Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. II.
by Jean Paul · English · Gutenberg #36087 · 850,390 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Hesperus; or, Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A Biography. Vol. II.
Author: Jean Paul
Translator: Charles Timothy Brooks
Release date: May 12, 2011 [eBook #36087]
Most recently updated: November 15, 2021
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36087
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. II. ***
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. The caret ^ indicates superscript. The superscript text is
enclosed by { }.
3. [Greek: gelotophuê] represents the transliteration of the Greek
text.
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. II.
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.
CONTENTS OF VOL. II.
25. DOG-POST-DAY.
Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.--Julius.--Emanuel's Letter
Concerning God.
26. DOG-POST-DAY.
Tergemini.--Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.--The Ascending Peruke.--
Detection Of Knaveries.
27. DOG-POST-DAY.
Eye-Bandaging.--Picture behind the Bed-curtain.--Two Virtues in
Danger.
28. DOG-POST-DAY.
First Easter-Holiday.--Arrival at the Parsonage.--Club of the Three
Twins.--Carps.
Second Easter-Holiday.--Funeral-Discourse on Himself.--Two Opposite
Sorts of Fatality to the Wax-Statue.
Third Easter-Holiday.--F. Koch's Double Jews-harp.--The
Sleigh-Ride.--The Ball And....
Preface to Part III.
Seventh Intercalary Day.--End of the Register of Extra-Shoots.--
Unfeelingness of Readers.--Vol. III. (Preface to).
29. DOG-POST-DAY.
Conversion.--Billet-Doux of the Watch.--Crape Hat.
30. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letters.
31. DOG-POST-DAY.
Clotilda's Letter.--The Night-Express.--Rents and Gashes in the
Band of Friendship.
32. DOG-POST-DAY.
Physiognomies of Victor and Flamin.--Boiling-Point of Friendship.--
Splendid Hopes for us.
33. DOG-POST-DAY.
First Whitsuntide-Day.--Police-Regulations of Pleasure.--Church.--
The Evening.--The Blooming-Cavern.
34. DOG-POST-DAY.
Second Day of Whitsuntide.--Morning.--The Abbess.--The
Water-Mirror.--Dumb Action for Libel.--The Rain and the Open
Heaven.
35. DOG-POST-DAY.
Third Day of Whitsuntide, or Burgundy Chapter.--The Englishman.--
Meadow-Ball.--Blissful Night.--The Blooming Cave.
36. DOG-POST-DAY.
Fourth and Last Day of Whitsuntide.--Hyacinth.--The Voice of
Emanuel's Father.--Letter from the Angel.--Flute on the Grave.--
Second Nightingale,--Farewell.--Pistols.--Ghostly Apparition.
Fourth Preface, or, Extorted Anticritique against one or another
Review, with which I might possibly be displeased.
Ninth Intercalary Day.--Victor's Essay on the Relation of the Soul
to the Organs.
37. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Amoroso at Court.--Preliminary Recesses of Marriage.--Defence
of Courtly Back-bending.
38. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Sublime Hour before Midnight.--The Blissful After-Midnight.--The
Soft Evening.
39. DOG-POST-DAY.
Great Disclosure.--New Separations.
40. DOG-POST-DAY.
The Murderous Duel.--Apology for the Duel.--Prisons regarded as
Temples.--Job's-Wails of the Parson.--Legends of my Biographical
Past.--Potato-Planting.
41. DOG-POST-DAY.
Letter.--Two new Incisions of Fate.--His Lordship's Confession of
Faith.
42. DOG-POST-DAY.
Self-Sacrifice.--Farewell Addresses to the Earth.--Memento Mori.--
Walk.--Heart of Wax.
43. DOG-POST-DAY.
Matthieu's Four Whitsuntide Days and Jubilee.
44. DOG-POST-DAY.
Brotherly Love.--Friendly Love.--Maternal Love.--Love.
45. OR LAST CHAPTER.
Knef.--The Town of Hof.--Sorrel House.--Robbers.--Sleep.--Oath.--
Night Journey.--Bushes.--End.
APPENDIX.
Additional Notes to "Titan".
HESPERUS,
OR
45 DOG-POST-DAYS.
25. DOG-POST-DAY.
Feigned and Real Swoons of Clotilda.--Julius.--Emanuel's
Letter concerning God.
Good, beautiful sex! Sometimes, when I see a diamond heart hanging
above thy warm one, I ask: Is it for some such reason as _this_ thou
wearest a copied heart on thy bosom, in order to indicate to Love,
Fate, and Slander a common mark for their different arrows, as the poor
soldier who is shot kneeling points out to the balls of his comrades,
by a heart cut out of paper, the place of the beating one?
--When this chapter is ended, the reader will no longer ask me, why I
begin it thus....
Once Victor came back from a day's walk, when Marie ran breathless to
meet him with a letter from Matthieu. It contained the question whether
he would not accompany him and his sister to-day to Kussewitz via St.
Luna. Marie's running had arisen merely from a rich messenger's-fee and
gratuity on the part of Mat, who often treated poor people at once with
generosity and with persiflage, just as he thought his sister at once
amiable and absurd. To people who knew him, he therefore appeared comic
when he must have been serious. But Victor said "No" to the request for
his company; which was very well, for in fact the two had already
started. I cannot determine whether it was after two or after three
days that they came back, the sister with the coldest face towards him
and the brother with the warmest. This double temperature could not be
wholly explained, but only about half, on the ground of discoveries
which the couple might have made at Tostato's and Count O.'s concerning
his disguise and his shop-drama. Heretofore Joachime's anger had always
been a consequence of his: now it was the reverse; but this vexed him
exceedingly.
Some days after he was standing with the Princess and Joachime in a
window of the Ministerial _Louvre_. The conversation was lively enough;
the Princess counted over the shops in the market, Joachime was
following with her eye the swift zigzag of a swallow, Victor was
standing secretly on one leg (the other he set, only apparently and
without resting on it, on the floor), to try how long he could hold
out. All at once the Princess said, "Holy Mary! how can one carry round
a poor child shut up so in a box!" They all peered out into the street.
Victor took the liberty to remark that the poor child was "made of
wax." A woman was carrying a little glass case hanging before her,
wherein there slept a swaddled waxen angel; she begged, like the rest,
as if for this child, and the little one supported her better than if
it had been alive. The Princess called up the new apparition. The woman
came in trembling with her mummy-chest, and drew back the little
curtain. The Princess bent an artistically enchanted eye on the sweet
slumbering form, which (like its wax material) seemed to have been born
of flowers and reared in springtimes. All beauty penetrated deeply into
her heart; hence she loved Clotilda so exceedingly and many Germans so
little. Joachime was fond of only _one_ child and _one_ beauty,--and
each was _herself_. Victor said, "This waxen mimic and copy of life had
always made him sad, and that he could not even see his own wax
counterfeit in St. Luna without shuddering."
"Doesn't it stand in a frock-coat at the window of the parsonage?"
asked Joachime, becoming much more pleasant.
"Isn't it true," he asked in return, "that you thought, some days ago,
it was I myself?" He guessed from her look her former error, which
perhaps had contributed to excite her against him.
The father confessor of the Princess now came up and added,--after his
custom of being complimentary,--that, in order to save him the trouble
of a sitting, he would draw him the next time merely from his wax
image. The Pater was well known to be a good draughtsman.
I let circumstances which are less important lie unrelated, and gayly
proceed.
It was as early as March, when the higher classes, on account of their
sedentary winter sleep, are more full-blooded than cold-blooded,--any
one who does not understand the matter takes for granted that
their overflow of blood proceeds more from their sucking that of
others,--when sicknesses leave their visiting-cards in the form of
recipes with the whole court,--when the eyes of the Princess, the
_embonpoint_ of the princely ether, and the gouty hands of the court
apothecary continued the storms of winter; it was even then; I say,
that Clotilda also experienced every day more intensely the influence
of the winter, and of her double withdrawal from relaxations and of her
intercourse with her fancies.... If I must speak sincerely, I attribute
little to her seclusion, but all to the necessity which propriety
imposes on her of intercourse with the noble Mat, with the Schleuneses
and with other cold-blooded Amphibia;[1] an innocent heart must, in
moral frosty weather, like alabaster garden statues in the physical,
when the former and the latter have soft, absorbing veins, get cracks,
and break.
Thus matters stood with her on a weighty day, when he found with her
little Julia. This beloved name she affixed to the child of the Senior,
Flamin's landlord, in order to keep alive her sad yearning after her
dead Giulia by a similarity of sound, by the relic of an echo. "This
funereal tone," said Victor to himself, "is indeed to her the welcome
distant roll of the hearse which shall come to take her to the friend
of her youth; and her expectation of a like fate is truly the most
mournful evidence of a like grief." If anything further was needed to
purify his friendship from all love, it was this swift falling-off of
the leaves of so fair a passion-flower;--towards the suffering, one is
ashamed of the least selfishness. During the conversation, from which
the jealous Julia was excluded by not understanding it, the child in a
pet twitched at the servants' bell; for girls make claims to attention
eight years earlier than boys. Clotilda forbade this ringing by a too
late interdict; the little one, delighted that she had set in motion
the chambermaid, who came hastening up, tried again to twitch at the
cord. Clotilda said in French to the Doctor, "One must not give her any
command too monarchically; now she will not rest till I have tried my
extremest method." "Julia!" said she once more, her large eye
overflowing with love; but in vain. "Well, now I am going to die!" said
she, already dying away, and leaned her fair head, inhabited by a
departing genius, back against the chair, and closed her pure eyes,
which deserved to open again only in a heaven.--While Victor stood in
silent emotion before the still tranced one, and thought to himself:
"If now she should never wake again, and thou shouldst vainly snatch
her stiff hand, and her last word on this dreary earth should have
been, 'Now I am going to die,'--O God! would there be any other remedy
for the inconsolableness of her friend than a sword and the last wound?
And I should clasp with a cold hand her hand, and say, I go with thee!"
As he thought thus, and as the little one, weeping, lifted the sinking
right hand, her countenance really grew paler, and the left hand glided
down from her lap;--here was that sword's sharp edge drawn across his
heart;--but soon she opened her wandering eyes again, coming out of the
drowsiness of the death-sleep to herself and to a sense of shame. She
excused the transient swoon with the remark, "I have done as that
player[2] did with the urn of his child: I imagined myself in the place
of my Giulia in her last moments, but a little too successfully."
He was just on the point of drawing up medical pastoral letters against
this consuming enthusiasm,--so much does an unhappy love translate
every female heart from the _major_ tone into the _minor_, even that of
a Clotilda, whose forehead had a manly elevation, and whose chin
expressed almost more courage than beauty,--when quite other pastoral
letters arrived. The bearer of them was Victor's _happier_ friend
Agatha. Send back with thy laugh, thou untroubled one, life into two
hearts on which death has flung his flying cloud-shadows! She fell
confidingly into two friendly arms; but towards her doctor brother, who
so long, instead of his whole person, had let only his hand, i. e. his
handwriting, go to St. Luna, she was still shy. But this fault of his,
when he had avoided a house one quarter of a year _for_ reasons, of
absenting himself from it another quarter of a year _without_
reason,--this fault I cannot wholly condemn, because I--have it myself.
She could not satisfy her eyes with looking at him; her blooming
country face showed him, instead of his present passion-week of grief,
a red chalk drawing of his and her vanished days of joy in the
parsonage-garden. He solemnly promised her to be her Easter guest with
her brother, and, instead of heads and windows, to break nothing but
eggs; he rested not till he was the same old Sebastian and she the same
old Agatha again. As she delivered to the two court-people, smiling
only from love, the long duodecimo history of the village and her
father, not at all as a compiler or epitomist, or in a mutilated
edition, but in volumes as long as her heel-ligaments; then did
Clotilda and Victor feel how soothing to them was this descent from the
glittering, sharp court-glaciers into the soft vales of the middling
stations of life, and they both yearned to exchange polished hearts for
warm ones. Among men and Borsdorf apples the best are not the smooth
ones, but the rough ones that have some warts. This longing for sincere
souls, too, it may well have been which wrung from Clotilda the
assertion, that there were mismatches only between souls, not between
ranks. Hence came her growing love for this Agatha, who bloomed
outside of the forcing-box of a genealogical tree only in the common
pasture,--a love which the reader and I in the first volume, from
sharp-sightedness, explained as the hiding-cloak of another love toward
Flamin, and which ought to wean us both from bringing a reproach upon a
heroine, who in the sequel continually refutes it.
The superscription of the thick letter-packet which Agatha brought was
in the handwriting of Emanuel, whom Clotilda got to superscribe
everything to the parson's wife, in order to save her stepmother the
trouble of--closing her letters. Madame Le Baut had learned this
_insight_ into documents, this Socratic art of midwifery, in the
ministry, which possesses the right of search into the letters of all
subjects, because it can hold them either as infected or arrested, if
it please. While the step-daughter, in the adjoining chamber, broke
open the outer packet, because from its thickness she prophesied an
enclosed communication for the Doctor: the latter breathed, by
chance--or design, for he had, this long time, established everywhere
his deciphering offices of women, in the narrowest corner, in every
fold of a dress, in the marks of books which had been read,--he
breathed, I said, accidentally on the window-panes, on which one can
then at once read what a warm finger has written thereon. There came
out, after the involuntary breathing, nothing but French initial S's,
sketched with the finger-nail. "S!" thought he, "that is singular; that
is the beginning of my own name."
His conjectures were interrupted by Clotilda's returning with a face
blissfully cleared of all its clouds, and, handing to the thoughtful
Medicus a great letter from Emanuel. Upon the heels of this second
pleasure followed, in the place of the third, a piece of news; she now
disclosed to him, "that Emanuel had at last enabled her to be an
obedient, though not believing patient." She had, namely, hitherto
suppressed the purpose of her obedience and her spring cure, until
her friend in Maienthal had secured her for some spring months a
sick-chamber at the Abbess's,--the very one Giulia had had,--that the
fanning of spring might there lift her drooping pinions, the incense of
flowers heal her torn heart, and the great friend enable _his_ great
friend to stand upright.
Victor slipped away hastily, not only from hunger and thirst after what
he held in his hand, but because a new flood of thought broke through
his old trains of ideas. "Bastian!" said Bastian to himself on the way,
"I have often held thee to be stupid, but so stupid as that--no, never.
It is sinful that a man, a court-medicus, a thinker, should ruminate
for months, often half-evenings together, and yet not bring the matter
out, till he hears it, now for the first time. Verily, even the 'S' on
the window fits!" The reader and I will take out of his hands the thing
with which he is stoning himself before our faces; for he throws at
both of us as well, because we failed to guess at anything just as much
as he did. In short, the unknown happy one who makes the fair Clotilda
unhappy, and for whom she sighs out her dumb, shy soul, and who for
most of her charms has no eye at all, is the blind--Julius in
Maienthal. Hence her desire to go thither.
I should like to fill a folio volume with the proofs of this: Victor
counted them off on his five fingers. On his thumb he said, "For
Julius's sake she seeks little Julia; so, too, is it with Giulia." At
the forefinger he said, "The French initial _I_ looks like an _S_
without the cross-stroke." At the middle finger, "Minerva has furnished
him, indeed, not merely the flute, but also Minerva's fair face, and in
this blind Cupid's-face Clotilda could lose herself without blushing;
even from love for his friend Emanuel, she might have loved him." At
the ring-finger, "Hence her justification of mis-matches, since his
citizenly ring-finger is to be joined to her noble one." At the little
finger, "By Heaven! all this proves not the least."
For now, for the first time, all the proofs came upon him in a flood:
in the first volume of this book there came often an unknown angel to
Julius and said: "Be good, I will hover round thee, I will guard thy
veiled soul,--I go back into heaven."--
Secondly, this angel once gave Julius a paper, and said, "Conceal it,
and after a year, when the birches grow green in the temple, let
Clotilda read it to thee; I take my flight, and thou wilt not hear me
sooner than a year hence."----
All this fitted Clotilda as if it were moulded on her: she could never
unfold to the blind one her dying heart,--she was going just now to
Maienthal (how long is it still to Whitsuntide?) to read to him herself
the leaf which she had handed to him in the character and mask of an
angel,--finally, she was going off precisely then to St. Luna;----in
short, everything hits to a hair.
If the Biographer might venture to put in a word, it would be this: The
Mining-Superintendent, the Biographer, for his part, believes it all
with great pleasure; but as to Clotilda, who hitherto has come forth
whitely radiant from every pitchy cloud, and on whom, as on the sun,
one has so often confounded _clouds_ with _sun-spots_, he cannot blame
her, until she herself sets the example. Victor, as I myself did in the
first edition, has even forgotten many proofs of Clotilda's love for
Julius: e. g. her warm interest in his blindness, and her desire of his
recovery (in her letter to Emanuel), Flamin's obsolete jealousy in
Maienthal, even the rapture with which, in the playhouse, she calls the
vale an Eden, and rejects the Lethe.
Victor tore open the packet, and two leaves fell out of a large sheet.
One of the notes and the large sheet were from Emanuel, the other from
his Lordship. He studied the last, written in double cipher, first; it
was as follows:--
"I come in autumn, when the _apples_ ripen,--the Trinity [his Lordship
means the Prince's three sons] is found; but the fourth Person [the
fourth, merry son] is wanting.--Flee from the Palace of the Empress of
all the Russias [with this cipher the two had concerted to designate
the Minister Schleunes], but the grand duchess [Joachime] avoid still
more: she wants no heart, but a princely hat.--In Rome [he means
Agnola] beware of the crucifix, out of which a stiletto springs! Think
of the _Island_, ere thou makest a misstep."
Victor was astonished at first at the accidental appropriateness of
these prohibitions; but when he bethought himself that he would have
given them to him even on the Island, if they had not referred to his
more recent circumstances, then he was still more astonished at the
channels through which the espionage-despatches of his present
relations might have reached his father,--(as if my correspondent and
spy might not have been the father's also!)--and most of all at the
warning against Joachime. "Oh! if she were false to me!" he said,
sighing, and would not complete the dark picture nor the sigh.----But
he drove both away by the little leaf from Emanuel, which read thus:--
"My Son:--
"The dawn of the new year shone on my face across the snow, as I placed
before me the paper [Emanuel's second immediately following letter],
upon which I sought to impress for the last time my soul with all its
images reaching out beyond this globe. But the flames of my soul dart
even to the body, and singe the frail thread of life; I was obliged
often to turn away my too easily bleeding breast from the paper and
from my rapture.
"I have, my son, written to thee with my blood.--Julius has now the
thought of God.--The spring glows under the snow, and will soon lift
itself up out of the green, and bloom even to the clouds.--My daughter
[Clotilda] takes spring by the hand and comes to me,--let her take my
son with the other hand, and lay him on my breast, wherein is a failing
breath and an everlasting heart.... O how melodiously sound around me
the evening bells of life!--Ay, when thou and thy Clotilda and our
Julius, when we all, we who love each other, stand together, when I
hear your voices, then shall I look to Heaven and say, The evening
bells of life sound around me too mournfully; I shall for ecstasy die
still earlier than the eve of the longest day, and ere my sainted
father has appeared to me.
"EMANUEL."
* * * * *
Dear Emanuel, that, alas! thou wilt do! The heaven of joy presses
downward to thy lips, and amidst breezes, amidst tones, amidst kisses,
it drinks up thy flickering breath; for the earthly body which will
only _graze_, not _pluck_, digests only _lowly_ joys, and chills under
the beam of a higher sun!--
With emotion I draw aside from Victor's distracted, irrecognizable face
the veil which covers his sorrows. Let us look upon thee, disconsolate
man, who art going to meet a spring where thy heart is to lose
everything: Emanuel by death, Clotilda by love, Flamin by jealousy,
even Joachime by suspicion! Let us look upon thee, impoverished one; I
know why thy eye is still dry, and why thou sayst brokenly and with a
shake of the head, "No, my dear Emanuel, I shall not come, for indeed I
cannot."--What ate most deeply into thy heart was, that thy true
Emanuel should be the very one who still believed thou wert loved by
his friend.--An undeveloped sorrow is without tears or signs; but when
man through fancy draws out of his own bosom a heart full of confluent
wounds, and counts the gashes, and then forgets that it is his own,
then does he weep sympathetically at that which beats so painfully in
his hands, and then he bethinks himself and weeps still more. Victor
would fain release as it were by warming his stiff soul from frozen
tears, and went to the balcony window and pictured to himself, while
the suppressed evening-glow of March burned out of the clouds over the
hills of Maienthal, Clotilda's marriage to Julius.--O, in order to make
himself right sad, he drew a spring day over the vale, the genius
of love flung open, above the nuptial altar, the blue heaven, and bore
the sun as bridal torch without cloud-smoke through the pure
immensity.--There walked, on that day, Emanuel transfigured, Julius
blind, but blissful, Clotilda blushing and long since well again, and
every one was happy. Only one unhappy one he saw there standing among
the flowers, namely, himself; he saw there, how this afflicted one,
chary of words for sorrow, joyous from virtue, more familiar and
confidential with the bride from coldness, went round among the rest,
so unknown, properly so superfluous; how the guiltless pair, with every
sign of love, reckoned up before him all that he had lost, or indeed
concealed those signs from forbearance, because they guessed his
grief;--this thought darted at him like a blaze;--and how at last, as
the heavy-laden past brought all his slain hopes and his withered
wishes before him, he turned round, when the beloved pair went from him
to the altar and to the eternal covenant, how he turned round
inconsolably toward the still, empty fields, to weep infinitely, and
how he then remained so alone and dark in the fair region, and said to
himself: "In thee, no human being takes an interest to-day,--none
presses thy hand, and says, 'Victor, why weepest thou so?'--Oh! this
heart is as full of unspeakable love as any other, but it fades unloved
and unknown, and its dying and its weeping disturb no one.
