and reading world, to which one does not often disclose the
weightier facts, must at least come at this one,--that the Court
Chaplain, just as men are snatched from among men to overtop and master
the rest, precisely so bound up the hairs which his comb plucked out,
into a skin-fascicle or hair-union, in order to powder therewith the
others that were left standing,--which now could not, of course, by
this most exalted spirit and pentameter,[60] be well christened
anything else than a hair-puff. Nevertheless, Eymann's face was longer
than his cap; he let this syringe of the coloring powder of his head
lie and cool there, and said, "If I don't ferret out the Bible, then I
don't see how this tuft alone is to get me out of the scrape."
As the Bible was sought before Luther's time, so now was the Canstein
Bible, with its black beetle's-wing-shells. If anything could make this
hard blow still more bitter, it was this,--that Eymann's band, like his
reason, lay between the lost canonical leaves[61] as in a napkin-press;
for the clergy, especially the Pope, love to make the Bible commentary
a smoothing-press and finery-box to their outer man. Although he had
eight other Bibles, even the simple Biblical Chrestomathy of Seiler, in
the house, and to-day, at week-day church, did not need any at
all, still it was certainly better and more human--that is, more
foolish--that he should whistle the head of his vestry-beadle, the
schoolmaster, to the window, and postpone divine service, like a
reformation, by a quarter of an hour's interim, than that, instead of
simply the hour of tolling, he should change nothing less than Bible
and bands. Good heavens! how like exegetists and Kennicottists[62] they
searched and smiled! "This hunting for the Bible," said Sebastian,
"redounds to a clergyman's honor, especially as he seeks the truths in
the Bible only by _daylight_, not by _funeral-torches_."
The monks, like the lighters of the street-lamps, have a _ladder_ and
much oil, but with the oil they _extinguish_ the lamps and their own
thirst, and with the ladder they conduct those who light them again up
to the gallows.
As the Chaplain passed along before the quiet head of the six-weeks'
child, which to-day's lace-cap already oppressed, he went back, from
vexation at its indifference, lifted its bedizened head with his right
hand, and thrust the left through the stratum of the cradle-straw,
thinking there to exhume the Bible, which is usually the pillow and the
supporting amulet of children (particularly of _Dauphins_), saying,
meanwhile: "The miserable little brat would lie there through all our
misery, perfectly cool, seeming to say, 'What's that to me?' if I
didn't stir him up." And just at this moment something fell, not like a
shot, but like a book, although it can be heard through my quill, even
to the thirtieth century. Eymann flew, thoughtfully, into the second
story, and found at his feet a smashed--mouse under his long-sought
Bible. The Protestant imperial circles can never have been ignorant of
the students' or Dr. Luther's mousetraps,[63] for which one needs only
a book, and which are to mice what symbolical books were to candidates.
Sebastian drew forth the corpse by the tail from under the Biblical
vellum-mould, and Seiler's Bible-arrangement, swung the cadaver toward
the light, and delivered extempore this funeral sermon: "Poor
schismatic! the Old and New Testaments were the death of thee, but
neither thou nor the Testaments are to blame! Only be glad that the
Bible did not absolutely singe thee to ashes, like a Portuguese
Israelite; but thy lines fell in enlightened times, where it takes away
nothing but livings. It is genuine wit, if I ask, As the Bible used to
extinguish conflagrations into which it was thrown, why not, then,
_auto-da-fés_ also?"
I have long been watching for an opportunity here to force the world to
ask why the case of a mouse's death should interest it more than the
shooting down of an army in general history,--the loss of another's
hair-puff more than Christina's abdicated crown.[64] ... This interest
arises from the source whence it comes with those to whom the case
really occurs: because I relate it copiously, i. e. because the
readers, like the heroes concerned in it, painfully live over one
moment of childish history after another. Many little blows riddle the
firmest man as surely as one great one; and it is all one whether fate
does it or an author. And thus it comes that the modern man is placed
so near to the index-finger of time, that he can see it move; hence a
trifle, when it takes up _many_ moments, becomes so great to us, and
this short life, which, like the picture of our soul in the _Orbis
Pictus_,[65] consists of points--of black and golden ones--seems so
long. And hence, too, everywhere, as on this page, does our serious
mood stand so near to our mirthful.
Except Flamin, all moved to church, godfather and godchild. It was a
so-called week-day prayer-hour, such as will be set apart in every
rational duchy and margravedom, where one still sees to it that the
parson shall freeze once or twice a week, and that, as novices do for
the exercise of obedience, they may be obliged to sprinkle dry sticks,
to scatter the seed of the Divine word into empty pews, as Melancthon
did into empty pots.[66] In German countries, mine and a few others
excepted, it takes two centuries thoroughly to do away a folly,--one to
recognize it, and one more to do it away. The _views_ of a consistory
always become rational a hundred years sooner than its orders
(_circularia_) do.