Nevertheless, nevertheless, O Julius! O Clotilda! I wish you eternal
happiness, and only contented days." ... Then he could do no more; he
pressed his eyes to his hands and to the window-frame, and gave free
play to them, and thought of nothing more; the sorrow, which, like a
rattlesnake, had watched with distended jaws him and his charmed and
writhing approaches, now seized and swallowed him and crushed him to
pieces....
Soft hearts, ye torment yourselves as much on this flinty earth as hard
ones do _others_,--the spark which only makes a burn, ye swing round
till it becomes a wheel of fire, and under the blossoms a sharp leaf
becomes to you a thorn!... But why, I say to myself, dost thou show
that of thy friend and open afresh remote similar wounds in men who
have been healed?--O, answer for me, ye who resemble him, could you do
without a single tear? And since the woes of fantasy are to be reckoned
among the joys of fantasy,--a moist eye and a heavily drawn breath are
the least with which we buy a fair hour....
--Pride--the best counterpoise to effeminate tears--wiped away my
hero's, and said to him: "Thou art worth as much as they who are more
fortunate; and if unhappy love has hitherto made thee bad, how good
might not a happy love make thee!" There was stillness in and around
him; night stood in heaven; he read Emanuel's letter.
"My Horion!
"Within a few hours Time has reversed its hour-glass, and now the sands
of a new year are trickling down.--Uranus strikes for our little earth
the centuries, the sun strikes the years, the moon the months; and on
this concert clock, constructed out of worlds, human beings come forth
as images, that utter cries and tones of joy, when it strikes.
"I too come out gladly under the fair new-year's dawn, which gleams
through all the clouds, and flames up the high hemisphere of heaven. In
a year I shall look into the sin from another world: O how my heart,
for this last time, under the earthly cloud, overflows with love toward
the Father of this fair earth, toward his children and my brothers and
sisters, toward this flowery cradle, wherein we only once awake, and
amidst its rocking in the sun only once fall asleep!
"I shall never live to see another summer-day, therefore will I
describe the fairest one, on which, with thy Julius[3] I for the first
time tremblingly penetrated through luminous clouds, and through
harmonies, and fell down with him before a thundering throne, and said
to him, 'Overhead, in the immeasurable cloud which they call eternity,
He dwells, who has made us and loves us.' This day will I to-day repeat
in my soul; and never, too, may it be extinguished in my Julius or my
Horion!
"I have often said to my Julius, 'I have not yet given thee the
greatest thought of man, which bows down his soul and yet erects it
again forever; but I will name it to thee on the day when thy spirit
and mine are the purest, or when I die.' Hence he often begged me, when
_his angel_ had been with him, or when the flute and the awe-inspiring
night or a tempest had exalted him, 'Name to me, Emanuel, the greatest
thought of man!'
"It was a sweet July evening, when my beloved one lay on my bosom,
weeping, under the birch-tree on the mountain, and said: 'Tell me why I
weep so very much this evening? Dost thou, then, never do it, Emanuel?
But there fall also warm drops from the clouds on my cheeks.' I
answered: 'There are little warm clouds that float round in heaven, and
shake out a few dew-drops; but does not the angel walk up and down in
thy soul? For thou stretchest out thy hand to touch him.' Julius said:
'Yes, he stands before my thoughts; but it was only thou that I wanted
to touch: for the angel indeed is gone from the earth, and I long right
earnestly for his voice. Dreamy shapes undulate into each other within
me, but they have no such bright colors as in sleep,--gracious, smiling
faces look upon me, and come up to me with outspread, shadowy arms, and
beckon to my soul, and melt away, ere I can press them to my heart.[4]
My Emanuel, is not thy face, then, one among my shadowy forms?' Here he
pressed his wet face glowingly to mine, which seemed to hover before
him in shadowy outline; a cloud sprinkled the consecrating water of
heaven upon our embrace, and I said: 'We are softened so to-day only by
that which encircles us, and which I now see.'--He answered: 'O, tell
me what thou seest, and leave not off till the sun is gone down.'
"My heart swam in love and trembled in rapture at my words: 'Beloved,
the earth is to-day so beautiful! that indeed makes man more tender:
heaven rests with a caress and kiss of love on the earth, as a father
on a mother and her children,--the flowers and beating hearts fall into
the embrace and nestle around the mother. The twig gently rocks its
singer up and down, the flower cradles its bee, the leaf its fly and
its drop of honey: in the open flower-cups hang the warm tears, into
which the clouds dissolve themselves, as if in eyes, and my flower-beds
bear the rainbow, which is built up on them, without sinking. The woods
lie nursing themselves at the breast of heaven, and having drunken
deeply of the clouds, all summits stand fixed in silent bliss. A
zephyr, not stronger than a warm sigh of love, breathes along by our
cheeks among the steaming corn-blossoms, and lifts clouds of seed-dust,
and one little breeze after another plays its antics with the flying
harvests of the lands; but it lays them at our feet when it has done
playing. O beloved, when all is love, all harmony, all loves and is
loved, all meadows _one_ intoxicating blossom-chalice, then indeed in
man also does the lofty spirit stretch out its arms, and long to
embrace with them a spirit, and then, when it folds its arms only
around shadows, then it grows very sad for infinite, inexpressible
longing after love.'
"'Emanuel, I am sad too,' said my Julius.
"'Lo, the sun goes down, the earth veils itself: let me still see all
and tell it to thee. Now a white dove flies dazzling, like a great
snow-flake, across the deep blue.... Now she sails round the gold-spark
of the lightning-rod, as if around a glistening star hung out in the
day-sky. O, how she floats and floats, and sinks and vanishes in the
tall flowers of the churchyard!... Julius, didst thou feel nothing,
while I spoke? Ah, the white dove was perhaps thy angel, and therefore
thy heart melted when he was so near thee to-day. The dove does not fly
up, but clouds of dew, with a silver border, like fragments torn from
summer-nights, glide across the church-yard, and overspread the
blooming graves with colored shadows.... Now, one such shadow falling
from heaven swims towards us and bathes our mountain. Melt, melt,
fleeting night, emblem of life, and hide not long from me the sinking
sun!... Our little cloud moves on into the flames of the sun.... O thou
gracious sun, looking back so softly from behind the shore of earth,
thou maternal eye of the world, truly thou sheddest thy evening light
from thee as warmly and slowly as trickling blood, and palest as thou
sinkest, but the earth, hung up and laid upon thee in fruit-festoons
and flower-chains, reddens as if new-created, and with swelling
energy.... Hark! Julius, now the gardens resound,--the air hums,--the
birds with their calls wheel across each other's tracks,--the
storm-wind lifts its mighty wing, and flaps against the woods; hark!
they give the sign that our good sun is departed.
"'O Julius, Julius!' said I, and embraced his breast, 'the earth is
great; but the heart which rests upon it is still greater than the
earth, and greater than the sun.... For it alone thinks the _greatest
thought_!'
"Suddenly there came forth a coolness from the deathbed of the sun, as
from a grave. The high sea of the air undulated, and a broad stream, in
whose bed woods lay prostrate, came roaring back through the heaven
along the path by which the sun had departed. The altars of Nature, the
mountains, were veiled in black as at a great mourning. Man was
fastened down to the earth by the mist-cloud and separated from heaven.
Transparent lightnings licked at the foot of the cloud, and the thunder
smote three times at the black arch. But the storm upreared itself and
rent it asunder; it drove the flying ruins of the shattered prison
through the blue, and flung the dismembered masses of vapor down below
the sky,--and for a long time it still continued to roar alone over the
open earth, through the bright and cleansed plain.... But above it,
behind the curtain which it had torn aside, glistened the all-holiest,
the starry night.--
"Like a sun, the greatest thought of man rose in heaven,--my soul was
borne down when I looked toward heaven, it was lifted up when I looked
upon the earth.--
"For the Infinite has sowed his name in the heavens in burning stars,
but on the earth He has sowed his name in tender flowers.
"'O Julius,' said I, 'hast thou been good to-day?' He answered: 'I have
done nothing but weep.'
"'Julius, kneel down and put away every evil thought,--hear my voice
quiver, feel my hand tremble;--I kneel beside thee.
"'We kneel here on this little earth before immensity, before the
immeasurable world floating over us, before the radiant circumference
of space. Raise thy spirit and conceive what I see. Thou hearest the
storm-wind which drives the clouds around the earth,--but thou hearest
not the storm-wind which drives the earth around the sun, nor yet the
greatest, which blows beyond the suns and carries them around a veiled
All which lies with sun-flames in the abyss.--Step from the earth into
the void ether, here float and see it dwindle to a flying mountain, and
with six other particles of sun-dust play around the sun,--moving
_mountains_, after which _hills_[5] flutter, whirl along before thee,
and go up and down before the sunshine,--then gaze about thee in the
round, flashing, high vault, built up of crystallized suns, through
whose chinks looks the immeasurable night in which hangs the sparkling
arch.--Thou fliest for thousands of years, but thou wilt never set foot
on the last sun, nor step out into the great night.--Thou shuttest
thine eyes and throwest thyself with a thought over the abyss and over
the visible universe, and when thou openest them again, lo! there sweep
around thee, as thoughts do around souls, new streams, surging up and
down, composed of light waves of suns, of dark drops of earths, and new
successions of suns stand over against each other in the east and in
the west,--and the fire-wheel of a new Milky-Way revolves in the stream
of time.--Ay, let an infinite hand remove me out of the whole heaven;
thou lookest back and fixest thine eye on the paling, shrivelling sea
of suns; at last the remote creation hovers now as nothing more than a
pale, still cloudlet in the depths of night; thou imaginest thyself
alone and lookest round thee and----just as many suns and milky-ways
flame up and down, and the pale cloudlet hangs still paler between
them, and out around the whole dazzling abyss move nothing but pale,
still cloudlets.----
"'O Julius! O Julius! amidst the onward moving fire-mountains, amidst
the milky-ways hurled from one abyss to another, there flutters a
particle of blossom-dust made of six thousands of years and the human
race,--Julius, who beholds and who cares for the fluttering particle of
dust which consists of all our hearts?--
"'A star was just now cast down. Fall willingly, O star caught in the
atmosphere of the earth; the stars above the earth also, as well as
thyself, fall headlong into their distant graves,--the sea of worlds
without shore or bottom wells up here, dries up there; the great moth,
the earth, flies round the sunlight and sinks into the light and is
consumed;--O Julius, who sees and sustains the fluttering particle of
dust on the moth, in the midst of the fermenting, blooming, dissolving
chaos? O Julius, if every moment witnesses the dissolution of a man and
a world,--if time passes over the comets and treads them out like
sparks, and grinds to powder the carbonized suns,--if the milky-ways
dart only like returning flashes of lightning out of the great
gloom,--if one procession of worlds after another is drawn down into
the abyss,--if the eternal grave is never full and the eternal starry
firmament is never empty: O my beloved, who then sees and sustains us
little mortals made of dust?--Thou, all-gracious One, sustainest us,
thou Infinite One, thou, O God, thou formest us, thou seest us, thou
lovest us.--O Julius! raise thy spirit and grasp the greatest thought
of man! There where Eternity is, there where Immensity is, and where
night begins, there an Infinite Spirit spreads out its arms and folds
them around the great falling universe of worlds and bears it and warms
it. I and thou and all men, and all angels and all worms, rest on His
bosom, and the roaring, beating sea of worlds and suns is an only child
in his arms. He sees away through the ocean, wherein coral-trees full
of earths sway to and fro, and sees the little worm that cleaves to the
smallest coral, which is I, and He gives the worm the nearest drop,
and a blissful heart, and a future, and an eye to look up even to
Himself--yea, O God, even up to thee, even to thy heart.'--
"Inexpressibly moved, Julius said, weeping: 'Thou seest, then, O Spirit
of Love, poor blind me also!--O, come into my soul, when it is alone,
and it rains warm and still on my cheeks, and I weep at it and feel an
inexpressible love: ah, thou good, great Spirit, it is surely Thou whom
I have hitherto meant and loved! Emanuel, tell me yet more, tell me his
thoughts and his beginning.'
"'God is eternity, God is truth, God is holiness,--He has nothing, He
is all, the _whole heart_ conceives Him, but no _thought_; and _we are
only His thought, when He is ours_.[6]----All that is infinite and
incomprehensible in man is his reflection; but beyond this let not thy
awestricken thought go. Creation hangs as a veil, woven out of suns and
spirits, over the infinite, and the eternities pass by before the veil,
and draw it not away from the splendor which it hides.'
"Silently we went hand in hand down the mountain, we perceived not the
storm-wind for the voice of our thoughts, and when we entered our
cottage, Julius said: 'I shall always think the greatest thought of
man, amidst the music of my flute, amidst the roar of the storm, and
amidst the falling of the warm rain, and when I weep and when I embrace
thee, and when I am dying!'--And thou, my beloved Horion, do so too.
"Emanuel."
* * * * *
The petty woe of earth, the petty thoughts of earth, had now flown
away from Horion's soul, and, after a devout look into the open
starry heaven, he went, led by the hand of sleep, into the realm of
dreams.--Let us imitate him, and come upon nothing further to-day.[7]
26. DOG-POST-DAY.
Tergemini.--Zeusel and his Twin-Brother.--The Ascending
Peruke.--Detection of Knaveries.
If I were in Covent Garden, and had wept over the tragedy, I would
still stay to the epilogue, although I should have to laugh over it.
Only, however, from tragedy does a cross-lane lead over to comedy, but
not from the epic; in short, man can laugh after _tender_, but not
after _exalting_ emotion. I cannot, therefore, allow a fast reader,
immediately after the twenty-fifth chapter, to begin this one. In fact,
when one sees how they read a book,--namely, even five times as
miserably, thoughtlessly, fragmentarily as it is written--(I speak
merely of attention; knowledge is, of course, out of the question
during the reading, and the author's pen cannot raise the spirits of
the reader, any more than the piston can the water, beyond a certain
level); how, at the best passages, they turn over two leaves at
once,--now grapple two unlike chapters, and now spend four weeks in
reading through a chapter which ought to have been finished in one
sitting; how such classical readers often just before a visit, or
during the twisting on or in fact the heating of the hair-roller, or
during the combing out of the hair (which absolutely powders the
sublimest chapter) how they take that moment to read one of this last
kind, or an affecting one while scolding at the whole room;--when one
considers that such readers comprise most of those in Scheerau and
Flachsenfingen, those female readers only excepted who know how to hit
the way into all books and men, and to whom it is all one what they
read or marry,--and when one actually learns by sad observation, that,
if not even the reading-penny which they have to pay for the book has
power enough to persuade them into the enjoyment of affecting and
sublime pages, this long period will still less constrain them to
it,--one must congratulate the German public, which is still nourished
by works in which, as in turkey-fowls, the best part is the _white_.
As the _Vienna Magazine_ is also such a turkey-cock, and I had a dream
last week that my dog wrote for it, this will be a fitting place to
revoke my error. The dream does not strike me as strange,--(since my
bestial correspondent is likewise named _Hofmann_,[8])--that this same
beast was the Professor swaddled and chrysalized into the body of a
dog. I certainly never should have hit upon the idea that a Professor
of "practical eloquence" would in the form of a dog give the world
printed things, had not once in Paris a fellow got himself sewed up
with _contraband_ goods in a poodle-skin, in order, thus disguised, to
make his way through the gate. I might have known well enough, from the
inequality of size between the two creatures, what was in the wind;[9]
but I went so far in my crazy dream as actually to pinch and feel of
the dog to probe him, when the Professor, whom I sought behind this
mask, himself in person entered the door. He at once removed all
confusion; I imposed on myself, however, as it were to give him
satisfaction, the penalty of making the whole thing known, and of
being, into the bargain, his fellow-laborer, i. e. his monthly pigeon,
which hatches every month.... Many are actually said, therefore, to
have looked in the Vienna Magazine (for in the first edition I forgot
to state that I had only dreamed) for articles by me: is it possible, I
ask?----
We left our Victor in suspense under a cloud of dark conjectures: now
we meet him again in the presence of an incident that confirms them
all.
Whoso knows, though only by hearsay, the Apothecary Zeusel, around whom
the whole occurrence revolves, knows that he is a hare's-foot.[10] The
said foot--a hare and the Devil, though the whole skin is stripped off,
still retain the foot--was delighted when a gentleman of the court got
a dinner out of him and--a laugh upon him; he could not keep within the
bounds of modesty, when a distinguished person made a fool of him. The
noble Mat, therefore, often took away his modesty. From him he could,
like the Flachsenfingeners, bear everything, from Victor nothing. I can
explain it only by the fact, that Victor's satires were general and
apt, and improving; but men sooner forgive lampoons than satire,
slander than admonition, jests upon orthodox and aristocrats than
reasonings about them.[11] Notwithstanding, though Zeusel was again
this time the victim of practical jokes[12] and trouncings at
Matthieu's hands, he could not fairly forgive him for it, but got the
gout on the subject.
It was, namely, just before the first of April--many have three hundred
and sixty-five first of April's every year--when the page made the
apothecary an April fool.[13] In St. Luna three bathing and drinking
visitors had already arrived, three wild young Englishmen, who
announced themselves as _tergemini_, but were probably only brothers
born in succession, not at once. Only their souls seemed three twins of
the spirit of freedom and fraternity; they were so republican, that
they did not even appear at court, and, like every Englishman,
accounted us all, me and the reader and the Professor of Eloquence, as
Christian slaves, and the enfranchised as turnkeys' assistants. The
magic influence of a congenial heart soon drew the Regency-Councillor
Flamin into their Cartesian vortex; they had hardly been there eight
days, when they had held with him a club at the Chaplain's. He promised
them for Easter a sight of their countryman Sebastian; and the noble
Matthieu he had at the very beginning brought with him. Mat's
liberty-tree was merely a satirical thorn-bush; his satires supplied
the place of principles. Only a single one of the three twins,
whom the very evil one with horns and buck's feet,--namely, the
Satyr[14]--rode, could properly like the biting _Evangelist_ and false
_Apostle_ of liberty; for in a clear, bright head every word of wit and
lightning from another, assumes a greater lustre, as glowworms gleam
brighter in dephlogisticated gas.
When Matthieu saw the parsonage coachman and the hired lackey of the
Englishmen, the bellows-blower Zeusel,--the twin-brother of the
Apothecary,--he devised something which I will presently relate. The
Apothecary was notoriously obliged to be ashamed of his veritable
brother, because he was a mere bellows-blower, and raised no other wind
than musical,--and because, furthermore, he had bad inner ears, and, as
to outer ones, none at all. Nevertheless, as respects the latter he had
protected himself with a judicial certificate which stated, to his
credit, that he had lost his acoustic volutes in an honorable way by a
surgeon who undertook to help his difficulty of hearing. But his head
was his ear. If he held a staff in contact with the speaker or his
seat, or if one preached directly over his head, he heard very well.
Haller relates similar examples, e. g. of a deaf person who always
thrust a long stick against the pulpit as conductor and bridge of
devotion. His deafness, which called him rather to the post of a
highest state servant than to that of a hired servant, was the very
thing which secured him the victory over the competitors, because Cato
the elder--so the jolly Englishman styled himself--was pleased with the
fellow's droll posture.
The noble Matthieu, whose heart had full as dark a hue as his hair and
eyes, hung the three twins as bait-worms on his line, to draw the
Apothecary between his arm and Flamin's to St. Luna. Zeusel went
gladly, never dreaming of the misfortune that awaited him, namely, his
brother, with whom he had years ago agreed, for a certain
consideration, that they would absolutely not know each other in
company. Besides, the bellows-blower, in his simplicity, could not at
all comprehend how such a distinguished man as Zeusel could be his
brother, and adored him in silence afar off; only one thing he could
not endure, despite his stupid patience, namely, that the Apothecary
should pretend to be the first-born. "Am not I," said he, "a quarter of
an ell longer, and a quarter of an hour older than he?" He swore it was
forbidden in the Bible to sell one's birthright,--and then, like all in
whom a stupid patience gives out, he was no longer controllable.
The Apothecary, after his first terror at the presence of his brother,
saw with pleasure that no one knew his fraternity; he proposed,
therefore, to imitate the rest, and demanded of his servant-brother, as
coldly as any one, something to drink. The bellows-blower, as he bowed
down his head that his brother _overhead_ might give his commands,
surveyed with astonishment and real reverence the silver trellised-gates
and shackles on the feet of his kinsman, and his hip-pendant of steel
garlands of watches. Zeusel would gladly--if the page could have
been trusted--have made believe to the Britons that he was deceived,
and took the bending-down of the deaf man for overdone cringing before
courtiers; he would then have been able to add, that _Opisthotonos_
towards inferiors is a cramp of the same kind with _Emprosthotonos_[15]
towards superiors;--but, as was said, the Devil may trust court pages!
Meanwhile the Britons hardly noticed the fool with his money-purse on
his posterior, and merely wondered what he wanted there. Their
republican flames blazed up together with Flamin's, and in fact in such
a manner that the page would have taken them for Frenchmen and for
travelling agents and circular-messengers of the French Propaganda, had
he not been of the opinion that only a fool could have anything
to do with or believe in that. Matthieu had acuteness, but no
principles,--truths, but no love of truth,--sharpness of perception
without feeling,--wit without purpose. What he was after to-day was, by
letting fly grazing shot, to fix the Apothecary in the agonizing fear
that some connection of ideas or other would lead him every moment to
the subject of his present brother. Thus he incidentally with great
success laid the poor hare's-foot on the rack of the "larded hare,"
when he contended ironically--for nepotism.
"Popes and ministers," said he, "give important places, not to the
first chance-comer, but to a man whom they have narrowly proved,
because they have been almost brought up with him, namely, a friend by
blood. They have too moral a way of thinking to let them, after their
elevation, no longer know their kindred, nor do they hold the court to
be a heaven where one never inquires about his fellow-trenchermen
condemned to hell. Inasmuch as a minister can digest like an ostrich,
one wonders that he does not also, like the ostrich, toss his eggs,
full of relatives into the sand under the burning sun, and trust the
hatching to accident. But nothing accords less with genuine nepotism
than this; nay, the very ostrich, by night and in colder places, broods
in person, and only omits it where the sun broods better; so, too, the
man of influence provides for his cousins only in those cases where
great want of merit requires it. I confess, morality can as little
command nepotism as friendships; but the merit is so much the greater,
when without any moral obligation one covers, as it were, with his
family-tree, half the steps of the throne." This smelting-fume and
vapor of satire prepossessed the Britons in his favor, especially as
the fume implied noble metals, that is to say, the highest impartiality
on the part of a son whose father was minister.
While the Apothecary carved the _souper_,--Mat had begged him to act as
_grand écuyer tranchant_, his friend watched the moment when he had a
great turkey-cock on the fork, to carve him in the air, as herons do
fishes, and that, too, in Italian fashion; then the noble page took his
way over the partitioned turkey-cock, and Poland, through the
Electorates, till he arrived at the hereditary kingdoms, where he
stopped to make the remark, that very naturally the first great
Dictator will have raised up his own son to sit on his throne after
him: "So had he often, at the Flachsenfingen shooting-matches, enjoyed
seeing the children dance about with the crowns and sceptres which
their fathers had shot down, and toss and play with them." The deaf man
maintained by his gauging-rod and linstock, which he pressed against
the table, the freest intimacy with the whole club, and watched his
laboring brother, to see how he sawed and balanced. Matthieu, who loved
the chief-carver, but the truth still more,[16] could not for his sake
suppress his reflections upon crowned first-borns, but freely remarked,
that "One should at least among the reigning family, if not among the
people, have a free choice."
We do not now think even as the Jews do, with whom, to be sure, a
half-bestial abortion has still the rights of primogeniture, but not,
however, an entirely bestial one.[17]--The bellows-blower was
impregnated through the fallopian tube[18] of the staff with new ideas
of primogeniture,--his brother was more dismembered with agony than the
turkey-cock in the air. The Evangelist went on: "With the Jews, too,
the bestial first-born, because it can never offer a sacrifice, has the
best food, and is holy and inviolable,--the rest of the cattle belong
to the class of _younger sons_." ...
--Thereupon he suddenly and smilingly pronounced the compliment: "Only
my friend here with the turkey-cock makes the happiest exception to my
assertion, and his respected brother with the staff there the
wretchedest; they are, however, twins, and he is only a quarter of an
hour older than the deaf one." He turned composedly to him of the
staff, who had already mobilized[19] his face for war, "Am I not right,
a quarter of an hour older?"
"Yes, may God punish me," said he, "if I am not. What says my brother?"
The Apothecary, fainting, had to let fall the dividend on the fork,
though it had already been lightened by the cutting off of successive
quotients. The bellows-blower took a flying survey of all faces, and
detected on all a silent scepticism, which the page by his cold
assurances made still more legible. "There is nothing in the whole
joke," said Zeusel in a low tone, "that can possibly interest any one."
As the bellows-blower could not get hold, through his long auricular
organ, of the low murmured exception,--but he did not see how even then
he was going to maintain his case and his right of primogeniture,--he
entered upon his proof, and fetched out four long curses, as answering
to just so many syllogistic figures, and bent his head before his
brother, that he might hand in over it his replication. The Apothecary,
who wanted to invalidate, not the primogeniture, but only the claim to
be his brother, and who, on account of doubt as to his title, did not
care to address him, said imploringly to Matthieu, "Concede the point
to him, for he does not know at all what we have hitherto been talking
of."
Quickly and abruptly, then, but with an incredulous look, the page said
to him, "You shall be right, my friend," and added, under pretence of
wishing to divert him, "You look right fresh and young."
"By heaven!" replied he, flaming up, "_he there is younger_; but he
came behind me, as a fellow-traveller, into the world in the form of a
tobacco-pouch: he is woven and twisted together out of the little
beggar-men[20] that fell off from me."
The bellows-blower now fired off all the cannons on the wall of his
head, exasperated by the vinegar-glances and poisonous looks and
inaudibleness of his blood-friend: he therefore stretched out his thumb
and his little finger, and set them like the feet of a pair of
compasses on his own face by way of measuring it; then he set out to
apply the two as a long-measure to the face of his blood-friend: he
would then, as man is ten faces long, have held his own and the other
face opposite each other, and then from their difference in measurement
have easily inferred their respective statures; but the Apothecary
wabbled, and the bellows-blower quite incorrectly planted his thumb
above the jawbone. Here the thumb, which sought to press itself into
the soft cheek, was stopped by something hard and round, and the
servant of the bellows, by the slipping down of the thumb upon the jaw,
propelled out of the mouth a ball of wax with which the Apothecary had
stuffed out as with a padding his sunken cheeks, in order to swell up
the inlaid sculpture of his visage into relievo. The emerging ball
knocked over, like a nine-pin ball, the Apothecary, i. e. upset his
equanimity, and with flashing eyes he said to the deaf one, who was now
on the point of absolutely striding on to a history of his bald head,
only this much: "You, man, have no bringing up, and your elder brother
must plane you down first."
But as the Calcant[21] had already made some headway in the natural
history of the baldhead, Zeusel hurried off with the excuse that the
Court-Physician Horion was awaiting him this evening. The most serious
of the Englishmen stepped up very near to him and said: "Commend me to
the Doctor, and as he makes such good cures, tell him, in my name, you
are a great fool."
Hardly had he got out of the village, when the Calcant took pity on the
Emigrant, and would fain have done with his history of the bald head.
The Evangelist, therefore, despatched him after the enraged twin, to
catch him now in the dark; and took up himself in his place the
historic thread. On an evening--so the story ran--when the court was
not at the play, the Court Apothecary--Heaven knows how--poked out his
nut-cracker-face from one of the first boxes. Matthieu, who was then
still page, posted the bellows-blower in the zenith of his peruke,
namely, in the gallery exactly above him. The Calcant let down from
above by an invisible horsehair a little hook, which hung like a bird
of prey over the out-looking peruke, which I hold to be an ideal of
hair. For it seemed to have grown out from the head (from which locks
and vergette[22] had long since fallen off) as an indigene and shoot,
and no one took it for an adopted for. The bellows-blower let the hook
swing and sway like a pendulum above the peruke, till such time as
there was a certainty of its having fastened into the vergette.
Forthwith he made use of his hands as a drayman's windlass, and lifted
up (as the frost does other growths) the whole frisure by the roots,
and slowly drew the pig-tail wig like an ascending hair-balloon up into
the air. The pit and the chief-lover and the lamplighter were turned by
astonishment into lumps of ice, as they saw the tailed comet go up in
right ascension to the gallery. Upon the Apothecary, who felt his head
uncovered and blown upon by a cold wind, the few natural hairs lifted
themselves up with terror, like the artificial ones, and when he turned
round with his bald skull to look after the lifting of his head of hair
on the cross, his twin-brother (in order not to be discovered) let the
whole hairy meteor, which wanted to go after the hair of Berenice[23]
in heaven, actually fall down before his face among the people, and
looked composedly down at its culmination in the nadir, like the rest
of the gallery.
During our recital the twins have been pommelling each other. The
aspirant for primogeniture called out there, on the Flachsenfingen
road, which was covered with the darkness of night, in one continued
yell, "Mr. Court Apothecary!" and as he could not, of course, hear any
answer, he was obliged to knock his ear-trumpet against every object,
to hear whether it said anything. At last his probing-rod came in
contact with the firstborn, and he marched up to him to beg his
forgiveness and return. But the Apothecary was in such a boiling and
overflowing state, that, when the bellows-blower ducked his head to
take in his answer, he made up his hand into a ball and let it fall
like a bell-hammer on the sagittal suture of the bended head, whereupon
the diving-bell gave out a regular tone. The Apothecary, if one had
rightly understood him and given him time, would by this trip-hammer
have made the sutures on the deaf-head considerably more prominent; but
in this he was disturbed by his own brother, who bent his head down
like a bush,--for the bellows-blower would have inserted his fingers
like ornamental pins into the artificial hair and dragged him by that,
if the peruke had been made fast on his head,--so that he could lay his
hearing-tube as a second backbone so stoutly and yet so carefully along
the twin's first, that no one came off with compound fractures, except
the hearing-tube.--Thereupon he said good night, and recommended him to
keep to the left, in order not to lose his way....
--Had I known that this history would overshadow so many leaves, I
would sooner have thrown it away.--The next morning the impudent
Matthieu paid a visit to the cross-bearer, on whose hands the chiragra,
warmed into maturity by wrath, was burning; he was going now--for he
answered every reproach against his shamelessness with a greater--to
make the gouty hands cat's-paws again to take fresh chestnuts of fun
out of the fire. But the Apothecary, whose heart was only small, but
not black, felt himself too sorely injured, and when Matthieu, laughing
at his complaints, departed from him in silence, without even giving
himself the trouble of an excuse, then the chiragrist swore--and there
we have the fool again--to upset him.
Come forth again, my Victor! I yearn for fairer souls than these
foolish brothers have! None of us lives and reads on so carelessly
as not to know in what biographical period of time we are living;
it is, namely, eight days before Easter, when Zeusel is on the way to
St. Luna.--Flamin disclosed to our Victor the joke upon the sick
Zeusel. It displeased him altogether, just as writings like the
_Anti-hypochondriac_, the _Vade-Mecum_,[24] or the oral retailers of
printed jokes,--the stalest of all companions,--disgusted him. He could
never set on a bearbaiting between two fools: only the sketch of such a
battle-piece tickled his humor, but not the execution, just as he loved
to read and imagine cudgelling-scenes in Smollett (the master in that
line), but never cared to see them. Even of the incarnate bon-mots and
hand-pointings at another's body he thought too disparagingly, which I,
indeed, should be disposed to call dumb wit (just as there are dumb
sins), and which are the true attic salt of small towns; for true wit,
methinks, must, like Christianity, show itself, not in words, but in
works. He looked upon our follies with a forgiving eye, with humoristic
fantasies, and with the ever-recurring thought of the universal lunacy
of man, and with melancholy conclusions. When he had once deducted the
bad point, that Zeusel came bending before every nobleman as his hired
beast, till the latter cudgelled him back, as in Paris one can hire
lapdogs to go to walk with,--then the vanity of the man, especially as,
in other cases, it was good-natured, indulgent, and often even witty,
was something he had little to object to. No one tolerated vanity and
pride more affectionately than he. "What does a man get by it, then,"
said he, much too spiritedly, "unless he is a fool, or where then shall
he leave off being lowly? We must either think too well of ourselves,
or not at all."
Victor, therefore, with his sympathetic soul, paid at once a friendly
and a professional visit to his landlord. This mood of his fell in
grandly with the Apothecary's plan of securing the Doctor's influence
against Mat.
"For this I need nothing," said Zeusel to Zeusel, "except to let him
see the intrigues which the Schleunes family is playing against him;
for without me he is not _raffiné_ enough for that."
For, in fact, he holds the hero of the Dog-Post-Days--who very
willingly lets him--to be a little too stupid, merely because the
latter was good-natured, humoristic, and confidential towards all men.
In fact, life in the great world gave him, it is true, mental and
bodily flexibility and freedom, at least greater than he would
otherwise have had; but a certain external dignity, which he perceived
in his father, in the Minister, and often even in Matthieu, he could
never properly or long imitate; he was content to have a higher dignity
within, and felt it almost ludicrous to be serious on the earth, and
too small a thing to look proud. Perhaps it was for this very reason
that Victor and Schleunes could not like each other; a _man_ of talents
and a _citizen_ of talents hate each other reciprocally.
Before I allow the Apothecary to point out all the threads of the
Schleunes spider-web, I will merely explain why Zeusel was so
all-knowing on this subject, and yet Victor so blind. The latter was
so, because in the midst of his enjoyments he never set himself at all
to the guessing out of indifferent or bad people; in fact, like a bird
of paradise, he floated always in the air of heaven, far removed from
the dirty ground, and, as all birds of paradise do on account of the
looseness of their plumage, always flew _against_ the wind; hence, from
a want of communication, he did not get _oral_ court news till all the
Heyducs,[25] lackeys of pages, and stove-heaters had already read them
black,--often did not get them at all.--The Apothecary is in the
opposite case, because he has the bad eyes, it is true, but then the
good ears of a mole, and because in the _camera-obscura_ of his
congenial heart the forms of kindred tricks more readily image
themselves; add to this, that he applies two long ear-trumpets--two
daughters--to cabinets, or rather to their lovers, when they come out
therefrom, and overhears by the tubes many a thing, of which I can
avail myself grandly in the Third Part of this biography. There are
men--he was one--who will hunt up intelligence without the least
interest in its contents, and _personalia_ without _realia_, and
who, with no curiosity about learning, seek to become acquainted
with all learned men,--without any care for politics, to know all
great statesmen,--and without the least love for war, to know all
generals,--personally and by letter.
It may be that many a reader of fine sense has already, from the
foregoing, got wind of that which Zeusel will now disclose. I give the
Apothecary's _exposé_ in the following abridgment:--
"The Minister had never been able formerly to draw the Prince into his
interest, seldom to get him to his house; to be sure, he had sometimes
not omitted to give in marriage a daughter who might please him; but
either the diverse interest of the daughter's husband was always
unpropitious to his own, or else the influence of his Lordship was.
Hence he was more to be excused than condemned for espousing the cause
of the _weaker_ party, namely, that of the Princess, who at least, in
all events, was something, and who perhaps was only concealing still
her Italian arts. On the whole, then, it was not unjust, that one
should endeavor through Matthieu to attach the Princess, who has much
_frailty_, to the house of Schleunes, wherein they constrained
themselves to walk after her external grandioseness of virtue, while
they could make up to her by the court page for the coldness of her
spouse." ...
If the reader imagines to himself the worst, he will comprehend
Victor's incredulous staring and cursing; but he will let Zeusel have
his say out first.
"Fortunately the Court-Physician had done the family the honor of often
visiting them; and the Schleuneses probably had encouraged him in
_every_ way to a more frequent bestowal of his visits, especially as he
thereby made the Prince also a familiar guest. Deponent had a variety
of information on this subject from good authority." ...
Victor guessed, what Zeusel from politeness concealed, the allusion to
Joachime. "Singular,--is it not?" thought he, "that my father writes me
almost the same thing! But here is a fine complication of purposes! I
make the Minister my cloak of concealment in my designs upon the
Princess, and he makes me his in his designs upon the Prince." That is
what he ought to have known without me, that bad men never seek good
ones out of love, and that Joachime's heart is nothing but a bait in
the hands of the Minister; but poetic men, who keep the wings of fancy
forever on the stretch, are caught, like larks, by means of their
_outspread_ wings, even in nets which have the _widest_ meshes, through
which the smooth body of a bird might easily slip. Only one word more:
why did Victor demean himself toward the best persons--towards
Clotilda, his father, &c.--more finely, handsomely, and properly than
the best man of the world; and yet towards mediocre and bad people
conduct himself so clumsily; why?--Because he did everything from
inclination and regard, and nothing from selfishness and imitation;
worldlings, on the contrary, maintain always a uniform demeanor,
because they never shape it after other people's merits, but according
to their own designs. Hence his father, on the island, among those
rules of life which, taken together, were a fine covert prophecy of his
faults and fortunes, gave him this one: _One commits the most follies
among people whom one does not respect_.
"Now, as Clotilda pleased the Prince, this Matthieu, who had been a
suitor for her some years before, would seek to make her one of his
conquests, in order, through her, to achieve much more important ones."
Fie! cried Victor's whole soul, now I see for the first time all the
prickles of the crown of thorns which they are pressing upon thy heart,
thou poor Clotilda!
"Matthieu would long since have got farther on with his propositions of
marriage had he had his present prospects (of--an adulterous act)
nearer before him. Perhaps, too, Matthieu was further anxious about the
return of her brother (Flamin, on account of her diminished
inheritance), although the death of his sister (the source of the
inheritance, Giulia) slightly indemnified him. Hence the Princess loved
Clotilda, since the marriage of the latter with Matthieu was only a
matter of interest. But if it really came to an espousal, as was
probable, since Matthieu, if only by coarseness, would extort it from
the Chamberlain," ... (it is a peculiar trait of the Evangelist, that
towards the weak he was coarse, and often towards the same person rude
and then again refined,) ... "then might Matthieu and January exercise
themselves in mutual forgiveness; and the band of friendship would bind
at once four persons in different knots. This fourfold concatenation no
one would then any longer be able to dissolve, and all would go to the
Devil. The only _Deus ex machinâ_ who could still prevent the tying of
this knot was the Court-Physician. To him, perhaps, Herr Le Baut would
not refuse his daughter, as he had helped her get the place of maid of
honor, 'which, at that time, when I was not at liberty distinctly to
explain myself to you, was precisely my true intention, which you
guessed quite as well as you executed,'--and as the fate of the son
(Flamin, who, according to the general opinion, was not yet visible and
acknowledged) really lay in the hands of his Lordship. Nor did he doubt
about gaining the Princess, as he (the Doctor) had hitherto possessed
her favor, and she preferred him to Dr. Culpepper. The loss of Clotilda
and Agnola would clip the Schleuneses' wings." ...
Scoundrel! was the curse which Flamin would here have vented; but
Victor, who believed that only an entire life, not a single action,
deserved this moral besom, and who to the greatest intolerance of vice
joined a too great toleration of the vicious, simply said,--though with
more heat than one will now expect,--"O thou good Princess, the
_German_ scorpions sit around thy heart and wound it with their
stings, and for balm pour poison into the wound, that it may never
heal!--Abominable, abominable calumny!" Victor loved to praise and
defend his friends too ardently,--and, in fact, from his very
inclination to the opposite; for as, in the matter of his _own_ honor,
he calmly and silently opposed to the libels of the world the
commendatory letters of his own conscience, his inclination would,
indeed, have led him to defend the honor of his friends as coldly as he
did his own, but it was obedience to his conscience to do it (despite
the feeling of its superfluousness) with the greatest warmth.
The polite and triumphant smile of Zeusel was a second calumny; the
blockhead regarded Victor as a dial-plate-wheel or striking-wheel in
the matter, and himself as the pendulum. Therefore Victor said, with a
chagrin compounded of pride and melancholy: "My soul is too far exalted
above your court-littlenesses, above your court-knaveries; your stuff
inexpressibly disgusts me.--O thou noble spirit in Maienthal!----"
He went away with transpierced heart. The night-watchman, who always
reminded him in the higher sense of time, and of eternity too, called
up his teacher's form before his weeping soul,--and Clotilda came with
her pallid looks and said: "Seest thou not yet why I have such pale
cheeks, and hasten so to the holy vale of Emanuel?"--and Joachime
danced by and said, "I laugh at you, _mon cher_!" and the Princess
veiled her innocent face, and said from pride, "Defend me not!"