In the latticed pew of the Eymanns, whose door made nearly a right
angle with that of the vestry, Sebastian found all the flowers again,
or at least the flower-skeletons, which had bloomed around his fair
childhood's days,--figurative and literal ones; and the literal ones,
which had crept away all soiled under the footstool of the choir-pew,
opened out again into flowers of memory. He thought of his childish
sorrows here,--among them the length of the sermon,--and of his
childish pleasures, among which were to be reckoned the length of the
voluntary and Eymann's kneeling on the middle of the pulpit-stairs. He
pushed back the wooden lattice-window, and found in its wooden groove
his initials, V. S. H., notched by his own hands. So far is it from the
child to the youth! And man wonders at the distance. "Ah! then," said
Horion,--and we will say it with him,--"all was to thee as yet
infinite, and nothing little but thy heart. Ah! in that warm,
quickening time, when a father is still God the Father, and a mother
the mother of God, not yet did the bosom, oppressed with spirits,
graves, and storms, press itself for comfort to a human one. All the
four quarters of the world were installed in this church; all rivers
were named Rhine, and all princes January. Ah! this tranquil and lovely
day was set in a golden horizon of infinite hope and a ring of
morning-red. Now the day is gone, and the horizon sunk, and only the
skeleton remains there,--the latticed pew."
But if we now, even in the noonday hours of life, think and sigh thus,
how much more at evening, when man folds up his flower-leaves, and
becomes undistinguishable like other flowers,--at evening, when we
stand low in the western horizon and go out,--then, when we turn round,
and survey the short road strewed with trampled-out hopes,--oh! then,
how much more sweetly will it not look upon us,--the garden of
childhood, lying in the east, low down near the place of our rising,
and still suffused with an old, pale redness,--how much more magically
will it gleam on us, and yet how much more will it affect us to
tenderness! And thereupon man lays himself down on the earth not far
from the grave, and hopes here below no more.
To Eymann it must be a touching thought, that he, as he had for years
given the benediction in this church to newly-delivered mothers only
parishionally related to him, could, for once, give his wishes to a
nearer one. Victor crept back into all his boyish Sundays and their
illusions by this simple act, that he to-day, as in his tenth year,
went, while the whole congregation were singing, into the vestry, to
the Parson, and asked him for the page of the hymn. He enjoyed it with
a real childish gusto to think that there were four _moving_
creatures[67] in the temple,--the Parson, the Schoolmaster, the
Exchequer-master of the poor's-box,[68] and himself. Is there anything
more sublime, thought he, than a jingling alms-bag-father with a long,
horizontal balance-pole, walking to and fro alone, among nothing but
stiffened statues?
After church the festival began with mere preliminaries, as a treaty of
peace does with articles about the neutral ground, about rank, &c. Only
the world must not suppose that anything came on sooner than five
o'clock in the afternoon, or that any one could earlier than that slip
out of his prosaic week-day clothes into the poetic festal ones, or
quietly settle down beside a neighbor; but, according to the order and
programme of pleasure, all must now run up and down, obedient to
Apollonia, that _majoress-domo_,--must carry away bean-poles and
seed-cornucopias out of the summer-house,--fan out therefrom
butterflies that had burst the cocoons and waked up bottle-flies,--tie
back the twigs which had grown over the windows,--lug down the
orangery, which consisted of a hundred blossoms of a pomegranate-tree,
out of the parsonage into the garden alley, in like manner an invalid
harpsichord, whose sounding-board had not sprung[69] so often as its
strings.... The serious Flamin was compelled by the bustling Sebastian
to take part in these puppet-plays,[70] and between them, in this
preparatory chase of pleasure, the tormented visage of Eymann had to
labor, to which Victor delivered the most essential exhortations:
"Master Godfather, we cannot be earnest and busy enough,--this festival
may yet be talked of in places where it will have influence; but a
middle course between princely pomp and Belgian stinginess will, I
think, throw upon us the most favorable light." All went well,--even
the clouds dispersed,--Clotilda would come. The primate of the
festival, in whose honor the church-going took place,--the little
six-weeks'-man,--memorized his part aloud, which he had to perform
after five o'clock, and which, as in the case of more than one hero of
festivities, was to consist of nothing but going to sleep.
The memorizing consisted of his waking and screaming in one steady
scream for the bosom in which the Creator had stored up for him the
first manna in life's wilderness. But not till five o'clock did the
mother still him with the maternal sleep-potion, and enable the little
speaker to close his throat-lid[71] and eyelids at once. At first I had
come near suppressing--from respect for the Parson's lady--the fact
that she suckled, and so, like a whale as it were, still reckoned among
the mammalia, nourished at her bosom another child than Cupid; but I
flattered myself, upon reflection, that a person who is neither a
theatre-princess nor a crown-princess would not be so strictly judged
as others, if she _had_ children or milk....
Before I say that Clotilda came, I will, inasmuch as she has eight
residences,--although many a magnate who owns sixteen noble residences
still seeks a seventeenth with walls in which he may sleep,--offer a
slight excuse for her going into the house of a common citizen; but she
needs after all no other justification than the fact that she was in
the country, where often the oldest blood can avail itself of no better
intercourse than that of citizens, unless perhaps it is that of cattle,
which even some not uncultured cavaliers really prefer....
It strikes five o'clock,--the matchless beauty enters,--the moon hangs
down towards her out of heaven like a white leaf newly budded,--the
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/36071