The reader can easily conceive that Victor held the name of Clotilda
too great to be so much as suffered to pass his lips in such a
neighborhood,--as the Jews only in the holy city, not in the provinces,
took on their lips the name of Jehovah. His soul fastened itself now on
the after-flora of his love, the Agnola besprinkled by Zeusel. It was
the thing he could have wished, that precisely at this time the
merchant Tostato was to arrive from Kussewitz to make his Catholic
Easter-confession in the city; he could at least insist upon his
silence in regard to the masquerade-part in the shop, so that he might
spare the abused Princess at least the pain she would feel at a
well-meant offence; namely, the declaration of love pasted into the
watch.
27. DOG-POST-DAY.
Eye-Bandaging.--Picture behind the Bed-curtain.--Two
Virtues in Danger.
In Passion-week Clotilda, released by the Princess amidst caresses,
went to St. Luna. In Easter-week she is to carry her heart, full of
concealed cares, to Maienthal, to more congenial souls, when she has
first passed through a purgatory, namely, through a brilliant ball
which the Prince gives her--or, to speak more politely, to the
Princess--on the third Easter-holiday.... If this flower shall be dug
out and transplanted by the melon-lever of death from my biographical
beds,--I throw away my pen and cudgel back Spitz,--I have come to be as
much accustomed to her as to a betrothed,--where shall I again discover
at court a female character which, like hers, unites _holy_ and _fine_
manners, _Heaven_ and _this world_, virtue and _ton_,--a heart which
(if it is allowable to compare it with anything small) resembles the
heart-shaped _montre à régulateur_ so tormenting to our hero, that with
the index-hand of the court hours combines an index-hand of the sun's
hours and the magnet of love?
Now, we are still together through all the Easter-holidays; for
Sebastian must go to Pastor Eymann's, to see him and the three British
twins, and his dear Chaplainess, and so much else that was dear. He
would gladly have followed the Regency-Councillor thither on holy
Easter-eve, (and it would have been as delightful to the biographer as
an Easter-pancake, for he is more than sated with cities and courts on
paper,) but the genius of the tenderest friendship beckoned to him for
the sake of Flamin and Clotilda, who had both so long wanted and so
longingly wished each other, and were now reciprocally bringing with
them to the meeting new wounds, to stay behind at least only till the
first Easter-day, as if he would ask, "Surely, the first glad looks of
brother and sister so long held asunder, my unhappy Sebastian will not
wish to disturb?"--"No, surely!" answered his tear.
The city was now emptied of his loved ones.--Passion-week was truly one
to him, not even the Princess, as it were the electrophorus of his
love-flame blown back upon his own heart, had for a long time been
visible to him,--for in this mood he could not go to Joachime's----when
the father-confessor of the Princess, who to-day had confessed to him
(on holy Easter-eve), called upon him and unfolded before him a medical
bulletin of the state of her eyes, and scolded at him in a friendly
manner, that the Court-Confessor, instead of bringing remission of sins
to the Court-Physician, had to bring the sins themselves before his
conscience. "I was on the point of making a journey to-morrow," said
Victor.--"Very well!" said the Pater, "the Princess desires your help
this very day."
On the way he said to himself: "Has, then, Tostato forsworn his Easter
confession, that now at evening he still has not arrived? and where the
devil will he be to-morrow?"--Here! answered--Tostato behind him.--Such
a jolly penitent no sacristy had ever yet seen. The child of fun and
deviltry and penance told the reason of his wild delight: "The Princess
had to-day, as his countrywoman, bought out half his shop." Before
Victor had arrayed on his face in rank and file _those_ serious looks,
with which he was going to entreat of him silence on the subject of his
mercantile vicariate,--I mean, his shop-keeping,--the skipping penitent
gladdened him with the news, that the Princess had inquired after his
and her countrymen, his _associés_, and that he had not at all
concealed from her, that somebody had once been of the latter without
being of the former, namely, her Court-Physician himself.--"Thunder!"
said the ...
The poor fool of a merchant meant it well, and there was nothing
further to be done about it than to investigate, whether Agnola's
questioning had not been mere accident; whether she still had the
watch, or had ever opened it; whether no wind had blown away the
declaration of love as a sister-wind!
After all it was a matter of grave consideration that the Pater and the
Merchant, the evil eyes and the good news, should fall upon precisely
the same time: this 30th of March, Easter-eve. As this visit is a very
memorable one for my hero, I beg every one to settle himself down very
comfortably, and split open beforehand the leaves of this narrative,
stuck together with bookbinder's gilding, and to listen like a spy.
When Victor reached the palace, the Pater encountered him, who said he
would go in too. It was fortunate; for without this guide he would
hardly have found his path through a labyrinth of apartments into the
altered cabinet of the patient. And with him went as a pewit through
all the rooms the apprehension of seeing on the face of the Princess an
indictment against the encased _Billet-doux_; but not so much as an
initial letter or the _rubrum_ of a sentence was seen upon her face, as
he came before her, and his thunder-cloud had passed aside. At least
his was repelled by one which hung over the Princess herself; that is
to say, she was ill, but not merely in the eyes; and a second message
which was sent to fetch him had just missed him. She received him in
bed,--not on account of her sickness, but of her station; for with
ladies of some rank the bed is the residence,--the moss-bank,--the
high-altar,--the royal palace,--in short, the princely chair and seat.
Like the philosopher Descartes, the Abbot Galiani, and old Shandy, they
can think and work best in this hothouse. Although she lay in bed,
nevertheless she was, as we said, not well, but was attacked with pain
in head and eyes. She had therefore to-day sent away all her domestics,
except a chambermaid who loved her very much, and the fly on the wall
who plagued her, and our Doctor who omitted one of the two things. I
should have been glad to reckon in a sedentary court-dame in a
picture-cabinet that stood open; but she sat so dumb and motionless,
that Victor swore she was either a knee-piece, or--a German lady,--or
both. It spared the scalded eyes of the Princess quite as much pain as
it gave well eyes pleasure, that the green light-screen, and the green
satin tapestry, and the green satin curtains in the sick-cabinet
conspired to shed an undulating _blue_ clare-obscure. A single wax
taper stood on a candlestick, which was enchased by all the seasons,
that is, in sculpture,--upon which custom of the great not to enjoy
nature except in counters, in _effigie_ and copy-paper, never _in
naturâ_ itself, I can here state neither my opinion nor its reasons,
because it would require a whole
EXTRA-LEAF
in order, among so many possible reasons why they everywhere--on
tapestry, on the _dessus des portes, des trumeaux_,[26] _des
cheminées_, on vases, on candle-sticks, on _plats de menage_,[27] on
snuffer-stands, in their gardens, on every trifle--love to see a
landscape which they never tread, a Salvator-Rosa rock which they never
climb ... I say, because among so many reasons why they do this and
concede to old Nature this _jus imaginum_, the true one could be picked
out only by an Extra-Leaf, as only such could fully decide whether it
arose from the fact that Nature, at the eternal parting had given them
her picture, as a mistress does to her lover,--or from the fact that
the artists love best to offer them, as to the old gods, precisely what
they hate,--or that they resemble the Emperor Constantine, who at the
selfsame time abolished the true cross, and multiplied and consecrated
images of the same,--or that from a finer feeling they fancy less
the enduring but mosaic pictures of Nature, in which whole mountain
ridges are the mosaic-pebbles, than the more delicate, but smaller
puzzle-pictures of the artists,--or that they would resemble people (if
there were such) who should cause to be painted on the theatre curtain
the whole opera with all the decorations, in order to spare themselves
the raising of the curtain and the seeing of the acts----and yet, if
the Extra-Leaf were in the very midst of deciding, every one would,
from canine hunger after mere incidents, take French leave and run out
after nothing but the confirmation of the incidents, and the
_End of the Extra-Leaf_.
The Princess had two coverings, of which he loved the one and hated the
other very much. The beloved one was a veil, which was a healing-bandage
to her inflamed eyes; but such a thing was to him the foil and
setting of the female face, and he pledged himself to defend, as
Respondent and Præses at once, the proposition, that virtue was never
better rewarded with beauty than in St. Ferieux[28] at Besançon; for at
the feast of morals there the best maiden gets a veil worth six
livres.--The hated covering was the gloves, against which he
universally threw down his glove of defiance. "Let a lady," he said in
Hanover, "once dare to draw against me, that is her hand, and fight
with that without the help of the Esau's hands against the Esau's
hands, and say, one must not take them off except in bed.--There, at
most, must she put them on, I might reply; but I will ask: Of what use
then; finally, are the loveliest hands which I see, if they always lie
under their wing-sheaths, as if we men were Persian kings? And is it
then too severe, if one tells those persons to their faces, who wear
such imitation-hands of silk or leather, that they resemble the Venus
de' Medici, even to the very hands?[29] I pause for a reply!"
In fact, in this dark green cabinet, almost everything--except Agnola's
beautiful Roman shoulders--is covered up; even two images of saints
were so. For a painted image of Mary with a real metallic crown--it was
not meant for an emblem of princes with mock-heads under genuine
crowns--was hidden by the cedars of the bed-plumes, and over a very
fine St. Sebastian by Titian--copied from the Barbarigo palace in
Venice--(the man looked, with his arrows, like a hedgehog, and yet hung
close by her pillow)--she had drawn the bed-curtain, when his namesake
without the arrows arrived, who rather adored than was adored. Many
have assured me since, that it was a Sebastian of Vandyk's, from the
Düsseldorf gallery; but farther on I shall show why not.
Except a female eye reposing behind a veil, no finer specimen of
nature's loveliness visits, methinks, us mortals (the Devil has got in
here six final _S's_ in succession) than one which is just in the act
of laying it aside. The poor Doctor had to meet the out-flashing of
such a lovely glow--when he was about to proceed as oculist--that he at
once proceeded as Protomedicus[30] of her head, in order to take her
hand and thereby save himself. For while she stripped off from her hand
the glove-callus--they were, however, only half-gloves with bare
fingers, or semi-wing-sheaths, i. e. _hemiptera_,--then was the Doctor,
because she had to look down at what she was doing, in the greatest
possible security, and the Greek fire shot quite by him. Hence has
there been inserted with just forethought in the fire-regulations of
morality a whole, almost too long article, which forbids young girls to
go about with their eyes exposed, as if with an uncovered light, in a
parlor of company, because there is so much inflammable stuff lodged
there,--all of _us_ in a body,--but they must bury them in a stocking,
which they are knitting, or an embroidery frame, or a thick book--e. g.
the Dog-Post-Days--as in a lantern.
--It is really a pity: since the public and I have been in the princely
chamber, one tail--I mean one digression _à la Sterne_--has followed
another.--
The princely pulse went at a somewhat more feverish rate than even his
who here describes it. Shortly before he came, she had taken off from
her eyes a warm bandage of roast apples. She desired a temporary
bandage, while they should be preparing that which the doctor
prescribed. But now in the darkness, in this confusion of the twilight,
he could not, in all the four corners of his brain, or the eight lesser
brains of the fourth central chamber, muster up a single oculist except
Dr. von Rosenstein, who started up within there and advised him to
advise the spreading of powdered saffron, one fifth camphor, and melted
winter-apples on lint of fine linen. The chambermaid was sent to
oversee or order the preparation of the recipe, after she had first
bound a black taffeta ribbon with the apple poultice before two of the
most beautiful eyes, which deserved a more agreeable bandage and
blindness. I am lively, when I write, that the poultice seemed to be
made of the apple of beauty--and the black ribbon of beauty-patches
pounded apart. The Pater also went away, so soon as he got from the
doctor the hope of a speedy recovery. But for the Medicus it was verily
now no child's play to sit opposite an Italian rose-cheek and
Madonna-face,--and that, too, so near that he could hear the breath
whisper, after having been able previously to see it grow,--to keep
himself opposite to a face (methinks, was no sport) on which roses are
engrafted upon lilies, like sunsets upon light lunar clouds, and which
a picturesque shadow, namely a black order ribbon, a priestly fillet, a
true _postillon d'amour_, so beautifully divides and sets off,--a
bandaged face which he can contemplate in one steady gaze, and which
supports itself (in a picturesque half-front) turned towards him, on
the pillow and on the hand....
I ought to have attempted a climax, have begun with Sebastian's soul,
which to-day out of its own melancholy, out of its sorrows, out of its
love for Agnola magnified by Zeusel's calumny, made nothing but lines
of beauty and flowing tints in order to paint into his own face as
beautiful a new one as ever a fair soul created on canvas, or on its
own head or on another's.
Agnola may well have had this perception sooner than I.
It furnished, of course, to the couple slender assistance that they
were (not under four eyes--for Agnola's were darkened--but) under only
two eyes; for the two other eyes, of the Court-dame in the cabinet,
about which Victor could not be sure, till now when the princely ones
were shut, and he could without questions investigate by glances and
smiles the stiff thing on the chair in there in the cabinet, were
really _painted_, and so was the body which bore them.
It struck him as singular now, that, against all Court-order, he was
suffered to be alone with the Princess; but, he said to himself, she is
an Italian,--a patient,--a lovely little child of fancy--(this last was
perceptible even in the unusual winter _negligé_ and Sicilian fire). He
could not possibly, therefore, (even to-day before the bandaging of the
eyes,) hit the right tone with her; for as she was too fine for a
German,--not tender enough for an Englishwoman,--too lively for a
Spaniard, he would certainly have written on her _p. p. p_. (_passé par
Paris_, which is inscribed on letters that come via Paris), he would
have done it, I say, had she not again been too impassioned for a
Parisienne. There was the rub.--But as two persons converse more
courageously and freely when one or both sit in the dark--and that was
Agnola's case:--Victor was, after all, to-day not absolutely as simple
as a sheep. Add to this that he took heart from the jewel-cupboard, in
which to his joy--she could not see him look round so impolitely--he
discovered among twenty watches no _montre à régulateur_. She asked him
whether she should be so far restored by the third holiday, that she
might contribute something to the Prince's pleasure at the ball. He
answered affirmatively, though he knew that she would contribute still
more to it by staying away, and although she knew it, too. Here he
began to pity her, and he would fain make a clean heart. He would not
exactly say plumply: "In Gross-Kussewitz I let the Devil so abuse my
good nature as to prevail on me to smuggle into your Highness's watch a
declaration of love"; but he would, in the finest outpouring of soul,
fall down with his beating bosom and say: "Not from fear of punishment,
but from fear lest the confession of my fault may contract some
similarity to a repetition of the offence, I have hitherto concealed
the fact that I once expressed, not so much too strongly as too boldly,
a profoundness of esteem in which I am permitted to imitate only your
Court, and not its sovereign; but the strength of feelings is easily
confounded with their lawfulness."
He still delayed this falling down, because he perceived behind
the curtain a gold strip which seemed to be the beginning of a
picture-frame. This border-work must surely run round something,--round
a picture, I fancy: and this was what he would like to know.
The cursed Court-Apothecary with his calumny had it to answer for, that
he had this wish; not as if he supposed that Mat's face hung in a
gilded frame behind the bed, but because to-day all sorts of things had
startled him. He could do it very easily, as the arras-door and
nunnery-grating of her eye was hung with black; he needed only to
support his left hand softly on the edge of the bed, and thus, bending
forward and hovering over her with suspended breath, reach across with
his right over the bed (it was narrow, and he tall) and pull the
curtain a little,--and then he would know what hung behind there. I
repeat, but for the Apothecary it would never have entered his head.
A slanderer causes one to demand of every action at least its
passport,--one does it merely to effect a most patent refutation of the
slanderer,--and as, often, the most innocent act has no certificate of
health, one shakes one's head and says, It is a real calumny, but then
I will still be on the watch.
He had made several attempts to reach over, but as she always had
something to say and he to answer, it would not do, unless he chose to
betray his nearness to her ears. The conversation related to the
ball,--the presence and illness of her maid of honor, Clotilda,--the
substitute of the latter, Joachime, upon whose appointment Victor
expressed himself with decided coldness; he could never, with Agnola,
get beyond court-news; all that was abstract and metaphysical she
seemed to hate or to ignore; and as to _talking_ of emotions with
her,--which he generally loved best to do with women, and for which the
husband's would have given him ample occasion and material,--that
seemed to him not much better than actually to _have_ them.
When he had given his cold answer about the promotion of Joachime,--a
coldness which formed a flattering contrast to his present enthusiastic
warmth and fulness of feeling for the Princess,--he would fain insert
in the half-bar-rest which followed, and which Agnola filled out with
thinking, the raising of the curtain. He rested on his hand, held his
breath, drew the curtain,--but the St. Sebastian was behind it, which I
have already mentioned above, and which was most certainly by Titian,
and not by Vandyk, because he looked so like our Victor,[31] that it
was credible to him that the Pater had copied it from his wax-statue
at St. Luna. The Saint appeared to him still worse than the
Evangelist,--not because he thought the portrait was his namesake, but
because it occurred to him _why_ the women in Italy sometimes _veil_
the pictures of saints. Tho reason can, notoriously, form the subject
of a wood-cut for the ten commandments--(Göschen and Unger ought to
edit the catechism with more tasteful cuts to the prohibitions than the
old ones are). Even the Mary over the bed was veiled with plumes and
everything.... Zeusel! Zeusel! hadst thou not calumniated, this whole
biography (so far as I can foresee) might well have had a different
course!
He supported himself by resting his right hand against the wall, in a
hovering posture above the blind fair one, because a little world-globe
attracted his centripetal force and drew him out of his returning
orbit.--For as the patient rested on her right side, one cloud after
another of dishevelled hair had flowed down over the heart and over the
lily hill which is lifted by sighs, and the locks falling towards the
other hill had not been able there to cover up so much as they had
here disclosed. The lace-veil sank slowly after the tresses, and
the heart-leaves and the ripe blossoms fell away from the protruding
apple-fruit.... Dear æsthetic hero of these Post-days, wilt thou remain
a moral one, hanging, as thou art, unseen over this veritable Belidor's
_globe de compression_,[32]--over this _waxing_ moon-globe, whereof one
never sees the other half,--near this commanding eminence, which, like
other eminences, one should not suffer round a fortification,--and that
too at a court where generally the _dress-regulations_ suppress
everything _elevated_?
When he is once away from the bed and the Paullinum, I will have a good
quarrel with the reader about the whole occurrence,--but now it must
first be related continuously and with a good deal of fire.
He was, as it were, fastened in the air. But at last it was time to
withdraw from a position which was the torrid zone of all the feelings.
Besides, a new circumstance enhanced at once the danger and the charm.
A long sigh seemed to surcharge and heave her whole bosom, and to
undulate like a zephyr through a bed of lilies, and the superincumbent
snow-hill seemed to tremble with the swelling heart that glowed beneath
it, and with the swelling sigh. The hand of the veiled goddess moved
mechanically toward the imprisoned eye, as if it would press away a
tear behind the bandage. Victor, in his fear that she would push aside
the bandage, withdraws his right hand from the wall, and the left from
the bed, in order, on tiptoe, to bend back, without grazing anything,
out of this enchanted heaven.
Too late!--The ribbon is down from her eyes,--perhaps his sigh had been
too near, or his silence too long.
And the unveiled eyes find above them an inspired youth, dissolved into
love, hovering in the beginning of an embrace.... Stiff as a statue he
hung in the petrified posture,--her eyes, inflamed with pain, suddenly
overflowed with the milder light of love,--ardently and softly she
said, _Comment?_ And too lame for apology, trembling, sinking, glowing,
dying, he falls upon the hot lips and the beating bosom. He closed his
eyes for rapture and confusion, and blind and love-intoxicated, bold
and fearful, he grew to her lips with his thirsty ones ... when
suddenly his ear, on the stretch for every approaching sound, heard the
night-watchman calling the hour of twelve, and Agnola, as with a
strange, intruding hand repelled him from her, to throw aside a bloody
chemise-pin.
Like a doomsday in the night-clouds the watchman's homely admonition to
think of death and of the twelfth spirit-hour of this midnight of life,
pealed into his ears, before which the blood-streams of the heart
rushed by. The call in the street seemed to come from Emanuel, and to
say: "Horion! Stain not thy soul, and fall not away from thy Emanuel
and from thyself! Look at the linen over her diseased eye, as if death
veiled it, and sink not!"
"I sink not!" said his whole heart; he unwound himself with respectful
forbearance out of the throbbing arms, and stiffening at the
possibility of an imitation of the wretched Matthieu, whom he had so
despised, he sank down outside of the bed on her hand, which he had
drawn out with him, and said with streaming tears: "Forgive a
youth,--forgive his overmastered heart,--his dazzled eyes,--I deserve
all punishments, any one would be to me a pardon,--but I have forgotten
no one except myself."--"_Mais c'est moi, que j'oublie en vous
pardonnant_,"[33] said she with an ambiguous look, and he rose, and as
her answer gave him the choice between the most agreeable and the
most humbling interpretation, he gladly punished himself with the
latter. Agnola's eye flashed with love,--then with anger,--then with
love,--then it closed;--he stepped back to the most respectful
distance,--she opened it again and turned her face coldly to the wall;
and by a secret pressure against the wall which, I suppose, commanded a
private bell in the apartment of the Chambermaid, gave the latter the
order to make haste,--and in a few minutes she came in with the
eye-band. Naturally (as in human life) they played out the fifth act,
just as if there had been no third and fourth.--Then he politely
withdrew.
There!--Now the reader and I begin to quarrel about the matter, and
Victor to think about it. His embrace was not right,--nor were his
voyage of discovery to the wall and his picture-exhibition,--but it was
_discreet_; for he could not, of course, really throw a backward
somerset, and say, "I thought Mat was hanging behind the bed."--To
this, to be sure, people of experience reply, "We do not quarrel with
him here for preferring discretion to virtue, but rather for this, that
he did not do so again after the kiss. That kiss is too small a fault
for Agnola to be able to forgive." I observe, these people of
experience are adherents of the sect who, in my book, reckon the
Princess, on account of so many half-proofs, among those women who, too
proud and hard for the love of the heart, only let the love of the
senses alternate flyingly with the love of domination, and who do it
only for the sake of making out of Cupid's bandage a rein, and out of
his arrows spurs and stirrups. I am very well acquainted, too, with the
half-proofs with which this sect backs itself,--the bigotry of the
Princess,--her confession-eve,--her previous attentions to my
hero,--the covering of the painted Mary, and the exposure of the more
living one,--and all the circumstances of my narration. But I cannot
possibly believe such a thing of a friend of Clotilda (unless the
latter, for this very reason, had taken leave of her, or from goodness
of soul had not at all comprehended those couriers of the temperament
more common with the male sex), until in the sequel manifest traces of
a more _exasperated_ than _afflicted_ woman compel me to it.
I am getting quite away from my promise, to present some
considerations, which would certainly, with impartial persons, if not
justify, yet excuse my hero, for becoming, after the kiss, virtuous
again, so to speak, and not full of the live Devil. I boldly set down
among the grounds of mitigation his want of acquaintance with those
women who, like the Spartans, bravely ask not about the _number_ of the
foes of their virtue, but about their _position_; he was often with
them, indeed, and in their camp, but his virtue hindered them from
showing him theirs. He is less excused by the influence of the
night-watchman, and the remembrance of death; for this needs itself to
be excused;--but then, on the other hand, it is only too certain, that
certain men of a philosophical or even a poetic organization, precisely
then, and in fact always, regard, instead of their own position,
general ideas, when others can understand nothing at all, and be
nothing at all but self: namely, in the greatest dangers, in the
greatest sufferings, in the greatest joys.
A fair man will throw all upon the Apothecary, who was Victor's moral
and mechanical bed-cord, or helper out-of-bed; for as he had prefigured
to him the noble Mat in a similar situation (but without the bed-cord),
of course the abhorrence which Victor, some days before, had felt of
the Evangelist's conduct, became in him a laming incapacity of copying
it in the least a few days after.--O if we could only, a couple of days
beforehand, see every sin, to which we are tempted by ourselves or
others, actually committed by a true scamp, whom we spit upon! Could we
then eagerly imitate the scamp?
Finally, one needs only to cast a glance at Victor in his balcony,
where he now sits in a singular barometrical condition, if one would
pass judgment on his previous state. His present state, namely, is a
mixture of emptiness, discontent (with himself and everybody), of
increased love for Agnola, justification of this Agnola, and yet the
_impossibility_ of imagining her a near friend, of Clotilda's.
For myself, I shall never repent the little which I have hastily
brought together, if I have shown up therein by a few happy hints how
well my hero, in regard to his conduct _after_ the kiss, which must
strike strict people of the world as singular, can plead a disagreeable
combination of constraining circumstances, and if I shall, therefore,
have succeeded in restoring to him, at the end of the twenty-seventh
chapter, the respect which he had forfeited, by not wrapping round the
princely ring; too large for his finger, the long silken threads of
love, so as to make it fit....
28. DOG-POST-DAY.
EASTER-FESTIVAL.
A dog-day so long and weighty as the twenty-eighth one may be allowed
to break up into three holidays.
FIRST EASTER-HOLIDAY.
Arrival at the Parsonage.--Club of the Three Twins.--Carps.
On the first day of Easter; Sebastian, full of snow-clouds as the
heavens above him, stole out of the farm-buildings of the passions,--I
mean the residence-city,--but not till towards evening, in order not,
to-day, with a heart whose very foundation had been washed away by a
half-year's rainstorm, to be long a burden to any friend. On the
mountain behind which Flachsenfingen drops down as by a sinking of the
earth, he turned round toward the dusky city, and let the remembrance
pass by as an evening mist before his soul, how, three quarters of a
year ago, in the refulgence of summer and of hope, he had looked out so
joyously over these houses,--I described it long ago,--and he compared
his prospects of that time with his present desolation; at last he
said: "Only say to thyself outright, what thou _hast_ and what thou
_meanest_,--namely, thou hast nothing more, not a loved or loving heart
in the whole city,--but thou meanest once more to march to St. Luna,
and, all impoverished as thou art, to take the _second_ leave of the
pale angel whom thy robbed and ruined heart cannot forget, as thou
climbest after the sun, and, having already seen his setting from out a
valley, once more seest him sink, from a mountain." ...
Five half Sabbath-day's journeys from the village he espied the
Court-Chaplain, pursued by a Catechumen (as well of the tailoring craft
as of Christianity). In vain did he and the young tailor seek to
overtake the hotly hunted shepherd of souls. The shepherd came
not to a stand until the youngster had got into his house. A
hundred-and-twenty-pounder (that is my physical weight) gets no
addition to his æsthetic weight by keeping so long to himself the
insignificant cause of this insignificant running, and not saying till
now that the Chaplain could absolutely hear no one coming after him,
because he was afraid the man would smash him from behind. Now the
apprentice wanted to tread in the footsteps of his spiritual master and
come up with him,--the more fiercely the master dashed forward through
space to leave the other behind him, so much the longer leaps forward
did the scholar take to overtake him,--that was the whole scrape, but
so do men chase men.
Victor ran with outflying arms to a pair of hanging ones, which the
owner in his agony could not raise. But in the parsonage two warmer
ones folded themselves around his frozen bosom, those of his
countrywoman; nor did the parson's wife disturb his and her
resurrection-joy with a single complaint of his long absence,--this
delicacy of friendship, which spared another unprofitable apologies, he
reciprocrated with double warmth, and with a voluminous bill of
accusation against his own follies. She led him up a stairway in the
joyful parsonage, which to-night was one pierced-work of lighted
stories, to her dear son's embrace, and into the presence of the three
kindred sons from one mother-country, the three twins....
O ye four men of one heart, press my forlorn Victor's to yours warmly,
and make the good youth glad only for one evening!... I myself have
verily been so, since the paschal Exodus from the Flachsenfingen Egypt:
I will therefore make the twenty-eighth chapter as long as the
watering-village itself is. A weightiness will thereby be imparted to
my work with true critics,--but with postmasters, too, who, when I
despatch it to the bookstore, will draw something considerable from me
for their weighing.... But shall an author be so shabby as to abridge
his sentiments, for the sake of postage, merely because a post-office
clerk weighs them more according to his own than the postal rates? And
am I not encouraged to the opposite course--that of protracting my
emotions--by the electoral, princely, and city-benches in Ratisbon,
inasmuch as the said benches by an imperial recess allow me a deduction
of two thirds of my postage for printed matter, in order, as they hope,
to give encouragement to literature and to sentiment?
The noble Evangelist, to be sure, was also up there among the rest,--he
and Joachime having politely escorted the maid of honor to the house of
her parents;--but here in the _country_, where there are fewer moral
weeds than in _cities_ (just as there are fewer botanical in _fields_
than in _gardens_), and where one enjoys pleasures without _maîtres de
déplaisirs_,--here where in Victor love of country appeased the longing
for all other love,--no one could be unhappy but he who deserved to be.
Mat disappeared there like a toad among tulips. Victor would have loved
the English, even without the blood-relationship of nationality, and
would have given a bad name to the Dutch, even with that relation; to
this is to be ascribed his inconsiderate speech, that these nations
pictured themselves in their tobacco-pipes, inasmuch as the English
ones had _upright_ heads and the Belgian _hanging_ ones.
All three were of the opposition party, and lost the coldness of their
blood at the ice-coldness of Pitt's. The correspondent of the Dog-Days
does not write me, whether it was because the Minister had offended
them,--or whether they took a nearer interest in the frightful
judgment-day and resurrection of the dead in France, where the sun
broods at once over Phœnix-ashes and crocodile's eggs,--or what the
reason was. In fact he reports to me nothing further about them than
their names, namely, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthazar,[34] which were
the names of the three holy kings from the East.
The one who took the whim of calling himself Melchior concealed under a
phlegmatic ice-crust an equatorial glow, and was a Hecla, that splits
its ice-mountains before it flings out flames; with cold eye and
languid voice and pale brow he spoke in a monosyllabic, sententious,
condensed style,--he saw the truth only in a burning reflector, and his
ink was a tearing waterspout. The second Englishman was a philosopher
and German at once. The elder Cato, who likewise represented the
Moorish king, every one knows. I am as glad as if it were I myself,
that my hero was the very one who was distinguished from them all by a
greater serene considerateness of free-thinking. I mean that Socratic
bright eye which glances round freely over and through the garden of
the trees of knowledge, and which chooses like a man, whereas others
are exclusively impelled by instinct toward some one proposition, some
one apple of these trees, as every insect is to its fruit. Moral
freedom operates no less on our opinions than on our actions; and
despite all grounds of decision in the understanding, and all grounds
of motive in the will, still man _chooses_ as well his system as his
conduct.
Hence, almost even before supper, the three twins had become cold in
affection toward Sebastian, merely because he was so in judgment. He
was to-day for the first time in a case with them, into which he fell
three times every day with Flamin; certain men can better worry down
unlimited contradiction than limited concurrence. The case was this:
Matthieu, by his satiric exaggerations, gave to the slight
dissimilarity between Victor and them an ever-increasing prominence. He
said (not for the purpose of making allusion, but only of seeming to)
that princes to whom, as from the Chinese king, their subjects prayed
for political weather, helped themselves like that rector who himself
composed the almanac, and allowed his scholars (in this, case the
favorites of the princes) to make the weather for it. He said, too,
that the poets could _sing_ for Liberty, indeed, but not _speak_ for
it; that they imitated in a timid plight under the mask of tragic
heroes the voice of the heroes, just as he had often witnessed a
similar joke in the case of a roasted calf's head, which seemed to the
whole table to bellow like a living calf, whereas there was nothing
inside but a live tree-toad, which sent forth its croaking. "But it
were a still greater cowardice," said Victor, "not even to sing; only I
know men are now neither _barbaric_ nor cultivated enough to enjoy the
Poets and follow them; _Poets_, _Religion_, _Passions_, and _Women_ are
four things which live through three ages, whereof we are just in the
middle age,--that of _despising_ them; the past age was that of
_deifying_ them; the future will be that of _honoring_ them." The
indignant trio of twins were of opinion that religion, and women
particularly, were merely for the state. Besides, Victor's republican
sentiments were ambiguous in their eyes, if only by reason of his
aristocratic relations. And now, when he actually added that the
freedom of states had nothing at all to do with retrenchment of
expenses, with greater security of property, with increased comfort of
living, in short, with the promotion of material welfare, that all this
was found often still more abundantly in monarchies, and that that for
which one sacrificed property and life must of course be something
higher than property or life;--when he further said, every man of
culture and virtue lived under a republican form of government,
notwithstanding his physical relations, just as prisoners in
_democracies_ enjoyed nevertheless the rights of freedom;--and when he
made himself, not so much for the Minister and the Upper House as for
the English people, armor-bearer and _Contradictor_, because the
principles of the first two had from time immemorial combated those of
the latter and not yet determined them; because the complaint of to-day
was as old as the (English) revolution; because the ground-plan of this
last could be torn to pieces only in a formal counter-revolution;
because all acts of injustice were committed _according_ to the _show_
of law, which was better than a justice _against_ the _show_ of law;
and because the _nunnery-grating_ which had now been built around the
freedom of the English press[35] was no worse than the Athenian
prohibition of philosophizing, but better than the permission of the
Roman emperors to make pasquils upon them,----
The English love long coats and speeches. As he began with "when," so
must, in his as in my period, a "then" follow....
Then was there not a devil of them satisfied, and Cato the Elder said:
"If he should deliver these principles in the Upper House, there would
arise the greatest uproar on the subject, but from approbation, and
every hearer would still cry, _Hear him!_" Victor said, with the
modesty of a man of the world, he was as warm a republican and Old
Briton as any of them, only he was incapable to-day of "proving from
these principles that he resembled them;--perhaps at the next club!"
"And that can be held," said the Court-Chaplain, "on my birthday, in a
few weeks."--If we live to see it,--I and the reader,--it is to be
hoped they will invite us, too, as old godfathers; the first time (on
the sixth Dog-Post-Day) we were, as is well known, a part of the
company.
My hero exacted of men (especially as he did not give himself the
trouble) too little respect. He labored, to be sure, for these wages;
but if they did not give him any, he knew how to make a thousand
excuses for men, and drew out his mint-stamp and struck off for himself
a medal of honor, swearing meanwhile, "I'll be hanged, if the next time
I don't behave myself more proudly, and less indulgently, and
altogether more seriously, so as to excite a certain reverence." The
next time is yet to come. He therefore forgave the twin-trio so
beautifully, that they at last folded the philanthropist with
passionate embrace forever to their souls.
After such a commencement-disputation there was nothing he loved to do
better than something really nonsensical, gallant, childish,--this time
it was going to the kitchen. Catinat said, he only was a hero _qui
jouerait une partie de quilles au sortir d'une bataille gaynée ou
perdue_,[36]--or, after winning in a disputation, could go to the
kitchen. "Either all or nothing has weight in this mock-life," said he.
Into the kitchen, which was not so dirty as a French bedchamber, but as
clean as a Belgian cattle-stall, another festal hare and envoy
extraordinary had already made his entry, the Court-Chaplain, who had
there his calling to attend to. He had to see whether his four-pound
carp,--a native of the pastoral pond, and wintered expressly for the
adopted son Bastian,--not so much whether it was properly scaled (he
passed over that question entirely with very little philosophy) as
whether the tail was properly tucked up. It could not surely be a
matter of indifference to him, but as a man he must at once feel and
fight down his sorrow on the subject, if a carp of as many pounds as a
mortal has brains were so miserably slit open that the one quotum of
the tail should be no smaller than a hair-bag, and the other no bigger
than a fin. And this entire nominal terrorism[37] is after all of small
consequence compared with another real terrorism (so much does
important trouble fade before greater) which tormented the Parson with
the threat that they would crush the four-pounder's gallbladder.----His
own would have at once emptied itself after the other. "For God's sake,
more considerately, Appel! _Embitter_ not my first Easter-day," said
he. Gall is, according to Boerhaave, true soap: hence the satirical
kind washes half the reading world clean and shiny, and the liver of
such a man is the soap-ball of a quarter of the world and its colonies.
However, it turned out gloriously. But, by Heaven! the world should for
once perceive (after the printing of this book) that a carp of four
pounds--so long fed in the fish-box, so skilfully gutted--weighs more
in the fish-scales of _contentment_, than the golden _fish-bones_ in
the red field of the arms of Count Windischgrätz!
Could he then stay long in the kitchen,--that widow's seat of his old
departed youth,--among so many female friends of Clotilda, who all
bewailed to him her sinking and going away (in a double sense), without
having the oxymel of regretted pleasures run over his lips, and the
pang of sympathy shoot through his heart,--although he had to-day in
the second story spread the disputation on Freedom, as a true
scattering medicine, as an arquebusade-water,[38] at least as a bandage
over his open veins? I asked whether he could long avoid thinking of
the good soul. But I absolutely would not give the answer, from
sympathy with the innocent Victor I absolutely would not disclose
before so many thick-skinned souls--who in their empty breasts approve
the poetical joys of love, and yet not its poetical sorrows--how often
he again and again mixed fate's sugar of milk with memory's sugar of
lead, were I not obliged to for the reason--
--that little Julia came back from the castle and brought with her the
promise that Aunty (Clotilda) was coming to-morrow. This promised,
then, that the Minister's daughter would leave to-morrow. Let no one
think hardly of the parsonage-people for their importunity about
Clotilda: for on the third holiday she goes to the ball, on the day
following to Maienthal,--and all they had left was to-morrow and
to-day.... Our Flamin had brought along with him little Julia herself,
being well pleased with her office of penny-post. I am morally certain,
the Chaplain's wife saw in my hero as much as I write of him, and she
loved him so much, that, had she been obliged to decree instead of
Fate, she would have died for sorrow, before she could have brought
herself to bless the son at the expense of the friend. So very much did
he win, by a beautiful blending of refinement, sensibility, and fancy,
the fairest and tenderest hearts,--I mean those of women.
This tiny Julia, the after-flora of the faded Giulia, twined together
in Victor's soul roses and nettles, and all his flowers of to-day's joy
had their roots in tears deep buried in his breast. Even the kiss of
Clotilda's friend, of Agatha, affected him. He thought of the Stamitz
concert, and of their sitting side by side, and of the crape hat which
veiled the grief of two beloved eyes. He begged Agatha to borrow that
hat of Clotilda, and make him an exact copy of it, because he wanted to
give it as a present. "When she is gone," he said to himself,----"no,
when she is dead,--then I will weep without concealment, and tell all
men openly that I loved her." My dear fellow, at the _souper_--a parson
can give one--they will ascribe the glistening of thine eyes more to
thy self-discharging wit than to the repressed flood of tears, and, if
I were at the table, I could not look upon thee for emotion, when
during the hammering and "hardening" of the red eggs I saw thee try to
fix thy overflowing and downcast eye, half shut, steadfastly on
the pole of a red egg, and silently place thy egg-gable under the
cross-block of Eymann's egg, in order to gain time for victory over thy
voice and eye-socket! And yet I cannot see what important advantage
thou wilt then think to gain by this mask, when Old Appel sends thee by
the little Iris and express, Julia,--she can never, herself, undertake
it,--a stained, tattooed egg, a real, boiled, allegorical picture, and
when thou readest over in the fragile shell the flower-pieces etched
into it with aqua-fortis, and thy name bordered with forget-me-nots; I
say, what help can thy previous dissimulation be to thee, when thou
now, in order not to think out the thought "Forget-me-not," hurriest
from the room under the double pretext of having to thank Apollonia,
and on account of exhaustion, to retire thus early to rest? Ah, the
thanking thou wilt! undoubtedly do, but rest thou wilt not!...
SECOND EASTER-HOLIDAY.
Funeral-Discourse on Himself.--Two Opposite Sorts of
Fatality to the Wax-Statue.
The snow-heavens had fallen and lay upon the landscape. The snow made
me melancholy, and reminded one of the wintry lace-knots of Nature. It
was the 1st of April, when Nature, so to speak, made the season itself
an April fool. Victor had long ago learned manners (_mores_) enough to
teach him that, when one is visiting a Court-Chaplain, he must go with
him to sermon. And then, too, he loved to march to sacristies for the
same reason that he loved to steal away to the huts of shepherds,
hunters, and fowlers. It did not strike him as overwrought that the
Chaplain (as he himself did at last) should place his mounting of the
pulpit,--merely on account of the multitude of preparations he made for
it,--in point of importance, side by side with the scaling of a wall.
Nay, he disputed with him during the long hymn about the surplice-fees
of a stillborn fœtus, and proved by a short argument that a parson
could demand of every fœtus--and though it were five nights old--the
appropriate burial-fees, whether the miserly parents bespoke a funeral
sermon for the thing or not. The Chaplain made a weighty objection, but
Victor removed it by the weighty proposition that a clergyman (for
otherwise he would be cheated out of his best fœtuses) could make
every couple pay him burial-fees as often as it could pay baptismal
moneys. The Chaplain replied: "It is stupid that the best pastoral
Theologies hurry over this point like a pinch of snuff in the wind."
With all the humor of my hero, and with all the gayety of my
parson,--who on every holy eve scolded and, condemned like a
revolutionary tribunal, and who on every first holiday softened, till
on the third he became absolutely an angel,--the world should promise
itself something different from what nevertheless is coming: namely,
that Victor saw gleaming out of every hour of the approaching evening
which was to bring Clotilda for the last time but one into his company,
a protruding sacrificial knife against which he must press his wounded
bosom. She was invited to-day, as it were to a farewell-supper,--the
three twins of course.
At last she came at evening on the arm of the misunderstood
Matthieu.--If, as Ruska asserts, the number of devils (44,435,556) who,
according to the assertion of _Guliermus Parisiensis_, flank a _dying_
Abbess, is made much too small,[39] one can readily imagine how many
devils may form the escorting squadron of a _living_, a _blooming_ one.
I, for my part, assume as many devils around a fair one, as there are
male persons.
When Clotilda appeared with that face of hers smiling down into its
fading beauty, with the exhausted lute-voice, which sorrow draws from
us, as a peculiar pianoforte variation, by the pressure of the
stop,--but is it not with men as with organs, of which the _human
voice_ goes most finely with tremolos?--when she thus appeared, then
had her noblest friend the choice, either to fall down before her with
the words, "Let me die first," or to be, to-day, right funny.
He chose the latter (excepting with her) by way of drowning his dreams.
He therefore flung about him with stories and healthy observations.
Therefore he threw into the imperial military chest against
sentimentalism this satirical contribution, that it was the March-gall
or moist-gall in the human field, i. e. a spot that always remained
damp, and on which everything rotted. As this availed nothing, he
entered into alliance with whole states, and promised himself some help
from remarking concerning them, that their summits, like forest-trees,
had grown into each other, and that it had no effect to saw one through
down below,--that the equality of kingdoms was a substitute or a
preparation for the equality of ranks,--and that gunpowder, which had
hitherto been the _sticking powder_ of the great powers, would finally
burn out and heal the hydrophobous wounds of the human race. At last,
when he plainly perceived that it helped him very little, as he
expressed the conjecture that Europe would one day become the _North
India_, and the same North which had once been the breaking-tools and
building-materials of the earth would be so once more, but the North in
the other hemisphere, he struck, with his chemical process, into the
wet road, and (like a secretary of legation) instead of politics
took--punch.
But only cares, not melancholy nor love, can be drowned by drinking.
The other spirits, dissolved in the nervous spirit, array themselves in
a magically sparkling circle around every idea, around every emotion,
which thou hast therein, as in breweries the lights, by reason of the
steam; burn in a colored circle. The glass with its hot cloud is a
Papin's digester[40] even to the densest heart, and decomposes the
whole soul; the draught makes every one at once more tender and bold. A
soft heart was of old ever associated with a bold, hardened fist. As it
kept on snowing, he offered Clotilda for to-morrow his shell-shaped
sleigh and himself (as he was, besides, invited to the ball) as
knight-errant,--whereby he compelled the Evangelist to offer himself as
sledge-gondolier to the stepmother.
Clotilda withdrew now from the merry male company into the adjoining
room, where her Agatha and all were,--it was not done from disapproval
of decorous, manly festivity,--still less from embarrassment, as it is,
in fact, easier, and made easier for her sex, to behave itself
naturally under forty eyes than under four,--still less from inability
to disguise her sisterly love towards Flamin; for her flying soul had
long since learned to fold together its wings and hide its tears and
wishes, brought up as she had been among _strangers_, trained in thorny
relations and between discordant parents. She did it merely, like the
Parson's wife, because it is a _British_ custom, that the ladies shall
take themselves away from the men and their incense-kettle of punch.
When she was out of Victor's sight,--and when, from her _present_ look
of _increased paleness_, he drew the conclusion that the vale of
Emanuel would hardly restore her spring-colors, since the prospect
of the journey had brought no healing influence,--and when this
_short absence_ held before him as it were in a pocket-mirror the
death-apparition of an _eternal_ one,--and when, at last, to be sure,
the swelling heart carried away the dam of dissimulation,--then he
rushed out into the winter,--bared his inflamed breast to the cooling
flakes, and tore wider the clefts into which fate grafted its
sorrows,--and ran up through the white night to the observatory;--and
here, covered with the snow-avalanche silently descending from heaven,
he looked out into the gray, whirling, trembling, flickering landscape,
and in the broad snow-pierced night,--and all the tears of his heart
fell, and all the thoughts of his soul cried: "So looks the future! So
glistening fall the joys of men from heaven, and dissolve even while
they fall! So does everything melt away! Ah, what air-castles I saw
shine around me on this eminence, and how they gleamed in the evening
red! Alas! all are buried under the snow and under the darkness of
night!" He looked down into Clotilda's garden, in whose dark bowers,
now whitened with snow, he had found and lost again the Eden of his
heart. "The tones which flowed over this garden are dried up, but not
the tears which streamed after them," thought he. He looked down into
her brother's garden, where the tulip-C had dropped its leaves, and the
blooming names had passed away into obscurity.
With such a soul, which had looked into this landscape as into the
charnel-house of mouldered days, he returned to the joyous club. The
alternation of cold and warmth had kept up his similarity to the
punch-union, which meanwhile had gone on drinking. He and all had
touched the limits of drinking, where one laughs and weeps in the
same breath; but I am glad that man can after all extract true
nourishment of mind and heart (though not from a cloister-kitchen or
cloister-library, yet) from a cloister-cellar; that he drinks the
health of his wit; that every cup (not merely on the altar) spiritually
strengthens him, and that, if serpents take off their crowns upon
drinking,[41] he puts his on during the process; and that the vine
sheds tears not merely of itself, or from the eyes of a Catholic image
of the Virgin, but also from those of a man, who has drunk of it. The
club hit upon the fancy of making parliamentary speeches. The Chaplain
proposed occasional discourses. Victor jumped up in a chair and said:
"I am going to deliver a funeral-sermon on myself,--I preached here
long ago in my childhood."
All drank once more, even the corpse, and the latter began the
following harangue:--
"_Most beloved and distressed hearers and brethren!_"
A mortal, deeply-afflicted hearers, may sink into the next world,
without having a mourning-steed prance after him, just as he makes his
entrance into this, without having a festive-nag trot before him. We,
for our part, have jointly taken the _funeral-cup_ beforehand, in order
to be able to go through it all; for man expands by moistening, and
shrinks up when he is dry, I mean, when he takes only solid food, like
the bloodsucker, which, when out of water, loses four inches in length.
And I hope I and the deeply afflicted funeral-procession have _toasted_
the deceased sufficiently.
"And so then I see before me" ... --Here he beckoned to the Parson to
toss out his nightcap, that something death-like might lie there on
which his emotion could "vent itself--
"I see lying before me him, the never-to-be-forgotten Mr.
Court-Physician, Sebastian Victor von Horion, and dead he is and is
about to go down under the covering of earth, into the place full of
long repose. What do we see still lying at rest before us but the
diving-bell, wherein the covered soul descended into this vapory
life,--what but the dry shell of a kernel which is sown for the first
time in a second planet,--what but his hull,--what but (so to speak)
the cast-off nightcap of his awakened spirit?
"Behold, weeping hearers, this emblematic pale cap! Here it lies, the
head is out of it, which once mused therein. Our Victor is gone and is
hushed, who talked so often of mathematics, clinical medicine,
heraldry, precautionary jurisprudence, _medicina forensis_,
Sphragistics and their auxiliary sciences. We have lost much in
him--who shall console you for this loss, excellent Herr von Schleunes,
and the other gentlemen likewise? One has not however, absolutely, in
this absurd life, which may well be a sort of ante-death, time enough
to administer proper consolation. Not merely church-pews are often
built on tombstones, but also princely chairs--_they_ particularly--and
even pulpits.
"Can it be supposed that thy soul, deceased Sebastian, in its
intermediate state after death, should know anything of its body, from
which it is unpacked, as out of its hat-box, and of the last honors
which we here pay to its case? If it still has consciousness and an eye
for this room, wherein it has been so often, then will it be glad that
the three holy kings, of whom the Moor is Cato the Elder, are standing
round its worm-bag, hardly willing to let the bag go; it must be
pleased, that we are unitedly lamenting: where is his equal in
common chemistry, in physiognomies and physiognomy,--in the modern
languages,--in the _doctrine of ribbons_, from which he imbibed a love
for all kinds of ribbons? Who sought less than he that strict
concatenation of ideas, which misleads the Germans to cement good ones
with bad ones, and to use more mortar than stones? Not even the
Court--hence he never liked to go thither, when fun was going
forward--could break him off from a certain serious sedate way, which
he ran even into a ridiculous one, which last was always his aim.----By
heaven! through the hour-glass of death, through which he peeped, as
through a pocket spyglass, everything came out so small to him, that he
knew not why he should be serious--I hope I may not be standing here
alive and well, if in the aforesaid glass all the _steps_ of the throne
did not appear to him as diminutive as the thumb-long _wood-stair_ of
the tree-frog in his preserving jar.
"He was a very good preacher, particularly of funeral sermons, hence
even a very good preacher asked him for godfather, and the godson
stands among the present company and takes his part in the weeping, for
the stomach-ache.... Only great court preachers, who deliver the
princely funeral oration in the Cathedral Church, can boast of what I,
to my greatest satisfaction, now hear, that they make the mourning
company laugh, and this is to me an earnest that my consolation is
effectual....
"And yet one who lies upon the death-bed has more consolation than one
who only stands at the foot of the bed. The souterrain of the earth's
crust is peopled only by still, reposing human beings, who draw close
together; but above the souterrain stand their uneasy friends, and long
to go down to the beloved arms of dust; for the linen on the eye of the
dead is truly a padded hat for the cold brow, the coffin is a parachute
to the unhappy, and the winding-sheet the last bandage of the widest
wounds. Ah! why does weary man love better to sink into the short than
into the long, undisturbed, sure sleep? Take, then, good Sebastian, the
death-certificate as an eternal peace-instrument from the hand of
gentle nature....
"But, the Deuse! where then is our dead man? what has the white cap to
do down there? I see the corpse in the looking-glass opposite--it must
be somewhere--I must fetch it":----with a shudder running through his
soul he sprang down; an exalted frenzy passed, through the stages of
tears, of smiles, of torpor, up and down his face. He ran behind a
screen which had been placed before his wax statue--and brought
out the waxen man--and threw him down as a corpse--and a veil was wound
over the corpse--and with a distorted face he mounted the chair to
proceed:--
"This is the night-corpse,--the scorified, carbonized man,--into such
stiff lumps are conscious beings fastened and compelled to turn them
round. Why do you tremble at me, hearers, because I tremble, to stare
so at this overturned form of humanity?--I see a spectre hover round
this corpse which is an 'I.' ... I! I! thou precipice that in the
mirror of thought runnest back deep down into the darkness,--I! thou
mirror within the mirror,--thou terror within a terror! Draw the veil
away from the corpse! I will boldly look on the dead, till he destroys
me."
Every one shuddered in response; but one of the Englishmen drew aside
the veil from the dead.... Rigid, speechless, horror-struck and
quaking, Victor looked upon the unveiled face, which also in a living
shape hung round his soul; but at last tears gushed out down his cold
cheeks, and then he spoke in a lower tone, as if his heart were
melting:--
"See how the corpse smiles! why, then, dost thou smile so, Sebastian?
Wast thou perchance so happy on the earth, that thy mouth stiffened and
grew cold in a rapture of delight?... No, happy thou canst scarcely
have been,--joy itself was often to thee a seed-vessel of sorrow. And
thou saidst thyself very often, I am well contented and deserve hardly
my hopes and wishes, to say nothing of their fulfilment.----
"Flamin! look upon this assumed countenance here,--it smiles from
friendship, not from joy. Flamin, this extinct breast was arched over a
heart that loved thee without limit, and even unto death.
"And this, after all, is the only misfortune of the poor man now at
rest. In and for himself, and so far as concerned his original
condition and temper, the good Bastian might have fared well
enough; but he was too sensitive for joy,--too inconsiderate,--too
ardent,--almost too much a child of fantasy. He wanted even to love
(during his lifetime), and it could not be done. The flower-goddess of
love passed by him, she denied him the transfiguration of man, the
melodrama of the heart, the golden age of life.... Cold form, erect
thyself, and show men the tears that flow from a tender heart, which
breaks for love and finds none!...
"If our Horion was not happy, then, of course, it may well be a comfort
to him, if he is permitted even in the noonday of life to take his
siesta, if he is permitted to die, and released from the hotly-beating
heart, hushed by the death-angel, to lay himself down so early under
the long shroud, which the genius of humanity draws over whole peoples,
as the gardener draws the cover over the flower-bed to shield it from
sun and rain,--against the glow of our joys, against the gush of our
sorrow.... _Rest thou too, Horion!_" ...
His grief at these words from the old dream so overmastered and so
unmanned him that he passed over from it--by way either of excuse or of
relief--into an almost frenzied humor.
"The whole joke, however, is half against my taste, which at court I
wanted to cultivate. Life absolutely does not pay for one's scolding on
its account at our good friend Death, or fumigating him with the
incense of praise. The fear of dying excepted, there is nothing more
pitiable than the fear of living. People of true talents should get
drunk in order to see life in the right light, and afterward report it
to us. The wretchedest of all (but so that _human_ life in the
comparison turns out still passable) is _civil_ life, at which I could
let fly for years, because it has nothing but long troughs for the
stomach, from which hang down chains for the fancy,--because it
perverts man into a cit,--because it turns our fleeting existence from
a corn-field into a drill-plough,--because it exhales a pestilential
vapor which lies thick before the grave and over the heavens, and in
which the poor expeditionary committee-man, sweating, chewing, fat, and
besmeared, without a warm sunbeam for his heart, without a streak of
light for his eye, drives round, till the ramming-block of the
pavior[42] pounds him down on the marshy ropewalk. The only advantage
such a poor piece of marble has, out of which a _pavement_ is made,
instead of a _statue_, is that it looks upon the whole of human life as
something really edifying, which it cannot sufficiently praise. And
yet to us good fools the outer world could not appear so small, were
there not something eternal and great within us, whereto we contrast
it,--were there not a sunlight in us, which falls into this
opera-house, just as the daylight, sometimes, when a door opens, falls
in upon the nightly stage,--were it not that, like men in old pictures
of the resurrection, we are half bedded in the earth and half out of
it,--and if this ice-life were not an _Aiguille percée_,[43] and had
not an opening out into an eternal blue.... Amen!
"I have, however, still to announce to the sorrowing assembly, that I
have been making an April-fool of it; for the dead man, whose funeral
sermon I have been delivering, is really myself." ...
But here all his friends embraced him, in order to set limits to his
ingenious frenzy,--and to press such an impassioned, true British heart
to their own. The embrace softly warmed all his cold wounds, and he was
healed, though exhausted; another's life grew into his, and love
conquered death. The Englishmen, in whose eyes stood the tears of a
double intoxication, could hardly tear themselves away from the
humorous darling.
Clotilda, who with her female friends overheard the funeral oration in
the adjoining chamber, at first held them back beseechingly from
opening it. But when Victor said, "Cold form, erect thyself, and
show men the tears which flow from a tender heart that breaks for
love,"--then she took leave of them with a hasty "good-night," unable
to master an emotion which upheaved her whole being. When they reported
to him the time of her withdrawal, then did he, who was now already so
weary, weak, and tender, become inexpressibly so,--all the lights which
his effort had brightened on his countenance seemed to melt away in
love like moonlight in dew-drops,--he waited not for his chamber to be
empty, but showed that which Clotilda in hers would conceal,--he could
even contemplate the unveiled wax statue with softened spirit, and said
smilingly: "I fancy, the reason why I have let the _whole_ of me be
repeated in wax is the same for which the Catholic does it with single
limbs, in order to hang them on a saint, and thereby give thanks or
pray for recovery; or like the Roman Emperors, whose wax statues the
physicians visited after the death of the original."[44] The company
went away, and he was at last alone. The moon, which had risen at 11
o'clock and 57 minutes, just began to throw its still low and waning
light up against the windows of Clotilda's sitting-room. Victor put out
his night-lamp, and, in order not to sink with his still tossing,
dreaming heart into the dreams of sleep, seated himself at the
window, almost in the wonted place of his wax copy and in a similar
attitude----when fate ordained, that he, who to-day had given out the
wax mummy to be his own person, should now inversely be looked upon as
the image--by Clotilda! She stood at some distance from her window, on
which no light fell but that from heaven; Victor, as this latter could
not yet reach him, was quite in shadow, and turned towards her with
five quarters of his profile. Scarcely had he observed that she fixed
upon him an unchanging glance, that seemed as if it would not only take
him in but go through him, when he guessed that she confounded him with
the man of wax; he also observed out of the corner of his eye that
something white fluttered around her, i. e. that she often dried her
eyes. But how would it have been possible for his fine feeling by the
least motion to take away from her her error, and to make her blush
with confusion for her innocent gaze! Another, e. g. the misunderstood
Mat, would in such an emergency have composedly straightened himself up
and looked indifferently out of the window; but he ossified himself, as
it were, in his attitude of lifelessness. But only the night and the
distance could conceal from her his trembling, when her tears shed for
his corpse seized like a hot stream his dismembered heart, and softened
and dissolved the little of it which this evening had still left whole
into a burning wave of love. Children's tears flow more freely, when
one shows them sympathy; and in this hour of exhaustion, Victor, who
was generally made more hard by another's sympathy for him, grew
softer; and when Clotilda seated herself at the window, to lean upon it
her weary head, it seemed to him as if something exhorted him now to
verify that which he had said to-day to the statue: Cold form, erect
thyself, and show men the tears which flow from a soft heart.
Clotilda at length closed the curtains and disappeared. But he still
cautiously acted for some time longer the part of his image, and just
when he made less effort to play the statue he succeeded better. All
his thoughts flowed now like balm over the lacerated spots of his inner
man, and he said: "Though thou art only my friend, I am satisfied, and
thou canst appease this bosom's tumultuous yearnings. O, besides, this
full heart would fly to pieces, if it should entertain the thought that
thou lovest me!" For the rest he took home to himself to-day for the
first time the improbability of his recent supposition, that a person
so reserved as she could have demeaned herself in so unreserved a
manner towards the blind Julius, and he asked himself: "Is there not,
then, sufficient explanation of her departure from the court, in
January's and Matthieu's unholy love, and the holy love of Emanuel?"
But that she might not in the morning discover her erroneous
confounding of things, he gave his wax figurant exactly the position
which he had occupied at the window.
THIRD EASTER-HOLIDAY.
F. Koch's double Jews-harp.--The Sleigh-ride.--The
Ball--and....
The reader will wish, with me, that the third Easter-holiday ended
something worse than the long 28th Dog-Post-Day.
The sleigh went tolerably, so far as could be foreseen.----I however
foresee yet something quite different: that half a million of my
reading-customers (for the other half I will answer) cannot find out
what is in my hero. It is therefore my office to tell them only so much
as this: Victor was never pusillanimous, man's subjection to the yoke
of fortune disgusted him; once every day Death took him up on the
Sublime Arm, and let him, looking down therefrom, remark how diminutive
were all mountains and hills, even graves. Every misfortune hardened
him to steel, the Medusa's head of the death's-head turned him to
stone, and the melting sun-glance of joyful emotion always vexed him in
the remembrance. His sportive humor, his ideal of female perfection,
the want of opportunity, and the shield of Minerva, had helped
him along over the wind-months of feeling, and he had hitherto
worshipped no other sun than the one which is twenty-one million miles
distant,--till Heaven or the Devil brought along the nearer one, just
in the year 1792. Still things would have gone quite tolerably, and the
misfortune would have been easy enough to get through with, if he had
been discreet or cool; I mean, if he had not said to himself: "It is
fine to weep never for one's self, but yet for another; it is fine to
worry down every loss, except that of a heart; and which will a
departed friend from his lofty place count greater, if I deliver
consolatory sermons to myself on his decease with true composure, or if
I sink, yearning, after the loved one, in voluntary, overmastering
sorrow?"
Thereby,--and from unacquaintance with the over-powering influence of
noble but untamed feelings,--and because he confounded his previous
accidental calm of the heart with a voluntary one,--and from an
overflowing love of humanity,--he had intentionally let the feelers of
his inner man up to this time grow too large,--and thus, by the whirl
of all the previous influences, the previous bereavements, the previous
emotions of these Easter-days, of this fair village of his youth, he
had been driven so far out of his course, that, notwithstanding his
considerateness, his court-life, his humor, he forfeited (at least for
Easter) somewhat of his old dissimilarity to those geniuses who, like
the sea-crab, stretch out feelers which a man can hardly span with his
arms....
That sympathetic look of Clotilda which yesterday, after his previous
heat, had been a cooling balm, was to him to-day a very burning one;
the thought of her eye full of tears for him conjured up all the days
of his love for her and her whole image in his heart. I am convinced
that not even the Regency-Counsellor, who, for the rest, might by
yesterday's funeral-sermon have lost something of his jealousy,
as well as, by the republican diversion, somewhat of his love for
Clotilda, failed to note the drunken and dreamy look of his eye. The
parsonage itself was fortunately to-day an exchange, or a spiritual
intelligence-office and recruiting-house; the Chaplain registered--not
any of your French _car tel est notre plaisir_, but--the catechumens
who were to confess at Whitsuntide.
He would not go over to the castle--his misunderstood friend Mat
had already by ten o'clock called to him out of the window a
morning-greeting and congratulation upon the snow-storm--until his
sleigh had come from the city, so that he might start off at once,
because he would not show over yonder any ridiculous emotion. Since the
great world had become for him a work-day world, to disguise his
feelings from it became harder; one conceals one's self most easily
from those whom one respects.
But the three twins and Franz Koch carried him over earlier than he
would have gone, as early as half past five o'clock in the afternoon.
The name of Franz Koch in the Dog's papers made me jump off of my feet.
If any one of my readers is a guest of the Carlsbad waters, or should
happen to be his Majesty, the King of Prussia, William the Second, or
one of his court, or the Elector of Saxony, or the Duke of Brunswick,
or any other princely person, he has heard the good Koch, who is a
modest pensioned soldier, and travels round everywhere with his
instrument and plays on it. This instrument, which he calls the double
Jews-harp, or mouth-harmonica, consists of an improved pair of
jaw-drums, or humming jaws-harps, played at once, which he shifts
according to the piece he is playing. His handling of the buzzing-irons
bears the same relation to the old Jews-harp playing as harmonica-bells
do to servants' bells. I am under obligation to induce such of my
readers as have wren's wings to their fancy, or at least, from the
heart upwards are _lithopædia_ (petrified fœtuses), or have the
ear-drum membrane for nothing but to be drummed on,--to induce, I say,
with the little oratory I have, such readers to tumble the aforesaid
Franz out of the house, if he undertakes to come and buzz before them.
For it amounts to just nothing, and the wretchedest bass-viol or rebeck
screams louder in my opinion; nay, its hum is so low, that he played at
Carlsbad before not more than twelve customers at once, because one
cannot sit near enough to him, particularly as in his leading pieces he
has the light carried away, that neither eye nor ear may disturb the
fantasies. If, however, a reader is differently constituted,--a poet,
perchance,--or a lover,--or very tender,--or like Victor,--or like me;
then, indeed, let him without scruple listen with still and melting
soul to Franz Koch, or--for to-day is just the time when he is not to
be had--to _me_.
The jolly Englishman had sent this harmonist to Victor with the card:
"The bearer of this is the bearer of an echo which he carries in his
pocket." Victor preferred, therefore, to take him over to the friend of
all sweet tones, that her departure might not deprive her of this
melodious hour. It seemed to him like going through a long church, when
he entered Clotilda's Loretto-chapel; her simple chamber was like
Mary's sitting-room, enclosed with a temple. She had already completed
arranging herself in her black ornamental dress. A black costume is a
fine eclipse of the sun, wherein one absolutely cannot take one's eyes
away from it: Victor, who, with his _Chinese_ regard for this color,
brought with him to-day to this magic a defenceless soul, an enkindled
eye, grew pale and confused at the radiant face of Clotilda, over which
the trace of a trouble that had rained out, hovered like a rainbow over
the bright, blue sky. It was not the cheerfulness of light thoughts,
which every maiden takes on when she dresses herself, but the
cheerfulness of a pure soul full of patience and love. He trembled lest
he should tread on two kinds of thistles,--on the painted ones of the
floor, over which he took care to step, and upon the satirical ones of
the fine observers around him, with which he was always coming in
contact. Her stepmother was still upon the stucco-work and finishing of
her worm-bag,[45] and the Evangelist was in her toilet-chamber as
assistant-priest and collaborator in the finery department. So that
Clotilda had still time to hear the performer on the mouth-harmonica;
and the Chamberlain offered himself to his daughter and my hero for he
was a father of good breeding towards his daughter--as part of the
audience, although he could make little out of music, table- and
ball-music excepted.
Victor now saw for the first time, by Clotilda's delight in the
musician he had brought with him, that her harmonious heart loved to
tremble in unison with strings; in fact, he was often mistaken about
her, because she--like thee, dearest * * *--expressed her highest
praise as well as her highest censure by silence. She begged her
father, who had already heard the mouth-harmonica in Carlsbad, to give
her and Victor an idea of it,--he gave it: "It expressed in masterly
manner, not so much the _fortissimo_ as the _piano-dolce_, and, like
the simple harmonica, was best adapted to the _adagio_." She
answered,--leaning on the arm of Victor, who led her into a still
chamber darkened for the occasion,--"music was perhaps too good for
drinking-songs and for mirthful sensations. As sorrow ennobled man,
and, by the little cutting pangs which it gave him, unfolded him as
regularly as they do the buds of the carnation, which they slit open
with a knife that they may bloom without bursting; so music as an
artificial sorrow took the place of the true." "Is the true so rare?"
said Victor in the dark chamber which only _one_ wax-taper lighted. He
came close to Clotilda, and her father sat opposite to him.
Blissful hour! thou--that didst once, with the echo-strains of this
harmonica, pass through my soul,--glide along by me once more, and let
the resonance of that echo again murmur around thee!
But scarcely had the modest, quiet virtuoso put the instrument of
enchantment to his lips, when Victor felt that now (before the light
was removed) he should not dare to do as at other times, when he
pictured to himself at every adagio appropriate scenes, and underlaid
every piece with peculiar fantasyings for its texts. For it is an
unfailing method of giving tones their omnipotence, when one makes them
the accompanying voices of our inner mood, and so out of instrumental
music makes as it were vocal music, out of inarticulate tones
articulate ones, whereas the fairest series of tones, which no definite
subject arranges into alphabet and speech, glides off from bathed, but
not softened hearts. When, therefore, the sweetest sounds that ever
flowed over human lips as consonants of the soul began to well forth
from the trembling mouth-harmonica,--when he felt that these little
steel-rings, as if they were the setting and touch-board[46] of his
heart, would make their agitations his own,--then did he constrain his
feverish heart, on which, besides, all wounds came out to-day, to
shrink up against the tones, and not picture to itself any scenes,
merely that he might not burst into tears before the light was gone.
Higher and higher swept the drag-net of uplifting tones with his heart
in its grasp. One melancholy remembrance after another said to him in
this short ghostly hour of the past, "Crush me not out, but give me my
tear." All his imprisoned tears were clustered around his heart, and in
them his whole inner being, lifted from the ground, softly swam. But he
collected himself: "Canst thou not yet deny thyself," he said to
himself, "not even a moist eye? No, with a dry eye receive this sad,
stifled echo of thy whole breast, receive this resonance from Arcadia,
and all these weeping sounds, into a broken heart."--Amidst such a
secret melting away, which he often took for composure, it always
seemed within him as if a breaking voice from a far region addressed
him, whose words had the cadence of verses; the breaking voice again
addressed him: "Are not these tones composed of vanished hopes? Do not
these sounds, Horion, run into one another like human days? O, look not
on thy heart; on the dust-cloud of the crumbling heart, as on a mist,
the gleaming forms of former days cast their image."--Nevertheless he
still answered calmly, "Life is truly too short for two tears,--the
tear of woe, and the other." ... But now, as the white dove, which
Emanuel saw fall in the churchyard, flew through his imaginings,--as he
thought to himself, "This dove, truly, once fluttered in my dream of
Clotilda, and clung to the ice-mountains; ah! it is the image of the
fading angel beside me,"--and as the tones fluttered more and more
faintly, and at last ran round in the whispering leaves of a
death-garland,--and as the breaking voice returned again and said:
"Knowest thou not the old tones? Lo! they sounded in thy dream before
her birthday festival, and there made the sick soul beside thee sink up
to her heart in the grave, and she left nothing behind for thee but an
eye full of tears, and a soul full of grief"----"No, that was all she
left me," said in broken tones his weary heart, and all his suppressed
tears gushed in torrents from his eyes....
But the light was just then carried from the chamber, and the first
stream fell unseen into the lap of night.
The harmonica began the melody of the dead: "How softly they slumber."
Ah, in such tones do the far-wandering waves of the sea of eternity
beat against the hearts of darkling mortals who stand on the shore and
yearn to put forth! Now art thou, Horion, wafted by a wave of harmony
out of the mist-rain of life over into the light of eternity! Hear,
what tones murmur round the broad fields of Eden! Do not the strains,
dissipated into breaths, reverberate from distant flowers, and float,
swollen by echo, round the swan-bosom, which, blissfully dissolving,
swims on pinions, and draw it on from flood to flood of melody, and
sink with it in the distant flowers, which a cloud of fragrances fills,
and does not in the fragrant dusk the soul glow again like a ruddy
evening, ere it sets in bliss?
O Horion, does the earth still abide under us, drawing its circle of
death-hills round the breadth of life? Do these tones tremble in an
earthly air? O Music! thou that bringest the Past and the Future with
their flying flames so near to our wounds, art thou the evening-breath
of this life, or the morning air of the life to come? Ay, thy sounds
are echoes, which angels snatch from the second world's tones of
gladness, to convey down into our mute hearts, into our dreary night
the faint spring-melodies of heavens flying far above us! And thou,
dying harmonica-tone! verily thou comest to us out of an peal of
exultation, which, driven from heaven to heaven, dies at last in the
remotest mute heaven, which consists of nothing but a deep, broad,
tranquil, and eternal bliss....
"Tranquil and eternal bliss," repeats Horion's dissolving soul, whose
rapture I have hitherto made my own, "ay, _there_ will lie the region
where I shall lift up my eyes toward the All-gracious, and spread out
my arms toward _her_, toward this weary soul, toward this great heart.
Then shall I fall upon thy heart, Clotilda, then shall I clasp thee
forever, and the flood of tranquil and eternal bliss will close around
us. Breathe again toward life, earthly tones, between my breast and
hers, and then let a little night, an undulating shadowy outline, swim
along on your light waves, and I will look toward it and say, That was
my life;--then shall I say more softly, and weep more intensely, Ay,
man is unhappy, but only on the earth."
O, if there is a human being over whom, at these last words, memory
draws great rain-clouds, to him, to her, I say, Beloved brother,
sister, I am, to-day, as much moved as thou; I respect the sorrow which
thou hidest,--ah! thou excusest me, and I thee....
The tune stopped and died away. What stillness now in the dark! Every
sigh took the form of a long-drawn breathing. Only the nebulous stars
of sensibility sparkled brightly in the darkness. No one saw whose eye
had been wet. Victor looked into the still, black air before him, which
a few minutes ago had been filled with hanging-gardens of tones, with
dissolving air-castles of the human ear, with diminished heavens, and
which now remained a naked, black firework-scaffold.
But the harmonica soon filled this darkness again with meteorological
apparitions of worlds. Ah, why, then, must it needs strike precisely
that melody which woke such restless yearnings in my Victor, the
"Forget-me-not," which sounded out to him the verses, as if he repeated
them to Clotilda. "Forget me not, now that fate sternly calls thee away
from me. Forget me not, when the cool earth one day rests lightly upon
this heart, that fondly beat for thee. Think it is I, when some soft
voice shall whisper to thy thought, Forget me not." ... And O, when
these tones intertwine themselves with waving flowers, when they flow
backward from one past to another, when they ripple more and more
faintly through the past years that repose back of man's memory,--at
last only murmur under the dawn of life,--only well up inaudibly under
the cradle of man,--and stiffen in our cold twilight and dry up in the
midnight, when each of us was not,--then does man, deeply moved, cease
any longer to conceal his sighs and his infinite pangs.
The still angel at Victor's side could no longer veil them, and Victor
heard Clotilda's first sigh.
Ay, then he took her hand as if he would sustain her, hovering over an
open grave.
She gave up her hand to him, and her pulse throbbed trembling in unison
with his.
Finally only the last lingering tone of the song still flung out its
melodious circles in the ether, and its wake undulated away over a
whole past,--then a distant echo wrapped it up in a fluttering breath
of air, and wafted it away through deeper echoes, and finally over to
the last which lay round about heaven,--then the tone expired and flew
as a soul into one of Clotilda's sighs.
Then the first tear escaped from her, and fell like a hot heart on
Victor's hand.
Her friend was overpowered,--she was carried away,--he pressed the soft
hand,--she drew it out of his,--and went slowly out of the chamber, in
order to come again to the help of the too tender heart, over whose
sweet signs night hung her veil....
The light which was brought in took away these dream-worlds. Matthieu
and the Chamberlain's lady appeared also. We will not, however, in this
soft mood, when one is precisely the severest against evil natures, say
or think anything about the new couple which cannot help its contrast
to our tenderness. Victor said this to himself, too, but more than
once; because the Apothecary's lyingly alleged engagement of Clotilda
to Matthieu impressed itself upon him in the liveliest colors, as
resembling that platonic union, in which the pure spirit, driven out of
its ether and with crooked-up wings, is immured in an unclean body.
Clotilda came back. She was in a state of embarrassment towards Victor,
merely because he was in one, or was to be still more so by her side in
the sleigh,--the swollen ball of her eye she withdrew from the light.
As condensation of tears, like inspissation of milk, oppresses and
destroys; his sadness, repressed and drawn back into his innermost
being, sought an outlet through the voice, which was vehement and
abrupt; through the motions of the body, which were quick; even through
vivacity of expression;--in short, it was well that they started.
He thought the opposite again, when he stood behind her on the sleigh.
The night seemed to have withdrawn behind the clouds, whose wide arch
occupied the heavens. He could not hunt up any subject of conversation,
let him think as much as he would,--he ran through Clotilda's,
Victor's, all his acquaintances' lives,--nothing occurred to him. The
reason was, that his thoughts, which he sent out on this errand,
returned every minute without his knowledge, and hung like bees on
Clotilda's noble profile, or on her soft eye, or buried themselves in
that tear of hers which had fallen on his hand, and in the whole
ethereal sea of to-day's tones. The dark heaven above him finally put
into his head Emanuel's last communication, and he could relate to her
out of that the blind youth's initiation into the highest thought of
man. Clotilda listened to him with delight, and at last said: "No one
is more fortunate than a pupil of such a teacher: but he must never go
into the world,--there he will be so no longer. His teacher has given
him too soft a heart; and a soft heart, as you yourself say, hangs,
like soft, fruit, so low down, that every one can reach and wound it;
the hard fruits hang higher."
They had arrived now at the hard fruits of the capital, and her
remark was her own history. But the new scenes,--the rattling
carriages and rustling dresses,--the much ado about little or
nothing,--the hall-lights like systems of fixed stars,--the double
mouth-_un_harmonicas,--the masculine court-fauna,--the feminine
court-flora,--the whole mobilized pleasure camp,--this din of a fair
drowned the muffled echo which passed to and fro between two harmonious
souls.
Our hero was received by the Princess in a more friendly manner than
even by the Prince. Joachime, Clotilda's lieutenant in office, had, in
addition to her cold angry friendliness, a _montre à régulateur_ rich
in jewels. In a public place it costs less than in a cabinet to cover
the inner man with the outer as with a theatrical mask. Victor, on
whom, besides, every _sorrow_ produced the witty effect of
_intoxication_, betrayed the former at most by the exuberance of his
vivacity.
A woman betrays herself by the opposite,--Clotilda by nothing. He
expressed to her in the singular stunned state into which outer tones
of joy and inner fantasies put one, when they come together like two
streams meeting, the following ideas: "Were I the Goddess of delight
(if there is one), I would have it strike three; round the chandeliers
I would draw prismatic colors, or in fact would hang them up in the
cabinets and diffuse through the dancing-hall with incense a magic
twilight,--then I should have to set back the tones of the orchestra
through so many apartments, that nothing of the music should find its
way hither but a soft echo,--and then if in the glimmering maze,
breathing throughout with melodies, the people did not, after some
silent movements, feel like sinking away with ecstasy, I greatly
mistake." ... "Add further," said she, "in order that we too may have
one, that we stay here and observe the dissolving."
But his composure hardly ever at any ball survived the minuet. After
the first din was over, at least about the witching hour, his whole
soul was always dissolved into a poetic melancholy which hardly left
him the mastery of his eyes. Besides the tones, I can further adduce
the _motion_ as an explanation of this phenomenon: all motion, in the
first place, is sublime,--that is to say, of great masses; or rather
every quick motion imparts to the object the greatness of the space
hurried through: hence, in contrast with the end in view, objects in
motion are more comic than those at rest. Secondly, the movement of men
imaged to him their fluttering by, their fleeing into graves; often at
night he would stop in sad musing under the windows of houses, where
they were dancing in the second story, and look up, and the gliding by
of heads in their movement was to him the mad dance of _ignes fatui_ in
the churchyard.
To-night with his melted, overflowing soul, he felt this sooner than
ever. The Anglaise, in which one couple after another disappears from
the column, was the very image of our shadowy life, into which we all
march out with drums, and encircled with thousands of playmates, and in
which we grow poorer and poorer every year as we move onward, every
hour more solitary, and in which we hurry to the end forsaken by all
except a hired man, who buries us behind the goal. But death spreads
out, as it were, our arms, and folds them around our beloved brothers
and sisters; a human being feels for the first time on the brink of the
tomb, when he comes upon the realm of unknown beings, how much he loves
the known ones who love him, who suffer like him, and like him die.
As a woman in no way discloses to us more touchingly the whole blessed
past, than when she lifts her eyelids and shows us her beaming eyes,
accordingly he could not well help, during the dance, at least,
looking into an eye, which pictured to him nothing but heavens that had
set,--and to-night all was to set for him, even the eye itself. And as
Clotilda usually grew pale with dancing, he entered through her eyes
into her innermost being, and counted there the tear-drops that hung
undisturbed on the still soul,--the many incisions made by the
grafting-knife of fate for new virtues,--the clipped roots which fate
shortens in this flower as we do in lowlier plants, before
transplanting into another soil,--and the thousand honey-vessels of
sweet thoughts. And as he thought on all her hidden virtues at once, on
the supremacy of her womanly reason over her sensibility, on her easy
consent in regard to the ball which the Prince now imposed upon her, as
well as in regard to the rouging on which the Princess had before
insisted, and on her ready compliance, whenever she had to sacrifice
nothing but herself;--and as he held the thought before his mind how
she, not like the women of court and city, who, like shrubs at the
window of the greenhouse, spread themselves out after the light, but
like spring flowers, loved to bloom in the shade, and yet made as
little show of her fondness for country life as of her modesty;--he had
to turn away his eye from the delicate, upright flower, on which death
threw down the gravestone; from that loveliest soul who never yet saw
her worth in the glass of an equal; from the dying heart, which
nevertheless was not happy.
And then, to be sure, the thought before which he shrank into himself
sprang up like a storm: "I will tell her to-day how good she is,--O, I
shall certainly never see her again, and she will die, otherwise
unknown to herself! I will fall at her feet and confess my
inexpressible love. She cannot be angry; God knows I crave not her holy
heart, which no man deserves; I will only say, Mine shall never forget
thee, but it desires not thine, only it will break more gently when it
has trembled and bled and wept and spoken before thee." ...
Close behind this thought came to him Clotilda herself, hand in hand
with her step-mother, and, the face robbed of its color by the warmth
as roses are by the sun, the tired and more sick-looking features put
forth the silent prayer to come out into the fresh air and go home.
She went; her step-mother followed her at a distance. What a change of
scene! Under the eastern gate of heaven stood the moon, who had taken
off the funeral veil of cloud from the milky-way and the whole blue
abyss. She gradually laid out a ground of silver, and sketched upon it
with gleams and shadows a growing night-piece. The frost seemed to
condense her light into body, into white meadows, into tumbling
streams, into floating flakes; it hung glistering as white blossoming
foliage on the bushes, it glimmered up the eastern mountains, which the
sun had cast into ice-mirrors. And all above man and around man was
sublimely still,--sleep played with death,--every heart rested in its
own night.
And here, at this entrance, as it were, out of the turmoil of earth
into the still twilight-shrouded underworld, cold thrills and after
them glowing thrills ran over Victor's nerves. This happens when the
soul of man is too full and too sorely agitated, and all the threads of
the trembling web of the fleshly organism sway with it. His sleigh
became now a flying gondola. The night-air blowing against him kindled
all his flames. O the stream full of ice-points, if it had only swept
over him! the cool coverlet of snow, if it were only laid upon him! A
voice was continually crying within him: "Thou art bearing the still,
the patient one with her black veil to death; it is her hearse: the
noble pearl-diver has given heaven her sign that she has collected here
below enough sorrows and virtues, that it may draw her up again to
itself." The procession of mountains gliding by, the trees that whirled
past, the fields that fled away, this flight of nature seemed to form
together one great cataract that carried all before it, and man first
of all, and left nothing behind it but time. And as he rolled down into
the valley, where the city disappears, as did a year ago his female
escort, and the moon behind the trees began seemingly to scud through
the heavens, then he lifted his eyes toward the stars, and, bent
backward in a rigid gaze, spoke aloud as out of a shattered heart to
the heavens: "Deep blue grave over men, thou hidest thy broad nights
behind crowded suns! Thou drawest us and our tears upward like vapors.
Ah, cast not poor short-sighted mortals so far asunder, so infinitely
far! And why cannot man look up to thee without thinking: who knows
what loved heart I may not a year hence have to seek up yonder!"
His darkened eyes fell painfully from heaven--upon Clotilda's, which
were lifted over against his. The tear which had just fallen from her
eye down to her cheek she could neither conceal through the veil, nor
make believe to be a snow-flake which had melted on her face, since the
veil kept off the flakes; but such a tear needed no veil. Clotilda had
thought lie meant merely Emanuel, and therefore she was touched and
softened.... Like two parting angels, the two now beheld each other
with tearful eyes. But Clotilda withdrew hers, and her sinking head
bent. Nevertheless, she turned round again, and with her heavenly face
and heavenly voice presented to him the sweet prayer: "Bestow this warm
friendship upon my brother also; and forgive his sister today this
prayer, as I may not for a long time have an opportunity to renew it."
He bowed himself down low, and could not answer.
But when now her place of residence and her castle, from which the
silver rain of the moon ran down, gleamed before their eyes,--as the
moment came on, darker and darker, in which the parting (perhaps the
mask of death) was to take this still angel from his side,--as every
indifferent formula of leave-taking which he could imagine to himself
lacerated his sick heart,--as he saw how she leaned her head on her
hand and on the veil, in order, unobserved, to remove or check the
first signs of her farewell,--then did the whole cloud which had so
long been letting fall single drops into his eyes, rent asunder, rush
down upon him and flood his heart.... Suddenly he stopped.... He looked
with still gushing eyes toward St. Luna.... Clotilda turned round, and
beheld a colorless face, a brow full of sorrows, and a quivering lip,
and said bashfully, "Your soul is too good and too tender." Ay, then
his over-full heart burst in twain. Then gushed up all the depths of
his soul in which old tears had been so long accumulating, and lifted
up from the roots his swimming heart, and he sank down before Clotilda,
radiant with heavenly love and streaming sorrow,--mantled with the
flame of virtue,--transfigured by the moonlight,--with his true,
helpless breast, with his veiled eyes,--and the dissolving voice could
only utter the words: "Angel of heaven! the heart breaks at last which
loves thee inexpressibly. O, long indeed have I been silent. No, thou
noble form, never canst thou pass out of my soul.--O soul from heaven,
why have thy sufferings and thy goodness, and all that thou art,
inspired me with an eternal love, and with no hope, but with an eternal
sorrow?" Her agitated face lay bent aside from him in her right hand,
and the left covered only her eyes, but not her tears. A dying sound
implored him to rise. They heard the second sleigh far off.
"Never-to-be-forgotten one! I torment thee, but I will remain where I
am till thou hast granted me a token of forgiveness." She extended to
him her left hand, and the gesture disclosed a holy countenance full of
emotion. He pressed the warm hand to his flaming face, into his hot
streams of tears. Trembling, he again asked: "O, my fault grows greater
every moment! Will you, then, wholly forgive it?" ...
Then did the blushing face bury itself in the folded veil, and, turning
away, stammered: "Ah, then I must share it, noble friend of my
teacher."
Blessed, blessed man! After this word, the whole of earthly life has no
greater heaven to offer thee! Rest now in silent rapture with thy
overpowered face upon the angelic hand, into which the noblest of
hearts pours the blood that kindles for virtue! Shed all thy tears of
joy upon the dear hand which has given them to thee! And then,--if thou
canst for rapture or for reverence,--then lift up thy pure, glistening
eye, and show her therein the look of sublime love, the look of the
love which is eternal and speechless and blissful and unspeakable!
Ah! he, who had ever been loved by a Clotilda, could now read no
farther,--write no farther,--for ecstasy ... or else for pain!
Silent and sanctified he now sped along the fair road; the moon hung
down from heaven like a dewy morning overlaid with white blossoms;
spring stirred its meadows and its flowers under the veil of snow;
rapture throbbed in Victor's heart, swelled in his breast, shone in his
eye; but speechless reverence controlled his rapture.... They arrived.
And when, in the harmonica-chamber, where in the evening he had grasped
her hand for anguish, they now stood alone face to face, so changed, so
blest for the first time, two such hearts,--she like an angel who had
descended from heaven, he like a mortal who had risen from the earth,
to fill on the heart of the timid angel, and, speechless, to go back
with her to heaven.... What an hour! O, only for you, ye fair souls,
who have never experienced such an hour, and yet have deserved it, do I
go on picturing this one!... Like two risen ones before God, they look
into each other's eyes and souls,--like a zephyr, which two swaying
roses prolong, breathes between the trembling lips the speechless sigh
of bliss, drunk in by the bosom in quick inspirations, and issuing with
a tremulous thrill of glad awe in long expirations,--they continue
silent, to look at each other, they lift their eyes, to see through the
drop of joy, and cast them down again to dry it away with the
eyelid.... No, it is enough: O, there is another tear that now lies
heavily on the fair heart, which is silent and would say, I was never
happy, nor ever shall be!
Victor had so much to say to her, and had so few minutes more left for
it; and yet not so much joy as reverence made him dumb,--for sacred to
the loving heart is the form that has said to it, I am thine. But think
not he would make any such rude request to her, as that she would stay
here on his account; only the _question_ whether he might visit her in
_Maienthal_, only the _prayer_ that she would take thought of her
recovery, can he venture upon. Clotilda had only one to make to him,
which she could not sufficiently veil over, namely, that, for the sake
of her jealous brother, he would not see her in Maienthal.
During the lingerings of rapture, they hear the bells of the second
sleigh. Haste necessitated courage. Victor transformed his _prayer_
into the _wish_ that spring might favor the design of her journey
(restoration to health), and the _question_ into the _joyful thought_
how happy she would be in Maienthal by the side of Dahore, how blest he
had once been there, and how little he had once dreamed that one could
ever be still more so there. Clotilda answered (probably to his wish of
following her thither): "I leave behind quite as much to you,--my
_brother_ and your _friend_; forget not my former prayer."
Not until the approaching parents reminded Clotilda to throw back her
veil, and admonished her beloved to take his first leave of the heart
which he had won,--not till then did they both look far into the great
Eden which had opened around their life,--and the bright moment which
now darted by in the stream of time projected into eternity the images
of two heavenly forms,--one unveiled, pale-red, transfigured with
tears, and one glorified by love, radiant with the reflection of hope.
And now let no longer the hand sketch souls, which not even the great,
glowing eye of love can portray....
When the parents came, he felt, but he forgave, all possible contrasts.
He soon took his leave, that he might at home, in the silence of night,
throw the first prayerful glance over the stream of his future life,
which now glided on toward the grave in lines of beauty, and in which
gay minutes played like goldfishes.
In the stillness of night, not far from his wax-mummy, the happy one
thought to fall down before the Infinite Genius and thank him, with new
tears, for this night, for this friend, of whom he is the first love.
But the thought of doing it is the deed, and O, how could our touched
heart, which even before men is dumb, find any other words before the
Infinite than tears and thoughts?
And in this resigned frame, full of deep tranquillity, wherein I lay
down the pen, mayst thou, dear reader, lay aside this book, and say
with me, There may well be more sad days that will conclude like the
Twenty-eighth Dog-Post-Day.
* * * * *
PREFACE TO PART III.
(_Which in the first edition came on a dozen sheets earlier_.)
As the Intercalary Day this time falls in with the Preface, and as it
begins, too, with the letter V,[47] both indeed can, with uncommon
felicity, be despatched together.
SEVENTH INTERCALARY DAY.
End of the Register of Extra-Shoots.
U. V.
Unfeelingness of Readers.--Vol. III. (Preface to.)
There were once happy times, when one had nothing to suffer from his
fellow-savage and neighbor, except being struck dead,--when the hail
was the only knout-master of the skin, whereas now the trade-wind of
the visiting-fan is to us a whirlwind, and the cool breath over the
teacup a sea-breeze,--when one took less interest in another's trouble
than in his fodder,--when the ladies never wounded the gentlemen in
bear-skins in any way (least of all with glances, charms, tresses),
except with clubs, and when, to be sure, they possessed themselves, as
well as to-day and to-morrow, of the heart of an honest man, but only
in this way, by first stretching out the proprietor of it on an altar
and regularly slaughtering him, before they cut out the heavenly globe
from his chest.
These times we have now all forfeited; in those which are upon us,
things look badly. By heaven! one really needs not much less than
everything to make him happy, and little more than nothing to make him
unhappy,--for the former he requires a sun, for the latter a particle
of sun-dust! We should be well off, and have the key to large
apartments in all pleasure-castles, if fate had provided for us that we
should endure, say as many degrees of torture as the Jurists have,
namely, three,--no more plagues than the Egyptians underwent, namely,
seven,--no more persecutions than the first Christians stood out,
namely, ten. But for such drawings of fortune a man of sense does not
look; at least, no one promises himself such prizes, who like me sits
down and considers our humming-bird stomachs,--our soft caterpillar
skins,--our ears tingling of themselves,--our eyes which are their own
tinder,--and our _culs de Paris_, which can be pierced, not by a
crumpled rose-leaf, but by the very shadow of a thorn,--and our fine
complexion, which without a moon-umbrella would blacken in the
moonlight.... And yet in this account of our troubles,--because I am
diligently intent upon lessening them,--I have not included other quite
different, most accursed items, but have left out riches, e. g.,
entirely, that smart-money for so many thousand gashes and fractures of
the breast, and in fact millions of wounds which would make our riddled
self absolutely transparent, were it not fortunately clothed from head
to foot in English court-plaster.... But I left out all such stuff,
because I knew it would after all amount to nothing, if I should set it
off against a quite different purgatory and tempest into which we
male-kind particularly are thrown, if we are so unfortunate as to
keelhaul ourselves, that is to say, fall in love, which in my poor
opinion is a slight foretaste of hell, as well as of heaven. Let the
best peeress in this department write to me, and enclose it post-paid
to the publishing office in Berlin, and give me her name, if she was
capable of not flaying and impaling her poor _pastor fido_, nor
persecuting him with backbitings, nor filling his heart full of bruises
with the compression-machines of her hands, his head full of fissures
with the bastinado of the fan, his breast full of blisters with her
eyes, nor of giving him, as they do to tobacco, a mellowing with her
tears.... At least I myself at this present moment come straight from
such a house of correction and baiting-house, and my skin looks as
pitiably as if I had a scalped one over my limbs.
We will say no more of this. My intention in all this is to brace up
the reader, because a wholly new rainy-constellation (Pleiad) which I
have not at all named is rising in his horizon, to snow upon him.
This will rage worse than all that has gone before. What I mean is
this: An imperial citizen may be just giving the finishing touch to
everything,--his coffers[48] and his enemies may have been already
overturned, and his labors right well received by the public or the
board,--his pleas for delay have been allowed, and the quinquenniats[49]
of his debtors refused,--his youngest daughter, who, like the eldest
of the French king's brother, is called Mademoiselle, may already have
got through with the measles and her betrothal afterward; it avails him
nothing, the worst of all, a whole Gehenna still awaits him on his
book-shelves; for there may the fair spirits (let him have swallowed as
he may all bitter salt of fate) have sliced for him, under the name of
romance-manna, a hard tear-bread, which I, for my part, should be glad
neither to bake nor to chew,--truly they may (to use another metaphor)
have composed and placed in readiness for him dead-marches and funeral
cantatas, which shall utterly upset him and make him so warm that his
eyes shall run over.
And unfortunately warm-blooded and soft-skinned excellent men are just
the ones least remarkable for steadiness and moderation in bearing the
poetical sorrows which authors send them. I cannot, therefore, possibly
leave this third part, which will too easily affect people, wholly
without a preface in the way of counterpoise, unless I am willing to be
myself the cause of innocent persons weeping over the best scenes of
this part, and suffering from sympathy. Such too sensitive persons, to
whom Nature has denied æsthetic apathy to cases of great distress in
tragedies and romances, should,--unless they are fat, for sorrow is
good for fatness as a fasting-cure and _lapis infernalis_,[50]--these
should make themselves cold, and arm themselves against the tragic poet
with philosophy; they should console themselves during the reading of a
great affliction and say: "How long does such a printed misery last?
How soon a book and a life are over! To-morrow thou wilt think very
differently. The unhappy condition into which I am here brought by
Shakespeare exists, in truth, only in my own imagination, and my sorrow
over it is indeed, according to the stoic, only illusion. One must not,
says Epictetus in his handbook, bewail that which lies not in our will,
and the sad scene of Klopstock here is, in fact, an external thing,
which thou canst not alter. Wilt thou let thyself be shamed by a North
American, by a saltwork-man of Halle, by the rabble, by the Cretin from
Gex,[51] who bore that whole scene from Goethe's Tasso quietly and
composedly, without the moistening of an eye?"
I assure the readers that I take the field here only against their
wives and sisters; for among readers of our sex stout-hearted
spectators of æsthetic woes have never been wholly wanting, and still
less than among the vulgar themselves; and least of all would I have
the appearance of disputing the great majority of business-people,
reviewers, criminal-lawyers, and Dutchmen, the possession of great
composure during the reading of sad crape-clad scenes, which I and
others give to the press. Much rather do I fondly persuade myself
that--if there ever was hope of the like--it is precisely now, when the
German promises to put on that Belgian stoicism, that noble
insensibility, which so becomes him, and through which he is made
bullet- and blade-proof against Melpomene's dagger, and goes through
Dante's hell, as Christ did through the real one, without suffering. We
never, to be sure, had the sensibility of the French, and their Racine
would never have been for us anything more than a prince's jester; but
we are now, if an author does not absolutely push the matter too far
and bring in too many battle-fields, and cups of rat-poison, and
gallows-trees,--for that takes hold of us,--but if he only half
good-humoredly trots along--I seem really to see him at this moment
riding--on a mourning-steed, and shakes with one hand a death-bell, and
with the other swings (ah, woe!) a funeral-marshal's baton; or if,
finally, he only delineates the invisible, stanched gashes of the
tenderer, more delicate soul;--then are we now already in a condition
to maintain our merry humor, and to show what a German can endure.
People of more moderate force _sleep_ at least, so as not to _suffer_
over a Goethe's _Iphigenia_, because sleep sets sufferers right; or we
absolutely forget such elegies, because, according to Plattner, we have
no memory for sorrows, and because oblivion--as a prince wrote--is the
only remedy for sorrows; or Heaven sends us, as after sorrow joy, after
a Messiad (of which a good travesty were to be desired for us) a
Blumauer's parody, over which we can easily forget the preceding
epopee.
W.
Women.--Ye sweet, soft spring flowers and angel shoots by the side of
us hard winter-cabbage-stumps, I have indeed already, under the former
letter, remembered you and your tenderness in contrast to the German
_immeltableness_! What shall I further say, except that, when you are
good, you are so in the highest degree, and that you and the Cornwall
tin have one and the same kind of stamp,--namely, the figure of an
angel?
X (see I K S).--Y (see I).--Z (see T S).
Tz.
Spitz.--Poor Spitz likes as well to be in Prefaces among Extra-Shoots
as his Master, and comes in just right with the Twenty-ninth Chapter. I
can talk for hours with Pomeranian dogs, as Yorick did with asses. I
will now set the messenger of the gods on his hind-feet and hold him by
the fore-paws, that he may listen to me in an erect posture.----"Stand,
nimble beast!--I talk with thee about something only that I may place
thee in the third Preface. It deserves, Spitz, to be remarked, that
thou art a rogue as men are, and like them wilt not remain _straight_,
but _crooked_ and bowed down, merely for the sake of eating well; thou
and they will, like Faro-cards, win by _bending_ and _crooking_, as the
common English bend their bad silver money that it may not be passed
for less, namely, two pieces for one. Thou hast false eyes, but
nevertheless thy actions are good. The reviewers, impatient cattle,
say, if they were in thy place, they would bring along the biographical
building-stuff more industriously, that the biography might be over
before it snows;--meet them not with the counter-assertion, that I
might do like Baronius, who began his annals without a beard and ended
them with a gray one. In that can only reviewers (but not I) imitate
him, who have time to polish, and who can begin a work beardless, on
shaving day, and not till three days after finish it, when they are
lathered.---Just fall down, Hofmann, and eat; thou art at least not
wholly without sense, and givest more heed to an harangue, after all,
than a Dauphin-fœtus, and at least waggest thy tail, which the
fœtus does not. I have now to talk with quite other people, and the
fewest possible among them wag their tails in token of appreciation,
Spitz!"
JEAN PAUL.
29. DOG-POST-DAY.
Conversion.--Billet-Doux of the Watch.--Crape Hat.
In the morning Clotilda went off to her poplar-Island, and at noon
Victor departed to his Pontine marsh,--both contented with a separation
which made them worthy to enjoy a reunion. The first thing to which the
court-physician gave himself in Flachsenfingen was--afterthought, or
rather after-feeling. Man is the Iceland-spar of time, which shows all
scenes twice, side by side. Memory caught once more in her mirror the
moonshine of last night, and the angels which floated in it, and turned
the mirror with this lustre, with this perspective, towards my Victor.
He thought over Clotilda's past conduct, in which he--as I hope my
reader has--discovered the traits of the purest love, which looks with
only one eye out of the veil, together with the traces of a decided
mastery of woman's feelings over woman's wishes. She comes on the 1st
of May from Maienthal with a weeping heart, which, torn away from a
dead companion, still bleeds on from its open wounds.--The pupil of
Emanuel meets her, and she hastens back again to the grave, there to
quench in tears of mourning her first love.--But Emanuel communicates
his holy fire to this love by his own, by his praise of the beloved, by
his open letter full of germinating love, which the latter had written
to him on the birthday festival of the 4th of May.--She returns
unrestored, towards the time of his approaching departure.--But her
good Emanuel, with the cruel kindness of friendship, impresses the
image which makes her heart too uneasy still more deeply into its
wounds, by reporting to her Victor's life in Maienthal and his
confession that he loves her. Victor is silent before her, but she
thinks he is so because he has no permission from his father to speak
with her about Flamin's relationship.--He goes to court, and seems to
forget her, nay, he puts upon her the chains of the court office, which
nevertheless, as he knows, oppress her soul even to blood. Her parents,
either by way of sounding her, or of flattering her secret suitor
Matthieu with her female veiling of herself, extort from her by a
tyrannical question the unhappy No, which deceives her brother and
repels her friend. Victor steals away, on her festal evening, from the
garden, without speaking to her, thereupon visits her parents again,
and grows entirely cool. Now she hears nothing more of him excepting,
at most, of his pleasures at court and his visits to Joachime.----Ay,
thou good soul, thus, in conflict with wishes and with troubles, in
sick pining after the loved soul, must all thy joys go to sleep and thy
hopes die out, and thy innocent cheeks grow pale!----As, now, Victor
thus thought over this sad past, and remembered how, in the playhouse,
where he revealed to her his knowledge of her sisterly relation, the
last bloom of her cheek, the last twig of hope, fell off, because she
could regard his previous silence as owing to a command of his
father,--and as all these traits conspired to form the image of a
heavenly queen before whom it is easier to kneel down than to embrace
her,--and as he further reflected that this noble heart, improved by an
Emanuel and worthy of an Emanuel, nevertheless gave itself with all its
heavens to the fickle heart of the pupil----and that the good soul
could not have even this modest wish fulfilled, because fate delayed
the blossoming of her love like that of a rose-bush by transplanting
it, by setting it in the shade, by clipping the buds in _spring_ and
_autumn_,--and as he saw that nevertheless this noble one had gone off
to Maienthal with her finger on her lips, with her hand on her heavy
heart, without a hint of her bitter disappointment, and that moral
coldness _lifted up_ this flower, as physical cold does other flowers,
but tore from it thereby the roots of life,--and as, finally, his dream
on the third Easter-holiday, when it appeared to him as if he saw her
rise singing from the earth on a light veil of mist, passed by before
him like a great rain-cloud, and the dream with her faded hues paused
before his pining soul, and a voice out of the dream asked him, "Wilt
thou long continue to love her, when angels yearn for her and lift her
out of her sorrow, and leave thee nothing but the grave of the too long
misinterpreted heart?"----As all these thoughts, in glowing procession,
like mountain chains of ruddy evening clouds, moved around his soul,
then was his heart, like an altar, covered by a sacrificial fire
falling from heaven, and all his earthly desires, all his stains, were
consumed in this fire,--in short, he resolved to amend hims
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